Making Sense of World History

Front matter

z = Rick Szostak N

Making Sense of World History is a comprehensive and accessible textbook that helps students understand the key themes of world history within a chronological framework stretching from ancient times to the present day.

To lend coherence to its narrative, the book employs a set of organizing devices that connect times, places, and/or themes. This narrative is supported by:

PART I: Organizing world history Key organizing devices and principles 4

Placing this text within the evolution of world history 6

Implications for how the book is organized 9

Placing individuals in history 10

What is history about? The key themes of world history 10 Our themes and the world of today 13 The theme of culture 13 The theme of social structure 14

Understanding change in history through evolutionary analysis Inter-societal transmission 19 Evolution in cultural values and practices 20 Evolution and progress compared 24

Philosophical orientation of this book 24 Interdisciplinarity and world history 25 Both/and thinking 26 Valuing multiple perspectives 27

Outline of this book 28

PART II: Prehistory and ancient history 35

2 The Big History prelude: From the Big Bang to hominids 37 Guiding questions 37 The nature of Big History 38 The Big Bang 40 Stars and planets 42 The Earth 46 The theme of non-human environment 49 Life on Earth 51 Evolutionary theory revisited 54 Multicellular life 60 Mammals 63 Reprise 64 Questions 66 Readings 66

3 Evolution of human nature itself in early human history 69 Guiding questions 69 The evolution of human nature 70

Environmental influences? 76 Culture and more 77 Language 78 Culture 81 Emotions 82 Altruism 83 The subconscious 84 Human activities 85 Tool-making 85 Fire 89 Economic activity 91 Incomes 92 Gender relations 93 Polity and social structure 94 Art 95 Migration 98 Population growth 104 Effects on the natural environment 105 vi

Connections across societies 106 Speculation on the nature of hominid life 106 The theme of common genetic inheritance 107 The theme of individual differences 108 Questions 109 Readings 109

A critical transformation: The development of agriculture, nomadism, and fishing 111 Guiding questions 111 The development of agriculture 113 Some preliminary considerations 113 Agriculture in the Middle East 118 A regional survey 120 Some effects 130 Agriculture means storage and control over land 130 Environmental impacts 131 Addressing the soil nutrient challenge facing farmers 132 Population and health 133 Human nature 135 Politics 139 Gender relations 140 Speculation on peasant behaviour 142 Nomadism 143 The nature and location of nomadism 143 The emergence of nomadism 145 Nomads and farmers 146 The domestication of the horse 148 Nomad life 148 Fishing 151 The theme of the economy 152 Questions 153 Readings 153

Some early impacts of agriculture: Key technologies and trade practices 155 Guiding questions 155 Agricultural technology 156

The diversity of agricultural practices 157

Irrigation 158 vii viii

Fermentation 158 Vegetable oils 160 Non-agricultural technologies 160 Pottery 161 Brick 164 Glass 164 Textiles 165 Metals and mining 167 Other technologies 172 The theme of technology and science 173 Trade 173 Money 175 Transport 177 Merchants 180 Artisans 186 Economic growth 187 Evolution of technology and science 192 Questions 197 Readings 197

Grappling with “civilization”: The development of cities, states, and writing Guiding questions 199 The earliest “civilizations” 201 Cities 202 Emergence of early cities 202 The nature of early cities 205 Effects of cities 208 Architecture 209 Organized states 214 Emergence and expansion of early states 214 Nature of early states 218 The rise of “kings” 219 Effects of states 223 Writing 223 Education 229 Laws 231 Gender relations 233 Science 235

War 235 The birth of war 236 The common experience of war 237 Military leadership 243 Soldiers 243 War and social differentiation 245 The changing face of war: Technology, scale, and organization 245 The theme of politics 248 Questions 249 Readings 250

Early civilizations around the world 251 Guiding questions 251 City states and “empires” in Mesopotamia 252 Inscriptions 257 Anatolia 259 Egypt 260 Nubia 268 Africa beyond Nubia 268 The Levant 268 Greece 269 Indus Valley 272 The Ganges 275 China 277 Central Asia 282 Americas 283 Meanwhile elsewhere in the world 286 Trade expansion through time 286 Institutional evolution 289 Climate and civilization 293 Population 294 Migration 295 Travel 299 The theme of population and health 299 Families 300 Questions 301 Readings 301 ix

