Introduction

This introductory chapter explains the various reasons to examine world history: the invitation to consider the range of human achievements and cruelties; the chance to see how various identities have emerged around the world; the ability to test analogies between past and present; and above all the opportunity to see how contemporary patterns have emerged from the past. This short text emphasizes connections between earlier global developments and current themes, with considerable attention to the formation of contacts among regions and how these have evolved. This chapter forecasts the major regions that provide some coherence across time, and also the major periods that help organize world history’s extensive chronology.