Ways of the World: A Brief Global History

Citation

Strayer, R. W., & Nelson, E. W. (2022). Ways of the World: A Brief Global History (5th ed., value edition, combined volume). Bedford/St. Martin's.

Chapter Summary

The fifth edition runs to 23 chapters in six parts, preceded by a prologue, "From Cosmic History to Human History", and short sections on working with primary sources. Each part opens with a "Big Picture" essay that frames the period, and every chapter ends with "Conclusions and Reflections" followed by "Revisiting" questions on specifics and core ideas and "A Wider View". The value edition is the narrative text only: the publisher notes that the "Working with Evidence" and "Historians' Voices" source features belong to the comprehensive edition, available in the Achieve platform. The combined volume contains all chapters; Volume 1 covers Chapters 1–12 and Volume 2 Chapters 12–23.

Part 1: First Things First, to 600 B.C.E. (Chapters 1–2)

Chapter 1, "First Peoples; First Farmers: Most of History in a Single Chapter, to 3500 B.C.E." follows human migration out of Africa into Eurasia, Australia, the Americas and the Pacific, Paleolithic lifeways, and the transition to agriculture, ending with pastoral societies, agricultural villages and chiefdoms. Chapter 2, "First Civilizations: Cities, States, and Unequal Societies" examines the urban revolution, the erosion of equality through class and gender hierarchies, the rise of the state, and a comparison of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Part 2: Continuity and Change in the Second-Wave Era, 600 B.C.E.–600 C.E. (Chapters 3–6)

Three thematic chapters cover Eurasia and North Africa. Chapter 3, "State and Empire" sets Persians against Greeks and compares the Roman and Chinese empires, with India as a case of "intermittent empire". Chapter 4, "Culture and Religion" moves from Legalist, Confucian and Daoist answers in China through Indian religion, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, Greek rationalism, and the birth of Christianity compared with Buddhism. Chapter 5, "Society and Inequality" treats class in China, caste in India, slavery in the Roman Empire and contrasting patriarchies. Chapter 6, "Commonalities and Variations" turns to Africa, the Americas and Pacific Oceania, from Meroë, Axum and the Maya to Chavín, Moche, Bantu Africa and the peoples of the Pacific.

Part 3: Civilizations and Encounters during the Third-Wave Era, 600–1450 (Chapters 7–12)

Chapter 7, "Commerce and Culture" organizes long-distance exchange as Silk Roads, Sea Roads across the Indian Ocean, Sand Roads across the Sahara, and an American network. Chapter 8, "China and the World" covers Tang and Song China, the tribute system, Korea, Vietnam and Japan, and Chinese Buddhism. Chapter 9, "The Worlds of Islam" traces the new religion and its empire, then compares Islam's encounters in India, Anatolia, West Africa and Spain. Chapter 10, "The Worlds of Christendom" looks at Christianity's contraction in Asia and Africa, Byzantium and Russia, and the West in comparative perspective. Chapter 11, "Pastoral Peoples on the Global Stage: The Mongol Moment" presents the Mongol empire as a Eurasian network and ends with the plague. Chapter 12, "The Worlds of the Fifteenth Century" surveys the world around 1500, from Paleolithic and village societies to Ming China, Europe, the Islamic empires, and the Aztec and Inca empires.

Part 4: The Early Modern World, 1450–1750 (Chapters 13–15)

Three "transformations" chapters: Chapter 13, "Political Transformations: Empires and Encounters" (European empires in the Americas, the Great Dying and the Columbian Exchange, the Russian, Qing, Mughal and Ottoman empires); Chapter 14, "Economic Transformations: Commerce and Consequence" (Asian commerce, silver, the fur trade and the transatlantic slave system); Chapter 15, "Cultural Transformations: Religion and Science" (the globalization of Christianity, renewal in the Islamic world, China and India, and the birth of modern science).

Part 5: The European Moment in World History, 1750–1900 (Chapters 16–19)

The part essay addresses "European Centrality and the Problem of Eurocentrism". Chapter 16, "Atlantic Revolutions, Global Echoes" compares the North American, French, Haitian and Latin American revolutions and follows abolition, nationalism and early feminism. Chapter 17, "Revolutions of Industrialization" studies Britain's industrial society, the United States and Russia, and Latin America. Chapter 18, "Colonial Encounters in Asia, Africa, and Oceania, 1750–1950" compares colonial economies and identity change. Chapter 19, "Empires in Collision" compares China and the Ottoman Empire, and contrasts Japan's Meiji modernization.

