This overview of world history summarizes how the modern world has been shaped since 1500 AD. By exploring the most significant changes over the last five hundred years, Woodruff explains the extent to which global forces have been responsible for shaping both the past and the present. In his attempt to understand the whole, the complexity and diversity of the past, he shifts his attention to the whole rather than the parts, and focuses on the relationships between states, as the increasing convergence and interdependence of nations justify the adoption of a broader, more pluralistic perspective. The book discusses the rise and fall of empires and civilizations, and shows how many of the problems of the modern world are a legacy of Western domination.

The author is convinced that we are at a critical transitional stage in world history, in which the world is no longer shaped exclusively by Western modernism, but increasingly by the values of all cultures. With the shift of geopolitical and geo-economic power towards Asia and the growing global influence of religious fundamentalism and revolutionary nationalism, the need for a global perspective is more acute than ever. In this universal study, the approach, both thematic and chronological, is necessarily personal, temporal, and spatial. It is understood that only in historical terms can we comprehend the transformation of the modern world.

● William Woodruff is professor emeritus at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Loukianos Chasiotis is associate professor of modern and contemporary history at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.