In the beginning, life was perfect. That, at least, was what our ancient antecedents believed. In c700 BC, mirroring the biblical Eden, the Greek poet Hesiod told how people “lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote from toil and grief”.

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Some seven centuries later, Hesiod’s Roman successor Ovid recounted in his Metamorphoses how “the formation of man is followed by a succession of the four ages of the world. The first is the golden age, during which innocence and justice alone govern.”

Were Hesiod and Ovid on to something? Was the dawn of humanity the best time to be alive?

Historians rarely agree on anything, least of all whether things were going well for people in a past society. Were they good or bad times? Were they getting better or worse? Politicians and journalists frame the present in these terms. We, too, sense the ups and downs of our own lives. But can this apply to history? Should historians assess an age in the same way?

Comparing past societies

Some might flat-out reject value judgments and insist we only appraise a time by its own standards. Culturally at least, this works. Yet the increase of interest in social and economic history since the mid-20th century has made discussion of the relative prosperity of past societies more relevant than it had been with, for example, constitutional history.

Furthermore, such questions seem especially crucial to public history. We want to understand the differences and similarities between our lives and those who came before. History is, more than anything, about understanding change.

Then there’s the problem of what we mean by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ times. How do we define ‘prosperity’? This depends on your priorities, but little could be more important than basic material living standards. How well were people fed, clothed and housed? How robust was their health and security? Of course, beyond modest survival, quality of life is a far harder thing to articulate, both in a material and immaterial sense. In history, as today, little is so hard to measure as happiness.

But, from the start – even in elementary terms – our estimations of good or bad times are frustratingly at odds. The Neolithic Revolution (beginning c10,000 BC), the gradual adoption of sedentary agriculture by formerly hunter-gatherer societies, was once presented as a positive step forward. In the long run, it was what allowed humanity to create ‘civilisation’ – that is to say, complex, densely populated societies with cities, governments, bureaucracies and armies supposedly representing shelter, safety and comfort.

Beyond modest survival, quality of life is a far harder thing to articulate, both in a material and immaterial sense. In history, as today, little is so hard to measure as happiness

This was, surely, an improvement on what came before, if life had previously been, as the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In the next century, however, another thinker, the Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, famously considered such a “state of nature” superior. Akin to Hesiod and Ovid, Rousseau saw the deep past as a golden age corrupted by all that came after it.

This was a view significantly advanced in the 1960s by American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose ‘Original Affluent Society’ of hunter-gatherers ate better and had more leisure time than we do today. Yet many researchers have since confirmed that many such societies could also be extraordinarily violent ‒ both between and within groups ‒ with the killing of children and the elderly widely practised.

“Perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery”

In 1798, the English scholar and Anglican cleric Thomas Malthus presented a stark vision of life that seemed to explain this conflict. In his view, the production of resources was limited by the availability of land, so could only increase incrementally. But population sizes tend to rise exponentially, meaning societies would always experience poverty and are “condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery” as they repeatedly reached the carrying capacity of their environments.

A Malthusian interpretation of the past requires acceptance of uncomfortable ideas. Not least, that events that lowered the population – such as disease and violence – might have been good in history, that the pain and suffering we seek to avoid, might have been necessary. When the dust settled, it is argued, the survivors ended up with more resources per person.

But is this really the whole story? Aside from the obvious advantages to those concerned of not being dead, surely there are broader benefits to having more people. A larger group might compete more successfully against smaller ones for resources. It might win wars and expand further. But, most importantly, it might not all be a zero-sum game.

A Malthusian interpretation of the past requires acceptance of uncomfortable ideas. Not least, that events that lowered the population – such as disease and violence – might have been good in history

More people generally meant more collective intelligence, and so more creativity, innovation and, eventually, technological breakthroughs. Some argue that the very size of the human population is itself directly linked to the complexity of human societies.

The problem of the subjectivity of historians

Time and again, we find differing perspectives. The subjectivity of historians themselves is problematic, and we European historians often tend to offer an overly Eurocentric perspective. Our predecessors during the colonial era used to admire classical civilisations such as the Roman empire as model societies to be emulated.

