Notes
1. Expanding into Universe
1 For this chapter I relied most heavily on Terence Dickinson, 1992,
The Universe and Beyond, revised and expanded, Buffalo, NY: Camden; Timothy Ferris, 1997,
The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe Report, New York: Simon and Schuster; Brian Greene, 1999,
The Elegant Universe, New York: Vintage; and Robert T. Kirshner, 2003,
The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy and the Accelerating Cosmos, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2 Bill Bryson, 2003,
A Short History of Nearly Everything, New York: Broadway Books, 37.
5 Lee Smolin, 1998,
The Life of the Cosmos, London: Phoenix.
2. Living Earth
1 See two books by James Lovelock: 1979,
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, and 1988,
The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth, New York: Bantam Books.
2 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, 1986,
Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, new ed. 1997, 183-184.
3 For this section and the next I relied on Margulis and Sagan, 1986; Bill Bryson, 2003,
A Short History of Nearly Everything, New York: Broadway Books; Richard Dawkins, 2004,
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
4 Margulis and Sagan, 1986, 121-123.
5 In addition to the books named in previous notes, I used Stephen J. Gould, ed., 1993,
The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, New York: W. W. Norton.
7 J. R. McNeill, 2000,
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World, New York: W.W. Norton, 49.
8 Margulis and Sagan, 1986, 167.
10 Douglas H. Erwin, 2006,
Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 10, 87.
12 For the fascinating story of finding the crater, see Walter Alvarez, 1997,
T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Also see Bryson, 2003, ch. 13.
13 My favorite books about apes are Frans De Waal, 2005,
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are, New York: Riverhead Books; and Jared Diamond, 1991,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, London: Radius. Other fine books are: Roger Fouts with S.T. Mills, 1997,
Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees, New York: Avon; Jonathan Marks, 2002,
What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; Robert Sapolsky, 2001,
A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, New York: Simon and Schuster; and Craig Stanford, 2001,
Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature, New York: Basic Books.
14 Chimps are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas. If classification were based on genetic distance, than humans would belong to the same genus (
Homo) as the other two species of chimpanzee, i.e., we would be the third species of chimpanzee. See Diamond, 1991, 20-21.
15 De Waal, 2005, 7-19. De Waal believes that the sisterhood among bonobos would not be possible without predictable, abundant food supplies (228).
16 For a clear description of the process, see Dawkins, 2004, 517-523.
17 Bryson, 2003, 308-310.
18 Stephen Pinker, 1997,
How the Mind Works, New York: W. W. Norton, 386-389.
3. Human Emergence: One Species
1 David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 502-503.
2 Bill Bryson, 2003,
A Short History of Nearly Everything, New York: Broadway Books, 336.
3 My main sources for this chapter are: Richard Dawkins, 2004,
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Brian Fagan, 1990,
The Journey from Eden: The Peopling of Our World, London: Thames and Hudson; Stephen Jay Gould, ed., 1993,
The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, New York: W. W. Norton; Roger Lewin, 1988,
In the Age of Mankind, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books; Collin Tudge, 1996,
The Time Before History: Five Million Years of Human Impact, New York: Scribner; and Jared Diamond, 1991,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, London: Radius.
4 See Richard W. Wrangham, 2001, “Out of the
Pan, into the Fire: How Our Ancestors’ Evolution Depended on What They Ate,” in Frans B. M. De Waal,
Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 121-143.
5 Jonathan Marks, 2002,
What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 225.
6 Eugenia Shanklin, 1994,
Anthropology and Race, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 10-12.
7 Derek Bickerton, 1995,
Language and Human Behavior, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 70.
8 Roger Fouts, 1997,
Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees, New York: Avon, ch. 8; and Tudge, 1996, 246-250.
10 George Gallup Jr., and D. Michael Lindsay, 1996,
Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Beliefs, Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 36-37.
