Read this excellent post describing this fascinating part of human history. To think that all of Western History hinged on one man's night of alcohol abuse!
Imagine Montana, population 900,000, conquering the Western Hemisphere, population 800 million. In little more than one generation: slaughtering its armies, assimilating its air forces and navies, killing almost every government and corporate official; conscripting a tenth of the entire population in every country to provide logistical support; deliberately sparing, but nonetheless abducting, every high-profile scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, doctor, and clergyman, and rotating them amongst Helena, Albany, Austin, Mexico City, and Brasilia. Building infrastructure from Point Barrow and Labrador to Recife and Tierra del Fuego, then mounting a two-pronged invasion of Africa, overrunning Nigeria and South Africa in six weeks, poised to sweep north and east to the Mediterranean and Red Seas within months -- and then abruptly withdrawing.
In the thirteenth century, events on that scale occurred in Eurasia,and Jack Weatherford explains how in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World ...
With a few simple but fervently held and rigorously practiced organizational and fighting techniques, the Mongols smashed army after army and city after city, incidentally creating a profoundly uncorrupt, meritocratic, and egalitarian polity even while accumulating enormous amounts of plunder. Temujin's ... shifted the loyalties of hundreds of thousands of tribespeople to himself and the nation, transforming a hyperfragmented nomadic people into the most effective fighting force the world had ever seen...
What I regard as the single most fascinating counterfactual in human history is what failed to occur in 1242 AD. Batu Khan's armies, having already conquered Russia and the Ukraine, continued westward... having overrun Poland, eastern Germany, and Hungary as rapidly as the Nazi blitzkrieg would advance seven centuries later, and scouted at least as far west as Vienna -- they returned to the east, to attend a khuriltai to elect a successor to Ogodei Khan, who had drunk himself to death four thousand miles away in Karakorum.
What if Ogodei had sobered up? -- or moderated, even slightly, and lived even one more year?... [It is assumed] that they would have utterly destroyed Western civilization, thereby retarding political and technological development by several centuries.
Absolutely fascinating!
Questions: What other singular events have occurred that may have forever altered the course of human history? How much can one man influence the course of history? How much impact can each one of us have?
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