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William Hardy McNeill
Journal of World History, Volume 9, Number 2, Fall 1998, pp. 215-236
(Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2005.0105
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FORUM: THREE PLENARY LECTURES
FROM THE SIXTY-SIXTH ANGLOAMERICAN CONFERENCE OF
HISTORIANS ON THE THEME
“CONNEXIONS: EUROPEAN PEOPLES
AND THE NON-EUROPEAN WORLD”
(LONDON, 2–4 JULY 1997)
william h. mcneill
World History and the Rise and Fall of the West
jerry h. bentley
Hemispheric Integration, 500–1500 c.e.
terence ranger
Europeans in Black Africa
World History and the Rise and
Fall of the West*
william h. mcneill
University of Chicago (Emeritus)
A
generation ago historians were so much prisoners of written
texts that they paid scant attention to connections across cultural
and civilizational boundaries for which explicit literary evidence could
not be found. As a result, it was common to assume that gunpowder
and printing had both been independently invented in Europe, since
literary evidence attested their appearance in the Rhinelands, and no
contemporary had cared to record how illiterate, skilled craftsmen, traversing the caravan routes of the Mongol empire, carried the relevant
ideas and techniques from China to Europe. But now that Joseph
Needham and his colleagues have taught us so much about Chinese
technology and how it spread, no one doubts that connections across
Eurasia were what brought both printing and gunpowder to Europe.
This is only one example of how useful skills and knowledge can
travel long distances without leaving written records behind. Indeed,
when I wrote my book, The Rise of the West, I was sufficiently under
the influence of American anthropologists’ ideas about patterns of culture and resulting resistances to innovation of any kind as to assume
that borrowing from an outsider was the normal way in which new
techniques and ideas arose in any and every society.1 Faithful adherence to customary routine was normal, anthropologists declared, where* This article reproduces the text of a plenary lecture on “The Rise and Fall of the
West” delivered at the sixty-sixth Anglo-American Conference of Historians (London,
July 1997).
1 William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago, 1963).
Journal of World History, Vol. 9, No. 2
©1998 by University of Hawai‘i Press
215
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journal of world history, fall 1998
as the restless innovation of twentieth-century civilization was pathological, provoked by cultural dissonance arising from previous borrowings and breakdowns of older practices and beliefs. I have never had
occasion to change that assumption, even though in our self-conscious
age we deliberately organize invention and reward innovation—even
in history, as the changes in our discipline across the past fifty years
surely demonstrate. Even so, historians’ new ideas mostly come by
borrowing from the rhetoric of public affairs, from other academic disciplines, and every so often from heirs of divergent historical traditions,
such as the French annalistes.
Anthropologists’ view of social change did not rest entirely on conservative behavior among the contemporary peoples they studied.
After all, Paleolithic archaeological remains, representing something
like 99% of human time on Earth, attest to stable tool types through
very long periods and across very considerable geographic regions.
What upset the apple cart? Why do we not still belong to small roving
bands of hunters and gatherers like our ancestors?
The answer, I think, is that human beings developed uniquely
powerful modes of communication in the form of articulate language,
superimposed upon an older background of gesture, dance, and rhythmic voicing.2 This allowed them to create a world of shared meanings
and feelings connecting each separate person with others of the band.
Action on the basis of such shared feelings and meanings established
far more accurate, predictable cooperation than was otherwise possible.
It also opened gaps between expectation and experience every time
hopes and plans failed. Adjusting meanings to get desired results invited, indeed required, new forms of cooperative effort, altering the
environment anew in hope of making it conform to agreed-upon meanings. A feedback loop thus arose within which we still exist, changing
our behavior in response to new ideas about how to get what we want
whenever agreed-upon meanings within a given community fail to
produce expected results.
This sort of systematic interplay between a world of meanings and
the world of things is probably only about 40,000 years old, for about
that far back an unending succession of different humanly-made tool
2 William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), argues that shared emotions, aroused by dance, antedated articulate language as a means for coordinating human behavior. Among the books I consulted
on the origin of language, Derek Bickerton’s Language and Species (Chicago, 1981) and Terrence W. Deacon’s The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain (New York,
1997) struck me as especially plausible.
McNeill: World History and the Rise and Fall of the West
217
types begins to appear in the archaeological record.3 Changes
remained comparatively modest at first, but technological (and presumably other sorts of ideational) change seem to have accelerated
sporadically.
Until about 10,000 years ago, resulting differences among human
communities perhaps arose primarily through innumerable ingenious
adjustments to differences of climate and landscape. Assuredly, these
adjustments allowed our ancestors to spread across the face of the
Earth as a dominant species and to thrive in temperate and even
Arctic climates that were very different indeed from the tropical conditions of the African savanna where humans initially evolved.
Contacts with neighboring human bands must always have been
another way of testing agreed-upon meanings. And in proportion as
human skills increased and dominance over other forms of life became
more secure, relations with neighboring human bands presumably
tended to overtake adjustment to diverse natural environments as the
principal occasion for innovation. This, in turn, made connections
with strangers, who possessed different skills and ideas, critically
important. Communities that reacted by borrowing useful skills and
ideas, and then knitting new and old ways together by suitable invention, tended to expand their ecological niche, increasing both power
and wealth. Those that clung fast to familiar routines tended to be left
behind and survived only by retreating to marginal environments, as
the distribution of contemporary communities of hunters and gatherers
attests.