4. Advanced Hunting and Gathering
1 For this chapter, the following books were indispensable: Roger Lewin, 1999,
Human Evolution: An Illustrated Introduction, 4th ed., Malden, MA: Blackwell Science; Clive Ponting, 1991,
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, New York: Penguin; Brian Fagan, 1992,
People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory, 7th ed., HarperCollins; and L.S. Stavrianos, 1989,
Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History, New York: Pantheon Books. For summarizing this material I am guided here, and in subsequent chapters, by two basic books: Richard W. Bulliet, et al., 2003,
The Earth and Its People: A Global History, brief 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton.
2 Geoffrey Blainey, 2002,
A Short History of the World, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 12.
3 Margaret Ehrenberg, 1989,
Women in Prehistory, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 15-18; Fagan, 1992, 66-69.
4 Ehrenberg, 1989, ch. 2.
5 William H. McNeill, “Secrets of the Cave Paintings,”
New York Review of Books, October 19, 2006, 20-23.
6 Randall White, 1986,
Dark Caves, Bright Visions, New York: American Museum of Natural History, 113.
7 See Riane Eisler, 1987,
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, New York: HarperCollins.
8 Ehrenberg, 1989, 66-76.
9 See Derek Bickerton, 1995,
Language and Human Behavior, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press; Jared Diamond, 1991,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, London: Radius; and Stephen Pinker, 1994,
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, New York: William Morrow, 2000, HarperCollins Perennial.
10 Diamond, 1991, ch. 2, calls this the “Great Leap Forward.” See also Stephen Mithen, 1996,
The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science, London: Thames and Hudson.
11 David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 178-180; also Bickerton, 1995; Pinker, 1994.
12 Nicolas Wade, “In Click Languages, An Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients,”
New York Times, March 18, 2003, science section; this refers to the work of Alec Knight and Joanna Mountain.
13 From the work of Russian prehistorian Boris Frolov, reported in Ian Wilson, 2001,
Past Lives: Unlocking the Secrets of our Ancestors, London: Cassell, 28.
14 Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, 2000,
Genes, Peoples, and Languages, New York: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 140; Merritt Ruhlen, 1994,
The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue, New York: John Wiley, 119.
15 For discussions of human universals see Donald E. Brown, 1991,
Human Universals, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press; and Mark Ridley, 1996,
The Origin of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, New York: Viking Penguin.
16 For a clear account, see Loyal Rue, 2000,
Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 81-96.
17 See William Ryan and Walter Pitman, 1999,
Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History, New York: Simon and Schuster.
18 Colin Tudge, 1999,
Neanderthals, Bandits and Farming: How Agriculture Really Began, New Haven: Yale University Press.
19 For this discussion, see Ivan Hannaford, 1996,
Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
20 Spencie Love, 1996,
One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press; John H. Relethford, 1994,
The Human Species: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology, 2nd ed., Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 164-173.
21 Richard Dawkins, 2004,
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 405.
22 Relethford, 1994, 173-178.
25 Marshall Sahlins, 1972,
Stone Age Economics, Chicago and New York: Aldine-Atherton.
27 Dawkins, 2004, 32-33; Relethford, 1994, 160-161.
28 Bryan Sykes, 2001,
The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, New York: W. W. Norton.
5. Early Agriculture
1 This chapter relies heavily on J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton; Richard W. Bulliet, et al., 2003,
The Earth and Its People: A Global History, brief 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin; and John A. Mears, 2001, “Agricultural Origins in Global Perspective,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societis in Ancient and Classical History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 36-70.
2 See Mark Cohen, 1977,
The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture, New Haven: Yale University Press; and Stephen Jay Gould, “Down on the Farm, A review of Donald O. Henry,
From Foraging to Agriculture: The Levant at the End of the Ice Age,”
New York Review of Books, January 18, 1990, 26-27.
3 Charles B. Heiser, 1981,
Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food, 2nd ed., San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 16; Stephen Budiansky, 1992,
The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, New York: William Morrow, 82.
