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A History of the World in Numbers
The history of our world can be told through numbers. Numbers can illuminate the broad sweep of history, from vast movements of populations and the expansion of empires to the effects of technological achievements or climatic change. They also allow us to drill into the real detail of history, from the page count, the cost and the time it took to produce the Gutenberg Bible (the West's first mass-produced book) to the price of Virginian tobacco in the 1620s, both of which had an immediate and lasting effect on the course of world history.
And, just occasionally, numbers have the power to blow our minds. For example: in 2003 US research showed that one in every 200 men living on the planet today shares genetic material from a single male from around 900 years ago; the likely progenitor was Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan.
A History of the World in Numbers will span the early civilizations of man, from the plains of Mesopotamia and the Indus Empire, right through to the modern day. The numbers, statistics and figures will dictate the topic of each entry, shining a light on each subject, whether it's the development of early writing in China or the number of Brodie helmets issued in World War One.
193 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 9, 2014
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August 19, 2021
Book: A History of the World in Numbers
Author: Emma Marriott
Publisher: Michael O'Mara (9 October 2014)
Language: English
File size: 5433 KB
Print length: 192 pages
Price: 157.50/-
How many times have you heard someone say that mathematics and science are the preeminent languages to explicate the natural phenomena?
Wll, I’ve heard it repeated on plentiful occasions.
While many deem mathematics as too nonfigurative, for others it is the most gorgeous language of the universe.
There is no upper perimeter to the numerical abilities of humans. This is a race of beings who would first discover fire, to get warm. Thereafter, in need of light, he would invent electricity. And then when in need to communicate with someone 10,000 miles away, he would invent the internet!!
Behind all these contraptions, was mathematics! Numbers were everywhere.
Einstein had deliberated for years on how numbers work so flawlessly. He knew that numbers is the bridge or the language that connects humans with the universe. And being a bond between us and the universe, makes numbers the greatest accomplishment of mankind.
If you take a closer look at the blueprints of our world, you will observe the language of mathematics.
In the Preface to this exceedingly intriguing book, the author Emma Marriott says: ‘………..numbers do help to provide a sort of filing system for the past. We love to catalog history, reordering it into tidy folders, labelling them with numbers of note. By this means numbers seem to leap out of the annals of history right into our collective consciousness, to remain lodged in our minds long after other facts have fallen away….’
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, Henry VIII’s six wives, Marx’s six stages of history, all offer evidence to the enduring supremacy of numbers.
What this book does is, it juxtaposes numerical outlines with history.
What specifically this book seeks to achieve can be recapitulated in the following points, right at the onset of our review. Among other things, the book illustrates that:
1) Different types of numbers can alter our perspective on history. Vast numbers inform us how many people are living on the planet or how many millions are massacred in war.
2) Too often numbers communicate the dour realities of life in the past – how millions have died from disease, on the battlefield, or purely through the impulses of a single waylaid monarch or leader.
3) Big numbers can demonstrate the expansive sweep of history, from mass migrations of humans to the spreading out of empires (and often their abrupt termination), the reflective consequences of industrialization and the enlargement of a global economy.
4) Smaller numbers are no less momentous. The diminutive numbers gauge the living elements of history, the minuscule shifts that may have cosmic upshots. Consider the following examples: a) the ideal proportions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man,
b) the components of a ‘piece of eight’ silver coin, c) the US constitution’s thirteenth amendment -- all were to have a lasting brunt on the history of the world.
Armed with an obscene quantity of data and backed by unimpeachable analysis, Emma Marriott takes you on a package-tour through history seating you in an automobile of numbers.
*Did you know that the Qing Dynasty was founded not by Han Chinese, who formed the gigantic majority of China, but by inhabitants of what is now Manchuria? In effect they were a miniature ethnic minority, outnumbered by the Han Chinese by around 250 to 1.
*Did you know that the Crimean War (1853–6) fought by Russia against the Allied forces of Turkey, Britain, France and Sardinia, saw the first use of the telegraphic cable in a war environment? By the end of the war, 21 miles of cable had been laid in the Crimea, connecting eight telegraph offices on a circuit, with 340 miles of submarine cable laid from Varna to Balaclava in April 1855.