8 Belief systems: The nature and development of early religions 303 Guiding questions 303 Evolutionary processes 307 Historical analysis of religion 309 The earliest religions 310

Egypt 313 The Levant 316 Mesopotamia 316 Greece 317 Rome 318 Africa beyond Egypt 318 India 319 China 320 Mesoamerica 322 Nomadic religions 322 The nature of ethics 322 Reflections on religion and community 326 Religion and the family 327 Sacrifices and buildings 327 Art 329 The theme of art 334 Artistic evolution 336 Questions 338 Readings 339

PART III: Classical history 341

9 Political organization on an unprecedented scale: The classical empires 343 Guiding questions 343 From earlier large states to larger empires 345 The nature of empires 346 Imperial internal diversity and justification 348 Functions of empire 351 The expansion of empires 352 Administration of empires 353 The ends of empires 355 Particular empires 357

Persia 357

Mauryan and Gupta Empires in India 363 The Kushan Empire 368 Axum 369 The Americas 370 Slavery 370 Trade 377 Currency 377 Finance 378 Sea trade 380 Trade networks 383 Silk Road 384 Cultural and health impacts 388 Ancient science 389 Libraries 392 Questions 394 Readings 395

10 Similarities and differences: The Roman and Chinese Empires compared 397 Guiding questions 397 Greece 398

The lasting impact of Greek civilization 404 Rome 409 The Republic 410 The Empire 412 Roman family life 417 China 421 Chinese philosophy 421 The Qin 424 The Han 427 Comparing China and Rome 431 Similarities and differences 431 Empire and trade 436 Imperial decline 438 The question of reconstitution 441 The legacy of empire 443 Political thought 443 China and bureaucratic theory 447 Democratic impulses 448 Jewish political thought 450 xi xii

Patriotism 451 Questions 451 Readings 451

11 The birth of missionary religions: Why and how did the world’s major religions emerge?

Guiding questions 453 New religions from old 455 Religions and states 456 Why then? 457 Major religions 458

Hinduism 458 Jainism 459 Charvaka 460 Judaism 460 Zoroastrianism 463 Confucianism 465 Taoism 466 Buddhism 466 Christianity 472 Manichaeism 478 Islam 479 Shinto 485 Mayan religion 486 Some comparisons and reflections 487 Canon development 487 Religion and family values 487 Religion and trade 488 Faith 489 Religion and war 489 Religion and artistic representation 490 Relics 491 The geographical spread of religions 491 Conversion of rulers 492 Policies of rulers 493 Conquest 493 Political conflict 494 Missionaries and merchants 494 Migration 495 Financial resources 495

Syncretism 495 Suitability 496 Other factors 496 Summing up 497 Evolutionary reflections 499 Questions 500 Readings 501

12 A new force in world history: The Islamic conquests 503 Guiding questions 503 Early days 504 Islamic political realities 511 Battles over succession 513 Umayyads 514 Abbasids 515

Abbasid cultural and scientific efflorescence 517 Islamic attitudes toward women 525 Trade and the movement of ideas 526 Islam in India 529 Mamluks 531 Islam in West Africa 531 Islam in Central Asia 533 Islamic art 533 Questions 536 Readings 536

13 Eurasia in the centuries after the fall of the classical empires 537 Guiding questions 537 Nomadic peoples of Central Asia 540

Nomads and sedentary societies 540 Nomadic military technology and organization 542 Particular nomadic groups 544 “Barbarian” incursions into Europe 548 The Germans 549 The Huns 551 The Slavs 551 Magyars 554 The Vikings 554 xiii xiv

Islam 557

The classic feudal system 558

The Byzantine Empire 565 Justinian and Theodora 566 Byzantine strategy 570 The nature of empire 571 The Huns 573 Islam 574 Slavs 575

China 575 The period of disunity 576 Sui 577 Tang 577

Korea 583

Japan 585

Southeast Asia 587

Tibet 589

PART IV: The Middle Ages 595

14 Seeking global commonalities: Some key thematic trends 900-1500 and beyond 597 Guiding questions 597 Climate after 900 598 Political consolidation after 900 599 Courtly life 601 Cultural consolidation after 900 603 Trade expansion 606