5 Margaret Ehrenberg, 1989,
Women in Prehistory, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 77-78; Riane Eisler, 1987,
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, New York: HarperCollins, 68-69.
6 David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 208; Vaclav Smil, 1994,
Energy in World History, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 236.
7 Jared Diamond, 1999,
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: Norton.
8 L.S. Stavrianos, 1989,
Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History, New York: Pantheon Books, 48.
9 James Mellaart, 1967,
Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia, New York: McGraw-Hill; Ian A. Todd, 1976,
Çatal Hüyük in Perspective, Menlo Park, CA: Cummings Publishing; Eisler, 1987.
10 Malcolm Gladwell, 2000,
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Boston: Bay Books, Little, Brown, 178-180; Fred Spier, 1996,
The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang Until Today, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 62-66.
11 John Noble Wilford, 1993, “9000-Year-old Cloth Found,”
San Francisco Chronicle, August 13, 1993.
12 Mark Kurlansky, 2002,
Salt: A World History, New York: Walker, 6-12.
13 Heiser, 1981, 20-22; Catherine Johns, 1982,
Sex or Symbol? Erotic Images of Greece and Rome, London: British Museum, 39-40.
14 Sarah Shaver Hughes and Brady Hughes, 2001, “Women in Ancient Civilizations,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies of Ancient and Classical History, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 116-150; Donald E. Brown, 1991,
Human Universals, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 52.
15 Clive Ponting, 1991,
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, New York, Penguin; Roger Sands, 2005,
Forestry in a Global Context, Cambridge, MA: CABI Publishing.
16 Quoted in Daniel J. Hillel, 1991,
Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil, New York: Free Press, Macmillan, 16.
17 J. R. McNeill, 2005,
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World, New York: W. W. Norton, 45.
18 Stephen Mitchell, 2004,
Gilgamesh: A New English Version, New York: Free Press.
19 Hillel, 1991, 63, agrees with this interpretation, as does Colin Tudge, 1996,
The Time Before History: Five Million Years of Human Impact, New York: Scribner, 267.
20 Michael Pollan, 2001,
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World, New York: Random House, 11.
21 For further reading see William Ryan and Walter Pittman, 1999,
Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History, New York: Simon and Schuster.
6. Early Cities
1 For one discussion see Peter N. Stearns, 1987,
World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity, New York: Harper and Row, 13-16.
2 David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 248.
3 For this chapter my basic sources are J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton; Richard W. Bulliett, et al., 2003,
The Earth and Its People: A Global History, brief 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin; and Arthur Cotterell, ed., 1980,
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations, London and New York: Penguin.
4 About the Sumerians, see Harriet Crawford, 1991,
Sumer and the Sumerians, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6 Rosalind Miles, 1990,
The Women’s History of the World, New York: Harper and Row, 43.
7 Crawford, 1991, 151-153; Georges Jean, 1992,
Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 12-21.
8 Dale Keiger, “Clay, Paper, Code,”
Johns Hopkins Magazine, September 2003, 34-41; Timothy Potts, “Buried Between the Rivers,”
New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003, 18-23; Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, 1983,
Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, New York: Harper and Row, 127-135.
9 Brian M. Fagan, 2005,
The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, New York: Basic Books, 6-7, 141-145.
10 Jared Diamond, 1999,
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: Norton, 418.
11 Wolkstein and Kramer, 1983, 101.
12 Charles Officer and Jake Page, 1993,
Tales of the Earth: Paroxysms and Perturbations of the Blue Planet, New York: Oxford University Press, 62-63.
13 Mark Kurlansky, 2002,
Salt: A World History, New York: Walker, 38-44.
14 Daniel J. Hillel, 1991,
Out of Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil, New York: Free Press, Macmillan, 5.
