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Why did the first civilizations emerge when and where they
did? How did Islam become a unifying force in the world of
its birth? What enabled the West to project its goods and
power around the world from the fifteenth century on? Why
was agriculture invented seven times and the steam engine
just once?
World-historical questions such as these, the subjects of
major works by Jared Diamond, David Landes, and others, are
now of great moment as global frictions increase. In a spirited
and original contribution to this quickening discussion, two
renowned historians, father and son, explore the webs that
have drawn humans together in patterns of interaction and
exchange, cooperation and competition, since earliest times.
Whether small or large, loose or dense, these webs have provided
the medium for the movement of ideas, goods, power, and money
within and across cultures, societies, and nations. From the
thin, localized webs that characterized agricultural communities
twelve thousand years ago, through the denser, more interactive
metropolitan webs that surrounded ancient Sumer, Athens, and
Timbuktu, to the electrified global web that today envelops
virtually the entire world in a maelstrom of cooperation and
competition, J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill show human
webs to be a key component of world history and a revealing
framework of analysis. Avoiding any determinism, environmental
or cultural, the McNeills give us a synthesizing picture of
the big patterns of world history in a rich, open-ended, concise
account.
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