Jonathan Daly - The Rise of Western Power: A Comparative History of Western Civilization

Geography of Eurasia

Early river ralley civilizations

Chinese and Roman Empires juxtaposed

The Islamic lands, A.D. 750

The Earths axes

Mongol Empire at the death of Genghis Khan, 1227

Coastline and major water routes of Europe

Europe, c.1350

Principal European trade routes of the fourteenth century

The voyages of Saint Paul

Charlemagnes Empire

The Spread of monasteries in Medieval Europe

Early European universities

Campaigns and Empire of Alexander the Great

The Battle of Crecy, August 26, 1346

The Ottoman Empire before 1453

The world according to Herodotus, 450 B.C.

The Crusades

Routes of the seven fleets of Ming treasure ships

The chief voyages of exploration (to 1522)

The spread of printing presses in Europe

Extent of the Reformation, 152472

Scientific and scholarly institutions in early modern Europe

Map of Europe and Asia, c.A.D. 1200

The triangular trade

The Netherlands at the Truce of 1609

English Civil War at the end of 1643

The thirteen American colonies and Early Republic, 176090

Empire of Napoleon

Britain before and after the Industrial Revolution

The eight circuits of the Asia-centered System of Exchange, thirteenth century

Railroad networks in Europe, 1901

Chief railroad systems, 1910

Cable communications and some leading wireless stations

Principal ocean trade routes, 1934

The European colonial empires, 1913

The USSR in 1932 during Stalins collectivization and industrialization drives

Japanese expansion in Asia, 193741

Principal Nazi camps and killing fields

Allied and axis possessions in the West, 1944

Womens suffrage in the United States before adoption of the nineteenth amendment in 1920

Slavery and sectionalism

in all these spheres of endeavor. Yet by the time the engraving was produced, Europe was diverging from them. How this development unfolded is the subject of my book.

Figure 0.1Temperance(1559), attributed to Philip Galle (15371612), after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art.

Since the publication of the first edition, a flood of new scholarship has appeared concerning the This book in turn has shaped my revisions to the present book.

Most important, it conceives of human development and the evolution of societies as similar to alchemical experimentation. The idea is this: alchemists searched the stores of nature and systematically experimented to discover the properties, capacities, reactions, and uses of all available materials and substances as they sought elixirs of life or the philosophers stone. domestication of plants and animals starting 10,000 years ago in the prehistoric Near East, they flourished not only by drawing upon material features of their environments but also by appropriating ideas, inventions, customs, learning, and other breakthroughs of the mind and spirit. All cultures learned from each other. None advanced in a vacuum. In human cultural development, there has been no pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Each culture and each people owes much of its success to peoples and cultures that went before. We are all standing on the shoulders of our global forebears.

Yet historically, some cultures have flourished more dramatically than others, contributing more breakthroughs and innovations to the human patrimony. Each such culture seems to have had a peculiar genius. It is the contention of this book, however, that what sets the most flourishing cultures apart is their greater openness to learning from others and the greater opportunities for experimentation of their members.