The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes and Community

by William H. McNeill

William H. McNeill is known for his ability to portray the grand sweep of history. Now two of his popular books and an essay previously unavailable in book form are brought together in this new paperback edition. In The Human Condition McNeill provides a provocative interpretation of history as a competition of parasites, both biological and human. In The Great Frontier he questions the notion of "frontier freedom" through an examination of European expansion. The concluding essay speculates on the role of catastrophe in our lives. About The Human "A remarkable tour de force . . . . An elegant, intelligent and scholarly essay."--J. H. Hexter, The New York Times Book Review "A brilliant new interpretation of world history."--David Graber, The Los Angeles Times Book Review About The Great There is virtually no one in the profession who can match McNeill as a synthesizer--or, for that matter, as an interdisciplinary historian. . . . There is more insight in this volume than in others of double or triple the length."--David Courtwright, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Genres: History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

William Hardy McNeill was a historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Milikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.
In addition to winning the U.S. National Book Award in History and Biography in 1964 for The Rise of the West, McNeill received several other awards and honors. In 1985 he served as president of the American Historical Association.
In 1996, McNeill won the prestigious Erasmus Prize, which the Crown Prince of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander presented to him at Amsterdam's Royal Palace.
In 1999, Modern Library named The Rise of the West of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th century.
In 2009, he won the National Humanities Medal. In February 2010, President Barack Obama, a former University of Chicago professor himself, awarded McNeill the National Humanities Medal to recognize "his exceptional talent as a teacher and scholar at the University of Chicago and as an author of more than 20 books, including The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history".

Reviews

[David Nichols]

This is a collection of lectures McNeill presented at Clark, Baylor, and Princeton between 1979 and 1986. The first lectures, titled "The Great Frontier," define that frontier as the zone of interaction between Europeans and non-Europeans since 1500, and notes it was characterized by great mobility - since the Europeans had great technological and epidemiological advantages over Native Americans, Australasians, etc. - and social extremes. Frontier regions could be zones of anarchic personal freedom (e.g. California during the Gold Rush), but they also could be concentrations of coerced labor (colonial Mexico, Russia and Ukraine during the same period). The second lecture series, "The Human Condition," develops McNeill's concept of "macroparasites versus microparasites" by noting that these two phenomena tended to force human societies into equilibrium states over time. The development of intensive agriculture and cities ca. 6000 BP generated not only new crowd diseases, but also human predation by nomadic warriors, which societies resolved by creating state bureaucracies that could defend settled farmers from attack and (through taxation) regulate the extent to which they were parasitized. The commercial revolution that began ca. 2000 BP created a new disequilibrium, as old states broke up under the pressure of new diseases and new technologies (especially navigation and gunpowder), but this state of chaos was largely resolved in the twentieth century through the rise of dirigiste political economies and modern medicine. The last essay was so sketchy that I didn't even bother to learn its name. I suspect McNeill was getting a bit tired by then.

[Greg]

A collection of speeches from the late '70s to the '80s that do a pretty good job of encapsulating McNeill's take on world history. For evidence and/or further elaboration, see his other books. Among other things, he posits a "conservation of catastrophe" principle for human history analogous to the conservation of energy idea (which I think I learned in science class once or twice).