Rise of the West

“The most stimulating and fascinating book that has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of mankind.” —H. R. Trevor-Roper, The New York Times Book Review

The Rise of the West, winner of the National Book Award for history in 1964, is famous for its ambitious scope and intellectual rigor. In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human cultures interacted at every stage of their history. The author suggests that from the Neolithic beginnings of grain agriculture to the present major social changes in all parts of the world were triggered by new or newly important foreign stimuli, and he presents a persuasive narrative of world history to support this claim.

In a retrospective essay titled “The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years,” McNeill shows how his book was shaped by the time and place in which it was written (1954–63). He discusses how historiography subsequently developed and suggests how his portrait of the world’s past in The Rise of the West should be revised to reflect these changes.

“The most lucid presentation of world history in narrative form that I know. While the story leads up to the predominance of the West in the modern age, it also takes full account of the expansion of civilization eastwards, as well as westwards, from its birthplace in the Fertile Crescent. I am sure that anyone who reads this book will gain from it a greater insight into the long and complicated historical process that has resulted in the world in which we are living today.” —Arnold Toynbee, author of A Study of History