The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes inspired John Robert McNeill to try to compress human history into 200 pages. McNeill recruited his father, William H. McNeill, to assist with the task since he had written a much longer human history. The authors acknowledge the many colleagues and friends who were integral to completing the book as well as family members who supported the historians’ work.

Webs, “a set of connections that link people to one another” (3), shape human history through the exchange and spread of information, technologies, goods, and even pathogens. Webs originated through the development of human speech, and nomadic groups generated loose webs that became tighter locally and regionally when nomadic groups settled. The development of cities created metropolitan webs, and the amalgamation of different metropolitan webs across Eurasia and North Africa gave birth to the Old World Web. Oceanic navigation enabled the emergence of the cosmopolitan web, which became increasingly electrified.

Webs have four key characteristics. First, they combine cooperation and competition. Since cooperation is the basis of social power, competition at one level promotes cooperation at another.