Book description
Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of
Western civilisation and concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the
Roman empire and the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great
civilisations of China, India and Japan, and therefore the experience of
the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor
place.
World History
adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption
that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the
evolution of humans, their lives as hunters and gatherers and their
eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of
civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus
Valley, Mesoamerica and Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the
earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their
similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them and
how technologies, ideas and the world's great religions travelled from
one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China and of
the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly
to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations
and social and economic change. Clive Ponting is Senior Lecturer in
Politics at the University of Wales, Swansea. His Green History of the
World was a bestseller in many countries.