15 R. F. Willetts, 1980, “The Minoans,” in Arthur Cotterell, ed.,
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations, London and New York: Penguin, 204-210; William J. Broad, “It Swallowed a Civilization,”
New York Times, October 21, 2003, D1-2.
17 Colin A. Ronan, 1978,
The Shorter Science and Civilization in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham’s Original Text, vol. I, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 26-30.
18 Kurlansky, 2002, 44-46; Jerry H. Bentley, 1993,
Old World Encounters: Cross Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times, New York: Oxford University Press.
21 Christian, 2004, 257, 263.
22 Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, 1988,
The Power of Myth, New York: Doubleday, 169-171.
24 Catherine Johns, 1982,
Sex or Symbol? Erotic Images of Greece and Rome, London: British Museum Press, 42-61.
25 Christian, 2004, 143, 309.
26 Ibid., 258; Geoffrey Blainey, 2002,
A Short History of the World, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 72-73.
27 Cotterell, ed., 1980, 16-17; Bentley, 1993, 21.
28 See a review of the video
Black Athena by Franklin W. Knight, 1993, “
Black Athena,”
Journal of World History 4, no. 2, Fall 1993, 325-327.
7. The Afro-Eurasian Network
1 Mark Kurlansky, 2002,
Salt: A World History, New York: Walker, 54-55.
2 Peter Bernesford Ellis, 1990,
The Celtic Empire: The First Millennium of Celtic History, c. 1000 B.C.
-51 A.D., London: Constable.
3 Richard W. Bulliett, et al., 2003,
The Earth and Its People: A Global History, brief 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 108-115; J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton, 6-64; 86.
4 See Huston Smith and Phil Novak, 2003,
Buddhism: A Concise Introduction, New York: HarperCollins.
5 Robert Temple, 1986,
The Genius of China: Three Thousand Years of Science, Discovery and Invention, New York: Simon and Schuster, 219-224.
6 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 67.
7 Xinru Liu, 2001, “ The Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Interactions in Eurasia,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 151-179.
8 Vaclav Smil, 1994,
Energy in World History, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 232.
9 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 80.
10 Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Lee Wolff, 1960,
A History of Civilization , 2nd ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, I, 65.
11 Sarah Shaver Hughes and Brady Hughes, 2001, “Women in Ancient Civilizations,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 140.
12 Michael Cook, 2003,
A Brief History of the Human Race, New York: W. W. Norton, 226.
13 Donald J. Hughes, 1975,
Ecology in Ancient Civilizations, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 68-75.
14 Kurlansky, 2002, 63-68.
15 Shaye J. D. Cohen, 1988, “Roman Domination: The Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of the Second Temple,” in Hershel Shanks, ed.,
Ancient Israel: A Short History from Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 205-235.
16 William H. McNeill, 1976,
Plagues and People, Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 121-122; Robert Austin Markus, 1974,
Christianity in the Roman World, London: Thames and Hudson, 25.
17 William H. McNeill, 1992,
The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes and Community, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 103.
18 David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 143, 325-326.
19 Clive Ponting, 1991,
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, New York: Penguin, 54-83; Hughes, 1975, 99-124.
20 One of the earliest religions that believed in one God arose in the eastern provinces of the Persian empire by the beginning of the fifth century BCE. Called Zoroastrianism, its prophet was Zoroaster (Greek) or Zarathushtra (Persian), whose dates are not certain. Zoroastrians believe in a dualist universe, with forces of good and evil locked in cosmic struggle until good will prevail at the end of time. Its priests are called magi. Zoroastrianism may have influenced Judaism and Christianity. The later Islamic conquest of Iran caused the decline of Zoroastrianism; surviving communities are today called Parsees.
21 For further reading on the Axial Age, see Karen Armstrong, 2006,
The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, New York: Alfred A. Knopf; on why people still believe ancient religions, see Sam Harris, 2004,
The End of Faith, New York: W. W. Norton.
