The first context for the study of world history is change over time. The last five centuries of the human journey, which constitute the subject matter of this book, need to be understood in the context of human history as a whole. That history occupied roughly the last 250,000 years, conventionally divided into three major phases, based on the kind of technology that was most widely practiced. The enormously long Paleolithic age, with its gathering and hunting way of life, accounts for 95 percent or more of the time that humans have occupied the planet. People utilizing a stone-age Paleolithic technology initially settled every major landmass on the earth and constructed the first human societies. Then beginning with the first Agricultural Revolution, about 12,000 years ago, the domestication of plants and animals increasingly became the primary means of sustaining human life and societies. In giving rise to agricultural villages and chiefdoms, to pastoral communities depending on their herds of animals, and to state- and city-based civilizations, this agrarian way of life changed virtually everything and fundamentally reshaped human societies and their relationship to the natural order. Finally, in the centuries after 1500 two major changes ushered in a new phase of the human story. One was the new network of relationships between the eastern and western hemispheres following the voyages of Columbus. And the second, beginning around 1750, involved a quite sudden spurt in the rate of technological change, which we know as the Industrial Revolution. These enormous processes once again reshaped virtually every aspect of human life and gave rise to new kinds of societies that we call “modern.” Volume 2 of Ways of the World turns the spotlight of history on this distinctive chapter of world history.

Within these past five centuries many questions about change arise. What lay behind the emergence of a new balance of global power after 1500, one that featured the growing prominence of Europeans on the world stage? What global changes did the Atlantic slave trade generate? Why did the ancient civilizations of Russia and China explode in revolution during the twentieth century? How might we explain the emergence of Islamic radicalism as well as global environmentalism during the final third of that century?

A focus on change provides an antidote to a persistent tendency of human thinking that historians call “essentialism.” A more common term is “stereotyping.” It refers to our inclination to define particular groups of people with an unchanging or essential set of characteristics. Women are nurturing; peasants are conservative; Americans are aggressive; Hindus are religious. Serious students of history soon become aware that every significant category of people contains endless divisions and conflicts and that those human communities are constantly in flux. Peasants may often accept the status quo, except of course when they rebel, as they frequently have. Americans have experienced periods of official isolationism and withdrawal from the world as well as times of aggressive engagement with it. Things change.

But some things persist, even if they also change. We should not allow an emphasis on change to blind us to the continuities of human experience. A recognizably Chinese state has operated for more than 2,000 years. Slavery and patriarchy persisted as human institutions for thousands of years until they were challenged in recent centuries, and in various forms they exist still. The teachings of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam have endured for centuries, though with endless variations and transformations.