The Oxford Illustrated History of the World

Felipe Fernández-Armesto was an undergraduate and graduate student at Oxford (Demy of Magdalen College, Senior Scholar of St John´s, Fellow of St Antony´s) where he was a member of the Modern History Faculty before moving to chairs in the University of London (Professor of Global Environmental History at Queen Mary College), Tufts University (Prince of Asturias Professor), and the University of Notre Dame, where he holds the William P. Reynolds Chairfor Mission in Arts and Letters. His work, which has covered many fields and disciplines and has appeared in twenty-seven languages, has won him numerous awards, including the John Carter Brown Medal, a World History Association Book Prize (for Pathfinders, 2007), Spain´s national prizes for geography and
food-writing, and, most recently, the Gran Cruz de la Orden de Alfonso X el Sabio, Spain´s highest award for services to education and the arts.

Imagine the planet, as if from an immense distance of time and space, as a galactic observer might see it-with the kind of objectivity that we, who are enmeshed in our history, can´t attain.

The Oxford Illustrated History of the World encompasses the whole span of human history. It brings together some of the world's leading historians, under the expert guidance of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, to tell the 200,000-year story of our world, from the emergence of homo sapiens through to the twenty-first century: the environmental convulsions; the interplay of ideas (good and bad); the cultural phases and exchanges; the collisions and collaborations in politics; the successions of
states and empires; the unlocking of energy; the evolutions of economies; the contacts, conflicts, and contagions that have all contributed to making the world we now inhabit.

The Oxford Illustrated History of the World is the story of humanity itself, from earliest times to the present day, and the changes-good and bad-which have shaped our world.

Introduction; Part I: Children of the Ice; 1 Clive Gamble: Humanity From the Ice: The Emergence and Spread of an Adaptive Species; 2 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: The Mind in the Ice: Art and Thought before Agriculture; Part II: Of Mud and Metal; 3 Martin Jones: Into a Warming World; 4 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: The Farmers' Empires: Climax and Crises in Agrarian States and Cities; Part III: The Oscillations of Empires; 5 John Brooke: Punctured Rupture: Material Life: Bronze Age Crisis to Black Death; 6 David Northrup: Intellectual Traditions: Philosophy, Science, Religion, and the Arts, 500 BCE - 1350 CE; 7 Ian Morris: Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BC-AD 1350; Part IV: The Climatic Reversal; 8 David Northrup: Re-Convergence in a Smaller World: Economic and Ecological Encounters, 1350-1815; 9 Manuel Lucena-Giraldo: Renaissances, Reformations, and Mental Revolutions: Intellect and Arts in the Early Modern World; 10 Anjana Singh: Connected by Emotions and Experiences: Monarchs, Merchants, Mercenaries and Migrants in the Early Modern World; Part V: The Great Acceleration; 11 David Christian: The Anthropocene Epoch: The Background to Two Transformative Centuries; 12 Paolo Luca Bernardini: The Modern World and Its Demons: Ideology and After in Arts, Letters and Thought, 1815-2008; 13 Jeremy Black: Politics and Society in the Kaleidoscope of Change: Relationships, behaviour, institutions, conflicts from the beginnings of Western hegemony to the American Supremacy; Epilogue; Further Reading; Index