22 See G. W. Bowerstock, 1988, “ The Dissolution of the Roman Empire,” in Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, eds.,
The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations , Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 165-175; Allen M. Rollins, 1983,
The Fall of Rome: A Reference Guide, Jefferson, NC: McFarland; and Bryan Ward-Perkins, 2005,
The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
8. Expanding the Afro-Eurasian Network
1 My basic references are J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton, ch. IV; and Richard W. Bulliett, et al., 2003,
The Earth and Its People: A Global History, brief 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, chs. 7-9.
2 Bulliett, et al., 2003, 324; see David Christian, 1998,
A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1,
Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire, Oxford: Blackwell, 346-348, for a more complex discussion.
3 Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Lee Wolff, 1960,
A History of Civilization , 2nd ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, I, 221-222.
4 Xinru Liu, 2001, “ The Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Interactions in Eurasia,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 154-179.
5 Richard M. Eaton, 1990,
Islamic History as Global History, Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 10-11.
6 Frederick Kilgour, 1998,
The Evolution of the Book, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 54-62.
8 S.A.M. Adshead, 2000,
China in World History, 3rd ed., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 54-56.
9 Bulliett, et al., 2003, 222-223.
12 Robert Temple, 1986,
The Genius of China: Three Thousand Years of Science, Discovery and Invention, New York: Simon and Schuster, 224-228.
14 Colin A. Ronan, 1978,
The Shorter Science and Civilization in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham’s Original Text, vol. I, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 44-48.
15 See Peter B. Golden, 2001, “Nomads and Sedentary Societies in Eurasia,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History , Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 71-115.
16 Bulliett, et al., 2003, 206-207; Stewart Brand, 1999,
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, New York: Basic Books, 101.
17 On the Vikings, see Gwyn Jones, 1984,
A History of the Vikings, rev. ed., Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press; E.O.G. Turville-Petre, 1975,
Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia, Westport, CN: Greenwood Press; and David M. Wilson, 1989,
Vikings and Their Origins: Scandinavia in the First Millennium , rev. ed., London: Thames and Hudson.
18 For a discussion of this question, see Jerry H. Bentley, 1993,
Old World Encounters: Cross Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times, New York: Oxford University Press, 100-101.
19 See Roger Collins, 1998,
Charlemagne, Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
20 Lester Kurtz, 1995,
Gods in the Global Village: The World’s Religions in Sociological Perspective, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 271.
21 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 98.
22 Philip D. Curtin, 1984,
Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 15-27; John Illiffe, 1995,
Africans: The History of a Continent , New York: Cambridge University Press, argues that African history is unique due to its obstacles—climate, geography, and diseases.
23 Curtin, 1984, 38-39; McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 96; David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 344.
24 David Christian, 2003, “World History in Context,”
Journal of World History 14, no. 4, 451.
26 Johan Goudsblom, Eric Jones, and Stephen Mennell, 1996,
The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process and Civilization, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 22-28.
27 Basil Davidson, 1991,
African Civilization Revisited, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 93-97.
9. Emergence of American Civilizations
1 Roger Lewin, 1988,
In the Age of Mankind, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 167-169; Jared Diamond, 1999,
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies , New York: Norton, 44-48.
2 Basic to this chapter is John E. Kicza, 2001, “The People and Civilizations of the Americas Before Contact,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 183-223.
3 Charles C. Mann, 2005,
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ch. 9; William H. McNeill, “New World Symphony,”
New York Review of Books, December 15, 2005, 45.
4 J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton, 109; John A. Mears, 2001, “Agricultural Origins in Global Perspective,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 57.
5 Kicza in Adas, ed., 2001, 185.
6 Brian M. Fagan, 2005,
The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, New York: Basic Books, 214-230; Joseph A. Tainter, 1989,
The Collapse of Complex Societies , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 170-175.
7 Brian M. Fagan, 1984,
The Aztecs, New York: W. H. Freeman, 243-244.
