Besides being more comfortable than itchy British wool, cotton fabric (called calico) could easily be dyed and patterned, and the democratization of fashion took off, along with a massive global trade in cotton and cotton goods. Everything in the book was neither tool nor weapon: they were all toys.Ĭonsider what happened when cotton arrived in London from India in the late 1600s. Another story from Islamic history: when Baghdad was at its height as one of the world’s most cultured cities around 800 CE, its “House of Wisdom” produced a remarkable text titled “The Book of Ingenious Devices.” In it were beautiful schematic drawings of machines years ahead of anything in Europe-clocks, hydraulic instruments, even a water-powered organ with swappable pin-cylinders that was effectively programmable. Importing eastern spices become so essential that eventually the trade routes defined the map of Islam. In the Babylon of 1700 BCE-3,700 years ago-there were cloves that came all the way from Indonesia, 5,000 miles away. They were art, conforming to Brian Eno’s definition: “Art is everything you don’t have to do.” It looks frivolous, but Johnson proposed that the pursuit of delight is one of the prime movers of history-of globalization, innovation, and democratization.Ĭonsider spices, a seemingly trivial ornament to food. Beads and flutes had nothing to do with survival. He showed 50,000-year-old bone flutes found in modern Slovenia that were tuned to musical intervals we would still recognize. Johnson began with a slide of shell beads found in Morocco that indicate human interest in personal adornment going back 80,000 years. Humanity has been inventing toward delight for a long time.
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