Description
This text, based on the bestselling The World: A History, is presented in a highly affordable Penguin Academic format.
The World: A History interweaves two stories: the story of our interactions with nature and the story of our interactions with each other. The environment-centered story is about humans distancing themselves from the rest of nature and searching for a relationship that strikes a balance between constructive and destructive exploitation. The culture-centered story is about how human cultures have become mutually influential and yet mutually differentiating. Both stories have been going on for thousands of years. We do not know whether they will end in triumph or disaster.
There is no prospect of covering all of world history in one book. Rather, the fabric of this book is woven from selected strands. Readers will see these at every turn, twisted together into yarn, stretched into stories. Human-focused historical ecology–the environmental theme–will drive readers back, again and again, to the same concepts: sustenance, shelter, disease, energy, technology, art. (The last is a vital category for historians, not only because it is part of our interface with the rest of the world, but also because it forms a record of how we see reality and of the way we see its changes.) In the global story of human interactions–the cultural theme–we return constantly to the ways people make contact with each another: migration, trade, war, imperialism, pilgrimage, gift exchange, diplomacy, travel–and to their social frameworks: the economic and political arenas, the human groups and groupings, the states and civilizations, the sexes and generations, the classes and clusters of identity.
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Table of Contents
Brief Contents
Contents
Maps
Special Features
Getting the Most Out of the Maps in The World
About Felipe Fernández-Armesto
From the Author to the Reader
Introducing The World
Acknowledgments
A Note on Dates and Spelling
Part 6: The Crucible: The Eurasian Crises of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Chapter 13: The World the Mongols Made
Chapter 14: The Revenge of Nature: Plague, Cold, and the Limits of Disaster in the Fourteenth Century
Chapter 15: Expanding Worlds: Recovery in the Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
Part 7: Convergence and Divergence, to ca. 1700
Chapter 16: Imperial Arenas: New Empires in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Chapter 17: The Ecological Revolution of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Chapter 18: Mental Revolutions: Religion and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Chapter 19: States and Societies: Political and Social Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Part 8: Global Enlightenments, 1700—1800
Chapter 20: Driven by Growth: The Global Economy in the Eighteenth Century
Chapter 21: The Age of Global Interaction: Expansion and Intersection of Eighteenth-Century Empires
Chapter 22:The Exchange of Enlightenments: Eighteenth-Century Thought
Part 9: The Frustrations of Progress, to ca. 1900
Chapter 23: Replacing Muscle: The Energy Revolutions
Chapter 24: The Social Mold: Work and Society in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 25: Western Dominance in the Nineteenth Century: The Westward Shift of Power and the Rise of Global Empires
Chapter 26: The Changing State: Political Developments in the Nineteenth Century
Part 10: Chaos and Complexity: The World in the Twentieth Century
Chapter 27: The Twentieth-Century Mind: Western Science and the World
Chapter 28: World Order and Disorder: Global Politics in the Twentieth
Chapter 29: The Pursuit of Utopia: Civil Society in the Twentieth Century
Chapter 30: The Embattled Biosphere: The Twentieth-Century Environment
Glossary
Credits
Notes
Index
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World: A History, Volume 2, The: Since 1300, Penguin Academics, CourseSmart eTextbook
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$21.99 | ISBN-13: 978-0-205-03268-6
