could Carthage have done it?

Already up to the chapter on the Second Punic War, which makes me think about the contingency of history.

Ortega y Gasset, who has a nice sense for human affairs, insists that Carthage could have done just as Rome did, implying that there was some sort of uniform ascendancy of “Mediterranean culture” and that one dominant city-state would have done as well as another.

This seems wrong to me. For one thing, Carthage was more restrictive on granting citizenship to others. For another thing, despite the ferocity of Hannibal and his relatives, Carthage strikes me as a lot less aggressive than Rome on the whole.

I think it’s true that Carthage might have won the Second Punic War, and possibly destroyed Rome before 220 B.C. as a result. But I don’t think the result would have been a great Carthaginian Empire stretching from Scotland to Iraq. History would have been very different.

I agree that if one thing somehow doesn’t happen, another similar thing can often happen in its place. But timing is everything, and to delay an event is to change its character drastically. Finding the love of your life at age 16 or age 45 is not the same thing, and leads to two utterly different biographies. And I think the same is true on the scale of nations– a Mediterranean superpower emerging in 150 B.C. or 50 A.D. or 300 A.D. (let alone “never”). Two different world histories in the two cases.

I’ve often thought something similar about key primeval inventions, such as the wheel or the use of fire. In those cases, even if there is a reason why they had to be discovered at a certain time, there was probably a leeway of at least century or two. And if fire or the wheel had been discovered 120 years earlier or later than they actually were, this would have had a domino effect on everything else afterward. The human race could easily still be trapped in a Neolithic sort of state, or just as easily be piloting flying saucers to Alpha Centauri. At least I suspect this is true.

In fact, that would be an interesting poll question for historians… Which discoveries/inventions narrowly missed being made earlier, with the greatest resulting devastation to the progress of the human race? Or more generally, which disasters have we as a species still not quite recovered from?

I don’t have any good candidates off the top of my head. But there are always safe possible answers such as “the destruction of the Library of Alexandria” or “the two world wars of the 20th century”.

If not for the two world wars, off the top of my head, I would expect German dominance of some sort in 2009: an overwhelmingly dominant industrial power, surely the first to control the power of the atom, and with much more national territory than currently. The USA ended up with a lot of the advantages that probably would have fallen to Germany without the two wars.

Those are just quick thoughts on a fairly recent turning point. There are surely even more fateful ones, buried much further in the past.