The Rise of the West

The Rise of the West is a history of the human community, in its own subtitle's words: an attempt to tell the story of civilization from the first cities of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century as a single connected narrative. William H. McNeill's organizing idea, which made the book a landmark, is that contact between civilizations, not the isolated flowering of each, drives historical change. Where Spengler and Toynbee had treated civilizations as separate organisms rising and falling on their own clocks, McNeill follows the traffic between them: armies, merchants, missionaries, technologies, crops, and diseases carrying novelty from one society to another and forcing response. The book moves in three great phases, from the ancient Middle East's initial dominance, through two thousand years of rough balance among the Eurasian civilizations, to the period after 1500 when Western Europe's oceanic reach tipped the scale. McNeill wrote it over a decade at the University of Chicago, and the compression is athletic; China, India, Islam, and Byzantium get sustained attention, rare in a general history written by an American in the 1950s. It won the National Book Award in History and Biography in 1964, was praised by Hugh Trevor Roper in the New York Times, and the Modern Library later placed it among the century's hundred best nonfiction books. McNeill himself, in a famous retrospective essay twenty five years on, criticized the book's residual Western triumphalism and its inattention to the world the West disrupted. That second look is part of the book's stature: it founded modern world history as a field serious enough to correct itself.