Connections with strangers were sometimes violent, sometimes
peaceable. Safeguarding each band’s territory against intruders by force
or threat of force was a prerequisite for maintaining established patterns of access to food. Yet peaceable exchanges with outsiders were no
less vital. Early human bands were so small that exchange of genes
with neighbors was biologically needed to avoid deleterious inbreeding. We may assume that this was achieved, as among contemporary
hunters and gatherers, by arranging festivals like the corroborees of
Australia, where negotiated marriages are accompanied by feasting,
dancing, and exchanges of rare goods and information. Such festival
encounters, supplemented in all probability by occasional encounters
with individual wanderers who left their natal bands behind for vari3 See Richard Leakey, The Origin of Humankind (New York, 1994), pp. 92–99, for this
takeoff and its possible connection with language. Deacon, however, in The Symbolic Species downplays connection between tool type change and any presumed sudden expansion
of linguistic capabilities.
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journal of world history, fall 1998
ous personal reasons, created a loose communications network that
kept humankind a single species despite its global distribution, disseminating information as well as genes. Accordingly, I venture to suggest
that festival networks made world history a tenuous reality even in
Paleolithic times.4
To be sure, after the initial occupation of Australia, America, and
various islands, choke points in the dissemination of attractive novelties came into play, so that inhabitants of these isolated regions had
only sporadic, belated, and often ineffectual encounters with the rest
of the world. Yet some contacts did occur, and especially valuable (and
portable) innovations actually did cross from Asia to America, such as
the bow and arrow, which arrived with the Eskimos about a.d. 500,
long after its initial invention.5 Its subsequent spread through the
Americas was comparatively rapid, as had been the case within Eurasia
when bows were new, some 15,000 years earlier. The resulting archaeologically well-attested diffusion of arrowheads stops short of Australia,
but still demonstrates the reality of globe-girdling human connections,
dating back, in all probability, to the start of the human adventure
itself.
The subsequent history of our species hinged on sporadic breakthroughs in communication, increasing the speed, range, and carrying
capacity of information networks right down to our own day when the
miracles of computerized data flows are beginning to transform private
lives and human society at large. Why did connections created by
communications networks matter so much? Because, as I said above,
groups receiving and acting on information about best practice tended
to enlarge their share of world resources, while those who rejected
change or received information belatedly fell behind and sooner or
later ceased to be able to protect what they already had.
Examples abound. After the fifteenth century, for instance, the
Chinese government and people were simultaneously aware of their
own superiority and of their dangerous vulnerability to outsiders. They
reacted by endeavoring to minimize external encounters and tried to
4 This is an idiosyncratic notion, at odds with the usual presumption that early human
bands lived in isolation as surviving hunters and gatherers sometimes try to do. But the
modern conduct of bands that maintained something like an age-old way of life by withdrawal from disturbing outside contacts and danger from other humans is not a good model
for the behavior of our ancestors, whose growing mastery of their environment arose from
picking up new information wherever it could be found and experimenting accordingly.
5 The belated arrival of the bow and arrow in America is familiar enough, but Americanists have not usually emphasized the connection with Asia implied by the reception of
such an important device. On the spread of the bow in America, see Michael Coe, Dean
Snow, and Elizabeth Benson, Atlas of Ancient America (New York, 1986), pp. 57, 64–65.
McNeill: World History and the Rise and Fall of the West
219
fit diplomatic and foreign trade connections into the framework of
tribute missions. After their neighbors the Manchus demonstrated
China’s vulnerability by seizing control of the imperial government in
1644, a small court circle toyed with Jesuit ideas and skills for a while,
but left official foreign policy unchanged until, in 1839, it became impossible to pretend any longer that British ships, offering opium for
sale, were merely ill-mannered tribute bearers. But by then, prolonged
disregard of shifting world patterns of best practice meant that China
had fallen so far behind British industrial and military capabilities that
a small expeditionary force easily penetrated the imperial coastal defenses and imposed a humiliating peace in 1841. After the Chinese
thus discovered that they could no longer defend their home territory
from foreign merchants and missionaries, a century of distressing disorganization ensued and provoked frantic efforts to catch up, with
results in our time that remain problematical even after the retrocession of Hong Kong.
Japan’s extreme fluctuations between a more than Chinese withdrawal and systematic, strenuous borrowing of best practice offer
another example of the dilemma facing a proud people when they
meet strangers who possess new and perceptibly superior skills and
knowledge. For the Japanese welcomed Europeans more warmly than
any other Asian people after 1542, only to cut off contacts more
rigorously than anywhere else in Asia after 1634 and then, through
an equally sudden reversal, to borrow more systematically and successfully than anyone else in the whole world after 1867. More
recently, American automobile companies went through a similar
cycle: first neglecting Japanese competition, then inciting U.S. diplomats to complain about it, and eventually borrowing some of the techniques that had made Japanese cars noticeably better than their own
product.
Examples from the deeper past are just as striking. China achieved
Eurasian primacy after about 1000 by dint of borrowing bazaar trading
techniques from the Middle East and superimposing them upon a
cheap, safe, and capacious water transport system. Canalization had
been carried through in order to irrigate rice paddies and to facilitate
concentration of tax revenues in kind at the capital. But when innumerable small-scale bazaar traders began to use China’s water transport
system to buy and sell goods of common consumption, they inaugurated a market that soon reached down the social scale to embrace a
large proportion of the entire population. The spectacular effect was
to increase agricultural and handicraft output by rewarding best practice and developing new techniques, thus putting Chinese wealth
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journal of world history, fall 1998
and skills ahead of all the rest of the world for the next 400 years
and more.6
I have already referred to the fact that Europeans, in their turn,
borrowed important techniques from China and proceeded to apply
them with equally spectacular results to a different political and geographic landscape after about 1450. Printing in China had helped consolidate and disseminate Confucian learning and had a thoroughly
conservative effect on the country’s society and literary culture by
making success in the imperial examinations more widely accessible
than before. In Europe, on the contrary, printing tended to disrupt
older ways of life. Christian texts had to compete with pagan classics
from Greece and Rome, and with a flood of reports about alien lands
and peoples written by explorers and missionaries in America, Asia,
and Africa. The information explosion that ensued swiftly provoked
painful reappraisal of almost all inherited ideas, as illustrated by the
religious controversies of the Reformation era, the rise of modern science, and the emergence of new political ideas. Contrast with the
triumphant conservatism of contemporary China could not have been
greater, despite the fact that the technique of printing was much the
same in East and West.