Trading cities 609

Travellers’ tales 610

Porcelain 614

Agricultural expansion 617 Monuments 617 Family patterns 622 Population 624 Questions 625 Readings 625

15 Regional developments: Eurasia after 900 627 Guiding questions 627

State formation in Europe 629

The Catholic Church 633

The Crusades 637

Trade and trading towns 642

Agriculture 646

Industry and guilds 650

The printing press 653

The Renaissance 654

China 658 Song politics 658 Economic dynamism under the Song 661 Landscape painting 665 The Yuan 665

Japan 667

Southeast Asian mainland 672

Southeast Asian islands 678

16 Regional developments: Polynesia, the Americas, and Africa 685 Guiding questions 685 Polynesian settlement 686

Easter Island 692 Australia 693 The Americas 694 Mesoamerica 695 Farther north 701 South America 703 Africa 709 West Africa 712 West African trading centres 716 East Africa 717 Kongo 717 Questions 719 Readings 719

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17 The Mongols and the largest ever contiguous empire 721 Guiding questions 721 Central Asia at the time of the Mongols 722 Chinggis Khan 722 Keys to Mongol success 726 Some speculations 730 The unfortunate logic of slaughter 730 The post-Chinggis Mongols 731 Mongol administration 734 The role of women 735 The Yuan Dynasty 736 Effects of the Mongol conquests 737 Trade and transport 737 Exchange of ideas 741 The Plague 743 Religion 746 After the fall 749 Muscovy 749 Timur 751 Questions 752 Readings 752

PART V: The Early Modern period 755

18 Thematic developments in the Early Modern period 1450-1800 757 Guiding questions 757 Climate 759 Political consolidation 759 Laws 760 Seventeenth-century disruptions 761 The Netherlands 764 Religious developments 764 Religious interactions 769 Witch hunts 770 Wars and gunpowder technology 772 Early development of gunpowder technology 772 The success of Europe 774 Trade 777

Trading networks 777 Coffee, tea, and cocoa 779 Trans-Sahara trade 781 Collecting 784 The transmission of art 784

Capitalism 786

19 Exploration and trade: Linking the continents 795 Guiding questions 795 The Spanish conquests in the western hemisphere 797 The Spanish discovery of America 797 Spanish conquests in the Americas 801 Silver and settlement 806 The Spanish and others across the Pacific 809 The Portuguese to the Indian Ocean 813 English and Dutch expansion 819 Russia into Siberia 822 Chinese expansion 825 The Columbian Exchange 827 The potato 830 An exchange of ideas 833 The slave trade 834 The Newfoundland fishery 839 The North American fur trade 842 Agricultural expansion 844 Questions 847 Readings 847

20 Comparing new empires in Asia 849 Guiding questions 849 Comparisons and contrasts 850 The Ottoman Empire 856 Ottoman administration 862 Reform initiatives 864 Ottoman decline 865 Ottoman culture 868 The Safavid Empire 869 xvii

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Safavid culture 872 The Mughals 873 Mughal culture 878 Caste 880 Mughals and British 881 The Ming in China 884 Ming society and economy 889 Ming naval expeditions 890 The Qing in China 893 Africa 898 Questions 900 Readings 901

21 It seems so natural now: The emergence of the modern nation state 903 Guiding questions 903 A historical survey 905 Europe in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries 905 Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 911 Asia 916 Latin America 918 Nation states and empires 919 Settler societies 921 Africa 923 The Pacific 924 The nation state system 926 Ethnicity itself 928 Nationalism 931 Democracy 937 Questions 942 Readings 942

22 The Great Divergence: The rise of the European economy and military 945 Guiding questions 945 Roots of the Great Divergence 947

Comparing incomes 949

Natural resources and colonies 951

Trade and markets 954

Demography 955

Political and economic institutions 956 Religion 961 Technology and technological innovation 961 Summing up 966 The scientific revolution 966 Changes in astronomical understanding 967 Changes in practice 971 The cultural environment of the scientific revolution 976 Non-European antecedents 977 Effects of the scientific revolution 977 Western Civilization revisited 978 Questions 979 Readings 980

