The Oxford Illustrated History of the World

Description

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.

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

Table of contents

Introduction
Part I: Children of the Ice
1. Humanity From the Ice: The Emergence and Spread of an Adaptive Species, Clive Gamble
2. The Mind in the Ice: Art and Thought before Agriculture, Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Part II: Of Mud and Metal
3. Into a Warming World, Martin Jones
4. The Farmers' Empires: Climax and Crises in Agrarian States and Cities, Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Part III: The Oscillations of Empires
5. Material Life: Bronze Age Crisis to the Black Death, John Brooke
6. Intellectual Traditions: Philosophy, Science, Religion, and the Arts, 500 BCE - 1350 CE, David Northrup
7. Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BC-AD 1350, Ian Morris
Part IV: The Climatic Reversal
8. A Converging World: Economic and Ecological Encounters, 1350-1815, David Northrup
9. Renaissances, Reformations, and Mental Revolutions: Intellect and Arts in the Early Modern World, Manuel Lucena-Giraldo
10. Connected by Emotions and Experiences: Monarchs, Merchants, Mercenaries, and Migrants in the Early Modern World, Anjana Singh
Part V: The Great Acceleration
11. The Anthropocene Epoch: The Background to Two Transformative Centuries, David Christian
12. The Modern World and Its Demons: Ideology and After in Arts, Letters and Thought, 1815-2008, Paolo Luca Bernardini
13. Politics and Society in the Kaleidoscope of Change: Relationships, Institutions, and Conflicts from the Beginnings of Western Hegemony to the American Supremacy, Jeremy Black
Epilogue
Further Reading
Index