This book is the integration of thoughts and ideas I have accumulated over many years, beginning with involvement in a World Civilization course at the University of California, San Diego’s Eleanor Roosevelt College as far back as the late 1980s. An earlier effort to make sense of global trends in the Early Modern era,* combined with the limitations inherent in teaching World Civilization as part of an interdisciplinary faculty committee, brought home to me the pervasiveness of Euro-centrism in the teaching of world history. The book itself is the product of many years of reading and of teaching world history with both undergraduates and graduate students. Any mistakes or misunderstandings, however, are my own.
I am grateful to my colleagues in the History Department at UCSD, where I taught for thirty-four years, and to the university’s Research Committee. My colleagues provided valuable critiques of parts of the manuscript, while the department, by allowing me to introduce the occasional unconventional course, helped open new perspectives on established narratives. UCSD, meanwhile, provided sabbatical leaves at helpful moments, and the Research Committee provided several timely travel grants.
I am also indebted to two other great institutions: the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and the Rockefeller Foundation. At a critical time in the development of this book, the National Humanities Center awarded me a yearlong research fellowship that provided time to read, reflect, and write. Surrounded by scholars from several branches of the Humanities, my approach to the project was enriched in many ways. Sometime later, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded me a residential fellowship at their Research and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. The foundation’s Villa Serbellone, which overlooks the picturesque town of Bellagio and Lake Como, was a uniquely peaceful setting. Its regular seminars, in fields as diverse as Neurology and Developmental Economics, enriched my approach to the evolving book.
The two anonymous reviewers solicited by Rowman & Littlefield provided long, thoughtful, and exacting critiques of the manuscript. They will find that, thanks to their suggestions, the book is much changed and significantly better. My thanks to both of you.
Without a sense of geography, World History can be frustrating to both the reader and the author. My attempt to overcome that problem is embodied in the twenty-one maps scattered throughout the book. The credit for these maps goes, without reservation, to Mack Carlisle, MFA, of Portland, Oregon. Mack’s keen intelligence and remarkable computer graphics skills produced a set of maps that make the geographic dimensions of this essay manageable to any reader.
Finally, I am deeply indebted to the Maritime Museum of San Diego and its welcoming crew of volunteer docents; its director, Dr. Ray Ashley; and its executive director, Susan Sirota, creator of the museum’s remarkable education program. This museum and its unique collection of ten historic vessels—most of them seaworthy—have provided space for a post-retirement career that includes this book and the Robert and Laura Kyle Chair in Maritime History. It is not enough to write history for a few hundred academic colleagues; it is also important to make it accessible to the rest of society.
* David Ringrose, Expansion and Global Interaction: 1200–1700 (New York, 2000).