The continents differ markedly in their coastal proximity and the extent of their river basins. In this respect, Europe is especially blessed: 51 percent of Europe’s land area is within one hundred kilometers of the oceans, and 25 percent of Europe’s land area is within twenty kilometers of a river. Around 80 percent of Europe’s population lives ne

There was no rest for the weary in the wake of the Persian-Greek Wars. Just years after the end of those long wars, Athens and Sparta entered into the Peloponnesian Wars, 431–404 BCE, which led to the downfall of the Athenian Republic. Aside from giving us the second great book of Western history, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, the defeat of Athen

Even today, the Americas remain sparsely populated relative to Europe and Asia. The population densities of the continents (population per km2) as of 2018 are estimated as follows: Asia, 95; Europe, 73; Africa, 34; North America, 22; South America, 22; Australia, 3.

The great dispersal from Africa, and migrations of modern humans across the planet, culminated in the birth of permanent settlements in dispersed villages and the so-called Neolithic revolution—the advent of farming around eleven thousand years ago. Initially, a small proportion of humanity took up the permanent cultivation of crops. Over time, mor

The Song Dynasty might justly be considered the world’s first large-scale capitalist economy: land was privately owned, merchant families invested in joint-stock companies, international trade was open, harbors were improved, and Chinese ocean-based trade expanded throughout the Indian Ocean to East Africa and the Red Sea. A navy established in the

The brutality of the Anglo-American system is underscored by the fact that the United States was essentially the only country in the world where it took a civil war to end slavery. Even tsarist Russia ended serfdom peacefully, with Tsar Alexander’s Emancipation Decree of 1861, just as the United States, ostensibly the land of freedom, was sliding i

The best evidence suggests that Homo sapiens emerged first on the African savannah around two hundred thousand years ago, the start of a period known as the Middle Paleolithic, though we must emphasize that genetic and fossil discoveries continue to alter the estimated chronology.

Two voyages of the 1490s—those of Christopher Columbus from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the Caribbean in 1492 and of Vasco de Gama from Lisbon to Calicut, India, in 1498 and back in 1499—decisively changed the direction of world history. Humanity’s understanding of the world and our place in it, the organization of the global economy, the center

Like some insect societies, but unlike other great apes, Homo sapiens became eusocial, or highly social. At the same time, in-group sociality was matched by aggression toward out-groups. Cooperation within the group was forged by war between groups.