The Human Web A Birds-eye View Of World History

The Human web is an impressive amalgam of world history chronicled by the illustrious and respected father and son historian, who has unfolded the theme around the gossamer of human connections and evolution. They have perfectly drawn the picture of human race as revolving around the unitary maelstrom of cooperation and competition and the subsequent spread of imagination, information, collaboration and competitiveness around the globe as embodying the overarching construction of human history and development.  In this perspective both William McNeil by being a world historian and J.R. McNeil as an environmentalist makes splendiferous concoction of collaboration that culminates a glaring and irradiating phantasm of human experience spreading over the stretch of twelve millennia.  Whether small or large, unthetered or condensed, these webs provided the superhighways for the progression of thoughts, movement of ideas, transportation of goods, shifting of power and money within and extending across the culture, societies, borders and nations.

From the thin localized web that first came into being in the times of our distant ancestors were constructed through the rise of expression, migration and primordial agricultural caucus. Both the authors thus take us through the journey of thin localized webs to the condensed, more interactive and congested metropolitan webs that flourished around the centers of Sumer, Athens and Timbuktu, till the electrified lattice of todays intertwined world wide web that came into being as a result of human ambition for efficiency, speed and spread of reach to engineer increasingly complex social organization that mated its longing of wealth and power though by seeding inequity and societal antagonism. They tended to marry them in the vortex of collaboration and competition that encompasses the whole world, thus in this way the authors has tended to show the significance of web as being the cornerstone of world history. Neils in their own way has given us the synthesizing portrayal of larger patterns of world history and her evolution in a richer, uncluttered and condensed delineation.

Throughout the history human fashioned and utilized symbols to synthesize web that formed the basis of communication on agreed-upon connotation and with the progress in time it passed on and evolved to inculcate greater breadth and depth thorough the age of increasing cooperation and dissension. Until we reached the age of communication technology that gave rise to the genesis of alphabetic writing and electronic communication devices resulting in a truly unified state of world existing as a cosmopolitan web chiseled through the pedigree of cooperation and conflict. So much so that the dissemination of both the good and bad technologies have started occurring almost expeditiously.

The sprawling and unfurling of ideas, information and observation and in the ever -losing web of communication and interaction characterizes the history of world. Thus the emergence of new technologies that renders newer tools like the origination of bureaucratic governments (for administering defense against challenging elements) origination of alphabetic writing (for comprehensive communication across the spectrum) and as the writers put it portable, congregational, non-local religions (for addressing the specter of conspicuous polarity in society as a consequence of complex societies by creating a concept of better and equal life hereafter, inserting the code of morality to address the question of cohesion which they exhibited in the smaller, isolated villages). All these developments lead to the creation of metropolitan web that seeped into earliest civilization through Southeast Asia, Middle East. Furthermore such connections of independent were augmented by traders and germinated innovation diffusion. 

Authors also contend that indispositions and economic relations had also been the result of this inter-web coupling. Resultantly the elaborations that culminated over these developments over the age further congealed inter-web communication while spurring velocity across different spectrums. The authors elaborate it by an example that though agriculture had been developed in different areas independently but the steam engine was made only once. The current worldwide multiracial web of synergism and competition got escalated by the capitalization of creation and innovation, the exploitation of energy sources and the advancement in electronic communication. Such advances in society increased complexities and social inequalities such technological improvements especially in the field of communication shed painful light on the societal disparity and inequality thus creating a dangerous incendiary mix.

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