Gunpowder, likewise, when used to knock down fortifications, as it
was in Europe, soon began to play a very different role from what it did
in China, where government authorities were not in the least interested in developing bigger and bigger guns that would make the walls
their soldiers defended vulnerable. Big guns in Europe, however, consolidated central government in France and, most spectacularly, in
Muscovy and the Ottoman empire. Placed on shipboard, they transformed naval fighting and made European merchants safe on the coasts
of the Indian Ocean, where local shipping was too slenderly built to
withstand the heavy recoil of large guns. The Portuguese and Spanish
empires were the first notable overseas constructs of the new European
style of naval power; the British empire in India was its most conspicuous eighteenth-century monument; and the forcible opening of China
in the nineteenth century was one of its last global achievements.7
It thus seems obvious to me that the main shifts of global history
have arisen from encounters with strangers bearing new ideas, inforWilliam H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since
1000 (Chicago, 1982), chap. 2, develops this view, with appropriate citations to relevant authorities and sources.
7 Cf. Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early
Phases of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York, 1965).
6
A . D.
McNeill: World History and the Rise and Fall of the West
221
mation, and skills. The reactions of receiving peoples to disturbing
novelties have varied from emphatic rejection to enthusiastic embrace, and fluctuations from one extreme to the other betray the ambivalence always aroused when people meet something new and attractive that is, by definition, also incompatible with prevailing practices
and interests.
In simple, isolated societies, defenders of the status quo ordinarily
prevailed, and social change remained correspondingly exceptional. In
complex, civilized societies, defenders of the status quo were always
under siege, and change was correspondingly frequent.8 Youths, in particular, like to reject the ways of their elders and experiment with
attractive novelties. To be sure, evanescent fads and failed sects are
more common than enduring transformations of behavior, but the
world’s most powerful religions and innumerable new technologies
trace their origins to tiny groups—indeed to single individuals—who
somehow combined old and new in ways that worked better than
before.
All historic change must ultimately rest on individual invention,
after all. But discrepancies of experience are what provokes invention
and opens the door for acceptance of new ideas and practices. Until
research institutions began deliberately looking for such discrepancies
—for the most part only toward the close of the nineteenth century—
the most common way discrepancies came to conscious attention was
when strangers with different skills and ideas showed up and had to be
dealt with somehow.
Connections across cultural and other boundaries should therefore
serve as an organizing principle for world history. In the deeper past,
this principle emphasizes encounters that contemporary scribes seldom
noticed, whereas political and religious events did seem worth recording in most of civilized Eurasia. As a result, global historians have to
treat literary sources differently from how local historians are accustomed to treat such material. Using our personal, contemporary ideas
to shape questions about what mattered in times past, global historians
draw information from the literary, archaeological, and artistic record
that the original artists and writers never intended to convey, and they
neglect most or all of the overt messages of such evidence. This
approach is liable to provoke distrust among other historians, who see
essentials of their art and craft wantonly discarded by such a highhanded distortion of written sources.
8 My notion of how civilized societies differ from simpler folk societies derives from
Robert Redfield’s lectures at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. He later summarized
his views on the subject in The Folk Society (Indianapolis, 1947).
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journal of world history, fall 1998
Misunderstanding is enhanced by the fact that global history cannot be organized around the rise and fall of states and the reigns of
individual rulers, as is commonly the case for more local history. But if
conscious purposes and political personalities disappear in a tangle of
anonymous processes, what sort of history is left? Notions of cultural encounter, borrowing, and subsequent adaptation to fit a different social
and geographical setting are painfully abstract. Exact details based on
explicit literary evidence are usually missing. So what happened, as
attested by contemporary records, bears almost no relation to the sort
of global history that fastens on indirect and inferential evidence of
unrecorded connections with marginal strangers and outsiders.
I answer that local and national historians of every stripe also interrogate their sources by asking questions framed in the light of their
own contemporary ideas. Reconstructing the past in this high-handed
fashion was, indeed, the pride and glory of “scientific source criticism”
as practiced by the founders of academic history in the nineteenth
century. What contemporary world historians attempt is no different.
All of us set out to understand what happened, and the only way to
understand the past is to use our own contemporary ideas and assumptions—themselves in perpetual flux—to interpret and reinterpret literary and other sources, generation after generation, hoping that the
most accurate, powerful, and persuasive ideas about the past will accumulate over time and tend to prevail.
Global history suffers another and rather more serious handicap
because Eurasian records and historical scholarship so far outdistance
what is known about the rest of the world. The absence of written
records drastically constricts the knowable past of most of the world’s
peoples, and archaeology does not yet provide enough information to
allow the construction of general narratives of Amerindian, Australian, and sub-Saharan African history. Strictly speaking, therefore, a
truly global world history has yet to be written. But since Eurasian peoples led the rest of the world in inventing new forms of wealth and
power, and after 1500 entangled the rest of the Earth in a Europecentered communications network, it seems safe to assume that the
mainstream of human history—measured by advances in skill, knowledge, and social organization—flowed in the Old World before as well
as after 1500, when it assumed its modern, overt, recorded, and European-dominated phase.
The lopsidedness of available sources and historical scholarship
therefore exaggerates the role of Eurasia in the deeper past but nonetheless allows a world historian to highlight changes within that part
of the world that later had an impact on other peoples. As a result,
McNeill: World History and the Rise and Fall of the West
223
inescapably lopsided attention to Eurasian history still allows us to reconstruct key landmarks of the past, despite nagging ignorance of what
was going on in most human communities, most of the time.
