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

“Economic specialization and exchange created poverty as well as wealth. Skilled warriors sometimes turned their weapons against people who looked to them for protection. And populations acquired disease immunities only by repeated exposure to lethal epidemics. Nonetheless, the survivors of these risks enjoyed marked formidability in relation to people living outside such webs.”

The text draws attention to the negative impact of expanding and tightening the human web: increased inequality, violence, and disease. While these downsides may appear to deterrents to web expansion and tightening, the text suggest that inclusion in the web is ultimately more beneficial than exclusion. In subsequent sections, the authors illustrate the advantages that the web confers to its participants, including collective wealth, exposure to new peoples and ideas, enhanced educational opportunities, and technological innovation.

“So it appears that our species is unique in a very special way. It alone created a world of symbolic meanings, capable both of exceedingly rapid evolution and also of coordinating the behavior of indefinite numbers of individuals—totaling in our time, billions of persons. That accomplishment is, in fact, what this book is about.”

The text contends that the human web originated with the development of speech. Since growth and tightening of the web depend on the exchange of information and ideas, speech is integral because it provides the means to do so. As later sections discuss, one impact of globalization is the loss of local languages, the domination of a few global languages, and the syncretization of languages among the human population.

“Wherever humans arrived they altered landscapes by their activities, especially by their use of fire. In effect, humans deployed their cumulating knowledge and skills to make more and more of the natural energy flows of their environment serve their hopes and wants, thereby enlarging their own ecological niche along with the niches of other species that fitted into the new regime that human societies began to shape.”

This passage highlights how human activity profoundly impacted the environment. The text continually notes the various ways that humans harness natural energy flows in pursuit of wealth accumulation and technological advancement. The environmental impact increases over time.

“Settlement therefore permitted far faster population growth, and a growing population intensified local hunting and gathering, making wild food supplies scarcer and scarcer. This meant that settled groups were likely to find themselves trapped into an increasingly laborious routine of life, working first in small gardens, then in larger fields as returns from old-fashioned hunting and gathering diminished.”

This quote explains how the initial settlement of nomadic hunter-gatherer groups became a self-perpetuating process. This marked a shift in human societies to agriculture, which created slender webs of communication as neighboring communities shared information and ideas about agricultural practices. The invention of agriculture transformed the basic cells of human society to villages, which gave rise to cities and increasingly innovative civilization.

“Indeed, the way domestication altered older ecological niches for wild as well as for domesticated forms of life is as exceptional in biological history as the initial spread of humankind around the entire earth had been. Human adaptability and conscious choices lay behind both. Webs of communication and concerted human behavior once again demonstrated their power to transform earth’s ecosystems, and this time more drastically than before.”

This quote refers to how agricultural practices transformed plants and animals through the domestication of certain species. This is one of many instances in the text that J. R. McNeill’s expertise as an environmental historian is evident.

“In effect, sedentary villages replaced roving bands of hunters and gatherers as the basic cells of human society. Within each village the web of face-to-face communication was intense and assured continuity of custom. But such villages were also embedded in a far-flung web, denser than before, yet still very slender in comparison with what was to follow when cities and civilizations, traders and missionaries, professional fighting men and specially skilled artisans began to operate across wider and wider regions of the earth.”

The text reiterates the significance of humans’ transformation from nomadic groups to settled villages. This statement in the conclusion of Part 2 sets the stage for Part 3, which elaborates on the rise of cities, civilizations, trade networks, missionary religions, military advancements, and specialization. The continuity of custom mentioned here is significant because it relates to W. H. McNeill’s suggestion in the final section on future directions for humans in the aftermath of globalization.

“We are still caught in this historic process and unlikely to escape it, simply because most people, most of the time, prefer collective and personal wealth and power to poverty and weakness, even at the cost of subordination to rules and commands issued by distant strangers.”

The historic process to which the text refers is the concentration of wealth and power in civilization centers through the control of natural resources and human effort on the periphery. Echoing their position in the Introduction (6), the authors hold that the benefits of this arrangement outweigh the negative consequences. This quote alludes to the rise of bureaucratic and imperial governance.

“The military prowess of pastoralists in Eurasian and North African history meant more than political instability and rapid diffusion of the arts of war: their mobility sustained trade links, as well as exchanges of microbes, religious ideas, and technologies. Pastoralists, in short, bound the agrarian heartlands together from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, persistently tightening the strands of existing webs, and eventually fusing them together into the Old World Web.”

This passage highlights the connection between advancements in military technology and strategy, specifically cavalry warfare, and the expansion and tightening of the web. Here and in other sections, the text emphasizes that steppe nomads did not merely disrupt civilized societies but also (through their mobility) played a key role in connecting different civilization centers. By emphasizing the dual role that steppe nomads played in the human web, the authors support their key point in the Introduction about the interplay between cooperation and competition.

“Buddhist-style monasteries surrounded by supportive laymen therefore turned out to be as important an institutional invention as the portable, congregational religions of the Judaic-Christian-Muslim tradition. Like those religions, Buddhism made the trials and hardships of entry into the Old World Web more tolerable for millions of ordinary people.”