PART VI: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries 983

23 Key thematic transformations of the long nineteenth century 985 Guiding questions 985 Colonization 988 South Africa and Algeria 1000 Japan and colonialism 1001 American imperialism? 1002 Mining 1003

Transport 1004

Changes in work 1009

Agriculture 1021

24 Industrial revolutions: Innovation, factories, and economic growth 1025 Guiding questions 1025 The British Industrial Revolution 1026

Relationships among factories, technology, and economic growth 1031

Why? The European context 1032 Politics and property rights 1033 xix

The British Empire 1033 Transport 1035 Other factors 1038 The second generation of industrializers 1041 The Second Industrial Revolution 1045 The third generation of industrializers 1048 Demographic changes associated with industrialization 1050 Social and cultural changes associated with industrialization 1057 Questions 1058 Readings 1059

25 Political revolutions around the world: A diverse set of experiences with important commonalities 1061 Guiding questions 1061 The American Revolution 1063 To revolt or not 1063 The twenty colonies 1066 Forging a new state 1068 The French Revolution 1073 Haiti 1079 Latin American revolutions 1082 The Sokoto caliphate 1087 Other revolutions and revolts 1088 Questions 1092 Readings 1093

26 A unique historical transformation: The abolition of slavery and serfdom 1095 Guiding questions 1095 The abolition of slavery 1097

Europe 1100 The Americas 1103 Elsewhere 1109 The aftermath of abolition 1112 Other types of coerced labour 1115 Racism 1117 The abolition of serfdom 1120 The abolition of seigneurial tenure in Quebec in 1854 1123

Questions 1124 Readings 1125

27 Key thematic transformations of the twentieth century 1127 Guiding questions 1127 Democratization 1131 Communism 1136 The growth of the state 1142 International organizations 1150 Rights 1154 Social change 1158 Religion 1163 Environment 1167 Questions 1171 Readings 1171

28 Devastation and fear: War in the twentieth century 1173 Guiding questions 1173 Prelude to war 1174 World War I 1176 Linking the World Wars 1187 Fascism 1191 World War II 1194

Wartime atrocities 1202 Allied bombing 1203 The impacts of war 1205 The Cold War 1209 The Hot Cold War 1216 Korea 1216 Cuba 1217 Indonesia 1217 Afghanistan 1217 Terrorism 1218 New wars 1221 Trends in war-making 1222 Questions 1223 Readings 1223

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29 The worst of times and the best of times: The

Great Depression and postwar recovery 1225 Guiding questions 1225

The Great Depression 1226

Technological innovation and the Great Depression 1232 The postwar Golden Age 1238

Social policy revisited 1242

Convergence 1244

Consumer culture 1251

Globalization 1252

30 An unprecedented development: Postwar decolonization 1265 Guiding questions 1265 A unique historical transformation 1266 Influences on the timing and nature of decolonization 1266 Challenges in transition 1271 The Middle East 1272 Asia 1274 Iran 1279 India 1280 China 1284 Vietnam 1287 Africa 1290 Latin America 1298 The Pacific 1300 Questions 1302 Readings 1303

Population movements: Dramatic changes in the numbers, location, and health of humans 1305 Guiding questions 1305 Population growth and stabilization 1307 Life expectancy 1313 Migration 1315 Nineteenth-century migration 1316 Twentieth-century migration 1320

Urbanization 1324

Tourism 1332

Epidemics and famines 1336 Obesity 1339

PART VII: Drawing lessons 1343

32 Drawing lessons from history: Why, how, and what 1345 Why to draw lessons 1345 Some important general insights 1345 Challenges in drawing lessons 1347 How to draw lessons 1347 Institutions and values 1348 Human nature 1350 Do no harm 1352 Human challenges 1352 Cultural understanding 1354 Toleration 1354 Science 1356 Technology 1359 Energy, resources, environment 1362 Trade 1364 Politics 1366 War 1371 Changing paths 1373 Population 1374 History itself 1376 Thoughts on our organizing structure 1377

World history and the meaning of life: How this book might shape your view of life 1379

We can achieve meaning by striving to make the world a better place 1379

We can achieve meaning through celebrating group identity (within a common humanity) 1386

We can achieve meaning by celebrating personal identity 1387 xxiii

We can achieve meaning through balance 1388 We can achieve meaning through our own life story 1390 We can find meaning in religion or philosophy 1391

