Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T18:15:12.614Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Production, destruction, and connection, 1750–present: introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

J. R. McNeill
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Kenneth Pomeranz
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Get access

Summary

Connection' is, obviously, central to a work that aims to explore 'world history' in particular, rather than all history that has happened in the world. It forms one of the major ways that we bring remote peoples and places into the same analytical frame. The beginning of 1750 is sharply marked by an increase in the prevalence of world wars, events that connected larger-than-ever parts of the globe in overlapping campaigns of destruction with world-altering consequences. In demography, economy, and ecology, the 1750s is likewise a watershed. Industrialization in some societies often led to soaring demand for commodities they could not easily produce at home, so rubber, cotton, jute, and other primary products became enormous sources of potential profit. 1400-1800 as an era of 'proto-globalization', in the loose sense of a world with much more frequent and influential intercontinental connections. Imagined or mediated communities can have wildly varying scales, scopes, durability, and degrees of emotional power.
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further reading

Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armitage, David, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840. New York: Palgrave, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830. London: Longman, 1989.Google Scholar
Belich, James. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World. Oxford University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burke, Edmund, and Pomeranz, Kenneth, eds. The Environment and World History. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Cain, P. J., and Hopkins, A. G.. British Imperialism 1688–2000. New York: Longman, 2002.Google Scholar
Carmagnani, Marcello. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, trans. Frongia, Rosanna M. Giammanco. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, Holt, Thomas, and Scott, Rebecca. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, and Stoler, Ann Laura, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, John. After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405. London: Allen Lane, 2007.Google Scholar
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.Google Scholar
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. New York: Verso, 2001.Google Scholar
Duara, Prasenjit, ed. Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Gabaccia, Donna, and Hoerder, Dirk, eds. Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s. Boston, ma: Brill, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Geyer, Michael, and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, eds. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850. Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848. New York: New American Library, 1962.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day. Baltimore: Penguin, 1975.Google Scholar
Jones, Eric L. Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture. Princeton University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Kershaw, Ian, and Lewin, Moshe, eds. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge University Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2002, 9th edn. Boston, ma: McGraw-Hill, 2004.Google Scholar
Maier, Charles S. Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-states, 1760–1914. Cambridge University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Norton, 2000.Google Scholar
McNeill, William H. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000. University of Chicago Press, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metcalf, Thomas R. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena 1860–1920. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Northrup, David. How English Became the Global Language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Camiller, Patrick. Princeton University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radkau, Joachim. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Dunlap, Thomas. Cambridge University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony, ed. The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Emily S. Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World, 1870–1945. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Emily S., ed. A World Connecting, 1870–1945. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Malden, ma, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990.Google Scholar
Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wong, R. Bin. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1997.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×