What Happened in History

Penulis: Gordon Childe
Penerbit: -----------
Terbit: 1954
Halaman: 288 hal.
Kondisi Buku: 60 % baik
Harga: 20.000 (nego)

Sinopsis
First published in 1942, Gordon Childe’s classic work “What happened in history” is an attempt to explain to the ordinary, non-academic person a history of the world. Concentrating on early history, Childe looks at how the ancient economies, their development and growth (as well as their decline) allowed civilisations to develop, flourish and in some cases, disappear.

Childe starts his work by looking at the study of history, but quickly moves on to how societies move from small bands of people, to forming small communities and then the development of a class based economy.

Alongside all this, he charts how the development of rudimentary science, tool making and the associated trade created the basis for a bigger society.

Childe can be contrasted magnificently with those historians, whose work concentrates entirely on kings and queens, and other “great” men and women. His understanding of how societies like that of Ancient Greece or Rome can grow, and then collapse is based on an understanding of the basic contradictions in their economies.

Marx explained how the developing forces of production – which can be crudely explained by things like invention of new tools or machines, or new ways of organising production, (factories over cottage industries say) – eventually clash with the existing methods and a ruling class wedded to the old methods. At this point society can either move forward, or fall back.

Childe for instance draws our attention to how both Greek and Roman societies had developed machines such as water pumps that could do the work of many slaves, but to get rid of slaves and replace them with machinery would start to undermine to basis of the whole economy.

But Childe ignores the fact that there are many examples of societies that did expand and then contract, leaving their grand children to scrabble in the mud while looking at monuments of their forefathers former glory – the civilisation on Easter Island springs to mind.

If this is the only weakness of Childe’s book, it’s a minor one. The work must have been an introduction to archaeology and history that has inspired generations since, and the errors that do occur can only be built upon to further our understanding of the past to illuminate the future.