In the late 18th century, the British historian Edward Gibbon considered the years AD 96‒180 to have been ancient Rome’s golden age. It was there and then, he said, that “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”. Some of Rome’s achievements are manifest in its surviving art, architecture and literature ‒ if those are your measures.

Yet, archaeological evidence from skeletal remains suggests the average standard of living in the empire was lowest precisely when it was most successful, during the Pax Romana, the ‘Roman Peace’. Life was probably far better in the empire’s western half after its ‘fall’ in the fifth century AD, during the so-called ‘Dark Ages’.

One 2021 study showed that people in Roman Gaul were shorter, and their bones presented more signs of physiological stress, than in the post-Roman period ‒ the result of more exposure to disease in childhood and overcrowded urban living.

The impact of inequality

At issue here is clearly also inequality: it mattered who you were. In complex hierarchical societies, elites could dominate resource extraction and distribution and so raise their level of prosperity well above non-elites, whose material existence remained barely above subsistence.

In Europe, for example, you nearly always did better if you were rich, white, free and a man ‒ as Gibbon was. Almost all surviving Roman archaeological sites, from Pompeii to Palmyra, provide ample evidence of how well the empire’s aristocracy and provincial elites lived. But for many, not least Rome’s vast enslaved workforce, life would hardly have been so “happy and prosperous”.

Yet with inequality arose cycles in the relative prosperity of different groups when populations rose and fell. Perhaps the most famous example of this was the so-called ‘crisis’ of the late Middle Ages in Europe, roughly 1300 to 1500.

The preceding centuries saw considerable economic growth, an expansion in population, and, with it, spectacular architecture ‒ such as Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals ‒ as well as a great revival of art, philosophy and literature. Subsequently, in the 14th century, came a series of disasters.

First there was the Great Famine of 1315–17/22; then, from the 1347–51 Black Death pandemic, repeated waves of plague. These struck alongside near constant warfare, not least the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between England and France.

A Distant Mirror, American historian Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 account of this period, is famously subtitled ‘the Calamitous 14th Century’. This leaves little doubt as to her assessment. Nevertheless, some historians have recast the late Middle Ages as almost a golden age. Those who survived the wars, plagues and famines appear to have become more prosperous on average – materially at least – than their forebears.

The European population halved and, as such, there was more land to go around: and thus, more abundant resources per head. With fewer workers, those who remained were able to attain higher wages and lower rents. Demand for meat and finer clothing increased among the general population. In some places, there was a decline in serfdom.

Do higher mortality rates reduce inequality?

In 2017, Austrian historian Walter Scheidel took perhaps the most pessimistic view of this. He surveyed much of history: from the collapse of late Bronze Age societies of the Middle East and southern Europe in the 12th century BC right through to the revolutions and ‘total war’ of the 20th century. And the thoroughly disheartening conclusion he reached was that mortality from pandemic disease, violent revolutions and the collapse of states were the only truly effective ways that inequality reduced historically.

But, again, is prosperity amid mass death how we’d genuinely define a ‘good time’? Is it right to attribute a high standard of ‘living’ to a period when half of all people, your loved ones included, are dead?

If truth be told, the main problem with our interpretation of good and bad times is our inability to absorb the full complexity of any historical period. The past involved a mass of individual and collective human experiences, which only survive in fragments. We struggle to make sense of this confusion until we conjure it into orderly narratives of rises and falls.

This is how we humans deal with a complicated, changing world: by ordering our memories into stories. We write history the same way: mirroring the same ups and downs in our own lives. There is no reason to assume these necessarily render an accurate interpretation of the past as a whole. As William Shakespeare had Hamlet tell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in c1600, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”.

Going back to Elizabethan England

Indeed, our view of Shakespeare’s own times contains especially glaring incongruities. He was born in 1564, during a century in which the late medieval trend of population decline in Europe reversed, and its explorers, traders and conquerors spread around the globe. This time saw a surge in economic growth, with an increase in the scale and complexity of societies.