9 Fagan, 1984, 9-11; my account of the Aztecs is based on this book.
10 Terence N. D’Altroy, 2002,
The Incas, Malden, MA: Blackwell, ch. 2.
11 Garcilaso de la Vega,
Royal Commentaries of the Incas, and Felipe Guaman Pom de Ayala; see D’Altroy, 2002, 14-15. My account of the Incas is based on D’Altroy, 2002, and Craig Morris and Adriana von Hagen, 1993,
The Inka Empire and Its Andean Origins, New York: Abbeville Press and the American Museum of Natural History.
12 Hugh Thomson, 2001,
The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland, Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 204; John Hemming, 1970,
The Conquest of the Incas, New York: Macmillan, 498.
13 Jack Weatherford, 1991,
Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America, New York: Crown Publishers, 97-98.
14 Richard W. Bulliet, et al., 2003,
The Earth and Its People: A Global History, brief 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 250; McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 112.
15 Kicza, in Adas, ed., 2001, 27.
16 I. A. Ritchie Carson, 1981,
Food in Civilization: How History Has Been Affected by Human Tastes, New York and Toronto: Beaufort Books, 106.
17 Johan Goudsblom, Eric Jones, and Stephen Mennell, 1996,
The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process and Civilization, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
18 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 162.
21 Morris and von Hagen, 1993, 86.
10. One Afro-Eurasia
1 David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 305, 335.
3 Jack Weatherford, 2004,
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, New York: Crown Publishers, xxvi.
4 Ibid., introduction; David Christian, 1998,
A History of Russian, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1,
Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire, Oxford: Blackwell, 426.
5 David Morgan, 1986,
The Mongols, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 30; Weatherford, 2004, xxvii. My account of the Mongols is based on these two books, plus Peter B. Golden, 2001, “Nomads and Sedentary Societies in Eurasia,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical Times, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 71-115; and Paul Ratchnevsky, 1991,
Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy. Oxford: Blackwell.
6 Morgan, 1986, 93; Weatherford, 2004, 113-117.
7 Quoted in Jerry H. Bentley, 1993,
Old World Encounters: Cross Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times, New York: Oxford University Press, 111.
8 William H. McNeill, 1976,
Plagues and People, Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 166-186.
9 Philip D. Curtin, 1984,
Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 125; Christian, 2004, 379; Richard W. Bulliet, et al., 2003,
The Earth and Its People: A Global History, brief 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 290-292. For a readable account, see Louise Levathes, 1994,
When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433, New York: Simon and Schuster.
10 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, 1989,
Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, New York: Oxford University Press, 344-347.
11 Curtin, 1984, 107; Bentley, 1993, 176.
12 Richard M. Eaton, 1990,
Islamic History as Global History, Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 23.
13 J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton, 132.
14 Eaton, 1990, 44-45; Ross E. Dunn, 1986,
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, Berkeley, University of California Press.
15 Bulliet, et al., 2003, 319-320; Paul E. Lovejoy, 2000,
Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 24-25.
16 L.S. Stavrianos, 1989,
Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History, New York: Pantheon, 54.
17 See Christopher Tyerman, 2006,
God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
18 Morgan, 1986, 179; Weatherford, 2004, 162.
19 Roger Sands, 2005,
Forestry in a Global Context, Cambridge, MA: CABI Publishing, 31-33.
20 Frederick Kilgour, 1998,
The Evolution of the Book, New York: Oxford University Press, 8, 82.
21 Christian, 2004, 344-345.
22 See the debate in the
Journal of World History 4, no. 4, December 2003, 503-550.
23 See Nicolas Wade, “A Prolific Genghis Khan, It Seems, Helped People the World,”
New York Times, February 11, 2003, D3.
24 See Robert Finlay, “How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America,”
Journal of World History 15, 2, June 2004, 229-242. For a sound account, see Levathes, 1994.
