A Global History — From Prehistory to the Present

Why it’s on the list: Stavrianos’s world-history survey, one of the books that made world history a subject in its own right: it treats the whole species as the unit of analysis, and its pivot is not a Western date but 1500, when the separate Eurasian, African and American worlds were forced into a single system.

Where I heard about it

• Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the last entry in the History of Western Civilization section, cited with neither publisher nor year. Placed after a Western primary-source canon running from Plato to Tocqueville, it insists that canon be read as one civilization’s record rather than as the record.

About this edition

Stavrianos first published the survey in 1962 as A Global History of Man; this combined title belongs to later Prentice Hall editions, which ran to a seventh in 1998.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the bibliography this came from.
• History · Globalization — the subject, and the process the book organises itself around.
• Economic History — the 1500 pivot is largely an economic one.