2/11/23

1/31/23

Covering approximately 7000 years of civilization over the entire world in less than 900 pages for a general audience is a tall order. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community by W.H. McNeill was written over 50 years ago that changed historical analysis by challenging the leading theories of the day and influenced the study of global history ever since.

McNeill divides his narrative in three parts: the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia to 500 B.C., the cultural balance of Eurasia from 500 B.C. to 1500 A.D., and the era of Western dominance since 1500 A.D. Every corner of the world is discusses, but the dominance is in the Eurasia “ecumene” that feature the interaction between for the four great civilizations of the Middle East (including Egypt), India, China, and finally Europe (starting in Greece before slowly moving West). Throughout McNeill highlights the interplay between cultural, political, and economical factors of each civilization as well as how they interacted and influenced each other.

The interaction and influences between different civilizations to McNeill’s narrative as he challenged the theory of the rise and fall of independent civilizations that did not influence one another. Because of the length of both of the book and time frame covered, McNeill did not go into a detail history instead focusing on trends and important historical moments that may or may not involve historical actors like Alexander or Genghis Khan. Yet information is outdated as new sources or archaeological evidence has changed our understanding of several civilizations over the last 50 years.

The Rise of the West takes a long time to read, however the information—though outdated in places—gives the reader a great overview of world history on every point of the globe. W.H. McNeill’s well-researched book is not a dry read and in giving a good background on numerous civilizations giving the reader a solid foundation if they ever decide to go more in-depth on any civilization. ( )

This book was published in 1963. I thought: "Never mind the 820 pages, I'll read through it in about a month, it will be to outdated". Well... yes it is outdated (as the author is the first to write in an accompanying essay), but nevertheless I took about half a year to absorb all of it.
McNeill is the first one ever to have written a truely world-history (Spengler and Toynbee before him were just speculative stories). Above all, I appreciated his extensive elaboration on the Middle East, China and India and especially the crucial role of the waves of nomadic people in Eurasia. My narrow-minded European-centered history vision has been changed forever!
Ofcourse, 50 years later, much of the details are not up-to-date any more, but the basic asumption of the book, that human civilisation has grown (with ups and downs) through the never-ending interaction between humans, institutions, and cilivisations. This asumption remains true, although McNeill himself, in his accompanying essay, dated 1990, enumerates some fundamental flows in his story (surprisingly, he thinks he has given too little attention to Chinese history). Some of these flows he has adjusted in his book The Human Web, written with his son. Nevertheless The Rise of the West remains, to me, one of the grandest historical works of the 20th century. ( )

The Rise of the West is nearly fifty years old now, and the research on which it rests is considerably older than that. Many of its ideas about the ebb and flow of world history have been modified, or set aside, in the decades since McNeill put them on paper, and much of the factual information on which they rest is now outdated at best. This is not a book to buy, or read, as a reference.

And none of that -- absolutely none of that -- matters. The Rise of the West is the first scholarly book for general audiences, and one of first for anyone, to take the notion of world history seriously, and to treat the history of the world as something more than the sum of the histories of its kingdoms and empires. It is a classic of the genre -- and world historians should read it for the same reasons that biologists should read On the Origin of Species: because even after all these years, the ideas and the writing retain their power and their ability to thrill. Five decades on, the book remains breathtaking in its scope, compelling in its narrative, and fascinating in its theory of history: a vision of change over time in which environment, trade, and the exchange of ideas and technologies play crucial roles. It still feels radical -- challenging to our insistence that the proper unity of analysis in history is the individual -- and I literally cannot imagine how it must have seemed to readers, in 1963, raised on a dates-and-dynasties view of the past.

I've been a professional historian for roughly half my life; this is one of the books that shaped the way I think about history. Even if you're just interested in history, though, this one is well worth your time. ( )