Synopses & Reviews
The history of the world in the past five centuries is one of Western dominance, the story of the age of European empires. This book charts a new approach to world history in a European age--a view centered on changing relations between the world and the West, but focusing on the ways in which people in Asia, Africa, and Indian America have responded to the overwhelming European power that existed in this period. \[P\] Written by one of the few living historians with the breadth and depth of knowledge called for by such an undertaking, \[I\]The World and the West\[/I\] eschews grand narrative and sweeping theories in favor of the \'eclectic empiricism\' of a series of case studies. This approach--reaching from such diverse cases as the Maya and Yaqui of Mexico and the Ghost Dance or the cargo cults of Melanesia to the Ottoman Empire and Meiji Japan--leads to a variety of different questions about relations between the world and the West in recent centuries, thus broadening our perspective on the book's underlying question: How do human societies change through time? \[P\] In each case, Curtin's chief concern is culture change--alterations in a particular people's whole way of life--in a time when human cultures have been, for better or worse, increasingly homogenized. \[I\]The World and the West\[/I\] documents this change as it occurred within the European sphere and outside of it (though often in direct response to the European threat), through the age of European empires and after their liquidation. Together, these essays comprise a vast and detailed picture of a world in transition--as the conquerors, the conquered, and the uneasy observers came to their own terms with the industrial age. \[P\] \[I\]Philip D. Curtin\[/I\] is Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of History, Emeritus, at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of many books, including \[I\]The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex\[/I\] (Cambridge 1990 and 1998) and \[I\]Death by Migration\[/I\] (Cambridge 1990).
Review
"Philips Curtin is one of the ablest, most prolific storytellers of our time. He has woven a number of these tapestries, often bringing together in elegant fashion many important and long-neglected threads (African history, the social consequences of migration, the impact of disease on the unfolding of empire) with themes and images more familiar from other, grander but less careful renderings of our portrait." The Boston Review
Review
"Philip D. Curtin's new book is a fascinating contribution to the debate...The book is well-written; the case studies are carefully selected; complex development and events are expounded with great ease and elegance; and they show how enormously erudite and experienced a historian Curtin is." The International History Review
Synopsis
This book is a study of the interaction of the Western societies of Europe and America with others around the world in the past two centuries--the age of European empire. Through a variety of case studies, it considers the European threat and the non-Western response, but the focus is on the ways in which people in Asia, African, and Indian America have tried to adapt their ways of life to the overwhelming European power of the period.
Table of Contents
Part I. Conquest: 1. The Pattern of Empire; 2. Technology and power; 3. The politics of Imperialism; Part II. Culture Change under Imperial Rule: 4. Culture change in plural societies: South Africa and Central Asia; 5. Culture change in Mexico; 6. Administrative choices and their consequences: examples from Bengal, Central Asia, Java, and Malaya; Part III. Conversion: 7. Christian missions in East Africa; 8. Varieties of defensive modernization; 9. Meiji Japan: revolutionary modernization; 10. Ottoman reactions to the West; Part IV. The Drive for Independence and the Liquidation of Empires: 11. Non-European resistance and the European withdrawal; 12. Personal and utopian responses: millenarianism; 13. The search for viable independence: Indonesia; 14. Paths to viable independence: Ghana.