麦克尼尔的《世界史》序言

 

WilliamsHardy McNeil

WilliamsHardy McNeil (1932-2016) was a Canadian-American world historian and author,particularly noted for his writings on Western civilization. McNeill wascritical in launching the field of world history at a time when the disciplinewas narrowly focused on the history of Europe and its past and presentcolonies. In his work, he emphasized the connections and exchanges betweencivilizations rather than placing them in a vacuum.

 

Sourcefrom: 世界史（影印本），北京：北京大学出版社，2008年，第3-6页。

 

（1）Thefirst great landmark of human history was the development of food production.This permitted an enormous multiplication of human numbers, and laid the basisfor the emergence of civilizations. How, when, and where hunting and gatheringgave way to farming and pastoralism is uncertain.

（2）One ofthe earliest and most important instances of this transition took place in theMiddle East, between about 8500 and 7000 B.C. Thence, through migrations andborrowings, few of which can be reconstructed by modern scholars, graincultivation spread into Europe and India, China, and parts of Africa. TheAmericas, Monsson Asia, and west Africa probably saw the independent inventionof agriculture, though this is not certain.

（3）Thesecond great landmark in mankind’s history was the emergence of skilled andcomplex societies we call civilized. Here the primacy of the Middle East isundisputed. Man’s earliest civilized communities developed in the valleys ofthe Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile between about 3500 and 3000 B.C. The Indusvalley followed suit soon afterwards.

（4）Atfirst civilized complexity required very special geographical conditions. Onlyon irrigated land could rich crops be harvested year after year from the samefields; and only where irrigation was needed did large numbers of men find itnecessary to co-operate in digging and diking. An agricultural surplus thatcould support specialists, together with habits of social organizationembracing large numbers of men, thus could and did emerge in the flood plainsof principal Middle Eastern rivers, and, until much later, not elsewhere.

（5）About athousand years thereafter, men began to extend civilized complexity torain-watered land. The invention of the plow was here fundamental. It permittedancient farmers to harness the strength of animals to the tasks of cultivation,and thereby allowed the individual farmer to increase his food production verysubstantially. This made farmer to increase his food production verysubstantially. This made available an agricultural surplus such as hadpreviously been produced only on irrigated land. In addition, civilizationdemanded a distinctive social order.

（6）Rulershad to find ways to compel the cultivators to hand over their surplus crops inorder to support the new courts and palace cities. A significant variationdepended on sea trade, which allowed rulers of such an island as Crete togather the fruits of the entire Mediterranean coastline and sustain a placecity at Knossos on the strength of trading profits.

（7）Afourth great change in human relationship brought steppe pastoralists andwarriors to the fore for the first time. This happened soon after 1700 B.C.,when techniques of chariot warfare were perfected somewhere along the northernfringes of Mesopotamia.

（8）Chariotsgave great center of horse raising was on the steppes, it was warrior tribes ofcentral Asia and the Ukraine, speakers of Indo-European tongues, who reaped theprincipal advantage. These warriors overran all of Europe, western Asia, andIndia. Others, who had somehow acquired the techniques of chariot warfare, alsoconquered the peasants of the Yellow river valley in China.

（9）InEurope, India, and China, interaction between pre-existing agricultural peoplesand the new masters of the land laid the groundwork for the emergence of threenew and enormously successful styles of civilization. The pace of theirdevelopment was roughly comparable, so that by 500 B.C. a distinctive Europeantype of civilization had emerged in Greece; an equally distinctive Indian styleof civilization had appeared in the Ganges river valley; and along the middlereaches of the Yellow river, Chinese civilization had likewise asserted itself.

（10）TheMiddle East had a more complicated history. the effect of the chariot conqueston Mesopotamia and Egypt was comparatively superficial, since local peoplessoon learned how to use chariots to oust their conquerors. Three civilizedempires, based in Egypt, Asia Minor, and northern Mesopotamia, then competedfor supremacy in the Middle East until a new wave of barbarian invasion struck.

（11）Thenewcomers were equipped with iron (actually soft steel) weapons, and the greatempires of the Bronze Age broke under the attack of tribesmen armed with thenew and more abundant metal. But once again the effect of barbarian conquestwas transitory. New empires arose, climaxing in the unstable politicalunification of the entire civilized area of the ancient Middle East, firstunder the Assyrians and then under the Persians.

（12）As aresult of his tangled development, what had once been separate civilizations inEgypt and Mesopotamia, as well as various satellite civilizations that hadarisen on rain-watered land around and between the two great river valleys, allbegan to merge into a new cosmopolitan Middle Eastern style of life.

（13）Adecisive formulation of a Middle Eastern world-view appropriate to thiscosmopolitan civilization took place among the Jews, whose religion, as shapedby the prophets of the eighth to sixth centuries B.C., was as vital andpersuasive as the Buddhism of India, the Confucianism of China, or thephilosophy of Greece, all of which also found their initial expression beforethe end of the sixth century B.C. With the clear and emphatic fourfoldpatterning of Old World civilization that thus came into focus by 500 B.C., aninitial, constitutive phase of world history came to a close.