Index 1397

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Figures

Thematic interactions

Influences on and effects of star formation

Path dependence

Influences on and effects of language

Malthusian population dynamics

Influences on and effects of agriculture

Influences on and effects of nomadism

Influences on and effects of metals technology Influences on and effects of increased trade

The four stages of innovation

Influences on and effects of cities

Influences on and effects of states

Influences on and effects of war

Influences on and effects of the evolution of religion Influences on and effects of Islamic conquests Influences on and effects of Islamic science

Influences on and effects of feudalism

Influences on and effects of cultural consolidation Influences on and effects of monuments

Influences on and effects of low population density in Africa Influences on and effects of Mongol conquests Influences on and effects of superior gunpowder technology Influences on and effects of connecting the two hemispheres Romanov Dynasty power profile

Influences on and effects of the nation state

Influences on and effects of the scientific revolution Transport improvements and the Industrial Revolution Influences on and effects of the demographic transition Influences on and effects of the abolition of slavery Influences on and effects of expanded state size Influences on economic growth

Influences on and effects of the Great Depression Influences on and effects of postwar decolonization

Influences on and effects of population growth

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Tables

1.1 Advantages of the five organizing devices 7 1.2 The phenomena 1S 32.1 Human progress by theme 1381

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Boxes

General education, world history, and this book Path dependence

Group selection

Self-deception and historical research Deception and hierarchy?

Sculpting the human body Individual biographies Malthusian population dynamics Political leadership terminology The nature of trade

The roles of money Characteristics of transport

The reputation of merchants Measuring economic growth Increased complexity

Cities in history

Gender and stratification

The motives for war

The evolution of war

Ecological collapse

Rules of succession

The spread of languages Migration decisions

The roles of religion

Magic and religion

The five types of ethical analysis The purpose of artistic illustration The economics of slavery Shipwrecks

Sports and games

War elephants

Cuisine

LIST OF BOXES

Comparisons across societies Expanding farm sizes

Religious choice

Decisive battles

Technology transfer

Travelling cuisine

Head-binding

Commodity history

Stocks and bonds and pensions

The history of timekeeping

Tales of leadership

Epidemics

Artistic borrowing

Scurvy

Universal empire

Secluding rulers

Dynastic rise and fall

Cosmopolitan Vienna

State capacity

The history of rubber

The globalization of timekeeping International expositions

History of childhood and ageing Revolutionary commonalities

A third gender

Ethical reflection

Historiography

Revisiting the ruler’s challenge

The causes of economic growth

Air conditioning

The historical experience of inequality The historical novelty of globalization Poverty rates

Resources and economic development The changing role of agriculture Population and economy in a post-Malthusian world The world’s biggest cities

Museums and historical sites and World History

Challenges facing agents

Hunter-gatherers 106 Farmers 131 Nomads 150 Fishers 152 Merchants 181 Artisans 187 Builders 214 Rulers 222 Soldiers 244 Priests 310 Slaves 375 Scientists 392 Workers 421 Women 526 Explorers 690 Artists 785 Voters 942 Technological innovators 965 Industrialists 1041 Modern parents 1053 Bureaucrats 1150 Migrants 1323

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Primary documents (by chapter)

6. A Sumerian Schoolboy; Ibn Khaldun; The Art of War 7. Code of Hammurabi; Advice from an Egyptian scribal teacher 8. Creation stories (several from different societies); Hymn to the Nile 9. Cyrus Cylinder; Ashoka’s Edicts; The Four Elements 10. Quotes from Cicero; Confucian quotations 11. Happiness of the Dhammapada; The Parable of the Pearl-Borer 12. The 1001 Nights; An anonymous account of Baghdad around 1000 cE 13. Ibn Khaldun’s Theory of History; An Arab impression of the Slavic slave trade; Cast off the Yoke of Bondage 14. Excerpt from Tale of Genji; Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta 15. Anonymous in Wurzburg in 1147 disdains motives for Crusades; The Divine Comedy; Zhu Xi 16. How the Aztec raised sons as warriors; Inca social policy; Mansa Musa visits Cairo 17. Visiting the Mongols; Pegalotti’s Advice to Merchants 18. Religious reform in many lands; Papal Bull of Innocent VIII on Witchcraft 19. The conquest of Tenochtitlan; Vasco da Gama on the natives of South Africa 20. Excerpt from Shaikh Hasan Al Kafrawi; Babur’s Autobiography; An address to two hundred million fellow countrywomen 21. Excerpt from Muhammad Iqbal; Giuseppe Mazzini on nationalism 22. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations; Galileo’s Recantation of Heresy 23. In Defence of Colonialism; Testimony of a Young Female Factory Worker in 1832 24. [Petition] To the Merchants, Clothiers...; Transport and industrialization 25. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens; Haitian Declaration of Independence; Excerpts from the Mexican Constitution 26. Decree of Simon Bolivar Emancipating Slaves in 1816; African slavery in America