But prosperity was very unevenly distributed. In England, the reign of Elizabeth I (1558‒1603) is exceptionally revered. A 2007 film was even titled Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Developments in theatre and poetry, and even the greater use of domestic comforts like chimneys, may have been significant.

Yet, average real income dropped by almost all measures. Poverty and destitution reached a level not seen in the Middle Ages. What’s more, plague never went away, and struck repeatedly, as in London in 1592–93. There were also food shortages, with harvest failures for four years running from 1594 to 1598.

The later propaganda value of Elizabethan England’s resistance to foreign aggression during the 1585‒1604 Anglo-Spanish War ‒ particularly the famous Spanish Armada of 1588 ‒ may have clouded our view. So has the perceived glamour of the Tudor court. However, even here, you were in danger of meeting a sticky end on an executioner’s block.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”

These were both good and bad times then, we think. But by Shakespeare’s own death, in 1616, much had certainly changed ‒ and was continuing to do so. The 17th century, it is now argued, laid the groundwork for the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, as agriculture commercialised, and manufacturing jobs began to proliferate.

Yet the move from a largely agrarian to an industrial society is as controversial as that of the hunter-gatherer to sedentary agriculturalist many millennia earlier. As Charles Dickens famously began A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Rapid technological innovation combined with massive new energy inputs – the burning of fossil fuels – to spectacularly increase the efficiency of the economies of first Britain, then Europe, America and the world. Human societies were able ‒ at least for a time ‒ to escape the growth and population limits envisaged by Malthus. Vastly more material wealth was generated than ever before.

The 17th century, it is now argued, laid the groundwork for the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, as agriculture commercialised, and manufacturing jobs began to proliferate

Simultaneously, whole communities and ways of life were torn apart as former agricultural workers moved into towns and cities in search of jobs in industry. While advantageous for some, working conditions, diet and housing for many was sufficiently appalling to inspire countless activists to action, not least Dickens himself, and the German philosopher Karl Marx.

Ideologies like socialism and nationalism grew in response to the uncertainties that arose from such rapid change. Meanwhile, industrialised militaries permitted European empires to further dominate and exploit the rest of the world. Conflict, particularly into the 20th century, was waged on an unparalleled scale.

Yet strangely, this may have been both the most and least bloody century in history. In absolute terms, the greatest number of people met violent deaths. But such was the increase in world population, in relative terms, the fewest did. What’s more, as French economist Thomas Piketty pointed out in 2013, these wars themselves went a long way towards eliminating the massive economic inequality of the industrial age.

Though admittedly as much a levelling down as a levelling up, nothing is more efficient at destroying factories, railways and fortunes than mechanised warfare and taxes to pay for it. But can we really present horrendous events, such as the Second World War, with its associated atrocities, positively? To do so would appear an affront to the many millions who died: sacrificed at the altar of nations.

Societies in the 21st century

By almost all measures, human societies are now ‒ in the 21st century ‒ richer, more complex, more interconnected and more technologically advanced than at any other time in history. Yet immense inequality has also returned, both within and between societies. And while our total population is predicted to peak, the effects of modern economies on the environment, not least greenhouse gas emissions and resultant runaway climate change, are immense.

The interaction between humans and their surroundings is complicated. Much of history has now had some long-term climactic change associated with it. We have arguably always shaped our planet, as we ourselves are in turn shaped by it ‒ but no more so than now. So, this is no golden age either.

It is nostalgia for a lost time that leads us, like Hesiod and Ovid, to see earlier periods of history, where we perceive our beginnings ‒ like our youth ‒ as ‘golden’. In reality, there are few entirely good or bad times: most are a fusion of both. The modern world is neither better nor worse. There’s just more of everything.

We struggle with this idea because we cannot think outside of our own storytelling nature. It is possible that, in a future with powerful artificial intelligence-driven tools, we may be able to escape these limits to our imagination and see past societies as closer to what they really were. But, with the ecological overreach and consequent threat of our extinction involved in reaching that technological complexity, it may well be that we will experience one perfect sunrise, before we finally sink back into the darkness.

Dr Robert Blackmore is a historian and a visiting fellow at the University of Southampton

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This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

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