William H. McNeill

Human migration in historical perspective.

Once civilized societies had taken root in the Far East in India and around the eastern Mediterranean as well as in the Middle East the resulting social diversity complicated and at the same time structured subsequent patterns of human migration. It is possible to distinguish 4 possible forms of migration: radical displacement of 1 population by another as a result of systematic exercise of force; conquest of 1 population by another leading to symbiosis of 2 previously diverse communities on the same ground; infiltration by outsiders with some degree of acquiescence from existing populations and without displacing existing rulers; and importation of individuals or even of whole communities that had been forcibly uprooted from their initial place of residence by slave raiders and/or traders. Of these the first was and remained characteristic of barbarian societies that is of societies organized on kinship lines in which nearly every family did the same sorts of things as every other family. Basic to civilized society was the fact that cities became seats of intensified infection to the extent that urban populations were incapable of sustaining themselves biologically. This changed only in the 2nd half of the 19th century when public health measures and the advance of scientific medicine made it possible to interrupt the cycles of infection for a wide variety of crowd diseases. The juxtaposition of civilized agricultural societies with steppe nomads and seafaring communities within the Eurasian context also provoked 2 other comparatively slender migration patterns that nonetheless played important parts in historic development. One was military and the other mercantile. The barbarian ideal of an ethnically homogeneous nation is incompatible with the normal population dynamics of civilization. Only since World War II have European nations begun to experience the ethnic mingling that was common in civilized lands of the deeper past. Dieoff at the center and recruitment from ethnically diverse peripheries again prevail in post-1950 Europe and America. Consequently polyethnic lamination is again asserting itself in the Soviet Union as much as in France Germany the UK and the US.

History and the Scientific Worldview

Worldviews affect human behavior, and how we behave affects the world around us. Animism and so-called higher religions remain influential worldviews; but the scientific worldview is comparably significant, and has undergone drastic change during the twentieth century. The physical science ideal of mathematical precision and predictability, as elaborated by Galileo, Newton, and their heirs, underwent an amazing transformation in the twentieth century when Big Bang cosmology substituted an expanding, unstable universe for the Newtonian world machine. As a result, a grand convergence of the sciences seems to be emerging around an evolutionary vision of how new aspects of reality emerge locally from new levels of complexity, like the heavier atoms, forged in stellar furnaces, the living molecules that arose in earths primordial seas, and the symbolic systems invented by human societies perhaps as recently as forty thousand years ago. History, once a hopelessly inexact laggard among the sciences, might even become something of a model for other disciplines, since it deals with the most complex levels of reality we are aware of, that is, the world of agreed-upon meanings that guides our interaction with one another and with the biological, chemical, and physical worlds around us.

World History and the Rise and Fall of the West

This article seeks how best to understand the history of humankind as a whole by emphasizing communications and transportation networks. It summarizes the principal consequences of major changes in the range and carrying capacity of these networks, with reflections on the role of the West in recent centuries. During these centuries Europeans enjoyed a brief experience of world dominance, thanks to an initial monopoly of modern forms of mechanically powered transport and electrical communication, only to see their dominant position decline as other peoples have caught up with them in our own time.

Passing Strange: The Convergence of Evolutionary Science with Scientific History

In the second half of the twentieth century, a surprising change in the notion of scientific truth gained ground when an evolutionary cosmology made the Newtonian world machine into no more than a passing phase of the cosmos, subject to exceptions in the neighborhood of black holes and other unusual objects. Physical and chemical laws ceased to be eternal and universal and became local and changeable, that is, fundamentally historical instead, and faced an uncertain, changeable future just as they had in the initial phases of the cosmos. The earth sciences along with biology had become historical in the nineteenth century; and the Big Bang cosmology in effect brought physics and chemistry into line, allowing venturesome intellects to concoct a new all-embracing worldview that recognizes the catalytic role of the observer in defining what is observed, and how different levels of local complexity provoke new and surprising phenomena—including terrestrial life forms, and most notably for us, humanly-constructed symbolic meanings—of which science is only oneexample. The article then argues that it is time for historians to take note of the imperial role thus thrust upon their discipline by making a sustained effort to enlarge their views and explore the career of humankind on earth as a whole, thus making human history an integral part of the emerging scientific and evolutionary worldview. Tentative suggestions of how this might be addressed, focusing on changes in patterns of communication that expanded the scale of human cooperation, and thus conduced to survival, follow. Dance, then speech, were early breakthroughs expanding the practicable size of wandering human bands; then caravans and shipping allowed civilizations to arise; writing expanded the scale of coordination; warfare and trade harshly imposed best practice across wide areas of Eurasia and Africa and kept the skills of that part of the world ahead of what the peoples of other continents and islands had at their command. Then with the crossing of the oceans after 1492 our One World began to emerge and swiftly assumed its contemporary shape with further improvements in the range and capacity of communication—for example, printing, mechanically-powered transport, instantaneous data transmission—with consequences for human society and earths ecosystem yet to be experienced. Much remains to be investigated and, in particular, interactions between the history of human symbolic meanings and the history of other equilibria—ecological, chemical, physical—within which we exist needs further study. But with suitable effort, history can perhaps become scientific and the emerging scientific evolutionary worldview begin to achieve logical completeness by bringing humankind within its scope.