What, then, about Eurasia? How can aspiring world historians make
sense of the overwhelming bulk of information about the history of
this segment of humankind? What really mattered?
I first addressed this question in the 1950s after Toynbee’s Study of
History had shown me how a single mind could indeed cope with the
whole human past, and I assumed with him that separate civilizations
were the principal actors on the stage of world history.9 But instead of
accepting Toynbee’s cyclic rise and fall, I believed that encounters
among civilizations provoked occasional seismic shifts whereby first one,
then another civilized people attained primacy over their contemporaries. Such primacy lasted for a few centuries—or in earliest times, for
a millennium or more—until in due course another civilization forged
into the lead and took over the role of “metropolitan center” of the
Eurasian ecumene, affecting all the peoples within it, not least the
other civilizations of Eurasia.
I still think this is a good way to conceive the Eurasian past, with
the following modification. I have already pointed out how a loose but
real communications network bound human societies together from
the start. I now believe that changes in the range and carrying capacity
of that network were more fundamental than the geographical shifts in
primacy that I used to mark the successive eras of world history in The
Rise of the West, because shifts in patterns of transport and communication within Eurasia were what permitted and provoked the rise and
fall of successive metropolitan centers.
A corollary of my change in emphasis is the recognition that civilizations were never very coherent actors. Influence exercised by ruling
and cultural elites within civilizational boundaries upon their subordinates resembled their influence on politically independent neighboring peoples—part submission to superior power and part resistance to
acceptance of alien ways. Ambivalence between acceptance and rejection was and is a universal human response to encounter with anything
or anyone perceived as somehow superior, and this was as true of relations among social classes and other groups within a civilization as of
relations among civilizations or across any other sort of social boundary.
9 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 10 vols. (New York, 1934–54). For my views
on Toynbee’s achievement and his limitations, see William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee:
A Life (New York, 1989).
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journal of world history, fall 1998
A shared code of conduct among ruling elites seems to have been
the principal commonality that held civilizations together, insofar as
they were (and are) human realities. Such codes soon took the form of
sacred or (for China and Greece) merely classical texts, and behavior
never conformed to precept very closely. Still, lip service and accepted
norms of departure from the prescriptions of righteousness on the part
of ruling elites assured a modicum of predictability in encounters up
and down the social scale. Both rulers and subjects knew approximately what to expect from one another, thus minimizing confusion
and maximizing collaboration—reluctant or willing as the case might
be. Similar accommodations among subordinated groups and classes
were also necessary to maintain public order in cities where transport
and communication networks brought all manner of strangers together. These were negotiated and renegotiated through everyday encounters, subject to occasional, often forcible, intervention by rulers
and officials, whose relationship to external barbarians differed only in
degree from their relationship to ethnically and occupationally diverse
subject populations.
If civilizations were as amorphous as I now believe, and if relations
within civilized boundaries among diverse communities were as similar
to relations across civilizational borders as I have just suggested, then
organizing world history around encounters among separate civilizations begins to seem less compelling than it did when I wrote my big
book. My mistake was to treat elites more deferentially than they
deserved, while neglecting the subordinated classes, diasporas, and
other mediating populations more than I should have.10 I now suppose
that it would be more illuminating to concentrate on changes in patterns of transport and communication within the Eurasian ecumene
both before and after it embraced the entire globe.
This approach has the further advantage that evidence of changes
in patterns of transport and communication is fairly easy to detect and,
once grasped, establishes geographical paths of transmission for the
array of ideas and skills that altered older ways of life in successive
ages. In other words, communications constitutes a sort of central nervous system for human society in general, as well as for local communities. Just as messages in and messages out create and sustain individual
personalities and shape private behavior, so also do messages exchanged
with outsiders affect the collective life and behavior of every human
group. History written with communications networks in mind ought
10
Cf. Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984).
McNeill: World History and the Rise and Fall of the West
225
therefore to cut with the grain of actual experience and show what
really happened more persuasively than is otherwise possible. What
would such a history look like?
In the beginning humans walked and talked, and, thanks to their
sweat glands, became capable of sustained cross-country walking and
running, even in the heat of the day. (This capability actually allows
human hunters in hot climates to overtake game animals that must
cool their blood by panting and are therefore liable to collapse from
overheating when pursued for hours on end.) Long-distance caravans
eventually combined the unusual human capability for sustained crosscountry locomotion with the parallel capability of a few large-bodied
animals that also sweat—donkeys, mules, horses—to create an overland network for carrying rare and precious goods across the breadth of
Asia, tenuously but continuously connecting China with Syria after
100 b.c. along what westerners called the silk route.
Caravan portage of rare goods on donkey-back over lesser distances
had undergirded the rise of cities in ancient Sumer some 3,000 years
earlier. And the location of those cities in the lower reaches of the
Tigris-Euphrates floodplain was presumably dictated by the fact that
the land of Sumer was where a water transport network ranging across
the southern seas abutted upon (or perhaps provoked the creation of)
a landward caravan network. Useful novelties accumulated in Sumer
when goods, skills, and ideas from a broad and varied catchment basin
began to converge there, provoking the rise of the first cities and the
earliest known civilization.11
Other early civilizations were probably all provoked by similarly
far-ranging transport and communications networks. For example, the
Nile current and prevailing trade winds blowing upstream gave Egypt a
uniquely cheap and reliable water transport system, and contact with
Sumer via the Red Sea and the Wadi Hammamat (and perhaps also by
overland caravan) supplied early Egyptians with key architectural and
possibly other ideas. With regard to the Indus civilization, however,
records are too fragmentary to make clear how influential the connections with Sumer and elsewhere may have been in stimulating the rise
of cities there.
