Customer Reviews

The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

W.H. McNeill has written several of the top 20 works for specialists and general audience on general history. This work is a breathtaking overview of world history seen in the context of environment.

People who rightly were thrilled by Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" should go on and enjoy this rare treat: lucid and easy to understand, based on a wealth of erudition connected with plain sense, a new vision.

Young readers might get ideas about a change of courses. As a university professor I immediately took this book up as reading matter for my students - mostly engineers and lawyers at present.

The Human Web is an excellent summary of human history. It is indeed a bird's eye view in that it looks at the broad overall sweep of human affairs and doesn't bog down in unnecessary detail. The major theme is the construction and expansion of human webs, or interconnections that tie cultures and civilizations together ever more tightly. If space voyagers ever arrived on Earth (and could read a human language) this book would be one of the first things I hope we hand them to help them understand us.

If you need to try to survive from our history by reading only one book, here's one of the better, perhaps even the best, alternative. I'm a student of history myself, and I can only say that, due to my experience, it's very difficult to beat J.R. and William McNeill. The task of creating a general view from the whole world history is very difficult, but the McNeills have managed extremely well and written this very readable and colorful analysis of our history. This is a rare success book with challenging thoughts not just for students and advanced historians, but also for any literate blue-collar lad, waitress or "hockey-mom".

When Human Web was translated into Finnish (in 2005), immediately four main history and social science departments took it as their entrance examinations book. And not just the schools of history in Turku and Tampere and the subject of social and economical history in Helsinki, but also the Finland's most respected school for world politics in Helsinki had it as their main entrance examination book - and most of them still have.

Human Web is a book written with an impressing academical knowledge on a very clear and readable way avoiding any frustrating jargon. All this makes it a very pleasant, refreshing and exceptional reading experience for anyone.

I'm a high school world history teacher and I have my students read this as we move through our textbook. It works as a great supplement. It's very fast and easy reading and it helps readers understand how everything and everyone throughout history is tied together (hence the name "The Human Web"). It's the basic premise of history--cause and effect. If you are just starting to study history (or doing so because you have to) or just a casual fan, this is a great book to read. If you are a teacher, scholar, or serious history buff, this might be a little bland and simple for your taste.

The McNeills, father and son historians, have given us a superb history of the course of human civilization that is richly detailed in its survey of world cultures while living up to its billing as a "bird's-eye view." The dominant theme in this history is the emergence of webs binding societies together through transportation, communication, economics, politics, and interaction with the environment. Prior to 1450 the emphasis is on how cultures developed in every part of the world and the emergence of the "Old World Web" of cultural interactions in Eurasia and northern parts of Africa. After Columbus, the thesis is that the cultural webs began to merge into a single World Wide Web which characterizes life especially since 1870. The role of Columbus was central, for his "voyage stands as the most crucial step in undoing that ignorance and isolation, in fusing the world's webs into a single, global one, the most important process in modern history." (p. 163)

Except for the period 1914-1945, globalization has reigned supreme, they say. They present this as fraught with danger as well as offering great promise. The global economy has increased the divide between the haves and have-nots, they point out. Contemporary life is also characterized by upheaval, they say. "With the creation of a single web, it is as if history speeded up. Innovations and inventions, booms and depressions, pests and plagues rippled through a unified system .... So, as human history grew more unified, it grew more unstable and chaotic than ever, a condition with which we still live." (p. 178)

Two paramount emphases for recent times are the scientific and economic booms that have been going on since 1945 and human impact on ecology. The factor with the greatest potential impact for the future of humanity is the fact that, "in the process of trying to feed ourselves, make money, and protect ourselves from our fellows, we recast the biosphere dramatically, inserting ourselves as the main force shaping biological evolution." (286) They point out that the planet has seen five previous "extinction spasms" and that the twentieth century appears to be the start of a sixth, this one caused entirely by humanity. (p. 286) They conclude soberly: "It may one day appear that this ecological tumult, particularly climate change and the reduction in biodiversity, was the most important development in the period after 1890, more so than ideological struggles or world wars." (p. 288)

Highly researched and well written, this history is recommended for its scope and insight. This work put the past and present in a perspective that makes sense in our pluralistic yet increasingly global world.

The Human Web, by a distinguished father-son team of historians, is a remarkable book. McNeill and McNeill endeavor to cover all of human history in 327 pages. Their analytical framework focues on the gradual emergence of regional "webs" of economic and cultural exchange, and consequently emphasizes demographic and economic themes over political, religious, and intellectual ones. Their treatment of politics and religion is sound but often cursory; what really excites the McNeills is how particular technologies moved around and how quickly particular populations grew. While I thought that the McNeills sometimes gave short shrift to the ways in which ideas can motivate people, I found their depiction of the emergence of a world-wide "human web" extremely compelling.

No one could accuse the McNeills of being timid in their approach to historical analysis. What delighted me most about this book were the bold international comparisons--"Travelers may notice that people in those parts of Europe where cooperative moldboard plowing once prevailed still obey rules, form queues, and in general trust one another more than do the inhabitants of lands where separate families cultivated their fields independently and often distrusted their neighbors because of boundary disputes or the like" (142)--and the stark statistics that contextualize key events--"World War II killed about 3 percent of the world's 1940 population" (298). I take each of these statements with a grain of salt-- we don't know exactly how many people died in World War II, though 60 million is a reasonable estimate, and it's unlikely that historical farming patterns fully account for differences in national character, which in any case is constantly in flux. But what powerful ideas! The McNeills illuminate broad historical themes in ways I had never thought of before and inspired me to get more information about some parts of the world I have never studied.

Two small caveats: On the whole, I found the McNeills' treatment of Europe and Asia more compelling than their treatment of sub-Saharan Africa and indigenous America. This may reflect the state of the secondary literature when the McNeills were doing their research; some passages already seem a little dated. Secondly, this is a well-written but extremely dense book. I got a lot out of it because I already knew a good deal about the topic. Students and general readers may find that they need to read The Human Web quite slowly and do a good deal of rereading or note-taking in order to keep all of the information straight. But if you are up for a challenge, this is a highly rewarding read.

I'm a William McNeil fan, but was stunned by how good this book was. Teaming with his Ecologically oriented historian son they have produced a short history of humankind so clear and transparent, and intelligent, that you end up sorry you didn't get to read it first, before you read all the histories overloaded with details. Having noticed that all of human society and civilization consists of dynamic webs of information and material flow, they write a history of the last 100 thousand years from that perspective -- political boundaries hardly figure, just people exchanging information and material in ever more complex webs. The current "World Wide Web" is then just the latest step in improved information flow. Buy one for yourself, your friends, your kids, high school seniors, etc. Human history is slightly clearer when you finish this book.

I purchased the book because it was assigned for my world history class. I expected it to be dry and straightforward. However that is has not been the case so far. I have read about five chapters and the book postulates interesting and fun theories about human development.

Due to that, in addition to "The Human Web", for those looking for a broad framework to understand the past, I would recommend to read the following works, whose scope is amazingly global: 1. Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 2. Economy: "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke; 3. Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. Finer; 4. Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 5. Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 6. War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat.

This book is loaded with great information that had interested me from the start. I think that it is one of the best informational World History books. I definetly recommend this book without a doubt.