Disease in history.

Abstract The role of infectious diseases in the development of civilizations has not been adequately formulated by historians. Comparative methods can be used to identify patterns of civilizational expansion, contact and change that were greatly influenced by the evolution and ecology of disease.

Africa in world history

Africa in World History stresses Africas interrelatedness to other regions and cultures, from early trade routes, the arrival of Christianity and Islam, and the ramifications of colonialism to contemporary issues such as HIV/AIDS and apartheid that have thwarted Africas efforts to establish unity. Africa stretches across more than 11 million square miles, from the Sahara and Sahel in the north to the mineral-resource-rich south, the endangered rain forests of the west, and the Serengeti savannas of the east. Fossils from Ethiopia tell us that the human species originated in Africa, and scholars have different theories about the journey out of Africa made by Homo sapiens some 60,000 years ago. Today, Africa is home to over 1 billion people speaking more than a thousand different languages.

History with a French Accent

The appearance of an English translation, twenty-three years after its initial publication, of Fernand Braudels masterpiece seems an appropriate occasion for the Journal of Modern History to sound a fanfare on behalf -of this majestic monument of twentieth-century historiography. The editor is pleased and proud that three such famous historians agreed to appraise the character and importance of Braudels work. I am particularly obligated to M. Braudel, who in writing of himself and his intellectual forerunners offers a remarkable example of both the strengths and weaknesses of the Annales school-perspicacious, penetrating, and detached, even in analyzing himself; yet, though in principle disdainful of mere occurrences, unable to explain his own history except in terms of personal encounters, friendships, conversations, yes, and rivalries!

A Defence of World History ( The Prothero Lecture )

World history was once taken for granted as the only sensible basis for understanding the past. Christians could do no other than begin with creation and fit subsequent details into the framework of divine revelation. This ordering of the past survived into the seventeenth century as Bossuet and Walter Raleigh may remind us. But with the revival of antique letters, a different model for historical writing asserted itself that could not fit smoothly within the Christian epos. In effect, Thucydides and Tacitus challenged Augustine, presenting the history of states and their interaction as a self-contained whole. Guicciardini and Machiavelli wrote their histories accordingly, dismissing as irrelevant the world historical framework that had seemed essential to earlier believers.

Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797

In this magisterial history, National Book Award winner William H. McNeill chronicles the interactions and disputes between Latin Christians and the Orthodox communities of eastern Europe during the period of 1081 to 1797. Concentrating on Venice as the hinge of European history in the late medieval and early modern period, McNeill explores the technological, economic, and political bases of Venetian power and wealth, and the citys unique status at the frontier between the papal and Orthodox Christian worlds. He pays particular attention to Venetian influence upon southeastern Europe, and from such an angle of vision, the familiar pattern of European history changes shape.

Violence & submission in the human past

in public affairs from its high points in the 1930s when the might of the British Raj in India was so seriously challenged by Gandhi and his followers, and since the 1950s and 1960s when Martin Luther King, Jr., led civil-rights demonstrators in facing police dogs and truncheons in the American South, is obvious today. That is scarcely surprising. It takes enormous self-discipline to invite attack and refrain from retaliation, and the moral effect of nonviolence depends on who witnesses such confrontations and how that larger public reacts. Violence exercised in secret against helpless victims, as at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, escapes the price of public disapproval as long as it remains secret. And all too obviously, the art of shaping public opinion by managing the news has become a far more potent ally of established authority, even (or especially) in the exercise of violence, than it used to be. Yet it is still true that violence has serious limits and that command of superior force is a very precarious basis for government. As Napoleon is supposed to have remarked, one can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. Effective and sustained public action requires at least tacit consent of the governed; active support is much more effective, if it can be contrived. More generally, human society depends on perpetual interaction between leaders and followers, and the exercise of violence and the threat of violence is part of that interaction. So is submission and obedience; and in practice the great majority of humankind has always submitted for very good reasons. Only so can collective action be ef1⁄2ciently exercised, only so can home territory be effectually defended, and, in a word, only so can conditions for group survival be optimized. In all probability, violence and threats of violence played a prominent part in de1⁄2ning which of several competing males achieved leadership of the protohuman, and then the 1⁄2rst fully human, bands of foragers from whom we all de-