ISBN : 9780198752905
Imagine the planet, as if from an immense distance of time and space, as a galactic observer might see it—with the kind of objectivity that we, who are enmeshed in our history, can´t attain.
The Oxford Illustrated History of the World encompasses the whole span of human history. It brings together some of the world's leading historians, under the expert guidance of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, to tell the 200,000-year story of our world, from the emergence of homo sapiens through to the twenty-first century: the environmental convulsions; the interplay of ideas (good and bad); the cultural phases and exchanges; the collisions and collaborations in politics; the successions of states and empires; the unlocking of energy; the evolutions of economies; the contacts, conflicts, and contagions that have all contributed to making the world we now inhabit.
Introduction
Part I: Children of the Ice
1: Humanity From the Ice: The Emergence and Spread of an Adaptive Species, Clive Gamble
2: The Mind in the Ice: Art and Thought before Agriculture, Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Part II: Of Mud and Metal
3: Into a Warming World, Martin Jones
4: The Farmers' Empires: Climax and Crises in Agrarian States and Cities, Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Part III: The Oscillations of Empires
5: Punctured Rupture: Material Life: Bronze Age Crisis to Black Death, John Brooke
6: Intellectual Traditions: Philosophy, Science, Religion, and the Arts, 500 BCE - 1350 CE, David Northrup
7: Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BC-AD 1350, Ian Morris
Part IV: The Climatic Reversal
8: Re-Convergence in a Smaller World: Economic and Ecological Encounters, 1350-1815, David Northrup
9: Renaissances, Reformations, and Mental Revolutions: Intellect and Arts in the Early Modern World, Manuel Lucena-Giraldo
10: Connected by Emotions and Experiences: Monarchs, Merchants, Mercenaries and Migrants in the Early Modern World, Anjana Singh
Part V: The Great Acceleration
11: The Anthropocene Epoch: The Background to Two Transformative Centuries, David Christian
12: The Modern World and Its Demons: Ideology and After in Arts, Letters and Thought, 1815-2008, Paolo Luca Bernardini
13: Politics and Society in the Kaleidoscope of Change: Relationships, behaviour, institutions, conflicts from the beginnings of Western hegemony to the American Supremacy, Jeremy Black
Epilogue
Further Reading
Index
Are you intellectually curious, but very busy? Would you have liked to understand the biggest questions about the history of the last 200,000 years, but you don't have the time required to read 97 different fat books to tell you the answers? Are you looking for just one book that will summarize it all? Then THIS IS YOUR BOOK! It's exciting, up-to-date, and well-written. You'll love it! - Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography at UCLA and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and The World Until Yesterday.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto and his gifted team have produced the world history for our times, ecologically oriented, written from multiple standpoints and informed by systematic comparison. - Peter Burke, Professor Emeritus of Cultural History, University of Cambridge
