Global History: A Short Overview - Hardcover

Cowen, Noel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745628052 ISBN 13: 9780745628059

Publisher: Polity, 2001

Synopsis

This short book offers a clear and engaging introduction to the history of humankind, from the earliest movements of people to the contemporary epoch of globalization. Cowen traces this complex history in a manner which offers both a compelling narrative and an analytical and comparative treatment. Drawing on a new perspective on global history, he traces the intersection of change in economics, politics and human beliefs, examining the formation, enlargement and limits of human societies. Global History shows how much of human history encompasses three intersecting forces -- trading networks, expanding political empires and crusading creeds. Abandoning the limits of a Eurocentric view of the world, the book offers a number of fresh insights. Its periodization embraces movement across continents and across the millennia. The indigenous American civilizations are included, for instance. The book also ranges over the early civilizations of China and Europe as well as the Russian and Islamic worlds. Modern American and Japanese civilizations are, in addition, a focus for attention. The author examines national and regional histories in relation to wider themes, sequences and global tendencies. In conclusion, he seeks to address the question of the extent to which a global society is beginning to crystallize.

About this title

Review:

"This great little book is well-written, erudite and provides a sweeping historical survey which anyone with an interest in world history will find a very valuable introduction."
--Professor Anthony McGrew, Politics Department, Southampton University

"This is a good contribution to theories of globalization, bringing an important historical dimension to approaches that are often ahistorical. The additional focus of civilizations rather than nation-states is particularly interesting."
--Gerard Delanty, University of Liverpool, Network

"Noel Cowen's brave and brief text consciously imitates and combines the broadest patterns suggested by McNeill, Wallerstein and Braudel. His subject is not humanity but 'civilizations' that developed significant surpluses beyond subsistence...Cowen predicts an impending victory for financial imperialism, which has already converted most of the world's elites into its gospel of economic growth and higher living standards. If the human community can be provided with a unifying history, it will not likely be built over the sad skeleton of the history of tyrannies that Cowen's conscientious account so clearly exposes." (Canadian Journal of History, December 2004)

About the Author:

Noel Cowen writes from long experience and observation, early on as a newspaper reporter, later as a civil servant in the Treasury working on problems of postwar reconstruction in a global context, and at the Ministry of Education seeking to develop the teaching of world history, and finally as an independent researcher, writer and speaker.

About this edition

• Publisher: Polity
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0745628052
• ISBN 13: 9780745628059
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224