This quote exemplifies the authors’ departure from a Eurocentric perspective of history by emphasizing the importance of non-Abrahamic religions in the human web. Underscoring the centrality of Buddhism to human history, the authors note that both Christianity and Islam emulated aspects of Buddhism to enhance their own success in attracting followers. Later parts of the text explain that Buddhism was integral to the creation of China’s market society, the flow of information and goods to and from China, and the alliance between religion and politics that emerged after 200 CE.

“The rapid emergence of Islamic civilization is the preeminent example in human history of how ideas proclaimed by a single person can change the lives of millions and hundreds of mullions within a generation and across subsequent centuries. The Old World Web that made this possible already existed. What Muhammad did was to inject a powerfully attractive new message into the web, one that resonated far and wide.”

Here, the text emphasizes the importance of another missionary religion. Islam, through both military conquest and peaceable conversion, united vast swathes of the Old World Web under a single trade network, initiated close cooperation between urban merchants and nomadic tribes, and fostered mutual accommodation among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. In addition, Islam was chiefly responsible for bringing West Africa into the Old World Web more fully. Like the messages of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity, the message of Islam was attractive and resonant because it offered a means for people to give their ordinary lives meaning amid great insecurity and distress.

“An ambiguous alliance between rulers and religion was a leading feature of the new age. Official patronage of religious institutions—monasteries, temples, churches, mosques, and madrassas—benefitted donor and recipient alike, yet also limited arbitrary royal or imperial power by subordinating rulers to the same moral and religious rules as everyone else.”

Religion and politics became deeply entangled with the growth of the Old World Web, setting a critical precedent for power dynamics over subsequent centuries. In addition, the emergence of Islam shifted the alliance to include war and conquest. The equal subordination of ruler and ruled to divine powers facilitated later intellectual and philosophical movements that challenged traditional forms of authority, like monarchy, and gave rise to representative governments.

“No one supposed that the development of priest- and then warrior-led states in the Americas owed anything (except the bow) to Eurasian and African precedents. Rather, the dense webs of interaction that grew up in favored locations produced the same kinds of pressures to regulate and defend agricultural societies, producing broadly similar outcomes.”

This passage note parallels between the Old World Web and the less dense American Web, though they remained unentangled at the referenced point in history. The idea that similar challenges produced similar outcomes supports the authors’ discussion in Part 1about distinctly human behavioral characteristics and in Part 2 about the parallel emergence of agriculture in different and still disconnected regions of the world.

“China’s conservative policy of withdrawal of course became Western Europe’s opportunity. But a vast population, sustained civil peace, and superior artisan skills mean that China’s prestige and primacy faded away far more slowly than brash Europeans, dazzled by their own successes, readily recognized.”

At the same time that China repudiated commercial-imperial expansion, Western Europe sought to extend its commercial-imperial power. Thus, while both regions had made critical advancements in seafaring technology, Western Europe led the way in charting inhabited Atlantic coastlines and fusing the Old World Web and the American Web. Even though Western Europe emerged as the preeminent global power, however, Chinese influence in the Old World Web remained formidable due to the success of their market society.

“The ability of Europeans to pursue power and knowledge by buying innumerable guns and books meant that religious and political authorities could not possibly maintain a stable status quo.”

The text highlights distinguishing characteristics of European society that explained their emerging global preeminence as China retreated from commercial-imperial expansion and the Ottoman Empire failed to harness the labor of the rural majority for market purposes. Europe’s commercialization of warfare and invention of universities created a society with an influx of competing ideas and new information about distant lands as well as the material means to pursue conquest of those lands.

“In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a parallel fusion of knowledge brought the software needed to unite the world. In Iberia, the traditions of Arab astronomy and mathematics, often buttressed by Jewish scholars, combined with the observations and practical experiences of Spanish and Portuguese sailors to generate a truly mathematical science of navigation.”

Although Atlantic Europe came to dominate the global order by leveraging advancements in ship design and maritime knowledge, the text illustrates here that the combined efforts of the Old World Web facilitated such advancements. This quote does not mention China, but it too was critical to the enhanced understanding of navigation and the world’s inhabited coastlines. What allowed Atlantic Europe to emerge as the dominating force was the monetary and administrative resources to turn merchant ships into warships and build navies that had no comparison among their Old World counterparts.

“Attacking one’s enemy, seizing as many soldiers as possible, and selling them made excellent political sense. Underlying all this was the reality that African slavers had no attachment to the fate of African slaves, because there was then no shared sense of African identity.”

The text explains how Africans themselves facilitated the transatlantic slave trade. The participation of African politicians and merchants in the Old World Web is not distinct from their Eurasian counterparts, whose pursuit of political and economic power often came at the expense of their neighbors with whom they had no sense of solidarity. Moreover, by acknowledging the active role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, the authors wrest world history from Eurocentric perspectives that present Europeans as the only active subjects while relegating everyone else to the role of passive objects.

