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The Oxford Illustrated History of the World is the story of humanity itself, from earliest times to the present day, and the changes--good and bad--which have shaped our world.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Children of the Ice
- 1: Clive Gamble: Humanity From the Ice: The Emergence and Spread of an Adaptive Species
- 2: Felipe Fernández-Armesto: The Mind in the Ice: Art and Thought before Agriculture
- Part II: Of Mud and Metal
- 3: Martin Jones: Into a Warming World
- 4: Felipe Fernández-Armesto: The Farmers' Empires: Climax and Crises in Agrarian States and Cities
- Part III: The Oscillations of Empires
- 5: John Brooke: Material Life: Bronze Age Crisis to the Black Death
- 6: David Northrup: Intellectual Traditions: Philosophy, Science, Religion, and the Arts, 500 BCE - 1350 CE
- 7: Ian Morris: Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BC-AD 1350
- Part IV: The Climatic Reversal
- 8: David Northrup: A Converging World: Economic and Ecological Encounters, 1350-1815
- 9: Manuel Lucena-Giraldo: Renaissances, Reformations, and Mental Revolutions: Intellect and Arts in the Early Modern World
- 10: Anjana Singh: Connected by Emotions and Experiences: Monarchs, Merchants, Mercenaries, and Migrants in the Early Modern World
- Part V: The Great Acceleration
- 11: David Christian: The Anthropocene Epoch: The Background to Two Transformative Centuries
- 12: Paolo Luca Bernardini: The Modern World and Its Demons: Ideology and After in Arts, Letters and Thought, 1815-2008
- 13: Jeremy Black: Politics and Society in the Kaleidoscope of Change: Relationships, Institutions, and Conflicts from the Beginnings of Western Hegemony to the American Supremacy
- Epilogue
- Further Reading
- Index
About the author
Felipe Fernández-Armesto is William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His work, which has covered many fields and disciplines and has appeared in twenty-seven languages, has won him numerous awards, including the John Carter Brown Medal, a World History Association Book Prize (for Pathfinders, 2007), Spain´s national prizes for geography and foodwriting, and, most recently, the Gran Cruz de la Orden de Alfonso X el Sabio, Spain´s highest award for services to education and the arts.
Summary
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.
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Brilliant and provocative
