Cover -- THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE WORLD -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- LIST OF MAPS -- LIST OF TABLES -- Introduction -- Part I: Children of the Ice: The Peopling of the World and the Beginnings of Cultural Divergence, c. 200,000 to c. 12,000 years ago -- Chapter 1: Humanity from the Ice: The Emergence and Spread of an Adaptive Species -- Over the horizon -- Recognizing humans -- Ice ages and humans -- Mobility and the original social network -- Changes forced by variations in the Earth's orbit -- Ocean temperatures and continental shelves -- Continents and regions: tectonics and deserts -- Push-pull factors and species factories -- Versatile humans -- Settling the earth -- What made global expansion possible? -- Identifying the settlers -- Terra 2 Africa 2000,000-52,000 years ago -- Terra 3 Arriving in Sahul 50,000 years ago -- Terra 3 Negotiating Siberia and the Americas -- Terra 3 Europe -- Conclusion -- Chapter 2: The Mind in the Ice: Art and Thought before Agriculture -- The birth of creativity? -- Food for thought -- Brain power -- Life imitating art -- Art as narrative -- The spirit world -- Talking to the spirits -- Art as understanding -- The feminine in Ice Age art -- Magic -- Art and the afterlife -- Ice Age art as comment on society and values -- Feasts and power -- Leadership figures -- The shaman -- Hereditary leadership -- Time to think -- Environmental influence on human change -- Part 2: Of Mud and Metal: Divergent Cultures from the Emergence of Agriculture to the 'Crisis of the Bronze Age', c. 10,000BCE-c. 1,000 BCE -- Chapter 3: Into a Warming World -- Knowing nature -- Fauna -- Flora -- Classifying food in nature -- Nature as nurture -- Taming life -- Domesticated crops -- The 'Fertile Crescent' -- House, hearth, and kiln -- Energy and fire -- Regulating water and soil -- Stepped terracing -- Flooding -- Wells.

Soil -- Ploughing -- Putting down roots -- Two episodes of prehistoric agriculture -- Home and the wanderer -- Food globalization and the trans-Eurasian exchange -- Nature reframed -- Conclusion -- Chapter 4: The Farmers' Empires: Climax and Crises in Agrarian States and Cities -- The spread and growth of dense settlements and large states -- The Americas -- Eurasia -- Crises of the late second millennium BCE -- Part 3: The Oscillations of Empires: From the 'Dark Age' of the Early First Millennium BCE to the Mid-Fourteenth Century CE -- Chapter 5: Material Life: Bronze Age Crisis to the Black Death -- Climatic context from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age: the Hallstatt solar minimum, 12000-700 BCE -- Epidemics and the Eurasian steppes -- Into the Iron Age and Steel Age -- Commerce and empire -- Rotary mechanics -- Epidemics and climate reversal: into the 'Dark Ages' -- Transformation, contest, and crisis in the Dark Ages, 400-950 CE -- Warming global climate: into the Middle Ages, 950-1260 CE -- Into the Little Ice Age, and the Black Death, 1260-1350: the Hallstatt solar minimum returns -- Chapter 6: Intellectual Traditions: Philosophy, Science, Religion, and the Arts, 500 BCE-1350 CE -- An 'Axial Age'? -- The foundations of science -- World religions: Christianity and Islam -- Religious conversion strategies -- Intellectual renaissances -- Conclusion -- Chapter 7: Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BCE-1350 CE -- The story -- Bigger, wider, stronger, deeper -- Homo superans -- The power of place -- The world in 1000 BCE -- The world in 175 CE -- The world in 1350 CE -- Conclusion -- Part 4: The Climatic Reversal: Expansion and Innovation amid Plague and Cold from the Mid-Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries CE -- Chapter 8: A Converging World: Economic and Ecological Encounters, 1350-1815.

Environment, economics, and expansion from the East -- Regional trading networks -- Environment, economics, and expansion from the West -- Population, plants, and plantations in the Atlantic world -- Conclusion -- Chapter 9: Renaissances, Reformations, and Mental Revolutions: Intellect and Arts in the Early Modern World -- Christendom -- Global conversions -- Buddhist and Muslim missions -- Syncretisms and mingled outcomes -- Western science and enlightenment -- Eastern enlightenments -- Enter the monsters: revolutionary and Napoleonic ideas -- Romanticism -- Chapter 10: Connected by Emotions and Experiences: Monarchs, Merchants, Mercenaries, and Migrants in the Early Modern World -- Introduction -- Empires of monarchs and mercenaries -- Courts, bureaucracies, and legislatures -- Cultural contacts and social changes -- Conclusion -- Part 5: The Great Acceleration: Accelerating Change in a Warming World, c. 1815-c. 2008 -- Chapter 11:The Anthropocene Epoch: The Background to Two Transformative Centuries -- Introducing the Anthropocene: 1815-2015 -- The idea of the Anthropocene -- Measuring the Anthropocene: a statistical sketch, and lots of hockey sticks -- The roots of the Anthropocene -- 1750-1900: breakthrough technologies of the Anthropocene -- The fossil fuels revolution takes off: the nineteenth century -- The twentieth century and the 'Great Acceleration' -- The 'Bad Anthropocene' and human impact on the biosphere -- Warning signs -- Conclusions -- Chapter 12: The Modern World and its Demons: Ideology and After in Arts, Letters, and Thought, 1815-2008 -- The four pillars of a disputed civilization -- The age of -isms -- The end of embourgeoisement -- Other worlds, and not-so-other -- The post-modern turn: mutability, uncertainty, pluralism, and their enemies.

Chapter 13: Politics and Society in the Kaleidoscope of Change: Relationships, Institutions, and Conflicts from the Beginnings of Western Hegemony to American Supremacy -- The transformations of empires -- The city -- The West and the rest -- The state, government, and politics -- The state in the twentieth century -- The local -- Egalitarianism, community, and prejudice -- Ideologies of hate -- Divisions and divisiveness -- The Cold War -- Changing identities -- Religion -- New world order, or asymmetric instability? -- New views of the world -- Epilogue -- FURTHER READING -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7 -- Chapter 8 -- Chapter 9 -- Chapter 10 -- Chapter 11 -- Chapter 12 -- Chapter 13 -- PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- INDEX.

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.

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2019. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.