Worlds Together, Worlds Apart

Citation

Tignor, R., Adelman, J., Aron, S., Kotkin, S., Marchand, S., Prakash, G., & Tsin, M. (2014). Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World, Volume 2: From 1000 CE to the Present (4th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Chapter Summary

This is the second volume of the two-volume split of the fourth edition. It begins at 1000 CE and runs to the early 2010s in twelve chapters (Chapters 10–21) and an epilogue; Chapters 10 and 11 also close Volume 1, so a two-semester course has a shared overlap. Each chapter is built around a single dated "world history story" rather than a region: the publisher lists examples such as the spread of the Black Death, the age of exploration, alternatives to nineteenth-century capitalism and the rise of modern nation-states and empires. Within that frame, most chapters move across many regions at once. The publisher describes the fourth edition as streamlined and shortened compared with the third, with new study tools aimed at critical thinking and connections across time and place.

Chapter 10: Becoming "The World," 1000–1300 CE

The volume opens with the centuries in which Afro-Eurasia's regions became tied together by trade and conquest. Placing the start at 1000 CE gives the second half of the course a starting point before the Mongols and the voyages of exploration.

Chapter 11: Death and Recovery in Afro-Eurasia, 1350–1600

A story of catastrophe and rebuilding: the Black Death, which the publisher names among the book's central stories, and the recovery of states and societies across Afro-Eurasia in its aftermath.

Chapters 12–14: Contact, Commerce, and Colonization (1450s–1600); Worlds Unsettled (1600–1750); Cultures of Splendor and Power (1600–1780)

The early modern chapters follow the oceanic voyages and the colonization that came with new trade (the "age of exploration" story), then a period of instability across the world in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and finally the courtly and imperial cultures of the long eighteenth century.

Chapters 15–18: Reordering the World (1750–1800); Alternative Visions of the Nineteenth Century; Nations and Empires (1850–1914); An Unsettled World (1800–1914)

The age of revolution is treated as a reordering of the world in Chapter 15. Chapter 16 looks at the alternatives to nineteenth-century capitalism proposed in the nineteenth century. Chapter 17 treats the rise of modern nation-states together with the empires they built, and Chapter 18 returns to the instability of the century leading to 1914.

Chapters 19–21: Of Masses and Visions of the Modern (1910s–1930s); The Three-World Order (1940–1975); Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: Globalization (1975–1999)

The twentieth century is told in three stories: the era of mass politics and competing visions of modernity between the world wars; the division of the postwar world into three blocs; and the globalization of the late twentieth century, which gives its name to the book.

Epilogue: 2000–2013

A short epilogue brings the narrative into the early twenty-first century, up to the years just before publication.

Key Concepts

Chapters 10–11

• World history stories: the book's organizing unit, a dated global process around which a chapter is built, instead of a regional history.
• Afro-Eurasia: the connected landmass of Africa, Europe and Asia, the main stage of the early chapters.
• Death and recovery: the Black Death as a shared catastrophe across Afro-Eurasia and the rebuilding that followed.

Chapters 12–18

• Contact, commerce and colonization: the linked processes by which oceanic voyages created new trade and new colonial societies.
• Alternative visions: nineteenth-century alternatives to capitalism and to the prevailing order.
• Nations and empires: the simultaneous rise of nation-states and of the empires those states built before 1914.

Chapters 19–21 and Epilogue

• Mass society and the modern: the politics and culture of the masses in the interwar decades.
• Three-world order: the postwar division into the capitalist West, the communist bloc and the decolonizing "Third World".
• Globalization: the integration of the world economy and culture after 1975, the theme that names the book.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Global by design. Organizing each chapter around a world-scale story keeps comparison and connection at the centre and stops the narrative from defaulting to one region. The publisher presents this as the book's defining feature, and the chapter titles bear it out: none of the twelve is named after a single region or nation.
• Team authorship. The second volume is written by a team of seven historians led by Robert Tignor, and the range of the chapter stories, from Afro-Eurasian recovery to the three-world order, reflects a collective rather than a single-author perspective.
• Clear periodization. Every chapter carries explicit dates, so the volume doubles as a chronological framework for the period since 1000 CE.
• Leaner than earlier editions. The fourth edition was shortened and streamlined, which addresses the most common complaint about the early editions. Heather Streets, writing in World History Connected (2006) about the first edition, reported that her students found it long and hard going, although she valued its periodization.

Limitations

• Dated coverage. The narrative stops in 2013. Later events, and the scholarship of the following decade, appear only in the later editions (the publisher has since issued a seventh edition with expanded Indigenous history coverage).
• Regional continuity is harder to follow. Because chapters are organized by global story, a student wanting a continuous history of China, Africa or Latin America has to piece it together across chapters.
• Volume split and overlap. This volume repeats Chapters 10–11 from Volume 1 and leaves out everything before 1000 CE; there is also a three-volume version (Volumes 1, B and C) with different boundaries, so chapter ranges in a syllabus need checking.
• Thin public evidence on this edition. Few published reviews of the fourth edition are available; judgements about its depth rest mainly on the structure and on reviews of earlier editions.

Where It Fits in the Course

This volume serves the second half of a world-history survey, from about 1000 CE to the present. Among the course's other surveys, Bentley and colleagues' Traditions & Encounters and Bulliet and colleagues' The Earth and Its Peoples are full single-volume histories organized more by region within each period; Strayer and Nelson's Ways of the World is the brief, thematic alternative. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart sits between them: a full survey, but one whose every chapter is a global story. Streets's review describes one instructor's move from an early edition of this book to Traditions & Encounters, with readability and periodization as the deciding factors.

The specialized books on the list connect closely to particular chapters. Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony is the classic study of the thirteenth-century world system behind Chapter 10, and Jürgen Osterhammel's The Transformation of the World is a thematic, much deeper history of the nineteenth century of Chapters 15–18. Sebastian Conrad's What Is Global History? explains the connection-centred approach that the book's design embodies. The regional books, on Latin America, the modern Middle East and the Aztecs, supply continuous regional narratives that this book deliberately breaks up.

How to Use This Book

The volume suits first-year undergraduates in the second semester of a world-history survey, or any student who needs a structured narrative of the world since 1000 CE; no prior world-history course is assumed, though Chapters 10–11 assume some sense of the earlier Afro-Eurasian world.

• Reading order: read the chapters in order; each builds on the stories before it. Before reading a chapter, note its dates and title and ask what single global process it describes; after reading, write a paragraph summarizing that story and where it played out.
• Core chapters: 11 (death and recovery), 12 (contact and colonization), 15 (reordering the world), 17 (nations and empires), 20 (three-world order) and 21 (globalization) give the spine of the volume in a short course.
• Regional threads: keep a running timeline for two or three regions across chapters to compensate for the thematic structure, or pair the volume with one of the regional histories on the course list.
• Edition check: make sure the course uses this edition and volume; later editions have different authors, chapter titles and coverage, and the three-volume version divides the material differently.