Recent Books of Excellence on World Civilizations

Send further suggestions to brians@wsu.edu.

Global Perspective

David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich And Some So Poor, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).

Andr* Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999).

Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

Frances Kartunnen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

Philip D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire, (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Bernard Waites, Europe and the Third World: From Colonization to Decolonisation, c.1500-1998, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

Africa

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, second edition, (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800, (London: Verso, 1997).

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Asia

Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).

Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).

Environmentalism

Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism : A Global History, (New York: Longman, 2000).

J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

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