A Brief History of the Human Race

[The book] begins with an ... exploration of why human history did not begin until the relatively recent past. Modern humans have been a presence for at least 50,000 years, but it was not until the ninth or tenth millennium B.C. that history became a runaway process in the Near East. [The author] gives an ... explanation for why this happened then and there ... [He] then explores the premodern cultures that developed in Australia, the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia ... With the birth of Islam in the seventh century A.D., [there is] the emergence of the first globalizing civilization in history. Under the caliphate and then the Ottomans, Islam became the prevalent culture throughout much of Eurasia and Africa ... The modern world emerge[s] from the ... industrial revolution in eighteenth-century Britain. The process has led to a more homogeneous world than has been before existed, and a world marked by great inequalities between peoples. [The author] explores these tensions through a discussion of Islamic fundamentalism and the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, bringing [the book] to the present.