In China, water transport seems to have played no role at first, but
11 Cf. Andrew Sherratt, “Reviving the Grand Narrative: Archaeology and Long-Term
Change,” Journal of European Archaeology 3 (1995): 17–19 and passim. Sherratt’s emphasis
on the importance of communication and of particular geographical routes of contact helped
me define my own ideas on the subject, and his examples are, to me, entirely persuasive.
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journal of world history, fall 1998
the loess soils, where the earliest civilization arose, abutted upon
sharply contrasting natural regions—mountain, steppe, and the Yellow
River floodplain, differing from one another quite as much as the landscapes surrounding Sumer. Communication across those boundaries
presumably provoked an initial elaboration of skills and knowledge on
the fertile and easily cultivated loess soils of north China. Then, about
2400 b.c., the reception of Near Eastern wheat and barley to supplement millet, the crop upon which the earliest Chinese farmers had
mainly relied, shows how widely valuable crops (and associated pottery
styles) could spread at a time when Chinese civilization was still defining itself. The appearance of horses and chariots in China by 1300 b.c.
constitutes a second demonstration of how the Chinese continued to
accept novelties originating in the Middle East. Civilized China, in
short, was never entirely isolated from western Eurasia, even though
its contacts with the initial Mesopotamian metropolitan center were
more sporadic than the connections that tied Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Indus peoples together.
In the Americas, as far as I know, evidence of communication
among the different places where civilizations first arose is so imperfect
that a plausible account of cultural contacts and key events in the diffusion of best practice from one archaeological site to another cannot
yet be constructed. Yet I believe that networks like those of Eurasia
functioned also in America, even though caravan systems were never
of much importance, and water transport had little scope for the inland empires of Mexico and Peru. Human muscles clearly limited what
could be carried across long distances, so the range and capacity of
American communications networks were, presumably, correspondingly
reduced, compared to what Eurasian peoples experienced with their
caravans and sailing ships. Yet the diffusion of maize northward from
Mexico into the Mississippi valley and across the Appalachians to the
Atlantic coast is a well-attested instance of how a valuable crop could
cross climatic boundaries, profoundly altering older lifestyles wherever
it became a staple.12
To get back to Eurasia: on the waters adjacent to monsoon Asia,
where winds blow from one direction for half the year and reverse
themselves for the other half, long-distance sailing was comparatively
easy. The initial settlement of Australia, some 60,000–40,000 years
12 For interesting observations on the spread of maize and other Mexican food crops in
North America, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York, 1997), pp. 150–52; and Lynda N. Shafer, Native Americans before 1492: The
Moundbuilding Centers of the Eastern Woodlands (Armonk, N.Y., 1992).
McNeill: World History and the Rise and Fall of the West
227
ago, is the earliest definitive proof that humans were somehow able to
travel out of sight of land across an open sea. Exactly how they did it is
unknown, but it seems likely that long-distance navigation arose along
the shores of monsoon Asia. Logs or rafts that perhaps carried the
aborigines to Australia eventually developed into historically known
sailing ships of the Indian Ocean, made by sewing planks together—
and into the Polynesian outrigger canoes as well. Indeed, it is plausible
to suppose that the ships of Sumer were part of the much wider Indian
Ocean seagoing community. But small wooden ships seldom leave any
archaeological trace, so the early history of navigation in Asia’s monsoon seas remains unknown.
When techniques of fair-weather seamanship were transferred to
the Mediterranean, the result was to link the shores and islands of that
inland sea as never before. Minoan, Mycenean, Phoenician, Greek,
and classical Roman civilizations all relied on concentrating resources
first in palaces, then in cities by resort to varying combinations of
seaborne trade, raid, tribute, colonization, conquest, and taxation. Collective exploitation of favorable terms of trade between olive- and wineproducing Greek citizens and grain- and raw-materials-producing
barbarians living along the shores of the Black Sea and western Mediterranean gave classical Greeks both the means and the necessary leisure for war and other forms of public activity. The resulting intensity
of their mobilization for war, in turn, allowed the Greeks first to repulse and then, with Macedonian help, to defeat the vast, socially
diverse, and divided Persian empire. Thanks to the superior concentration of resources that Mediterranean ships permitted, a sea-based
society thus displaced the ancient Middle East from its accustomed
role as metropolitan center. Even when subjected to the Roman empire,
the Hellenistic world retained that role for another 200 or 300 years
partly by converting its subjects and conquerors to (modified and
largely demilitarized) Greek ideals of civic living, and partly by borrowing techniques of imperial administration from its Middle Eastern
subjects.
Primacy shifted again when transcendental religion—first Buddhism, then Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—displaced the civic consciousness of classical Greek civilization with a new, more intense sort
of portable identity, based on sacred texts and daily or weekly congregational gatherings, where revealed truths were affirmed and applied as
rules for personal behavior. Such religious communities made urban life
more tolerable for poor, ordinary people, with the result that the new
faiths spread rapidly along Eurasia’s caravan and shipping routes.
Doctrinal differences sharpened collision among the new religions,
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journal of world history, fall 1998
but Islam soon took the lead in a much expanded Eurasian ecumene.
This was because Muslims supplemented long-standing navigation
across the seas of monsoon Asia and the Mediterranean with an expanded and more efficient caravan network by using strings of domesticated camels to cross desert landscapes. For the first time, thanks to
the desert-crossing capacity of camel caravans, East and West Africa,
together with the steppe peoples of Asia and those of the high Tibetan
plateau, entered into close and regular contact with neighboring civilizations.13 The effect was like what happened after 1500 when Europeans crossed the oceans: new crops (mainly from Southeast Asia), new
stocks of gold (mainly from West Africa), new peoples (mainly from
the Eurasian steppes), and new ideas (mainly from India, whence came
what we call “Arabic” numerals and seductive techniques of mysticism)
flooded into the urban centers of the Middle East and tumultuously
transformed Islamic society. Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist contemporaries lagged behind for about 400 years.
