History Of Civilizations

Written from a consciously anti-enthnocentric approach, this fascinating work is a survey of the civilizations of the modern world in terms of the broad sweep and continuities of history, rather than the "event-based" technique of most other texts.

Civilizations takes the reader forward from the earliest days of human settlement to the civilizations of the New World overthrown by the Spanish Conquistadors.

"The Rhythms of History" presents a quantitative theory of civilizations supported by the data in Toynbee's classic 12-volume "A Study of History."

From the History of the World series, Making Civilizations traces the origins of large-scale organized human societies. Led by archaeologist Hans-Joachim Gehrke, a distinguished group of scholars lays out latest findings about Neanderthals, the Agrarian Revolution, the founding of imperial China, the world of Western classical antiquity, and more.

"Written from a consciously anti-enthnocentric approach, this fascinating work is a survey of the civilizations of the modern world in terms of the broad sweep and continuities of history, rather than the "event-based" technique of most other texts."--Back cover

Based on the idea that communication technologies are a primary shaping force of civilizations, "Five Epochs of Civilization" presents a new scheme of world history. It identifies five epochs of historical experience and associates each with a civilization focused on particular institutions. These are: -- Civilization I focused on government, ending in large political empires -- Civilization II focused on religion, ending in the three world religions -- Civilization III focused on commerce and education within the nation state -- Civilization IV focused on the media of news and entertainment -- Civilization V focused on the internet and beyond The communication technologies which triggered these changes in culture (and their approximate dates of introduction) include: ideographic writing (3100 B.C.), alphabetic writing (800 B.C.), printing (1450 A.D.), electronic recording and broadcasting (1920 A.D.), and computer networks (1990 A.D.). McGaughey includes separate narratives for each of the four civilizations that have appeared to date in a developed form plus 'imaginative and plausible speculations concerning a possible fifth, computer-based civilization'.

The period treated in this volume is highlighted by the slow retreat of nomadism and the progressive increase of sedentary polities owing to a fundamental change in military technology: Furthermore, this period certainly saw a growing contrast in the pace of economic and cultural progress between Central Asia and Europe. The internal growth of the European economies and the influx of silver from the New World gave Atlantic Europe an increasingly important position in world trade and caused a major shift in inland Asian trade. Thus, 1850 marks the end of the total sway of pre-modern culture as the extension of colonial dominance was accompanied by the influx of modern ideas.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations