Explorations in the New Economic History: Essays in Honor of Douglas C. North Book

Outdated perhaps, but still awesome!
This book was published in 1963. I thought: "Never mind the 820 pages, I'll read through it in about a month, it will be too outdated". Well... yes it is outdated (as the author acklowledges in an accompanying essay), but nevertheless it took about half a year for me to absorb all of it.

McNeill is the first one ever to have written a really global world history (Spengler and Toynbee before him were just speculative theories). Above all, I appreciated his extensive elaboration on the Middle East, China and India, and especially the crucial role of the waves of nomadic people in Eurasia. My narrow-minded eurocentered history view has been changed forever!

Of course, 50 years later, much of the details are not up-to-date any more, but the basic asumption of the book, that human civilisation has grown (with ups and downs) through the never-ending interaction between humans, institutions, and civilizations, this asumption remains true, although McNeill himself, in his accompanying essay (dated 1990) enumerates some fundamental flaws in his story (surprisingly, he thinks he has given too little attention to Chinese history). Some of these flaws he has adjusted in his book The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History, written with his son John. Nevertheless 'The Rise of the West' remains to me one of the grandest historical works of the 20th century.