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This groundbreaking world history text has, in its first edition, become a market leader by offering a fresh, global perspective on the past. The text is unique in approach; covering the world as a whole, examining the formations and development of the world’s major societies (“traditions”), and also systematically exploring cross-cultural interactions and exchanges that have been some of the most effective agents of change in all of world history (“encounters”). In addition, the authors have taken great care in constructing a coherent vision of the past that is not weighed down by a mass of detail, thus enabling instructors to incorporate additional readings of their choosing. Finally the text emphasizes that historical processes work themselves out through the lives and experiences of individual human beings, opening each chapter with an account of individual experiences that illuminate themes in that chapter. The second edition includes scholarship updates throughout and revisions to organization and content.

Jerry H. Bentley was professor of history at the University of Hawaii and editor of the Journal of World History. His research on the religious, moral, and political writings of Renaissance humanists led to the publication of Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1983) and Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton, 1987). More recently, his research was concentrated on global history and particularly on processes of cross-cultural interaction. His book Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993) examines processes of cultural exchange and religious conversion before the modern era, and his pamphlet Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (Washington, D.C., 1996) discusses the historiography of world history. His most recent publication is The Oxford Handbook of World History (Oxford, 2011), and he served as a member of the editorial team preparing the forthcoming Cambridge History of the World. Jerry Bentley passed away in July 2012.

Herbert F. Ziegler is an associate professor of history at the University of Hawai'i. He has taught world history since 1980 and currently serves as director of the world history program at the University of Hawai'i. He also serves as book review editor of the Journal of World History. His interest in twentieth-century European social and political history led to the publication of Nazi Germany's New Aristocracy(1990). He is at present working on a study that explores from a global point of view the demographic trends of the past ten thousand years, along with their concomitant technological, economic, and social developments. His other current research project focuses on the application of complexity theory to a comparative study of societies and their internal dynamics.