11. Connecting the Globe
1 Richard W. Bulliet, et al., 2003,
The Earth and Its People: A Global History, brief 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 344; J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton, 163, 176.
2 David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 381.
3 John A. Mears, 2001, “Agricultural Origins in Global Perspective,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 38; Jared Diamond, 1999,
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: Norton, 266, 283; Christian, 2004, 344-345.
4 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 156-161.
5 Jerry H. Bentley, 1993,
Old World Encounters: Cross Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times, New York: Oxford University Press, 177.
6 James Reston, 2005,
Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors, New York: Doubleday, 205. England had expelled its Jews in 1290, Ibid.
7 Ivan Hannaford, 1996,
Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, ch. 4; George M. Frederickson, 2002,
Racism: A Short History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 17-34.
8 Milton Meltzer, 1990,
Columbus and the World Around Him, New York: Franklin Watts.
9 On Cortez and the Aztecs, see Brian M. Fagan, 1984,
The Aztecs, New York: W. H. Freeman, ch. 11.
11 On the conquest of Peru, see Diamond, 1999, 68-79; Terence N. D’ Altroy, 2002,
The Incas, Malden, MA: Blackwell; Nigel Davies, 1995,
The Incas, Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado; John Hemming, 1970,
The Conquest of the Incas, New York: Macmillan.
13 William H. McNeill, 1976,
Plagues and People, Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press/Doubleday; Robert S. Desowitz, 1997,
Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria? Tracking the Devastating Spread of Lethal Tropical Disease into America, New York: Harcourt Brace.
14 Hemming, 1970, 267-288; Hugh Thomas, 2004,
Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan, New York: Random House, 304-456.
15 On gold and silver, see Jack Weatherford, 1988,
Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, New York: Fawcett Columbine, 6-17.
16 I.A. Ritchie Carson, 1981,
Food in Civilization: How History Has Been Affected by Human Tastes, New York and Toronto: Beaufort Books, 111-128; J.M. Blaut, 1993,
The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History , New York and London: Guilford Press, 191-192; Bulliet, et al., 2003, 398.
17 Frederickson, 2002, 30; McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 168-169; William H. McNeill, 1992,
The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes and Community, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 21.
18 Paul Bairoch, 1993,
Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 146-147; Patrick Manning, 1990,
Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental and African Trade, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 171; Bulliet, et al., 2003, 421.
19 Fernand Braudel, 1985,
Civilizations and Capitalism, Fifteenth-Eighteenth Century , vol. II, London: Fontana Press, 101-102.
21 This section relies heavily on McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 186-212.
22 This phrase comes from Arnold Pacey, 1990,
Technology in Civilization: A Thousand-Year History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 62.
23 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 170-171.
25 Bulliet, et al., 2003, 384; Thomas, 2004, 304-456; Frederickson, 2002, 36.
12. Industrialization
1 Peter N. Stearns, 1993,
The Industrial Revolution in World History, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. For example, Fred Spier, 1996,
The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang Until Today, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 38.
2 J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, 2003,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, New York: W. W. Norton, 222; Donella Meadows, et al., 2004,
Limits to Growth: The Thirty-Year Update, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 28.
3 Robert Skidelsky, “ The Mystery of Growth,”
New York Review of Books, March 13, 2003, 28-31.
4 Fernand Braudel, 1985,
Civilizations and Capitalism, Fifteenth-Eighteenth Century , vol. II, London: Fontana Press, 245, 525-574.
5 Mark Van Doren, 1991,
A History of Knowledge: Past, Present and Future, New York: Ballantine, 227.
6 Howard Zinn, 1980,
A People’s History of the United States, New York: Harper and Row, 82-95.
7 George M. Frederickson, 2002,
Racism: A Short History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 56-57; Ivan Hannaford, 1996,
Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 206-208.
