History on a Wide Screen

THE RISE OF THE WEST by William H. McNeill. 829 pages. University of Chicago Press. $12.50.

In 101 B.C. soldiers of China's Han dynasty, pushing west, garrisoned the Gerghana oasis in what is now Iran. The consequences were silk and pestilence: merchants for the first time had a protected land route to carry their goods--and their ills--between China and the Mideastern Parthian empire (with the Roman dominions beyond). The opening of the silk road effected what Historian William McNeill calls the "closure of the ecumene"--his term for the great community of civilization, thus linked together across the land mass of Eurasia from extreme East to farthest West. From that time or even earlier, there have been no entirely independent civilizations.*

Instead, for more than 1,500 years, a strife-ridden but never-quite-failing balance was maintained among China, India, the Roman-European West, and at the pivot point--the Middle East. All four had cultural traditions of their own; but technologies, crops, philosophies, military methods and art forms were traded back and forth, along with epidemic disease. Invasions of horse-riding nomads from the steppes were another recurring plague; but even the greatest barbarian onslaught, the Mongol explosion of the 13th century, was finally fought off or absorbed.

Remarkable Synthesis. Eventually, the balance was upset. Beginning about A.D. 1500, Western Europe exploited a radically improved seafaring technology to become the new pivot point and center of civilization. In the process, McNeill sees the original Eurasian ecumene absorbed and replaced by a new globe-girdling and all-embracing community of civilization. And with the rise of the West, modern times begin.

These, in brutal brevity, are the organizing ideas of a remarkable new synthesis of world history from 6000 B.C. to the present day. And the stress is on "world," for Author McNeill, chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago, comes amazingly close to getting it all in. He makes the politics of China or the religious maelstroms of India as clear and relevant as the French Revolution or any more standard topic; and he bites down hard on the grit of factual detail with repeated appeals to archaeology, economics, demography, linguistics, engineering, art history.

Cultural Interaction. McNeill's title would appear to give the lie direct to Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. His book indeed emerges, though he nowhere claims such a purpose, as an arresting alternative to the speculations and systems of Arnold Toynbee, too. Here are no gloomy metaphysics about the soul of a culture or its organic life cycle, no simplistic tabulations of 21 separate civilizations mechanically rising and then running down in helpless isolation from one another.

In McNeill's view, "Western civilization" has become the leadership of world civilization. The emergent Asian and African peoples do not challenge Western civilization as such, even as they throw off the yoke of European rule. In fact, these peoples are developing in almost exact ratio to their adoption of Western techniques, attitudes and ideas. Thus they are not threats but enhancements of Western civilization. In plain, unflappable prose, McNeill gives a wide-screen vision of the world-wide cultural interactions that have moved and continue to move mankind.

*Excepting the American beginnings made by the Mayans and Incas, where cultural contact with Eurasia, across the Pacific, was early and slight.

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