The voyages of Columbus and his successors linked the two hemispheres, and this chapter surveys the positive and negative biological, cultural, and social consequences of this “Columbian Exchange.” Among these were the spread of disease and the transfer of plants, animals, and consumer goods, along with economic changes that led to social protests, revolts, warfare, and forced migrations in an increasingly interdependent world. Religious transformations, including the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the creation of Sikhism, were interwoven with all of these developments, as religions, too, migrated and morphed. New urban social settings and cultural institutions, such as coffee and tea houses, theatres, and salons, offered men—and sometimes women—opportunities for entertainment, sociability, consumption, and the exchange of ideas, but the increasing contacts among peoples also resulted in more rigid notions of human difference.

This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.

This chapter discusses earlier histories of the world, and explains the social and cultural approach of this book. It lays out the book’s five chapters.

This chapter discusses the Paleolithic and Neolithic, thus covering the vast majority of human history. It examines the more complex social structures and cultural forms that plant and animal domestication enabled, as the simple stone hand axes of the Paleolithic were replaced by more specialized tools, small kin groups gave way to ever larger villages, egalitarian foragers became stratified by gender distinctions and divisions of wealth and power, and spirits were transformed into hierarchies of divinities worshipped at permanent human-built structures. The basic social pattern set in early agricultural societies—with most people farming the land and a small elite who lived off their labor—was remarkably resilient, lasting well into the twentieth century for most of the world.

The transformations of the modern era have led to today’s vast social divisions between wealth and poverty, but also created a human community that is interconnected on a global scale, processes that are examined in this chapter. Major economic and political changes, such as industrialization and de-industrialization, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the rise and collapse of communism, and the expansion of nationalism, have intersected with social and cultural changes within a framework of rapidly increasing population and human impact on the environment. International movements for social justice have called for greater egalitarianism and understanding, while ethnic, religious, and social divisions have led to brutality, genocides, and war. Technological developments in agriculture, medicine, and weaponry have both extended human life and extinguished it at levels unimagined in earlier eras, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing long-standing social hierarchies and cultural patterns.

Most of the classical empires collapsed in the middle of the first millennium, but despite this collapse various regions of the world became more culturally, commercially, and politically integrated in the millennium that followed, a process traced in this chapter. Mercantile and religious networks, including Islam, linked growing cities and glittering courts, where hereditary rulers and their entourages of elites developed institutions and ceremonies that strengthened royal authority, and created courtly cultures with distinctive codes of behavior. All of these relied for their wealth on a spread and intensification of agriculture, which happened in both the eastern and western hemispheres, and was interwoven with changes in social and gender structures. Cites such as Constantinople, Tenochtitlan, and Hangzhou grew into large metropolises, and religion, trade, and diplomacy motivated people to travel, creating regional and transregional zones of exchange in goods and ideas.