8 Kenneth Pomeranz, 2001,
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 61; J.R. McNeill, 2000,
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, New York: W. W. Norton, 13; McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 230-232.
10 Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Lee Wolff, 1960,
A History of Civilization , vol. II, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 11-12; I.A. Ritchie Carson, 1981,
Food in Civilization: How History Has Been Affected by Human Tastes, New York and Toronto: Beaufort Books, 135-136.
11 Braudel, 1985, vol. III, 595-615; Paul Kennedy, 1991,
Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, New York: Ballantine, 6-7.
12 Braudel, 1985, vol. I, 249-261; Pomeranz, 2001, 275-281.
13 Louise A. Tilly, 1993,
Industrialization and Gender Inequality, Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 14, 48; Stearns, 1991, 14-15.
14 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 241-245; Stearns, 1991, 35-40.
15 David Christian, 1997,
Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity, New York: St. Martin’s Press, ch. 3; McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 252-258.
16 This paragraph and the previous one are based on McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 217-221.
17 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 14; Kennedy, 1991, 32.
18 Philip Curtin, 1984,
Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 251; Peter Jay, 2000,
The Wealth of Man, New York: Public Affairs, 186-208.
19 Frederickson, 2000, 170.
20 Paul E. Lovejoy, 2000,
Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 252, 288; McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 216; John Iliffe, 1995,
Africans: The History of a Continent, New York: Cambridge University Press, 3.
21 See Mike Davis, 2001,
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, London and New York: Verso. Also John Richards, 2003,
The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 82.
22 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 291-292; Paul Bairoch, 1993,
Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 9.
23 McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 280.
24 Lester Kurtz, 1995,
Gods in the Global Village: The World’s Religions in Sociological Perspective, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 21.
25 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 15-16; McNeill and McNeill, 2003, 290-316.
26 Kennedy, 1991, 45-46; Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, 2004,
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 42-43.
27 David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 444-445; Paul Kivel, 2004,
You Call This a Democracy? Who Benefits, Who Pays and Who Really Decides, New York: Apex Press, 25.
28 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 16.
29 Braudel, 1985, vol. III, 620-623.
30 Allen K. Smith, 1991,
Creating a World Economy: Merchant Capital, Colonialism and World Trade, 1400-1825, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 116.
31 Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Work?”
New Yorker, November 29, 2004, 154.
13. What Now? What Next?
1 J.R. McNeill, 2000,
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World, New York: W. W. Norton, 9. The rest of this section is based on Bjorn Lomborg, 2001,
The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2 Donella Meadows, et al., 1972,
The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe Books.
3 This section is based on J.R. McNeill, 2000, unless otherwise noted.
4 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 111-115; David Christian, 2004,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 478-479.
5 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 108-111; Jim Hansen, “ The Threat to the Planet,”
New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006, 12-14, 16.
6 Kenneth Pomeranz, 2001,
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 56-60; Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, 2004,
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 75.
7 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 229; Jared Diamond, 2005,
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York: Viking Penguin, 473, 487.
8 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 146; Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, 2004, 229-231.
9 Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, 2004, 66-74.
10 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 342; Martin Rees, 2003,
Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threatens Humankind’s Future in this Century—On Earth and Beyond, New York: Basic Books, 34-35; James Sterngold, “Experts Fear Nuke Genie’s Out of Bottle,”
San Francisco Chronicle, November 22, 2004, A8.
11 J.R. McNeill, 2000, 312; Lomborg, 2001, 129.
13 See Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, 1995,
The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Mankind, New York: Doubleday.
14 Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, 2004, xiv-xv.
15 Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, 2000,
It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 23.
16 Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, 2004, ch. 5; Christian, 2004, 478-479.
17 Quoted by Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, 2004, 13.
19 Nikos Prantzos, 2000,
Our Cosmic Future: Humanity’s Fate in the Universe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 10, 18, 56-85.
20 For the long-range future, see Prantzos, 2000, and Christian, 2004, 486-490.