A third context that informs world history involves the connections among different and often distant peoples. World history is less about what happened within particular civilizations or cultures than about the processes and outcomes of their interactions or encounters with one another. Focusing on these connections—whether those of conflict or more peaceful exchange—represents an effort to counteract a habit of thinking about particular peoples, states, or cultures as self-contained or isolated communities. Despite the historical emergence of many separate and distinct societies, none of them developed alone. Each was embedded in a network of relationships with both near and more distant peoples.

The growing depth and significance of such cross-cultural relationships, known now as globalization, has been a distinguishing feature of the modern era. The voyages of Columbus brought the peoples of the Eastern and Western hemispheres into sustained contact for the first time with enormous global consequences. Several centuries later Europeans took advantage of their industrial power to bring much of the world temporarily under their control. The technologies of the twentieth century have intertwined the economies, societies, and cultures of the world’s peoples more tightly than ever before. During these past five centuries, the encounter with strangers, or at least with their ideas and practices, was everywhere among the most powerful motors of change in human societies.

Changes, comparisons, and connections—all of them operating on a global scale—represent three contexts or frameworks that can help us bring some coherence to the multiple and complex stories of modern world history. They will recur repeatedly in the pages that follow.