A Brief History of the World

A Brief History of the World

Part I

Professor Peter N. Stearns

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Peter N. Stearns, Ph.D.

Provost and Professor of History, George Mason University

Peter N. Stearns is Provost and Professor of History at George Mason University, where he annually teaches a world history course for undergraduates. He previously taught at the University of Chicago, Rutgers, and Carnegie Mellon and was trained at Harvard University. While at Carnegie Mellon, Professor Stearns won the Smith award for teaching in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Spencer award for excellence in university teaching. He has worked extensively for the Advanced Placement program and chaired the committee that devised and implemented the AP world history course (1996?2006). Professor Stearns was Vice President of the American Historical Association, heading its Teaching Division from 1995 to 1998. He also founded and still edits the Journal of Social History.

Trained in European social history, Professor Stearns has authored a wide array of books and articles (on both Europe and the United States) on such subjects as emotions, childrearing, dieting and obesity, old age, and work. He has also written widely in world history, authoring two textbooks that have gone through multiple editions. He edited the sixth edition of the Encyclopedia of World History and is currently editing an Encyclopedia of Modern World History. He has written several thematic studies in world history, including The Industrial Revolution in World History (2nd ed., Westview, 1998), Gender in World History (2nd ed., Routledge, 2006), Consumerism in World History (2nd ed., Routledge, 2006), Western Civilization in World History (Routledge, 2003), and Childhood in World History (Routledge, 2005). His book Global Outrage: The Evolution and Impact of World Opinion (OneWorld) appeared in 2005, and his current interest in using history to understand contemporary patterns of behavior is illustrated in American Fear (Routledge, 2006).

Professor Stearns was "converted" to world history more than two decades ago and has taught it annually since then, first at Carnegie Mellon and currently at George Mason. He believes that the framework of world history allows him to learn a great deal about the world without degenerating into random detail and helps his students to better understand the past and the present.

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Table of Contents

A Brief History of the World Part I

Professor Biography ........................................................................................... i

Course Scope ...................................................................................................... 1

Lecture One

What and Why Is World History? ............................ 3

Lecture Two

The Neolithic Revolution.......................................... 8

Lecture Three

What Is a Civilization?............................................ 12

Lecture Four

The Classical Period in World History ................... 18

Lecture Five

Cultural Change in the Classical Period.................. 24

Lecture Six

Social Inequalities in Classical Societies ................ 29

Lecture Seven

The Roman Empire and Han China ........................ 34

Lecture Eight

The Silk Road; Classical Period Contacts .............. 38

Lecture Nine

The Decline of the Classical Civilizations .............. 43

Lecture Ten

The Postclassical Period, 500?1450 ....................... 48

Lecture Eleven

World Religions and Their Consequences.............. 53

Lecture Twelve

The Impact of Islam ................................................ 58

Timeline ............................................................................................................ 63

Glossary ............................................................................................................ 69

Biographical Notes..................................................................................... Part II

Bibliography .............................................................................................. Part III

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A Brief History of the World

Scope:

This course presents some of the highlights of the world historical approach to the past, suggesting major changes in the framework of the human experience, from the rise of agriculture to the present day. The lectures cover the emergence of distinct major societies as they deal with common problems but generate quite different institutional and cultural approaches. The course also discusses key changes in belief systems--the emergence and spread of the great world religions, for example--as well as alterations in trading patterns and basic shifts in technology, exploring why some societies reacted differently to technological change than others.

Throughout the course, we will look at many parts of the world, including those clustered into shared civilizations. East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean loom large from the start. Sub-Saharan Africa, where the human species originated, has also played a great role in world history, as ultimately has northern Europe, including Russia. The Americas offer an important variant until their incorporation in global patterns from 1492 onward. Central Asia maintained a distinct position in world history until the 16th century.

World history divides into a limited number of time periods, defined in terms of dominant themes. The rise of agriculture requires a discussion of preagricultural patterns. Following agriculture came, in several places, the advent of civilization as a form of human organization. The classical period in world history draws attention to China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean, when the expansion and integration of these large societies dominated over a millennium of human history. The collapse of the classical empires ushered in a vital postclassical period, when emphasis shifted to religion but also to more ambitious patterns of interregional trade. It was in this postclassical period (500?1500 CE) that the emphasis of major societies shifted from separate development to greater interaction and even deliberate imitation. The early modern period highlights a renewed capacity for empire, the inclusion of the Americas in global systems, and--though this must be handled with a bit of care--the rise of Western Europe. What some historians call the "Long 19th Century"--1750 or so to 1914--was dominated by Western industrialization and its economic, military, and cultural impact on, literally, the entire world. Finally, the contemporary period in world history, after World War I, features a bewildering variety of themes that must be sorted out, with emphasis among other things on the relative decline of the West, the huge surge in human population, and the potential for greater globalization.

World history highlights a number of major regions, but it avoids simply examining one area after another--"if it's Tuesday, this must be Latin America"--by making careful comparisons and focusing on interregional

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contacts. The discipline emphasizes a number of key time periods (though not an indefinite number), defined in terms of basic changes in the ways many societies operated, whether the change was in an economic system-- industrialization, for example--or a cultural system, as seen, for example, in the emergence of vigorous missionary religions.

World history also embraces two common themes. First, and most obviously, is the eternal tension between change and continuity--the stuff of history as a discipline. Particularly once the classical traditions are defined, world history can be seen in terms of new forces being met and interpreted by established cultural and institutional systems. Of course, these systems change but never completely and never in exactly the same ways from one society to the next.

The second theme involves a perpetual interplay between local or regional identities, on the one hand, and the attraction or simple inevitability of wider contacts, on the other. Societies began trading at long distances several millennia ago. They received immigrants and diseases and, sometimes, ideas from distant places. But they rarely, at least willingly, simply surrendered to outside influence, and sometimes they battled fiercely against such influence in the name of established values. Over time, of course, and particularly with contemporary globalization, the pendulum shifted toward more outside influence, either willingly embraced or endured of necessity. But the tension has not ended, and assertions of regional identities can intensify precisely because the external framework is so intrusive. World history allows us to trace the main iterations of this tension and to place its current iteration in context--and even, tentatively, to talk about its future.

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