World Civilizations And History Of Human Development

World Civilizations and History of Human Development is a component of Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and Humanities in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty Encyclopedias. The Theme on World Civilizations and History of Human Development discusses the essential aspects such as Civilizational Analysis: A Paradigm in the Making; The European Civilizational Constellation: A Historical Sociology, African Civilizations: From the Pre-colonial to the Modern Day; Industrial Civilization; Global Civilization - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; Islamic Civilizations; War, Peace And Civilizations; History: The Meaning and Role of History in Human Development; Role of Human Societies in the History of The Biosphere; Environmentalism; Role of Gender and Family Identities in Human History; Modern Approaches to the Teaching of History; Developing Dialogues: The Value of Oral History; Historical Knowledge. Nature and Man: Orientations to Historical Time; Big History This volume is aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers, NGOs and GOs.

Journey through time, from pre-history to the modern world, in this engrossing highly illustrated children's encyclopedia for 8- to 12-year-olds.

Carroll Quigley was a legendary teacher at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. His course on the history of civilization was extraordinary in its scope and in its impact on students. Like the course, The Evolution of Civilizations is a comprehensive and perceptive look at the factors behind the rise and fall of civilizations. Quigley examines the application of scientific method to the social sciences, then establishes his historical hypotheses. He poses a division of culture into six levels from the abstract to the more concrete. He then tests those hypotheses by a detailed analysis of five major civilizations: the Mesopotamian, the Canaanite, the Minoan, the classical, and the Western. Quigley defines a civilization as "a producing society with an instrument of expansion." A civilization's decline is not inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is transformed into an institution--that is, when social arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs.

Designed for introductory-level survey courses in World History. The primary goal of World Civilizations is to present a truly global history-from the development of agriculture and herding to the present. Using a unique periodization, this book divides the main periods of human history according to changes in the nature and extent of global contacts. This global world history text emphasizes the major stages in the interactions among different peoples and societies, while at the same time assessing the development of major societies. Encompassing social and cultural as well as political and economic history, the book examines key civilizations in world history. World Civilizations balances this discussion of independent developments in the world's major civilizations with comparative analysis of the results of global contact.

A groundbreaking look at Western and Eastern social development from the end of the ice age to today In the past thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful. The Measure of Civilization presents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions about when and why the West came to dominate the world and fresh perspectives for thinking about the twenty-first century. Adapting the United Nations' approach for measuring human development, Morris's index breaks social development into four traits—energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity—and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns. Morris reveals that for 90 percent of the time since the last ice age, the world's most advanced region has been at the western end of Eurasia, but contrary to what many historians once believed, there were roughly 1,200 years—from about 550 to 1750 CE—when an East Asian region was more advanced. Only in the late eighteenth century CE, when northwest Europeans tapped into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, did the West leap ahead. Resolving some of the biggest debates in global history, The Measure of Civilization puts forth innovative tools for determining past, present, and future economic and social trends.

This companion volume to Civilizations in History examines the story of human development with a focus on the Eastern world. It expands the spectrum of study to include the major historical developments of the world's largest continents: Africa and Asia.