The Rise of the West

A History of the Human Community; with a Retrospective Essay

By: William H. McNeill

Narrated by: Paul Brion

The Rise of the West, winner of the National Book Award for history in 1964, is famous for its ambitious scope and intellectual rigor. In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human cultures interacted at every stage of their history. The author suggests that, from the Neolithic beginnings of grain agriculture to the present, major social changes in all parts of the world were triggered by new or newly important foreign stimuli, and he presents a persuasive narrative of world history to support this claim.

In a retrospective essay titled "The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years," McNeill shows how his book was shaped by the time and place in which it was written (1954-63). He discusses how historiography subsequently developed and suggests how his portrait of the world's past in The Rise of the West should be revised to reflect these changes.

©1963, 1991 The University of Chicago (P)2022 Tantor

Magnificent.

Though noticeably dated, this is the greatest single volume history of humanity I have encountered.

The greatest world history book in English

If you're trying to understand what happened in the human past on the broadest level, there's no better book that I know of. From the rise of agriculture to 1963, the story is of the formation of new communities and their interaction, the diffusion of new and better ways of living, culminating in the rise of science and the democratic revolution in the last several centuries. Dense, meant for a knowledgable reader, an attempt to capture 'all there is' in the entire field of history all in one book. It has its failings, but they're trivial next to its merits. Read this book.