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The Human Web: A Birds-eye View of World History
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The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History

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The history of soil erosion
What bird's eye?
A major work for general readers
Great Overall View of History

The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History
Robert McNeill , and William H. McNeill
Manufacturer: W W Norton & Co Inc (Np)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0393925684

Book Description

An original vision of world history that reveals the larger patterns of human cooperation and conflict from the earliest times.

Why did the first civilizations emerge when and where they did? How did Islam become a unifying force in the world of its birth? What enabled the West to project its goods and power around the world from the fifteenth century on? Why was agriculture invented seven times and the Internet just once?

In a spirited contribution to the quickening discussion of world-historical questions such as these, J. R. and William H. McNeill explore the webs that have drawn humans together in patterns of interaction and exchange, cooperation and competition, since the beginning. Whether small or large, loose or dense, these webs have provided the medium for the movement of ideas, goods, power, and money within and across cultures, societies, and nations. Avoiding any determinism, environmental or cultural, the McNeills give us a synthesizing picture of the big patterns of world history in a rich, open-ended, concise account. Maps, 25 b/w illustrations.

Customer Reviews:

The history of soil erosion.......2006-07-21

By the 1990s, U.S miners moved about 4 billion tons of rock per year, and the world figures was about five times that. "All this mining corroded the lithosphere with a warren of underground shafts and chambers, and after the appearance of the requisite earth-moving machinery, pockmarked the earth's surface with thousands of huge open pits, mainly in the United States, Russia, Germany, and Australia.

Pulse One: Eroded soil ends up in reservoirs and lakes, affecting aquatic life. It silts up shorelines, harbors, and river channels, requiring dredging. The first pulse came when agriculture in the Middle East, India, and China emerged from the river valleys and spread over former forest lands. This occurred slowly, say between 2000 B.C to 1000 AD, as states, economies, and population grew- and as iron tools made clearing forest easier. Where ever existing vegetation was cut or burned to make way for crops or animals, faster erosion resulted. China's loess plateau typifies the first pulse. Some 40 million people live in an area the size of France; it is one of the worlds most eroded landscapes; soil consist of windborne deposits from Mongolia; before cultivation forests cover most of the loess plateau; by 1990 soil erosion carries off 2.2 billion tons of topsoil a year; the soil in the Dahe gave it the name "Yellow river".

Pulse Two: The second global surge in soil erosion came with the frontier expansion of Europe and the integration of world agricultural markets. The pulse began with the European conquest and the Euro-African settlements; thickly settle mountainous regions of the Andes and Central America's agricultural terraces fell apart and soil erosion spurred; cultivators would leave fields bare and hoofed animals loosened up more soil; European settlers had the power to move populations into marginal lands, such as steep lands where the soil was unstable; the lands came under the plow; in Rhodesia, Africa, white farms introduced plows and commercial agriculture plant wheat, tobacco, coffee, and other crops; the create a spate of erosion in Kenya and Rhodesia; people huddle in smaller area and made it more tempting to farm unstable soils; soil erosion accelerated promoting tree cutting; more incentive for cash crop increase pressure to produce; cattle and soil husbandry caused over grazing problems; Canals, railroads, steamships, and telegraphs knitted the world markets together making sense to plow up North America praire, run tens of thousands of sheep over lower slopes of New Zealand Southern Alps in order to sale to burgeoning urban populations far away. Plain development had its affects: dust storms in Saskatchewan darkened the skiess as 3 to 4 million hectares of prairie land was completely destroyed.

Third pulse. The third pulse gathered in the 1950s. Populations experienced an unprecedented level of health and survival. "Demographic growth, often together with state policies and land tenure patterns, spurred land hunger and land clearing, even on steep and marginal lands. Lowland peasants migrated to highland regions, mountain peasants invaded rainforests, and still others colonized semiarid lands. Once, ingrained agronomic knowledge and familiar animals and technology often proved inappropriate to new settings." "Technology changes in agriculture, specifically the adoption of heavy machinery, led to soil compaction after 1930, and especially after 1950, as tractor grew in size. " Soil compaction inhibit plant growth. Industrial pollution and heavy use of nitrogen fertilizers after 1960 led to soil acidification, especially in Europe. By 1990 soil irrigation had salinization 7% of the world's land.

Soil degradation now effects one third of the world's land surface; a quarter of the earths cultivate land area; about 2 billion hectacres; 430 million hectacres are irreversible destroyed; in China, 1978 erosion forced the abandonment of 31 percent of the arable land; the US loses 1.7 billion tons to erosion each year; a cost of $150 per person.

What bird's eye?.......2004-06-28

I love ambitious books, and today's world needs big perspectives. But this book is rooted more in current American values than in historical facts.
To give just a few examples: where else could the authors have found the wisdom that the first gardeners were women? or that farming could only take off after private property became the norm? The book is full of assumptions, and sometimes at the expense of the facts. Stating that Napoleon unified the French in the 1800-1810s, when France had been a centralized kingdom and European superpower for six centuries, is like saying that GWBush is the uniter of the Americans. To prove a point about exchanges speeding up, the book says that it in 1650, it would take a Dutch ship a year to go from Java to Amsterdam. But a famous dutch ship's journal relates of Bontekoe's adventurous journey there around 1620. Although plagued by tropical storms, losing his mast, losing his way, losing time to help other ships and the brandy on board catching on fire setting off a gunpowder explosion, he did Europe to Java in 10 months and came back in 9.
So I love the scope of this book but reading it is very disappointing. Jared Diamond or Marvin Harris are in a completely different league, culturally as well as scientifically.

A major work for general readers.......2003-12-13

W.H. McNeill has written several of the top 20 works for specialists and general audience on general history. This work is a breathtaking overview of world history seen in the context of environment.

People who rightly were thrilled by Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" should go on and enjoy this rare treat: lucid and easy to understand, based on a wealth of erudition connected with plain sense, a new vision.

Young readers might get ideas about a change of courses. As a university professor I immediately took this book up as reading matter for my students - mostly engineers and lawyers at present.

Great Overall View of History.......2003-06-13

The Human Web is an excellent summary of human history. It is indeed a bird's eye view in that it looks at the broad overall sweep of human affairs and doesn't bog down in unnecessary detail. The major theme is the construction and expansion of human webs, or interconnections that tie cultures and civilizations together ever more tightly. If space voyagers ever arrived on Earth (and could read a human language) this book would be one of the first things I hope we hand them to help them understand us.

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