*Did you know, by the time of Darius I, the Persian Empire also took in Egypt and to control this huge domain, Darius introduced an effective system of administration and taxes, an imperial postal network, and in 500 BCE built a road spanning 2,400 km (1,500 miles), from Susa in modern Iran to Ephesus in Turkey?
*Did you know that for the first two years of the First World War, Allied soldiers were sent into battle with nothing more than a cloth cap on their heads? German troops were slightly better protected with the pickelhaube, a spiked leather helmet, but both offered scant protection against artillery fire and shrapnel. The resulting massacre – around three out of four deaths caused by head wounds – prompted the British War Office to issue tin hats to all its troops in the spring of 1916!!
*Did you know that Jewish people numbered 200,000, just 1 % of the German population, but the eminence of wealthy Jewish families in commerce, banking and industry caused bitterness among other Germans – 5 out of the 29 wealthiest German financiers and bankers were Jewish?
*Did you know that an estimated 12.4 million slaves were transported from the west coast of Africa across the Atlantic to the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of the Caribbean, North and South America?
*Did you know that the traditionalism of urban planning found in Indus cities was mirrored in its standardization of everything from pots and everyday tools to writing and weights? For a unit of measurement, the Indus used the ‘hasta’, which represented the length of a forearm measured out to the extended middle finger (about 45 cm/18 inches).
*Did you know that the Sanskrit epic poem the Mahabharata is about eight times the combined length of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey?
The temperament of our past – weird, bizarre, often accidental – can be magnificently exemplified by numbers.
Consider: --
# The 12,000 molluscs that it took the Phoenicians to make just 1.5 grams of Tyrian purple,
#The $15 million paid by the US government for a vast tract of land known as Louisiana,
#The Twelve Knights of the Round Table
# The Seven Hills of Rome
What do you conclude? You most certainly conclude that numbers are eternal! Legendary (or at any rate partially legendary) stories of the past, can be given legitimacy or representative significance by their association with a number. The numbers 7 and 12 are inveterate favourites, as the author informs us.
Armed with numbers, this book whooshes backward and forward through time to balance events and achievements, taking in along the way the massive 15th century fleets of the Chinese Admiral Zheng He (whose size wasn’t rivalled in the West until World War I) to statistics showing that by the 1930s, 1 in 5 Americans owned a car, a figure that the UK didn’t reach until the 1960s.
This book helps the reader focus for an instant upon those who in fact dealt with numbers – the astronomers, philosophers, engineers, physicists, many of whom exerted and still wield a sweeping influence on our history, from the Indian scholar Aryabhatta, who came up with the priceless concept of zero, to the British mathematicians of the Second World War who cracked ‘the Enigma system’, thereby changing the outcome of a global war.
What you realize once you’ve finished reading this 192 page book is this that our universe is filled with spiral blueprints. Spirals can be found in the shapes of the DNA double helix, flowers, elephant tusks, sunflowers, hurricanes, draining water, animal horns, a nautilus shell, a snail shell, a pinecone, a cabbage, a fingerprint, algae, galaxies... the list continues.
Everything in life has numerical. Just consider the wild animals with stripes or patterns for the purposes of camouflage. But why does a leopard or cheetah or tiger have a particular design? Alan Turing had a mathematical theory about leopard’s spots. Turing suggested in his paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (published in 1952) “a mathematical schema for the formation of the patterns found in animals and plants.” This was over six decades ago.
Stars have patterns. Seasons have patterns. They come and go. And they influence nature: the climate changes, animals migrate north or south, rain comes, snow melts, the earth changes colour, etc. Of course, seasons cannot make these miracles. They can only have numerical patterns.
This tome acts as a kind of compendium to some of the most fascinating figures in our history, from the beginnings of early civilization to the upheavals of the Second World War. The book’s short entries are meant to be succinct and accessible, to provide a wide-ranging view of our past across the globe.
The only ‘inadequacy’, if I may use the term, would be the scanty place given to the ways ancient India changed the world – with mathematics – with numbers.