I have already described how China overtook the Middle East after
about 1000, and how western Europeans in their turn outstripped the
Chinese by borrowing key techniques and ideas from the old metropolitan center in each case and applying them in a different social and
geographical setting with unforeseen, transformative effect. The boats,
canals, and locks that provided China’s two principal river valleys with
a cheap, safe, capacious, and minutely reticulated transport network
still function almost as they did a millennium ago; so do the commercial skills and attitudes that made private, familial trade and artisan
production so successful. China’s contemporary political management,
likewise, resembles the imperial administration of the deeper past—
even, or especially, because of its ambiguous attitude toward private enrichment through buying and selling goods and services in an unregulated market. Divergence and rivalry between Chinese and European
styles of society therefore still lurk near the surface of contemporary
affairs, with consequences for the future that may be quite as dramatic
as those of the past.
Transport and communications in the European Far West differed
from China’s canal system in requiring transshipment from river to
seagoing vessels at port cities. Moreover, on the Atlantic face of
Europe, seagoing ships had to traverse stormy, tide-beset waters. Yet
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a series of improvements
13 Cf. Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (New York, 1990); William H.
McNeill, “The Eccentricity of Wheels, or Eurasian Transportation in Historical Perspective,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 111–26.
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229
in ship architecture, supplemented by new methods of navigation, made
sailing from port to port safe and sure enough to sustain intensified
interregional trade in commodities of common consumption—fish,
grain, salt, timber, wool, wine, and the like. The result was to induce or
compel a considerable proportion of the entire population to engage in
market production and exchange, rewarding best practice and encouraging technological and organizational innovation just as had happened
earlier in China. That was how Europeans began to catch up with
China, even though Chinese artisans long retained their superiority in
many luxury trades.
It is a striking fact of Eurasian history that when European seamen
were mastering the perils of the North Atlantic, Chinese shipbuilders
also developed comparably seaworthy vessels. Accordingly, when the
Chinese government channeled its resources into the creation of imperial fleets for exploration, trade, and conquest in the Indian Ocean,
results were swift and spectacular. Between 1405 and 1433 Admiral
Zheng He led seven voyages into the southern ocean, asserting Chinese suzerainty over such distant places as Ceylon, Hormuz, and Calicut, and exploring the coasts of India, Arabia, and Africa as far south
as Mozambique. Scores of ships and thousands of men were mobilized
for these voyages, far exceeding anything Europeans were able to dispatch to the same waters in the next century.
Chinese naval architecture was quite different from that of Atlantic
Europe, but no less seaworthy, and it is easy to suppose that if the Chinese had chosen to continue sending exploratory voyages overseas, a
Chinese admiral, riding the Japan current, might have sailed into San
Francisco Bay several decades before Columbus blundered into the
Caribbean islands. But in fact Chinese officials dismantled the fleet
and in 1436 actually prohibited the construction of seagoing ships. As
a result, maritime skills decayed, even though a mix of Chinese, Malay,
and Japanese pirates continued to sail the South China Sea, plundering and trading along the Chinese coast from offshore bases. But deprived of official support, China’s expansion overseas came to a sudden
halt, leaving systematic, politically organized exploration of the
Earth’s seacoasts to European ships and navigators.14
China’s abdication allowed European governments and seamen to
monopolize oceanic discovery after 1433. After a slow start exploring
Atlantic waters off the African coast, European seamen initiated enduring transoceanic contacts with the rest of the inhabited world within
14 Footnotes in William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, pp. 42–49, record the
authorities on which these remarks depend.
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a single generation, 1492–1522. The suddenness of the feat was amazing, yet it rested on rather simple techniques, since ships capable of
surviving the irregular storms and high tides of Europe’s Atlantic coast
found calmer, tropical seas easy going. Hence, as soon as European navigators had deciphered oceanic currents and wind patterns, they could
usually count on making relatively rapid headway—up to 100 miles a
day—across the world’s oceans, and by sighting the sun or north star to
measure latitude, they could make expected landfalls with sufficient
accuracy to get where they intended to go and back again.
European seamen, governments, and bankers were therefore in a
position to follow up whatever new discoveries promised profits—gold,
silver, spices, or slaves, as the case might be. No promising coast was
left unvisited, and the European ships that began to swarm across the
world’s oceans had a fateful side effect by introducing diseases and a
cloud of other organisms into new environments. The world’s ecosystem
is still recovering from gashes inflicted by the invasive organisms European ships carried with them—most notably in previously isolated
islands, the Americas, and Australia.
In Asia, the arrival of European ships in the Indian Ocean after 1499
changed the spice trade by putting a new route around Africa into
competition with the old route via the Middle East and Mediterranean. Initial efforts to defeat the Portuguese at sea failed decisively
when Portuguese cannon fire disrupted a much larger Muslim fleet in a
battle off Diu in 1509, but the fact that Indian Ocean ships were too
lightly built to carry cannon also meant that they were cheaper to build
and maintain than Portuguese vessels. The resulting cost advantage
allowed them to continue to carry Indian Ocean trade goods almost as
before, paying dues to the Portuguese when they had to and evading
their exactions when they could.
The initial effect of European transoceanic navigation upon Asians
was therefore quite modest, and the menace of superior European cannon merely made Asians wary of close contact with the intruders. Japan
was exceptional, for local warlords were immediately attracted to European-style guns and quickly learned how to manufacture them. By 1600
escalating warfare with gunpowder weapons had the effect of consolidating Tokugawa power over the Japanese islands, and soon thereafter
the new rulers gave up guns and adopted a policy of rigorous isolation,
allowing a single Dutch ship to exchange goods on an island in Nagasaki harbor each year.
