The McNeills' account depicts the human past as the story of networks of interaction—communication, trade, missionary work, raids, artistic movements, technology transfer and so on. Humans, the book contends, have always lived in a vast global “web” of cooperation and competition. Every culture, from prehistoric East Africa to ancient China to the Andes cities of the Inca, has relied upon ideas and goods imported from across the world. Globalization is as old as humanity. The only thing that changes is its intensity, scale and complexity.
In the Stone Age, knowledge of the bow and arrow spread around the world by foot and hoof over millennia. Today new microchip designs flash across the multibillion electromagnetic nodes of the Internet in seconds. Throughout history, the global web has drawn in ever more people, consumed ever-greater energies, because humans have sought more effective ways to wield power over each other and their environment. Some succeed in this effort, and prosper. The rest die.
Unlike most of the drivel produced by academic historians, this account explains and illuminates as well as simply narrates. It builds an overwhelming case that the expansion of civilizations and the quest for power underlying it have been the driving forces in human history.
Along the way, the McNeills convincingly show how Europeans, contrary to right-wing dogma, attained their global power by imitation and accident, not inherent superiority. Europe conquered the world by adopting foreign innovations like Chinese gunpowder and Arabic numerals. It also exploited accidents of history and geography. Europeans went on to slaughter and enslave much of humanity as a result, but the McNeills persuasively demonstrate that the drive for domination has always been a human trait. It is as much inherent in Native Americans, Muslims, Africans and Asians as Europeans. The sanctimonious propaganda of left-wing political correctness is nowhere to be found in this book.
What The Human Web doesn't discuss much is the idea of progress. It identifies a direction to history, in the expansion from simple, local ways of life to staggering global complexity. It suggests an underlying mechanism, in the innate human urge for dominance. Are people today better off as a result of these forces? Citizens of the developed countries are more comfortable and free than 500 years ago. But they enjoy this lifestyle only because global corporations and American firepower keep the rest of the world poor and subservient. In that sense, humanity hasn't come very far since god-kings of Mesopotamia raised ziggurats on the corpses of slaves, 3,500 years before George W. Bush became emperor of Iraq.