Consider our prosperous lineage, travelling right back over 3,000 years and having blossomed for centuries before comparable progress was even dreamt of in Europe or elsewhere.
Apart from giving the world ‘the concept of zero’ [which has been touched in this book], Indian mathematicians made determining donations to not only the study of trigonometry, algebra and arithmetic but also ‘negative numbers’ among other areas. And conceivably most radically, the decimal system that humans still employ worldwide today was first here, in India.
This singular dearth notwithstanding, lay your hands on a copy of this most entrancing book, if you choose.
Author: Emma Marriott
Publisher: Michael O'Mara (9 October 2014)
Language: English
File size: 5433 KB
Print length: 192 pages
Price: 157.50/-
How many times have you heard someone say that mathematics and science are the preeminent languages to explicate the natural phenomena?
Wll, I’ve heard it repeated on plentiful occasions.
While many deem mathematics as too nonfigurative, for others it is the most gorgeous language of the universe.
There is no upper perimeter to the numerical abilities of humans. This is a race of beings who would first discover fire, to get warm. Thereafter, in need of light, he would invent electricity. And then when in need to communicate with someone 10,000 miles away, he would invent the internet!!
Behind all these contraptions, was mathematics! Numbers were everywhere.
Einstein had deliberated for years on how numbers work so flawlessly. He knew that numbers is the bridge or the language that connects humans with the universe. And being a bond between us and the universe, makes numbers the greatest accomplishment of mankind.
If you take a closer look at the blueprints of our world, you will observe the language of mathematics.
In the Preface to this exceedingly intriguing book, the author Emma Marriott says: ‘………..numbers do help to provide a sort of filing system for the past. We love to catalog history, reordering it into tidy folders, labelling them with numbers of note. By this means numbers seem to leap out of the annals of history right into our collective consciousness, to remain lodged in our minds long after other facts have fallen away….’
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, Henry VIII’s six wives, Marx’s six stages of history, all offer evidence to the enduring supremacy of numbers.
What this book does is, it juxtaposes numerical outlines with history.
What specifically this book seeks to achieve can be recapitulated in the following points, right at the onset of our review. Among other things, the book illustrates that:
1) Different types of numbers can alter our perspective on history. Vast numbers inform us how many people are living on the planet or how many millions are massacred in war.
2) Too often numbers communicate the dour realities of life in the past – how millions have died from disease, on the battlefield, or purely through the impulses of a single waylaid monarch or leader.
3) Big numbers can demonstrate the expansive sweep of history, from mass migrations of humans to the spreading out of empires (and often their abrupt termination), the reflective consequences of industrialization and the enlargement of a global economy.
4) Smaller numbers are no less momentous. The diminutive numbers gauge the living elements of history, the minuscule shifts that may have cosmic upshots. Consider the following examples: a) the ideal proportions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man,
b) the components of a ‘piece of eight’ silver coin, c) the US constitution’s thirteenth amendment -- all were to have a lasting brunt on the history of the world.
Armed with an obscene quantity of data and backed by unimpeachable analysis, Emma Marriott takes you on a package-tour through history seating you in an automobile of numbers.
*Did you know that the Qing Dynasty was founded not by Han Chinese, who formed the gigantic majority of China, but by inhabitants of what is now Manchuria? In effect they were a miniature ethnic minority, outnumbered by the Han Chinese by around 250 to 1.
*Did you know that the Crimean War (1853–6) fought by Russia against the Allied forces of Turkey, Britain, France and Sardinia, saw the first use of the telegraphic cable in a war environment? By the end of the war, 21 miles of cable had been laid in the Crimea, connecting eight telegraph offices on a circuit, with 340 miles of submarine cable laid from Varna to Balaclava in April 1855.
*Did you know, by the time of Darius I, the Persian Empire also took in Egypt and to control this huge domain, Darius introduced an effective system of administration and taxes, an imperial postal network, and in 500 BCE built a road spanning 2,400 km (1,500 miles), from Susa in modern Iran to Ephesus in Turkey?
