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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge World History
  • Cited by 1
  • Volume 7: Production, Destruction and Connection, 1750-Present, Part 1: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making
  • Edited by J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Kenneth Pomeranz, University of Chicago
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139196079
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196079
Subjects:
American History: General Interest, British History: General Interest, Regional and World History: General Interest, History, Regional History after 1500, Global History
Collections:
Cambridge Histories - Global History, Cambridge Histories - British & European History, Cambridge Histories - American History, Cambridge Histories - Asian History, Cambridge Histories - Middle East & African Studies
Series:
The Cambridge World History
Information

Book description

Since 1750, the world has become ever more connected, with processes of production and destruction no longer limited by land- or water-based modes of transport and communication. Volume 7 of the Cambridge World History series, divided into two books, offers a variety of angles of vision on the increasingly interconnected history of humankind. The first book examines structures, spaces, and processes within which and through which the modern world was created, including the environment, energy, technology, population, disease, law, industrialization, imperialism, decolonization, nationalism, and socialism, along with key world regions.

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 18 - The Middle East in world history since 1750
    pp 467-492
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Population change can be interpreted as the result of the continuous confrontation and adaptation between the forces of constraint and the forces of choice. Forces of choice are the ability to modulate and control behaviors that have demographic consequences, such as entering into a reproductive union; having children; protecting and enhancing health with adequate nutrition, housing, and clothing; moving and migrating from one place to another. Modern demography has been characterized by an acceleration with a variety of geographical patterns, and this variety increases the smaller the scale of analysis. This chapter outlines the nature of the demographic systems prevailing in different parts of the world in the eighteenth century. It presents the factors that determine a change or a transformation of a demographic system, therefore affecting population development. To define demographic transition as the process that has reduced mortality and fertility from the high pre-nineteenth-century levels to the low ones that prevail nowadays in Europe, America, and East Asia.
  • 19 - East Asia in world history, 1750–21st century
    pp 493-525
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Long analyzed as biopolitics, the regulation of population always entailed geopolitics as well, although tracing the connections and separations of these strands across time, and across political cultures, is not easy. To appreciate the many dimensions of population in world history, a new approach is needed; something like an integrated and global gendered political economy of population. Considered at a global level, the eighteenth and nineteenth-century expansion of Europe was both demographic and geographic. The politics of fertility decline as it played out in international and racial relations has received much historical analysis, and within many different national traditions. The fertility decline has been read as depopulation. Imperial German scholars and statesmen had been deeply interested in population density, overpopulation, before and during the First World War. European demographic history was the main focus for European and non-European economists, both the massive population growth of the nineteenth century and the localized fertility declines.
  • 20 - Latin America in world history
    pp 526-555
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Disease has followed trade, exploration, and conflict, and has magnified their consequences. The middle of the eighteenth century saw few great shifts in patterns of disease but the advent of what would become a near global conflict between the European powers, the Seven Years' War, brought heavy mortality to the affected regions. By 1801, the disease had crossed the Atlantic, where it intermittently ravaged the Mediterranean coast of Spain for two decades, severely affecting cities such as Cadiz and Barcelona. As cholera disappeared from the developed world, a new and more terrifying threat emerged from the Orient. Epidemic diseases such as cholera remained a problem in the most deprived parts of Asia and Africa, particularly at times of famine and unrest. Civilian populations suffered as a result of infection and destruction of sanitary infrastructure. The influenza of 1918-1919 marked the end of a century of pandemic disease, but the great upheavals of previous decades affected many species other than humans.
  • 21 - Africa in world history
    pp 556-584
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The global eradication of smallpox required techniques to manufacture vaccine on a vast scale and, eradication had to await the advent of freeze-dried vaccine, which could be preserved and transported without need for refrigeration. Smallpox, a deadly, infectious disease, had plagued humankind for millennia. In 1796 an English country physician named Edward Jenner made a discovery that proved a crucial milestone in the control of smallpox, and eventually led to its eradication. Given the unprecedented nature of Jenner's discovery, the spread of vaccination around the world was rapid. By the turn of the twentieth century, the growing acceptance of the germ theory of disease introduced new methods of disease control. The establishment of the League of Nations Health Organization after the First World War marked yet another stage in the rise of disease control as a field amenable to global action. The eradication of smallpox has often been celebrated in retrospect as the World Health Organization's crowning achievement.
  • 23 - The economic history of the Pacific
    pp 611-631
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the development of international law by tracing its origins from the early days of the modern state system to the present. For many centuries Islamic law, in its several forms, served as international law in large parts of the world. The term international law, as well as the older term, law of nations, refers to a set of rules that are binding on international actors. For the emerging European system, the Peace of Westphalia meant the formal recognition of a new system of international relations. The concept of consent-based law is captured in the notion of legal positivism. With a growing acceptance of a positivist approach to international law, the international community recognized that there were two primary ways in which states could consent to create rules of international law: treaties and custom. The use of multilateral treaties to create rules of international law on a more general basis began in the nineteenth century.

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