Foundations
Before the Modern World
The pre-1200 bridge unit: how geography produced the first civilizations, how classical states held power, and what AP World assumes you already know before Unit 1 begins.
Volumes
Unit 01
The Global Tapestry
The Global Tapestry: six regions in the century either side of 1200, each answering the same questions about power, belief and wealth, and the comparison chapter that puts the answers side by side.
Unit 02
Networks of Exchange
Networks of Exchange: the three great trade systems of Afro-Eurasia treated as businesses, with the capital, the contracts, the ships and the animals, and then what the connection carried that nobody ordered.
Unit 03
Land-Based Empires
Land-Based Empires: how artillery made the old fortress useless, what it cost to keep an army that could use it, and how five empires governed enormous populations who did not share their religion.
Unit 04
Transoceanic Connections
Transoceanic Connections: the ships that could come home against the wind, the three incompatible ways of holding an ocean, the silver that paid for all of it, and the honest account of what Europeans still could not do in 1750.
Unit 05
Revolutions
Revolutions: where authority comes from and who counted as the people, why industrialization began in one set of counties and was blocked everywhere else, and the five competing explanations of why an economy producing unprecedented wealth also produced unprecedented misery.
Unit 06
Consequences of Industrialization
Consequences of Industrialization: why conquest suddenly became affordable, what an export crop does to a country that has only one, the five different things the word resistance covers, and the hundred and fifty million people who moved.
Unit 07
Global Conflict
Global Conflict: why three empires could not afford an industrial army, how a war became unendable by battle and therefore consumed whole societies, and what the same capacity did when a state turned it on a population inside its own reach.
- 7.1The Bill Comes Due
- 7.2The Month There Was No Time
- 7.3When a War Stops Being Fought by Armies
- 7.4Who Runs the Economy Now
- 7.5Empire Changes Its Vocabulary
- 7.6A Grievance Waiting for a Crisis
- 7.7The War the Factories Decided
- 7.8What States Did With Their New Capacity
- 7.9Ranking Causes Without Guessing
Unit 08
Cold War & Decolonization
Cold War and Decolonization: two things that happened at once and are usually taught apart, because a standoff that could not be fought in Europe turned every newly independent state into a place where it could be fought instead.
Unit 09
Globalization
Globalization: not connection, which is old and belongs to Unit 2, but a collapse in the cost of moving goods, money, people and information, and the question that follows it, which is who captured the savings and who absorbed the costs left off the invoice.