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Declaration of Rights of Working and Exploited People; The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Gas attack 1916; Treaty of Versailles

The Depression experience; Some quotes about globalization

A Plea for African Unity; The Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company The dawn of restrictions on immigration; The slums of Manchester Oswald Spengler on Human Progress

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This book had its genesis in a remark I came across some years ago: that students and instructors of World History courses found it hard to render the material coherent. They might enjoy tales of Babylonians and Aztecs and Polynesians but wondered why such different times and places were addressed in the same course. I set out to bring greater coherence to this subject matter through the use of a handful of organizing devices that are outlined in chapter 1. I stress here and there that these devices are innocuous in two important senses: They do not interrupt narrative flow, and they do not force the complexity of history into some simplifying perspective.

There are at least three key reasons why a coherent understanding of the history of the world is important:

e Humanity could benefit from a coherent sense of how we came to live in the sort of societies that we inhabit today. It might well prove that a better understanding of our past would aid humanity in charting its future. This is the hope of many world historians, and we will indeed suggest that this is so for the particular approach to world history advocated in this book — and will devote a closing chapter to drawing such lessons.

e Humans wish to understand the meaning of life, and comprehension of our place in world history can potentially aid in our pursuit of metaphysical meaning. We will return to this question also in the closing chapter.

e We will suggest that world history encourages us to reflect on our common humanity. We might alleviate the strife that exists at present among different cultural groups if we appreciated that the world we live in was shaped by interactions across diverse societies over the last millennia, and if we likewise reminded ourselves of our common heritage and common responses to similar challenges through human history.

This book is written with a passion for the practice of world history. World history is, after all, an invitation to think big.

An exhaustive and interactive thematic approach

As we shall see in chapter 1, world history texts often take a “thematic” approach, following themes such as “culture” or “environment” across time and place. This book takes a thematic approach also, but with two important differences:

e I will argue that we need to follow ten distinct themes through history. We gain a seriously biased and misleading view of history if we ignore “technology” or “health” or “gender relations” simply in order to make our story manageable in scope. We will, in particular, miss many important cases of cross-societal interaction if we arbitrarily limit the scope of our coverage. Happily, our organizing devices will allow us to treat all ten themes coherently.

e It is the interactions among themes that are central to world history. It is thus problematic to structure books or chapters around a single theme. We will highlight thematic interactions throughout this book. We will find that multiple themes play important roles in all major historical events and processes.

Implications of these organizing devices

The five organizing devices combine to achieve coherence in world history in four broad ways:

e To communicate the cumulative effect of thematic interactions through time (while stressing that cumulative change was never inevitable).

e To communicate the many ways in which societies have influenced each other through history.

e To communicate how all human societies have faced similar challenges, and allow us to compare and contrast how they have reacted to these.

e Indirectly these in turn support an appreciation that world history is a shared history that can only be understood by appreciating how themes, regions, and people interact.

Timeliness of this book

The timeliness of the book should be stressed. It comes at a point in time when:

e World history is growing in popularity.

e There is no consensus on how best to structure world history courses or texts. There is a great deal of experimentation.

e There is recognition that the material needs to be organized in some fashion to facilitate both teaching and learning.

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XXXiV e World historians often claim that there are lessons in world history. But most texts make little effort to draw such lessons.

e Lessons regarding connections across societies over time and similarities in development across societies are potentially useful in a world that talks much about a “clash of civilizations.”