*Did you know that for the first two years of the First World War, Allied soldiers were sent into battle with nothing more than a cloth cap on their heads? German troops were slightly better protected with the pickelhaube, a spiked leather helmet, but both offered scant protection against artillery fire and shrapnel. The resulting massacre – around three out of four deaths caused by head wounds – prompted the British War Office to issue tin hats to all its troops in the spring of 1916!!
*Did you know that Jewish people numbered 200,000, just 1 % of the German population, but the eminence of wealthy Jewish families in commerce, banking and industry caused bitterness among other Germans – 5 out of the 29 wealthiest German financiers and bankers were Jewish?
*Did you know that an estimated 12.4 million slaves were transported from the west coast of Africa across the Atlantic to the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of the Caribbean, North and South America?
*Did you know that the traditionalism of urban planning found in Indus cities was mirrored in its standardization of everything from pots and everyday tools to writing and weights? For a unit of measurement, the Indus used the ‘hasta’, which represented the length of a forearm measured out to the extended middle finger (about 45 cm/18 inches).
*Did you know that the Sanskrit epic poem the Mahabharata is about eight times the combined length of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey?
The temperament of our past – weird, bizarre, often accidental – can be magnificently exemplified by numbers.
Consider: --
# The 12,000 molluscs that it took the Phoenicians to make just 1.5 grams of Tyrian purple,
#The $15 million paid by the US government for a vast tract of land known as Louisiana,
#The Twelve Knights of the Round Table
# The Seven Hills of Rome
What do you conclude? You most certainly conclude that numbers are eternal! Legendary (or at any rate partially legendary) stories of the past, can be given legitimacy or representative significance by their association with a number. The numbers 7 and 12 are inveterate favourites, as the author informs us.
Armed with numbers, this book whooshes backward and forward through time to balance events and achievements, taking in along the way the massive 15th century fleets of the Chinese Admiral Zheng He (whose size wasn’t rivalled in the West until World War I) to statistics showing that by the 1930s, 1 in 5 Americans owned a car, a figure that the UK didn’t reach until the 1960s.
This book helps the reader focus for an instant upon those who in fact dealt with numbers – the astronomers, philosophers, engineers, physicists, many of whom exerted and still wield a sweeping influence on our history, from the Indian scholar Aryabhatta, who came up with the priceless concept of zero, to the British mathematicians of the Second World War who cracked ‘the Enigma system’, thereby changing the outcome of a global war.
What you realize once you’ve finished reading this 192 page book is this that our universe is filled with spiral blueprints. Spirals can be found in the shapes of the DNA double helix, flowers, elephant tusks, sunflowers, hurricanes, draining water, animal horns, a nautilus shell, a snail shell, a pinecone, a cabbage, a fingerprint, algae, galaxies... the list continues.
Everything in life has numerical. Just consider the wild animals with stripes or patterns for the purposes of camouflage. But why does a leopard or cheetah or tiger have a particular design? Alan Turing had a mathematical theory about leopard’s spots. Turing suggested in his paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (published in 1952) “a mathematical schema for the formation of the patterns found in animals and plants.” This was over six decades ago.
Stars have patterns. Seasons have patterns. They come and go. And they influence nature: the climate changes, animals migrate north or south, rain comes, snow melts, the earth changes colour, etc. Of course, seasons cannot make these miracles. They can only have numerical patterns.
This tome acts as a kind of compendium to some of the most fascinating figures in our history, from the beginnings of early civilization to the upheavals of the Second World War. The book’s short entries are meant to be succinct and accessible, to provide a wide-ranging view of our past across the globe.
The only ‘inadequacy’, if I may use the term, would be the scanty place given to the ways ancient India changed the world – with mathematics – with numbers.
Consider our prosperous lineage, travelling right back over 3,000 years and having blossomed for centuries before comparable progress was even dreamt of in Europe or elsewhere.
Apart from giving the world ‘the concept of zero’ [which has been touched in this book], Indian mathematicians made determining donations to not only the study of trigonometry, algebra and arithmetic but also ‘negative numbers’ among other areas. And conceivably most radically, the decimal system that humans still employ worldwide today was first here, in India.
