* In A World by Itself, six distinguished British historians offer the most definitive & compelling history of the British ...

* In A World by Itself, six distinguished British historians offer the most definitive & compelling history of the British ...

A chronological history of the world, which begins with hunting & gathering, & continues with the most fundamental transition in the whole of human history
- the adoption of farming & the settled communities it produced. It then examines the beginning of 'civilisation' in the Americas & the Pacific, before their first contact with Europeans. Eurasia dominates the central part of the book, with the empires of China & the Mongols & the rise of Islam. This is followed by a section on world balance after Europeans had made contact with the long-established societies of the Americas & Asians, while the last part deals with the massive economic changes of the modern world. Themes include contact between different cultures & how history interlocks; the passing on of ideas, technology & religions; how 'civilisation' spread; the relationship between settled societies & nomadic groups; the importance of trade; how Europe moved from the periphery to the centre in the last 1, 000 years; & the coming of industrialisation.
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Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation & concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire & the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India & Japan, & therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters & gatherers & their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica & Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them & how technologies, ideas & the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China & of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations & social & economic change. ...

Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation & concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire & the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India & Japan, & therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters & gatherers & their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica & Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them & how technologies, ideas & the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China & of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations & social & economic change. ...

Honeybees are dying.

In America, one in three hives was left lifeless at the beginning of 2008
In France, the


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Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life & Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its ...

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life & Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its ...

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life & Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its ...

How has Gay Talese found his subjects? How has he gotten them onto the page? What drives him to write? These are some of the questions at the heart of the narrative that combines memory, reflection, explanation & a satisfying obsession. I his trademark prose ...