On the Asian mainland, however, land frontiers against steppe
raiders and potential conquerors remained more important than anything happening in the ports where European ships put in. Both India
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231
in the sixteenth century and China in the seventeenth century were
conquered by mounted warriors coming directly or indirectly from the
Eurasian steppe. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, the Chinese
defeated the last steppe confederacy to defy a civilized army, by which
time Europeans had established political control over the spice islands
and much of India and were poised, thanks to steam power, to undercut age-old Asian artisan superiority with cheaper, machine-made textiles and other consumer goods.
By the mid-eighteenth century, therefore, European ships had in
effect turned Eurasia inside out. The sea frontier had superseded the
steppe frontier as the critical meeting point with strangers, and the
autonomy of Asian states and peoples began to crumble—exposed, as
they were, to European armies and navies equipped with ever more formidable weapons and managed by increasingly effective national governments. Europe, in short, had become a dominating metropolitan
center, whose capability of exercising power at a distance far exceeded
anything that had been possible in earlier ages. More obviously than
ever before, the world had become one, and we today are heirs of this
European achievement.
In the Americas, the impact of European oceanic discoveries was
far more immediate and drastic. European technological advantages
were greater there than in Asia, and the biological onslaught of European and African diseases on native American populations crippled
their resistance to the intruders.15 European soldiers and missionaries
therefore found it easy to impose themselves and much of their culture
on demoralized survivors, and when landowners wanted labor for sugar
plantations and other commercial enterprises, they imported millions
of indentured laborers from Europe and even larger numbers of slaves
from Africa to do nasty work they were unwilling to do themselves.
European settlers also crossed the Atlantic of their own free will in
hope of escaping economic and religious handicaps, but they were a
minority. Unfree migration was mainly responsible for repopulating the
Americas and creating the quasi-European, multiracial societies that
exist today in both North and South America.
Most of Africa was preserved for Africans by an array of tropical
diseases that killed off inexperienced intruders just as ruthlessly as European and African diseases ravaged the Amerindian peoples. The slave
15 Alfred Crosby’s book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences
of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972) is fundamental, and he later expanded the theme of biological encounters in a second book, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of
Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986).
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trade, managed by coastal African rulers and entrepreneurs, certainly
disrupted the interior, but African villagers also benefited from the
spread of American food crops—maize in particular. Overall, the impact of trans-Atlantic biological exchanges on the population of Africa
remains obscure, but it seems sure that nothing like the drastic die-offs
of the Americas took place, since the number of slaves reaching the
African coast continued to mount until the trade was abolished by
European governments early in the nineteenth century.
All the same, the travails inflicted on African societies by slave
raiders and the intensified encounters with outsiders incidental to the
slave trade were very severe. Imported weapons, tools, and other trade
goods altered war and politics, and affected the everyday life of millions
of ordinary persons. Their difficulties pale only by comparison with the
destruction suffered by Amerindians and other previously isolated
peoples of Australia and the Pacific Islands, where devastating die-offs
from unfamiliar diseases were added to drastic social dislocations
created by contact with intrusive Europeans.
By contrast, Europe, and especially western Europe, was in a privileged position. Since European ships and persons initiated and continued to manage most of the new, disruptive contacts that upset older
world relationships, Europeans were in a position to pick and choose
what to do, where to go, and what to pay attention to in most encounters. This meant they could afford to be curious and look for novelties
to bring back to Europe or, alternatively, to simply sail away from anything incompatible with their restless search for gain and glory.
Some of what their ships brought back was damaging and unintended, such as the fevers for which Lisbon and London became notorious. But climatic barriers prevented tropical diseases from establishing themselves in Europe, so that only demographically trivial new
infections, such as syphilis, began to afflict Europeans as a result of the
new circulation of diseases. Most imported novelties became mere curiosities, relegated to museums and learned catalogues. And only after
the mid-eighteenth century did fields planted with maize (in the Mediterranean) and potatoes (in the north) begin to expand Europe’s food
supply significantly.
Instead, the most important social effect of the opening of the
oceans for Europe (and more weakly for Asia as well) was exposure to
the multiple dislocations of an unprecedented inflation of prices largely
provoked by an equally unprecedented influx of silver from the mines
of Mexico and Peru. Rising prices disrupted traditional class relationships in Europe, strained governmental finances, and convinced almost
everyone that wicked greed was rampant as never before. Efforts to fix
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the blame embittered public controversy and made the century between
1550 and 1650, when price levels roughly quadrupled, unusually violent.
Europe’s initial encounters with the whole wide world were therefore unsettling enough, but not so much so as to persuade Europeans to
break off their pursuit of wealth overseas or to diminish their curiosity
about the rest of the world. On the contrary, the fact that a few enterprises and individual adventurers made handsome fortunes encouraged
others to try their luck. This sustained a flow of emigration to America
and other destinations that tended to increase decade after decade as
French, English, and Dutch traders and settlers rivaled and then overtook the Iberian pioneers. All the while, political and economic
rivalries overseas and at home pricked on persistent improvement in
political, military, and financial organization, and rewarded technical
innovation in peace and war alike. Despite frequent and destructive
combat, the European capacity to mobilize resources for political purposes and for the corporate pursuit of private profit expanded rapidly,
leaving the rest of the world far behind by 1750.
After that date Europeans’ advantages over other peoples widened
still further when newly invented steam engines allowed them to apply
energy from fossil fuels to industrial production and transport on a
rapidly increasing scale. Britain led the way and for about a century
between 1770 and 1870 enjoyed a quite extraordinary global preponderance. Beginning about 1840, iron and steel steamships carried larger
cargoes than wooden sailing ships had been able to do and did so more
quickly and predictably. Simultaneously, railroads improved overland
transport even more radically, opening continental interiors as never
before.16 Railroads (with potatoes), in fact, allowed Germany to challenge Great Britain for industrial and political primacy after 1870,
with results for world history in the twentieth century that we know
all too well.
