Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is a 200-page introduction to the period of 1500-1700 in world history. It focuses on the Europeans' desire to travel and trade in distant places, thanks to their navigational and sailing technology, and their appetite for greed. While one can and should argue that Europe's states were not world powers in 1600, the author Glenn Ames makes a good case that these events still constitute a world revolution with great significance. The world had become connected in a new way, and it still is, thanks to what da Gama and the others started.
I could see a teacher assigning this instead of a pricey textbook, and supplementing it with interesting books on what else is happening in the world outside of Europe, or perhaps books from the viewpoint of peoples being affected by Europe. Achebe's Things Fall Apart is just one example from the more recent period.
Recommended.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Globe Encompassed: The Age of European Discovery (1500 to 1700)
Part of the Connections: Key Themes in World History series, The Globe Encompassed combinesthe most recent secondary work in the field with the author's own personal archival work to present a updated synthesis of the topic. The Globe Encompassed lays out in clear narrative form a series of connected stories that simultaneously instruct and fascinate the reader. Beyond that,the author-guide provides carefully chosen excerpts from primary sources that enable the reader to enter the mindsets of such notable personalities (and driving forces in Europe's profound impact on the early modern world) as Vasco da Gama, Hernan Cortés, and Samuel de Champlain, and to see first-hand such widely separated and profoundly different colonial enterprises as Dutch-held Batavia (Jakarta) and Puritan New England. In so doing, Ames allows the reader to encompass the globe as it existed between 1500 and 1700.
