Brief Description

The key to a world history text is structure: one must organize the most important events and processes in world history into an intelligible narrative. Yet most world history texts plunge directly into a historical narrative with at most a couple of pages of introduction as to how the book will be organized. The reader/student has a much better likelihood of recognizing the key arguments behind the narrative if given an organizing structure. This world history text thus devotes introductory chapters to providing a structure to world history – but disperses other structural elements throughout the narrative. This structure is not theoretical but rather conceptual. The key elements are these:

  • · The reader is shown why certain themes among all the subjects investigated by social scientists and humanists will be stressed in the book, but students are actively encouraged to (and shown how to) explore links to other topics.

  • · Rather than follow these themes individually through time as some world history texts do, this book will focus on how these themes interact. History is best understood as interactions among polity, economy, culture, and other key phenomena. The text uses dozens of Diagrams that capture the diverse influences on and/or effects of particular historical events or processes.

  • · Several of our key themes – culture, political and economic institutions, science and technology, and art – evolve through time (humans also evolved early in our history). In an introductory chapter we can explain for each of these evolutionary processes the nature of mutations, selection environment, and transmission mechanism; we can then in later chapters discuss in more detail particular mutations or selection mechanisms or transmission challenges. (We do so, it might be stressed, without drawing the simple analogies between cosmological and societal evolution that sometimes characterize the Big History literature. Evolutionary analysis can be seen as providing a set of questions to ask of each historical episode rather than preconceived answers.)

  • · There are non-evolutionary mechanisms of change that operate in many times and places, such as epidemiological understandings of disease. These also can be briefly introduced when these processes are first encountered in history. There are thus a series of Boxes devoted to these.

  • · We identify a set of challenges faced by different types of historical actors such as rulers, farmers, and merchants. There are a couple dozen such Tables in the text. We can then in various places address how and how well these challenges are addressed.

  • · Since we will focus on interactions among themes, we will often confront differences of opinion among historians. World history texts are now beginning to address historical controversies. To ignore these would provide a very misleading sense of the nature of historical inquiry. Yet the reader can be frustrated if introduced to a series of seemingly insoluble disagreements. We will discuss how scholars in general and this book in particular will try to integrate different perspectives into a more holistic understanding.

  • Each chapter begins with a set of guiding questions. Students learn that history involves an inter-related set of Who, What, When, Where, and especially Why and How questions. There is also a brief discussion of how each chapter builds upon preceding chapters and sets the stage for later chapters.

Most of the book will follow a historical narrative. Its focus will be on key historical episodes: the early development of agriculture, the formation of early empires, and so on. For each episode we will address not only how it unfolded but why the process/event happened and the effects that it had. Readers want and expect a narrative approach but then often struggle to remember the key processes at work. When asked a “why?” question, they often provide lots of tangential “what?” and “where?” information. This book will carefully distinguish when these different questions are being addressed without interrupting narrative flow. It will likewise unobtrusively indicate when a particular interaction – say, how empires encouraged supportive religions – or evolutionary process is being discussed.

Some world history textbooks close with brief speculations on the future. Though we should always be humble in doing so, our approach allows us to discuss in turn how our evolutionary processes might unfold (that is, what sort of mutations might be selected for), and how our key themes might interact.