“Ultimately the most consequential element in this intellectual swirl of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was the so-called Scientific Revolution. In effect, it has not ended, because at its heart was the notion that experiment and unfettered reason are appropriate methods of inquiry, and that observation and experience need not bow to received authority.”

The authors consider the Scientific Revolution a critical aspect of the intellectual current that defined the period when the world’s webs fused, giving way to globalization and Atlantic Europe’s dominance in the global order. The text holds that the culture of scientific inquiry is distinct to Europe and conferred practical advantages in military, agriculture, mining, and metallurgy technologies. Additionally, this elevation of reason and inquiry over traditional forms of authority prompted revolutionary movements in the Atlantic world, as discussed in Part 7.

“These revolutions reverberating throughout the Atlantic world all had local and specific causes. But they also had causes in common: clamor for representative government or popular sovereignty, the rising power of commercial classes, population growth, fiscal woes of embattled monarchs. All these derived, to some degree, from the tighter linkages of the worldwide web.”

Rapid growth of trade and cities transformed the basis of politics from monarchy to representative government. Wealthy merchant and landowning classes grew resentful of the taxes levied on them, while monarchs demanded more taxes due to the financial strains of war. Moreover, the tightened web allowed the rhetoric of freedom, equality, limited monarchy, and legitimate government authority to circulate quickly and facilitated people’s ability to organize themselves into sociopolitical factions. Therefore, enslaved people also carried out revolts.

“The harnessing of fossil fuels, like the transition to agriculture a hundred centuries before, ratcheted up energy supplies available for human use, thereby permitting a vast increase in human numbers and wealth. Where the demographic transition (in its later stages) slowed population growth, the expanded energy harvest meant that for the first time in history, mass poverty became unnecessary.”

Although other sections of the text draw attention to the environmental consequences of increased fossil fuel usage, this passage emphasizes the benefits. In stating that mass poverty became unnecessary, the authors make two key suggestions about human society and behavior: one, that the concentration of wealth and inequality in the distribution of resources is largely deliberate, and two, that humans as a whole will pursue greater wealth, even at the expense of the environment and even if that collective wealth will not be distributed evenly.

“But just as the world’s systems of forced labor attained their maximum historical size, something strange happened: the systems were dismantled. Slavery, which had existed for at least 5,000 years, and had seemed part of the natural order of human affairs, in many societies came to be seen as immoral. Simultaneously, its economic logic began to weaken, its political support waned, and its opponents organized. All these developments show the worldwide web at work.”

The authors note that the tightening of the global web increased the demand for products, thereby greatly expanding enslavement and serfdom. At the same time, intellectual and philosophical currents, most notably the Enlightenment and its rhetoric of freedom and equality, as well as economic currents, like the growth of capitalism and the cost of slave rebellions, made enslavement and serfdom incompatible with progress. Moreover, a tightened web circulated information faster. Intellectual trends, economic concerns, and the rapid spread of information coalesced to bring about the abolition of forced labor systems.

“In international politics, war and its aftermath also promoted tighter interaction, both competitive and cooperative. The pitiless military competition of World War I brought a closer interaction, both among allies who had to integrate their planning and operations, and among enemies who had to study one another closely and copy successful innovations quickly.”

This quote underscores the authors’ assertion in the Introduction that the interplay of cooperation and competition characterizes webs. The authors demonstrate that although World War I and its impact disturbed the flow of goods, people, and information through the web due to nationalist and autarkic policies, it also stimulated greater international cooperation in the ways noted here as well as through the creation of international political organizations.

“The cosmopolitan web encompassed the habitable globe, all the world’s peoples and ecosystems, in a swirl of kaleidoscopic interaction. This made it harder to conceal the ethnic frictions and economic cleavages that beset the world, and perhaps harder to control them. On balance it was of differentiation: the ever-tightening web helped concentrate wealth and power and highlight the differences between those who had it and those who did not.”

Throughout the text, the authors note that the expansion and tightening of webs fosters greater inequality on various levels. Here, they discuss the 20th century, when globalization was in full swing. At the same time that wealth and power were being concentrated among a minority in certain regions of the world, information and ideas flowed faster than ever. Moreover, the dynamic replicated on lower socioeconomic levels. Thus, the 20th century illustrates how globalization created a volatile mix of factors that rendered human society unstable, and this instability continues today.

“The tendency of complex society to generate and maintain social inequalities, evident throughout history, in combination with cheap information and thus greater knowledge of such inequalities, is a combustible mix. Add yet more dangerous weapons than those already in existence, and the chances of cataclysmic violence seems depressingly good. That makes it prudent to strive to reduce such inequalities, a goal that runs counter to long-term trends of recent centuries and perhaps to cherished notions of freedom as well.”

J. R. McNeill again emphasizes that the expansion and tightening of webs fosters an atmosphere ripe for instability and violence because it increases inequality at the same time that it accelerates the flow of information. Given scientific and technological advancements, especially in weaponry, he questions humanity’s continued survival. McNeill’s suggestion for avoiding the devastating consequences of such a volatile mix is to reduce inequality.