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Book description

Volume 1 of the Cambridge World History is an introduction to both the discipline of world history and the earliest phases of world history up to 10,000 BCE. In Part I leading scholars outline the approaches, methods, and themes that have shaped and defined world history scholarship across the world and right up to the present day. Chapters examine the historiographical development of the field globally, periodisation, divergence and convergence, belief and knowledge, technology and innovation, family, gender, anthropology, migration, and fire. Part II surveys the vast Palaeolithic era, which laid the foundations for human history, concentrating on the most recent phases of hominin evolution, the rise of Homo sapiens and the very earliest human societies through to the end of the last ice age. Anthropologists, archaeologists, historical linguists and historians examine climate and tools, language, and culture, as well as offering regional perspectives from across the world.

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 18 - The Pleistocene colonization and occupation of Australasia
    pp 433-460
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the mid-nineteenth century, along with the first stirrings of interest in the history of technology among the literate elite, a phenomenon appeared that was to have a far greater impact upon the general population. World's fairs and other technological exhibitions privileged the most recent innovations rather than historical ones. It may seem odd to list exhibitions, museums, and magazines in a chapter on the historiography of technology, but popular perceptions and enthusiasms for various technologies form a presence around which historians of technology carry out their scholarly pursuits, for popular ideas on technology and its history are imbued with a philosophy historians call Whiggism. There are two aspects to the Whiggish interpretation of history. The first is a belief in progress. The second side of the popular history of technology: patriotism. Paralleling the explosion of scholarship was a continued popular interest in technology. In recent years, SHOT and the technological history field have broadened their perspective in several directions.
  • 19 - The Pleistocene colonization and occupation of the Americas
    pp 461-476
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter deals with the peculiar bond between humans and fire: what, in the course of history, have we humans done with fire, and what has fire done to us. Four successive phases in human history are distinguished: the phase before domestication; the phase of domestication of fire; the phase that in analogy with the subsequent phase of industrialization may be called agrarianization; and industrialization. A new phase (fifth phase), in which fire and fuel will play a very different role than in the still current phase of industrialization, is discussed. The history of the human bond with fire and fuel has aspects that relate to practically all academic disciplines, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Fire is a process of combustion of organic matter. A momentary conjunction of three conditions, Matter, Energy, and Information (MEI), is needed for it to occur.

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