Part 6: The Long Twentieth Century, 1900–present (Chapters 20–23)

Chapter 20, "War and Revolution, 1900–1950" covers both world wars, Soviet communism, the Depression, fascism and the Chinese Revolution. Chapter 21, "A Changing Global Landscape, 1950–present" treats the Cold War, decolonization and the end of communism. The last two chapters, "Global Processes", take a thematic view: Chapter 22 on technology, the global economy, social change and private life, and Chapter 23 on population, migration, disease, cultural identity, religion and the environment in the Anthropocene, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key Concepts

Parts 1–2

• Turning points: the emergence of humankind, its globalization, the agricultural revolution and civilization, the framework of the Part 1 essay.
• Second-wave civilizations: the empires, religions and social orders of 600 B.C.E.–600 C.E., studied thematically rather than region by region.
• Patriarchy and inequality: hierarchies of class, caste, slavery and gender, compared across societies.

Parts 3–4

• Third-wave era: 600–1450, defined by new civilizations and transregional interaction.
• Silk, Sea and Sand Roads: the overland, maritime and trans-Saharan networks of exchange.
• Columbian Exchange and the Great Dying: the biological and demographic consequences of European empires in the Americas.

Parts 5–6

• The European moment: Europe's period of global centrality, 1750–1900, and the problem of Eurocentrism in explaining it.
• Atlantic revolutions: the linked political revolutions of North America, France, Haiti and Latin America.
• Globalization and the Anthropocene: accelerating economic entanglement and human-driven environmental change in the long twentieth century.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Brevity with a thematic design. Twenty-three chapters cover the whole human past, and the second-wave and early modern parts are organized by theme (state, culture, society; political, economic, cultural transformations) rather than region. This makes comparison the default, as in the four-way comparison of Islamic encounters in Chapter 9 and the Roman–Chinese comparison in Chapter 3.
• Built-in study structure. The part-opening "Big Picture" essays and the end-of-chapter "Conclusions and Reflections" and "Revisiting Core Ideas" sections give each chapter a clear argument and review route. The publisher describes the "Core Ideas" questions as the most essential questions accompanying the narrative.
• Up-to-date and broad coverage. The fifth edition revised the material on early humans, the Little Ice Age, Islam in the Indian Ocean and southern India, the plague's long-term effects, the links between industrialization and the climate crisis, and modern pandemics including COVID-19. Africa, the Americas and Oceania receive dedicated chapters and sections throughout.
• Reflection on history itself. Several chapter conclusions address historical method, for example "Historians, Bias, and the Mongols", "Who Makes History?" and "World History and the Making of Meaning".

Limitations

• No primary sources in the value edition. The source features are in the comprehensive edition and the Achieve platform; a course using this edition needs a separate source reader.
• Breadth over detail. Compressing the world into 23 chapters means individual states and dynasties get far less space than in longer surveys; political narrative especially is condensed into comparisons.
• Thematic organization can scatter regions. China, for example, appears across Chapters 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 15, 19 and 21, so a student wanting a continuous regional story must assemble it.
• Several versions in circulation. The book exists as a comprehensive edition, a value edition, split volumes, a "with Sources" edition and an AP edition starting in 1200, with differing contents.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the general surveys on the course list, this is the brief one. Bentley and colleagues' Traditions & Encounters (38 chapters), Bulliet and colleagues' The Earth and Its Peoples and the Norton Worlds Together, Worlds Apart give fuller regional narratives; Ways of the World suits a course that wants a lighter main text and more time for primary sources, essays and discussion, or students who need a compact overview before tackling a longer survey. Its thematic chapters also make it a good companion for comparative questions when a longer narrative text is the main book.

Within the course, Sebastian Conrad's What Is Global History? explains the approach that the Big Picture essays put into practice, and David Christian's Maps of Time develops at length the cosmic and deep-history perspective introduced in the prologue. Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony deepens Chapters 7 and 11, and Jürgen Osterhammel's The Transformation of the World is the scholarly expansion of Part 5. The regional books on the list, on Latin America, the modern Middle East and the Aztecs, extend individual chapters such as 12, 17 and 19.

How to Use This Book

The book suits first-year university students and advanced secondary students with no prior background in world history; it can carry a one-semester course from prehistory to the present or a two-semester sequence split at Chapter 12, which both volumes share.

• Core: the prologue, every Big Picture essay, and the conclusion of each chapter. Read the part essay before the chapters and again afterwards.
• One-semester selection: Chapters 1–2, 3–4, 7, 9, 11, 13–14, 16–18, 20–21 and one of 22–23 give a coherent path through the main turning points; the remaining chapters can be assigned to individual students for presentations.
• Study routine: answer the "Revisiting Core Ideas" questions in writing for each chapter; they are the backbone of the book's argument. Use the "A Wider View" prompts for essay practice.
• Alongside it: pair the value edition with a primary-source reader (the companion reader or the Achieve source features if available), and add one deeper book from the course list for a term paper. Check which version a course uses before buying, because the AP and "with Sources" versions differ in content.