World History
World History covers the Neolithic Revolution through the present, organized around interaction across regions - trade, migration, conquest, disease, and technology - rather than a civilization-by-civilization list of facts. Expect questions that ask why a development spread, why one society industrialized first, or what connected two distant regions.
Core anchors
- Neolithic Revolution (roughly 10,000 BCE): settled agriculture, food surplus, occupational specialization, and social stratification.
- River valley civilizations: Mesopotamia on the Tigris–Euphrates, Egypt on the Nile, the Indus cities, and Shang China on the Yellow River. Irrigation management and record-keeping (cuneiform, hieroglyphs) accompanied urban growth.
- Classical empires: Greece and Rome, Han China, Maurya and Gupta India - road and canal infrastructure, legal codes, and universalizing religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism's consolidation).
- Trade networks: Silk Roads, Indian Ocean monsoon trade, trans-Saharan caravans. The Mongol Empire's unification of Eurasia reduced transaction costs, spread technologies and plagues, and enforced a fragile peace.
- 1450–1750: Columbian Exchange, Atlantic slave trade, gunpowder empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal), Reformation, and the Ming–Qing transition.
- 1750–1914: Industrial Revolution, imperialism, nationalism, and the Meiji transformation of Japan.
- 1914–present: world wars, decolonization, Cold War bipolarity, globalization.
Worked example
Why did Eurasian populations grow after 1500 while Indigenous American populations collapsed? Maize and potatoes moved eastward and raised caloric yields in Eurasia; smallpox, measles, and influenza moved westward into populations with no acquired immunity, with forced labor and warfare compounding mortality. Silver from Potosí crossed the Pacific to Manila and into Chinese markets, integrating three continents into a single price system - an exchange, not a one-way transfer.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating civilizations as sealed containers rather than nodes in networks.
- Single-cause explanations of the Industrial Revolution (Britain's coal, capital, colonies, and agricultural surplus interacted).
- Collapsing centuries of change into a single "revolution" date.