A History of the World

From the series A History of the World, Making Civilizations traces the origins of large-scale organized human societies. Led by archaeologist Hans-Joachim Gehrke, a distinguished group of scholars lays out latest findings about Neanderthals, the Agrarian Revolution, the founding of imperial China, the world of Western classical antiquity, and more.

Between 1350 and 1750 the world reached a tipping point of global connectedness. In this volume of the acclaimed series A History of the World, noted international scholars examine five critical geographical areas where exploration and empire building led to expanding interaction—early signals on every continent of a shrinking globe.

For most of human history, states and regions were connected by long-distance commerce and war, yet they developed essentially separately. The century after 1750 marked a major shift. An Emerging Modern World, fourth in the six-volume series A History of the World, charts this transformative period outside the West.

Between 1870 and 1945, advances in communication and transportation simultaneously expanded and shrank the world. In five interpretive essays, A World Connecting goes beyond nations, empires, and world wars to capture the era’s defining feature: the profound and disruptive shift toward an ever more rapidly integrating world.

Each of the five essays comprising A World Connecting—Leviathan 2.0; Empires and the Reach of the Global; Migrations and Belongings; Global Markets Transformed; and Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World—is now available as a standalone paperback volume.

Global Interdependence provides a new account of world history from the end of WWII to the present, an era when transnational communities challenged the long domination of the nation-state. Leading scholars elucidate the political, economic, cultural, and environmental forces that have shaped the planet in the past sixty years.

J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke’s contribution to Global Interdependence is now available in the standalone paperback volume The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945.