Achieving conceptual clarity

We will in chapter 1 outline the themes and subsidiary phenomena that will guide us in this book. This exercise, importantly, allows us to achieve a considerable degree of conceptual clarity. Some of these phenomena should be easily understood: Who can doubt what “population” or “economic output” (measuring this is a different matter) mean in general? We will define other terms, such as “science” and “technology” carefully as the book proceeds. Of course, philosophers have long established that absolute precision in definition is beyond human capability. But we have achieved a level of precision that should allow different readers to have broadly similar understandings of what we are talking about. This is sadly often not the case in works of history or social science.

Table 1.2 provides further definitional clarity. We know best what a thing is if we know what sorts of things it subsumes and what sorts of things it does not. This is especially important with respect to culture. Table 1.2 provides an extensive list of the set of beliefs and practices that we embrace by the definition of culture employed in this book. Importantly, it also describes the set of things that are not culture: Notably, we treat art separately (for reasons we shall discuss in chapter 8, but primarily because of the apparent existence of a shared aesthetic taste). To achieve further clarity we will strive in what follows to speak about particular attitudes or behaviours whenever possible rather than culture in general. Philosophers, it might be noted, have stressed that this “extensional” approach to definition in which one provides a list of “examples” of a thing is a useful complement to, if not substitute for, the “intensional” type of definition that tries to capture the essence of a term in a sentence or two. By providing an (fairly) exhaustive list of “types of culture” we achieve as much precision as may be possible.

Having achieved clarity in our definition of themes, we will not casually throw this clarity away by using other sorts of vague terminology in what follows. Our approach in this book is to break complex concepts — such as “globalization” or “modernization” — into their constituent parts. “Globalization” means for some the impact of expanding trade flows on employment, for others the increasing effect of American movies on French culture, and for still others the spread of democracy (a term we will use but carefully define in later chapters) globally. These are each important interactions among phenomena in their own right. And it is much easier to achieve a shared understanding of what we mean by “trade flows” or “American movies” than “globalization” itself. Yet the existence of a discourse around “globalization” suggests a belief that these economic, political, and cultural processes influence each other, and thus we should be sure to explore these thematic interactions as well. Likewise, the political, economic, cultural, and social aspects of “modernization” are best understood in isolation, though again these may interact. We should not assume at the outset that they interact in a particular way. Modernization theory also has had a tendency to imagine that all societies were tending toward Western outcomes, an assumption that can both bias historical understanding and offend non-Western sensibilities. “Civilization,” “capitalism,” “patriarchy,” and “imperialism” are yet other ambiguous terms that we will carefully break into components that likely interact in what follows.

Note that there is a danger in eschewing such terminology. “Globalization” signals not just an interacting set of economic, political, and cultural processes, but also such messages as “This is something new,” and “This is a problem.” “Capitalism” and “imperialism” have similar connotations. “Civilization” often signals a sense that some societies are better than others. We thus lose some of the rhetorical, ideological, and theoretical meanings of such words when we simplify their meaning into sets of thematic interactions. But arguably for the purpose of this book that is no bad thing. We want not to assume the results of any historical process but to evaluate these. Terminology that clearly signals thematic interactions better serves our purposes. We will not be shy of clearly stating both negative and positive effects on other themes of these processes.

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Treating a multi-dimensional subject matter

We can understand the challenge of teaching and learning world history as the challenge of multi-dimensional subject matter. The various themes or phenomena of interest to historians interact across both time and place. Tracing individual themes through time tends to push interactions into the background - and often makes it difficult to maintain temporal perspective. Focusing on particular regions diminishes one’s ability to compare these and to appreciate spatial interactions. Endowing historical periods with unique characters associated with one or two themes abstracts away from both thematic interactions and historical continuity. The trick is to capture time, space, and themes simultaneously. This can only be done episodically, taking a change (or indeed stability) in one phenomenon - say, the development of agriculture, or the emergence of empire — as a temporary focus, examining its extent across time and space, and investigating how other phenomena influenced the change and were in turn affected by it. These episodes naturally feed into one another, as changes observed at one point in time and place set the stage for changes later in time and (often) in different places. The effects discussed in one episode can become influences or even the focus of analysis in another (though we must be careful not to imply that one historical episode inevitably leads to