Until a few months ago, I had never heard of William McNeill, a historian who died in 2016 at the age of 98. In my class in world history, I came across his book The Rise of the West, an 828-page volume published in 1963.[1] Not only did it receive the prestigious National Book Award in 1964, but it was extremely successful—even a popular Christmas gift. For historians, its significance is that it expanded thinking about world history away from a narrow view based on Europe and the United States.
That accomplishment is ironic because the book itself, a wonderful treasure trove of information about the entire world, looks somewhat old-fashioned and out of date now. But it’s still fascinating.
The title would never fly today. The Rise of the West sounds like just what McNeill was combating: Eurocentrism. His narrative starts with the origins of humans in the African savannahs and ends in the year 1917 with the Russian Revolution). It unabashedly celebrates the “era of Western dominance,” which began around 1500 and hadn’t ended by the book’s conclusion (or, for that matter, by the end of McNeill’s life).
Another characteristic is McNeill’s lavish use of the terms “civilization“ and “civilized” and “barbarous” and “barbarians” (even “the dark ages”)—terms that would embarrass most historians today. To McNeill, civilization meant complexity, high skills, large population (enough to have a leisure class), organization, wealth; it could also mean sophisticated weaponry, merciless war, and bureaucratic power. Barbarians were backward ruffians. McNeill had no trouble calling the Huns, Franks, and Goths barbarians because they attacked the high civilization of Rome.
Nevertheless, The Rise of the West charted new territory. Its major contribution was to see the world as full of changing civilizations, influencing one another, pushing and pulling one another in different directions. As McNeill wrote in a retrospective essay in 1988, “The Rise of the West is built on the notion that the principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.”[2]
Higher-skilled peoples (civilized peoples, that is) affect lower-skilled peoples, for good and ill. Those with lower skills are attracted to what they see, even though it often disturbs and disrupts their own customs, not to mention their lives.
And while Europe is the chief higher-skilled protagonist from 1500 on, McNeill doesn’t mince words about it.
“The formidable combination of European warlikeness, naval technique , and comparatively high levels of resistance to disease transformed the cultural balance of the world within an amazingly brief period of time.” [3]
Although the book touches on all parts of the world, it is primarily about how civilization started in the Middle East, with the Sumerians, and expanded across Eurasia, rising and falling in places like Egypt, India, Greece, Turkey, and eventually the “Far West” (western Europe). It offers a rich view of how Islam, a product of the Middle East civilization “cradle,” has spread so widely for so long.
China had its own highly accomplished civilization, too, but this book suggests it was never globally dominant (partly because its high culture disdained barbarian outsiders). In his retrospective essay, however, McNeill says China should have been more prominent in the book, especially the period 1000 to 1500.
To me, what makes the book refreshing is none of the above. Rather, it tells history as a collection of cause-and-effect stories: what happened and what came about as a result. McNeill does not hedge; he does not pay obeisance to modern sensitivities (as indicated above). He tells stories. [4]
You can open up the book anywhere and find an interesting story about something you may have wondered about. How did castes arise in India? What enabled steppe nomads to overwhelm civilizations in the Middle East and China? And, of course, what causal forces propelled Europe toward industrialization ? He provides answers. They may not be perfect answers, but I think that explaining cause and effect is what history is about.
[1] William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1963] 1991).
[2] McNeill, xvi.
[3] McNeill, 574.
[4] For a discussion of the role of stories in history, see Wallace Kaufman’s “History: All Story, All the Time” on this site.
“The Rise of the West is built on the notion that the principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.”
Perhaps we should add a critical element–curiosity. Curiosity embodies the admission, conscious or not, that we are ignorant and have something to learn.
Despite the arrogance and brutality of conquerors, they were often curious or at least took with them curious scholars.
Examples:
1500s. Bishop de Landa, persecutor of the Mayans in Yucatan was meticulous about recording anthropological observations even while he burned scrolls.
Cortez. Deceitful, brutal, ruthless, but careful to study Aztec and other native cultures.
1600s. Many European voyages of conquest and territorial expansion included botanists and biologists.
1741. Bering enlisted the botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller to accompany his voyage from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in search of North America. (He never delineated the Bering Strait, but he did reach Alaska.)
Do we know how curious the captains of the Chinese Treasure Fleet were when encountering Indians and Africans?
Do we know how curious the Mongols were when conquering everything from China to Europe?
Wallace, you offer an interesting angle on the expansion of the West. I think you are suggesting that perhaps the captains in the Chinese Treasure Fleet were not curious. Or were they curious, but overwhelmed by the political forces in imperial China and forced to come home? Certainly, at some point, leading Chinese were not curious; they saw other cultures as having little that was worth their attention. As for the Mongols, McNeill views them as a “high barbarian” culture that absorbed a lot from the civilizations they conquered but did not have a sufficiently complex culture to change those civilizations.