This singular dearth notwithstanding, lay your hands on a copy of this most entrancing book, if you choose.
April 23, 2019
Excellent overview of world history from ancient times to WW II.
December 8, 2018
It sounds like it's going to be really dry, but actually, linking numbers to historical facts helps them to stand out, and i found myself thoroughly enjoying it.
May 15, 2019
Loving both numbers and history, this was the perfect combination. It breaks history up into tiny little tidbits using various numbers from ancient times through World War II. I just wish the author put a little more thought into the conclusion, considering it was published in 2015, even though it left off at WWII. “If the pace of progress we have seen since the end of that landmark is maintained, then the numbers are looking good for the future.” There’s been a police action, another war right on the heels of the police action, several serious terrorist attacks, 2 major nuclear disasters, the fall of the Soviet Union, multiple bloody civil wars, and another series of wars that are going on almost 2 decades. That’s just for starters.
June 28, 2019
I think if you take this book for what it is and don't ask too much of it, you will enjoy this book.
It is a book of history snippets told through numbers. It's a paragraph or two about a specific fact and then it moves on to another fact. I read this aloud to my teenager over the course of more than a year at breakfast. It spawned some interesting discussions.
This is just an aside, but when our local library copy went missing, the librarian tracked down another copy and got it transferred and waved the usual charge. I just thought that was generous of her. Yet another reason to love the local library.
It is a book of history snippets told through numbers. It's a paragraph or two about a specific fact and then it moves on to another fact. I read this aloud to my teenager over the course of more than a year at breakfast. It spawned some interesting discussions.
This is just an aside, but when our local library copy went missing, the librarian tracked down another copy and got it transferred and waved the usual charge. I just thought that was generous of her. Yet another reason to love the local library.
August 19, 2020
Well, I started reading this book because I was fascinated by the title. However, the book was something different from what I expected it to be. The book is an easy read history of the world, The titles of each chapter have some number associated with it- which is somehow related to the story the chapter tells. The number is not the key to the story like I thought it would be. But anyhow an easy read and unlike similar world history books, this one also gives a few chapters to Africa and Asia.
June 11, 2021
Despite what the title might suggest, the book is about history, but not really about numbers.
Yes, there is a number in the title of each chapter, but that's all. No graphs or data, but some random numbers associated with each story, that you are probably gong to forget pretty quickly.
Nevertheless, the book is a nice collection of "pills" (no more than 1 page long) of high-school-level history. A relaxing way to refresh your history knowledge.
Yes, there is a number in the title of each chapter, but that's all. No graphs or data, but some random numbers associated with each story, that you are probably gong to forget pretty quickly.
Nevertheless, the book is a nice collection of "pills" (no more than 1 page long) of high-school-level history. A relaxing way to refresh your history knowledge.
May 28, 2019
After reading this book, I realized that Emma Marriott loved mathematics very much :)))Because telling the world history with numbers is like a ridiculous idea. But when I read the book, it really makes sense.
Can you learn math with a lesson based on memorization like history?
Yes you can learn
Can you learn math with a lesson based on memorization like history?
Yes you can learn
August 28, 2019
I am a bit of a statistic nerd so the title appealed to me. The book really does covers thousands of years but in small pieces, ranging from a few lines to maybe 2 pages. I read this all in one go but it would make a great ‘dip into’ book for when you only have a few minutes to spare.
October 3, 2022
Math isn't my strong suit and this book teaches me the origins of numbers. Now when it comes to history that I'm eager to read it and I can finish it in no time. It's interesting 🤔 just like Harry Oliver's book called "Catflaps and Mousetraps".
May 30, 2021
I may use this in my AP Modern World History class to demonstrate a few basic concepts.
February 9, 2022
Kul bakışı dünya tarihini incelemek, okumak için iyi geldi açıkçası bana beğendim
August 22, 2025
A wonderful history lesson at a quick glance ...a paragraph at a time, a page at a time. Numbers I knew of and numbers I didn't. I really enjoyed reading it and learning from it.
May 29, 2023
It was interesting but didn't like how it was organized.
March 13, 2016
Some of the facts were very interesting. The book seemed to stop short.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews