When we began to work on the first edition of World Civilizations: The Global Experience in the early 1990s, we did so out of the conviction that it was time for a world history textbook truly global in its approach and coverage and yet manageable and accessible for today's college students. Our commitment to that goal continues with this third edition. We seek to present a truly global history—one that discusses the evolution and development of the world's leading civilizations—and balances that coverage with examination of the major stages in the nature and degree of interactions among different peoples and societies around the globe. We view world history not as a parade of facts to be memorized or a collection of the individual histories of various societies. Rather, world history is the study of historical events in a global context. It combines meaningful synthesis of independent development within societies with comparative analysis of the results of contacts between societies.

Several decades of scholarship in world history and in area studies by historians and other social scientists have yielded a wealth of information and interpretive generalizations. The challenge is to create a coherent and comprehensible framework for organizing all this information. Our commitment to world history stems from our conviction that students will understand and appreciate the present world by studying the myriad forces that have shaped that world and created our place within it. Furthermore, study of the past in order to make sense of the present will help them prepare to meet the challenges of the future.

Approach

The two principal distinguishing characteristics of this book are its global orientation and its analytical emphasis. This is a true world history textbook. It deals seriously with the Western tradition but does not award it pride of place or a preeminence that diminishes other areas of the world. World Civilizations: The Global Experience examines the histories of all areas of the world and all peoples according to their growing or waning importance. It also considers what happened across regions by examining cross-civilizational developments such as migration, trade, the spread of religion, disease, plant exchange, and cultural interchange. Civilizations or societies sometimes slighted in world history textbooks—such as the nomadic societies of Asia, Latin American societies, the nations of the Pacific Rim, and the societies of nonurban sedentary peoples—receive attention here.

Many world history textbooks function as factual compendia, leaving analytical challenge to the classroom. Our goal throughout this book has been to relate fact to interpretation while still allowing ample opportunity for classroom exploration. Our analytical emphasis focuses on how key aspects of the past and present have been shaped by global forces such as the exchange of technology and ideas. By encouraging students to learn how to assess continuity and change, we seek to help them relate the past to the present. Through analysis and interpretation students become active, engaged learners, rather than passive readers of the facts of historical events.

Periodization

This text pays a great deal of attention to periodization, an essential requirement for coherent presentation. World Civilizations: The Global Experience identifies six periods in world history, each period determined by three basic criteria: a geographical rebalancing among major civilizational areas, an increase in the intensity and extent of contact across civilizations, (or, in the case of the earliest period, cross-regional contact), and the emergence of new and roughly parallel developments in most, if not all, of these major civilizations. The book is divided into six parts corresponding to these six major periods of world history. In each part, basic characteristics of each period are referred to in chapters that discuss the major civilizations in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, and in several cross-cutting chapters that address larger world trends. Part introductions identify the fundamental new characteristics of parallel or comparable developments and regional or international exchange that define each period.

After sketching the hunting and gathering phase of human existence, Part I, "The Origins of Civilization," focuses on the rise of agriculture and the emergence of civilization in parts of Asia, Africa, Central America, and southeastern Europe—the sequence of developments that set world history in motion from the origin of the human species until about 3000 years ago.

Part II, "The Classical Period in World History," deals with the growing complexity of major civilizations in several areas of the world. During the classical period, civilizations developed a new capacity to integrate large regions and diverse groups of people through overarching cultural and political systems. Yet many regions and societies remained unconnected to the increasingly complex centers of civilization. Coverage of the classical period of world history, then, must consider both types of societies.

"The Postclassical Era," the period covered in Part III of the book, saw the emergence of new commercial and cultural linkages that brought most civilizations into contact with one another and with nomadic groups. The decline of the great classical empires, the rise of new civilizational centers, and the emergence of a network of world contacts, including the spread of major religions, are characteristics of the postclassical era.

Developments in world history over the three centuries from 1450 to 1750 mark a fourth period in world history—the period covered in Part IV, "The World Shrinks." The rise of the West, the intensification of global contacts, the growth of trade, and the formation of new empires define this period and separate it from the preceding postclassical period.

Part V, "Industrialization and Western Global Hegemony, 1750–1914" covers the period of world history dominated by the advent of industrialization in Western Europe and growing European imperialism. The increase and intensification of commercial interchange, technological innovations, and cultural contacts all reflected the growth of Western power and the spread of Western influence.

"The 20th Century in World History," the focus of Part VI, defines the characteristics of this period as the retreat of Western imperialism, the rise of new political systems such as communism, the surge of the United States and the Soviet Union, and a variety of economic innovations including the achievements of Japan and the Pacific Rim. Part VI deals with this most recent period of world history and some of its portents for the future.

Themes

We have tried to make world history accessible to today's students by using several themes as filters for the vast body of information that constitutes the subject. These themes provide a perspective and a framework for understanding where we have come from, where we are now, and where we might be headed.

Commonalities Among Societies

World Civilizations: The Global Experience traces several key features of all societies. It looks at the technologies people have developed—for humans were tool-making animals from an early date—and at the impact of technology on the physical environment. It examines social organization, including the inequalities between the two genders and different social classes. And it discusses the role of human agency: how individuals have shaped historical forces. These three areas—technology and the environment, inequalities and reactions to inequalities, and human agency—are three filters through which to examine any human society.

Contacts Between Civilizations

Large regional units that defined aspects of economic exchange, political institutions, and cultural values began to spring up more than 5000 years ago. These civilizations—that is, societies that generate and use an economic surplus beyond basic survival needs—created a general framework for the lives of most people ever since. But different regions had a variety of contacts, involving migration, trade, religious missionaries, exchanges of diseases and plants, and wars. Formal relations between societies—what we now call international relations—also were organized. Many aspects of world history can be viewed in terms of whether societies had regular connections, haphazard interchange, or some mix of the two.