Book summary

Fernandez-Armesto does not look at the last thousand years as an age of European dominance, but rather examines four major civilizations--China, Islam, Latin Christendom, and Eastern Christendom--and how they became powerful. The conquests of Latin Christendom were paralleled by the expansion of Russian into Siberia, the conquest of India by Islamic forces, and the expansion of China towards its modern boundaries. Latin Christendom ended up dominating much of the world, but its power is being challenged in our time by Islamic and Pacific civilizations. The author presents a provocative revision of history.

Media reviews

"Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has accomplished a herculean task....he has managed to write the whole world, or at least to compress the world's last thousand years, into 737 pages of illustrated text, with terse but thorough notes, in a volume that is a pleasure to hold and read....I close the book reluctantly, with a broader understanding of a world less divided into discrete civilizations than I had thought. More important, I was left wanting to go back and read it all again."