Europe’s twentieth-century civil wars were also fueled by intensified political mobilization pioneered in France after 1789. The revolutionary, democratic French government, having erased legal inequalities, enlarged its claims upon liberated citizens by requiring them to
defend their rights by serving in the army or otherwise supporting the
revolutionary war effort. The French were so successful that they were
widely imitated, with the result that during the nineteenth century,
European schoolteachers, publicists, historians, and politicians convinced most Europeans that they “belonged” to one or another nation.
16 See Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in
the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981).
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Intensified communication and advancing urbanization simultaneously
undermined village, religious, and other local identities, so rival
nations emerged as primary foci of personal loyalty, while compulsory
military training became a rite of passage into adulthood for millions
of young men.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, destructive results of national
rivalries became painfully apparent to western Europeans and generated a widespread sense of decline. Consciousness of decline was reinforced by the fact that after about 1870 the industrial, communications, and organizational techniques that had allowed a handful of
west European states to dominate most of the Earth took root in the
United States, Japan, and Russia. As a consequence, by 1945 the semicontinental scale of the United States and the Soviet Union eclipsed
the separate nations of Europe. More recently, industrial takeoff in
East Asia, with the vast bulk of China looming close behind the smaller
tigers, gave the decline of the West a second and more emphatic
meaning.
The disbalance of 1750–1914, when European states enjoyed an
extraordinary preponderance over the rest of the world, will surely not
recur, but I am not sure we can confidently assume that a new metropolitan center is destined to displace the West as in times past. Perhaps
China or some other people will someday do so, but other, novel
changes in human affairs may overtake and blunt such a simple, oldfashioned geographic displacement.
Modern instantaneous communications and computer technology,
for example, may make it needless to cluster global management in
any single location. Urban living may even be on the way out. Crowding millions of strangers together in cities generates crime and other
frictions, and the biological survival of city dwellers has yet to be demonstrated. If experts and professionals of every stripe can conduct their
affairs by electronic communications, and if automated factories can
turn out indefinite quantities of goods with skeleton staffs of actual
human beings—as seems entirely probable—the reasons for clustering
in cities will diminish or disappear, and the advantages of proximity,
which traditionally allowed distinct metropolitan centers to exercise
their influence upon surrounding populations, will decay.
It is too soon to tell. But if such a radical restructuring of human
society actually takes place, center and periphery, city and countryside,
capital and province will dissolve into less spatially differentiated
structures, united, one might suppose, by some sort of common language
—computer bytes, perhaps, supplemented, I still suppose, by some version of an actual spoken language. As of now, English has a clear head
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start for assuming such a global role. It may be dethroned in time to
come, but that has not happened yet. Until it does, proclaiming the
decline of the West seems premature.
More fundamentally, it seems to me that humankind has yet to settle on a successor to villages as sustainers of both cultural and biological continuity across the generations. Traditional village ways currently
face cruel pressure from galloping population growth in most of the
world at exactly the time when radio and television are disseminating
urban notions and expectations among even the most remote peasant
communities.17 This tends to upset the uneasy compromise between
urban privilege and rural oppression that prevailed from the time that
urban civilization first arose. Initially, cities were parasitic. Rents and
taxes in kind from the countryside sustained urban consumers, and in
return the rural population was (not very reliably) protected from further molestation. Villagers also sent surplus children to the cities to do
marginal, unskilled work. Without a continuous flow of food and manpower from village to city, urban life could not survive for very long,
since food was needed every day and intensified infections in town did
not usually allow urban dwellers to reproduce themselves across the
generations. Continuity of human life and society, in short, depended
on successful child-rearing in village communities.
Yet today the stability of traditional village communities seems
clearly in question all around the world. Discontent with peasant
living impels the young to swarm into overcrowded cities, where disruptions of age-old familial patterns of nurture put severe and unprecedented strain on cultural and biological reproduction. Radical uncertainty therefore pervades my thoughts about the future, especially since
I tend to suppose that human beings thrive best in face-to-face communities where shared expectations guide personal behavior and make
life meaningful. Whether such primary communities can coexist with
global flows of goods and services managed by instantaneous communications is yet to be seen.
Add to this sociological vulnerability the well-known uncertainties
of a global ecosystem under an equally unprecedented industrial assault,
and the future of humankind seems rather more precarious than usual.
Of course, new possibilities inhere in the situation as well as potential
disasters. Optimism is perhaps as plausible as gloom. So far, human
beings have been remarkably successful in increasing their wealth and
17 See Richard Critchfield, The Villagers: Changed Values, Altered Lives and the Closing of
the Urban-Rural Gap (New York, 1976); William H. McNeill, The Metamorphosis of Greece
since World War II (Chicago, 1978), pp. 138–206.
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power, and as long as modern communications affect our lives, future
inventions that meet human wants are sure to spread even more
rapidly than they have in the past.
I conclude that no matter what surprises the future may bring, the
rise of the European West to world dominion constituted the central
historical drama of the past 500 years. And when so many sociological
and ecological uncertainties prevail, it is too soon to say whether the
recent dilution of European power presages decline and fall, or whether
some new, surprising takeoff of human skill and knowledge will transform society anew—here, there, and everywhere, just as happened after
a.d. 1500, or after 1000, 634, or for that matter after 3000 b.c.
Clearly, the human adventure is still in train. Stakes have never
been higher, nor the upshot more uncertain, simply because our power
for good and evil is so much greater than before. This makes human
wisdom, ingenuity, and luck more important than ever. We need all we
can muster of all three, but every past generation faced similar uncertainties and somehow muddled through. I like to think that we and
our successors will do so too.