¹ The work was first published in abridged form at The Hague in 1753 under the title Abrégé de l'histoire universelle depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à Charles-Quint, and then in complete form at Genova in 1756: Essai sur l'hi stoire générale et sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à nos jours. Voltaire is probably the first European to attempt a uni versal history (he included India, China, Mexico, and Peru); he was pre ceded only by the cyclic philosophy of history of Giambattista Vico (La scienza nuova, Naples, 1725), which however confined itself to Classical-Western history; see Philip Bagby, Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Compar ative Study of Civilizations, Berkeley, 1963, pp. 12-14: see also H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate, rev. ed., New York, 1962, pp. 36-40.

² Herbert George Wells, The Outline of History, London, 1920; William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago, 1963, and the same in con densed form in A World History, New York, 1967. McNeill is a kind of in tellectual descendent of H. G. Wells, who in turn ‘descends' from Voltaire and Herder (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 4 vols., Riga and Leipzeg, 1784-91).

³ Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Vienna, 1918, and translated into English by C. F. Atkinson: The Decline of the West, 2 vols., London, 1934-61, and abridged by D. C. Somerwell (i.e., vols, 1-10): A Study of History, 2 vols., London, 1946-57.

⁴ Carrol Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to His torical Analysis, New York, 1961.

⁵ See Bagby, Culture and History, pp. 159-165; see also Glyn Daniel; The First Civilizations: The Archaeology of Their Origins, London, 1968; Robert McC. Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehis toric Mexico, Chicago, 1966; and Rushton Coulborn, The Origin of Civilized Societies, Princeton, 1959.

⁶ See Bagby, Culture and History, pp. 159-182; and Quigley, Evolution of Civilizations, pp. 32-37; see also Roger W. Wescott, "The Enumeration of Civilizations," History and Theory, Vol. IX, No. 1 (1970), pp. 59-83.

⁷ See Bagby, Culture and History, pp. 167-169 and 178-180; and Quigley, Evolution of Civilizations, pp. 35-37; see also Wescott, "The Enumeration of Civilizations," pp. 63-65.

⁸ For a critique of Jung's theories in historical context see H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society, New York, 1958, pp. 153-160; Hughes concludes that Jung was a "mystagogue."

⁹ Wells pointed out fifty years ago that in their desire "… to classify men into three or four great races and … to regard these races as having always been separate things …" students of mankind "… ignored the great pos sibilities of blended races …"; Outline of History, 110.

¹⁰ The very first centers of civilization may have independently achieved their position, and some others may subsequently have done so (e.g., Crete; see Colin Renfrew, The Emergence of Civilization: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millenium B.C. London, 1972), because at first civilization was consi derably less complicated than it later became and hence more easily approach able by a simple (neolithic) horticultural society. As civilization became more elaborated and complicated in the early centers, however, it became in creasingly less approachable independently by a simple horticultural society, so that henceforth it must be learned and adopted from an existing center by an ‘aspiring society' (e.g., Etruscan and Republican Rome). Today, of course, there is probably no place in the world that has not been touched either directly or indirectly by Western civilization (see Elman R. Service, Cultural Evolutionism: Theory in Practice, New York, 1971, pp. 151-157), so to compete in the modern world an ‘aspiring society', even when civilized, must learn and adopt an enormous amount of complicated technological and socio-political patterns—most notably witness Japan!

¹¹ For the contrary view see Betty J. Meggers, "The Transpacific Origin of Mesoamerican Civilization: A Preliminary Review of the Evidence and Its Theoretical Implications," American Anthropologist, Vol. 77, No. 1 (March 1975), pp. 1-27.

¹² Where a civilized society has directly confronted primitive societies— North America Argentina, Australia—it has simply overwhelmed them and ruined them; where it confronts horticultural societies it seems to stimulate inter-tribal warfare resulting in the disorganization (and enslavement) of the weaker less viable groups; see Service, Cultural Evolutionism, pp. 151-157.

¹³ Cf. Bagby, Culture and History, pp. 205-209.

¹⁴ For a critique of the U.S.-Rome analogy see this writer's article "Civis Americanus Sum: Are We, too, to ‘Decline and Fall'?." The University of Chi cago Magazine, Spring 1975, pp. 17-21.

¹⁵ See Bagby, Culture and History, pp. 165-166, 169, and 178-179; and Quigley, Evolution of Civilizations, pp. 34-37; see also Wescott, "The Enu meration of Civilizations," pp. 63-64, 76-77, and 80-81.

¹⁶ See Seton Lloyd, Early Highland Peoples of Anatolia, London, 1967; Sa batino Moscati, The Face of the Ancient Orient, London and New York, 1960, chs. v and vi; and Boris B. Piotrovsky, The Ancient Civilization of Urartu, New York, 1969.

¹⁷ See Renfrew, The Emergence of Civilization; Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age, Chicago, 1964; Smith College Studies in History, No. XLV, A Land Called Crete, Northampton, Mass., 1968; and the feminist maverick Jacquetta Hawkes, Dawn of the Gods, Toronto, 1968.

¹⁸ On early Persia see William Culican, The Medes and Persians, New York, 1965; and Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Persia, London, 1962, chs. ii and iii.

¹⁹ See MacNeill, Rise of the West, pp. 298-299.

²⁰ See Matthew Melko, The Nature of Civilizations, Boston, 1969, particu larly ch. v.

²¹ The ‘philosophy of history' of the Maghreban Moslem historian, Ibn Khalûn (1332-1406 A. D.), seems especially attuned to the pattern of cosmopolitan civilizations in its emphasis on the rise and fall of ‘ruling houses' and not on the rise and fall of civilizations, as is the case with our modern Western macro-historians; see Ibn Khaldûn, An Introduction to History: The Muqaddimah, trans by Franz Rosenthal, abridged and edited by N. J. Dawood, London, 1967; see also Grace E. Cairns, Philosophies of History, New York, 1962, pp. 322-336.

²² Surely the popularity of Spengler and Toynbee generally with the edu cated public in Europe and America is indicative of this cosmopolitanization, as is the interest in such books as F.S.C. Northrup's The Meeting of East and West, New York 1946.

²³ For example see Robert Bierstedt, " Indices of Civilization," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 71, No. 5 (March 1966), pp. 483-490; Bierstedt concludes that sophistication is the earmark of civilization: "… an uncivilized society has art but no aesthetics, religion but no theology, techniques but no science, tools but no technology, legends but no literature, a language but no alphabet …, customs but no laws, a history but no historiography, knowledge but no epistemology, … a Weltanschauung but no philosophy."

²⁴ That civilized societies existed before irrigation was invented, as per the thesis of Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven, 1957, see Adams, Evolution of Urban So ciety, pp. 66-78.

²⁵ For example, at a time when the Western intellectual superstructure was reaching certainly one of its culminations, i.e., the 17th century, Spain (or more exactly the Kingdom of Castile), even though it contributed in art and literature to this culmination, was headlong in decline as a polity.

²⁶ Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols., New York, 1937-41, and the same condensed by the author into one volume, Social and Cultural Dynamics: A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law and Social Relationships, Boston, 1957. Alfred L. Kroeber, Con figurations of Culture Growth, Berkeley, 1944; Idem, Style and Civilizations, Berkeley, 1957; and Idem, An Anthropologist Looks at History, Berkeley, 1966.

²⁷ On this point see Kroeber's famous treatment of female fashions in Style and Civilizations, ch. i.

²⁸ See Kroeber, " Flow and Reconstruction within Civilizations," in An Anthropologist Looks at History, pp. 55 and 58-59.