History Downstream or the Globalization Conspiracy?

Photo by Ricardo Rocha on Unsplash

1066, the Battle of Hastings, divided one man’s life between repute as William the Bastard before and as William the Conqueror after. In modern times, we would have called him Wild Bill, but after reshuffling the feudal fiefs of England the Norman conquest began putting together a new bureaucratic reality that morphed into the Common Law that came to undergird the actions of courts in the U.S. to this day.

1215, Magna Carta Libertatum, was not that long ago in geological time. But for most of the time between then and now, an individual human life span did not exceed 40 years. To count years in centuries is to count off into a void unknown and unknowable. It amuses historians to set a marker in that void to date the birth of enforceable individual rights to King John of England’s involuntary signing of the Great Charter of Liberty. The choice is as reasonable as dating the birth of the English Common Law to the Norman Conquest, and Magna Carta’s innovation that the individual sovereign’s power could be checked was woven into the legal fabric of what would become the British Empire.

1648, the Peace of Westphalia. It amuses historians to date the rise of the modern nation-state from the complex of treaties that attempted a new world order more peaceful that the one provided at the time by the military contest among Lutherans…