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Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History (review)

This book covers a series of issues dealing with agriculture, nomadology, gender, and trade in a global context. These are the topics that are dealt with in the first of the two parts that divide the book. The first essay gives an overview of historians and theoretical apparatus in regard to world history. In his article, J. H. Bentley provides a great service to historians interested in world history. He reviews the way in which historians such as Oswald Spengler viewed the world by classifying civilization in an interesting and bizarre manner (Appollinian, Magian, and Faustian), through Arnold J. Toynbee’s monumental and copious A Study of History, which was written through a European philosophical historical imagination, reaching into classical Greece. He states that in this Eurocentric view, Asia was misunderstood. He goes on to discuss the theories used to understand world history in the twentieth century, from modernization theory to world systems analysis. He proceeds by looking at the journals and books that are seminal for world historians, beginning with McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, which, it should be mentioned, came under scrutiny by the great Islamic historian Marshall G. Hodgson.1 Bentley further proceeds with the work of economic and social historians, concluding with new directions in world history, making the essay essential as an introduction for those who study and teach upperdivision world history. It includes an excellent bibliography.