Preface for the new Chinese translation

It is a pleasant surprise that my book, The Rise of the West, is now available in Chinese translation. I am grateful to CITIC and to the Global History Center of Capital Normal University for bringing it to pass. I hope the book will interest Chinese readers seeking new paths into the human past. In our globalizing world, achieving a global perspective on the human past is more important than ever before.

The book was first published more than fifty years ago, in 1963. I first conceived of the idea of writing such a book in my student days, in the late 1930s. I began work in earnest on it in the middle of the 1950s, and so the book reflects the state of historical knowledge at that time. It has rather little to say about early African history, for example, because that field was but little developed at the time.

My book was well received when it first appeared, but I gradually became aware of additional aspects of the global past not fully treated in the Rise of the West. So, subsequently, I wrote two more books that help to fill out my vision of world history: Plagues and Peoples (1976), which aims to tell the story of disease in human history; and The Pursuit of Power (1982) which carries the theme of the relationship between technology and political power forward to the 20th century. In the Rise of the West that theme pervaded much of the book, but I lost sight of it when dealing with the last millennium. So these three books round out my portrayal of world history. A fourth, written together with my son and entitled The Human Web (2003), attempts to pull together my full sense (and my son's) of world history.

But the Rise of the West was the first, and the most detailed, of these four books. It reflects my conviction that all human societies, to greater or lesser degrees, have been connected to one another. That is more true today than in previous millennia of course, but it has always been true in part. The book reflects my further conviction that societies changed frequently as a result of contact with others which spurs either imitation or reaction. This general approach, which emphasizes connections among societies and cultures (rather than their own independent development) is one that has acquired some following in world history scholarship. Many historians of course helped to develop that perspective, and many more are still refining it. But I hope that the Rise of the West helped to advance that paradigm.

In any case, I hope you will find The Rise of the West worthy of your attention and useful in your efforts to understand human history.

William H. McNeill
Colebrook, CT USA
7 April 2013