The Human Web Summary?

Question

Hi, I'm reading The Human web by John McNeill and I was wondering if there are any websites that summarize it by chapters or anything. I tried reading it, but nothing sinks in.

Answer 1

I don't think you'll find a chapter by chapter summary; it's too new (2002 ,and it's not fiction.
All you can likely get are reviews, such as the ones that follow. The first website is the best one I found:

A sample:
“The general direction of history has been toward greater & greater social cooperation - both voluntary and compelled - driven by the realities of social competition. Over time, cooperating groups of every sort tended to grow in size to the point where their internal cohesion, their ability to communicate and conform, weakened and broke down.”
(McNeill & McNeill, p.6)

Most historians have always been distrustful of macrohistory. To those trained in the analysis of minutiae, there appears something almost indecent in the preferences of those who work from secondary sources and cover vast reaches of time and space. On the other hand, macrohistory, when accessible, has always found it easy to attract a broader readership...albeit, this also supplies a further excuse for those who wish to denigrate the form.

Such distrust, however, is misplaced. History is a broad church, and macrohistorians, quite simply, are doing something very different from those who delve into specific times and places. A comparison with cartography is entirely apt here, as in both disciplines many features can only be resolved at the right scale. Macrohistory which seeks patterns appropriate to its scales is thus entirely complementary to its traditional counterpart, and we would be much poorer if historians ceased working in this area - however dubious some of the methodologies in this realm have been in the past.

William H. McNeill is undoubtedly the doyen of living macro-historians. Following after the tendentious excesses of Spengler & Toynbee, his The Rise of the West (1963) served to rehabilitate a genre (and discipline) that was badly in need of reform. Furthermore, it was also - contra the title - surprisingly non-Eurocentric in its assumptions and arguments, and is still well worth reading today...particularly with the addition of the introduction he composed for it in 1991 - a veritable model of scholarly objectivity about one’s own work. Here, he joins his son, a distinguished environmental historian, to offer us the best short world history we are likely to get, built around the growing scale and scope of human interconnectedness - a powerful model for integrating diverse evidence and theories into a coherent narrative:


“Webs...large or small, tightly or loosely integrated, were all zones of comparatively low transport and information costs. in which it was comparatively easy to learn about conditions elsewhere, to travel, and to exchange goods, ideas, and, inadvertantly, infections....All this meant that societies within the webs were richer, more powerful, and more hierarchical than those elsewhere.”
(McNeill & McNeill, p.162)

Over the years, William McNeill has pioneered the integration of factors such as disease and military technology/organization into macrohistory - a field previously noted for its overemphasis upon “idealistic” factors. However, he also has extremely interesting points to make on the latter, particularly in the area of religious forms & their social effects - many of which are repeated here in this, the most accessible of the books he has worked on:


“Animism...in effect, expanded the code of manners that defined interpersonal relations within the band to embrace the whole wide world, including, not least, relations with neighboring bands. It also cushioned collisions with the natural world by making all that happened seem readily intelligible and - within limits - ritually curable as well....[It] was and remains the most emotionally accessible worldview that humankind has ever created. Since it is shared by surviving hunters and gatherers in all parts of the earth, animism was probably part of the cultural baggage that that humans carried with them during their global expansion.”
(McNeill & McNeill, p.18)

While my model for these reviews is to attempt a summary via quotation, plus a personal overview & assessment through commentary, some books defeat this, as their strengths cannot be summarized properly in that they do not reduce to a basic set of arguments. This is one such. To be sure, the argument about interconnection structures and clarifies the evidence, but - like all history - the wealth is in the individual working-out of contingent and unrepeatable patterns, while the strength is in the way these interlock in our understandings as explainable, even if not predictable. Thus, all I can do here is to sample from the McNeills’ rich offering, whilst suggesting how it ties things together.


“By about two millenia after their emergence, agricultural villages had spread like a rash across Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas and become the frame within which the majority of humankind lived and died.... In effect, sedentary villages replaced roving bands of hunters and gatherers as the basic cells of human society.”
(McNeill & McNeill, p.39)

“If tropical gardening antedated grainfields by thousands of years, as seems likely, it remained comparatively insignificant for human history as a whole. That is because tropical gardeners leave roots and fruits where they grow until ready for consumption.... Without storage, massive and regular transfer of food from farmers to city folk was impractical, inhibiting social and occupational differentiation.”
(McNeill & McNeill, pp.34-5)

And, whilst the McNeills stress the importance of differentiation/hierarchy in the creation of new forms of complexity, their attitude to same is distinctly jaundiced, clearly following on from William McNeill’s earlier characterization of military elites as human “macroparasites”, complementary in action to those of our bacterial and viral burdens. On the other hand, as the beneficiaries of millennia of specialization, it would be hypocritical to deny that it has delivered beneficial side-effects, even if these were hardly intended by our “superiors”. This is a fine line to walk, but The Human Web traverses it skilfully...


“Until cities arose, face-to-face communication within small communities carried almost all the important messages governing human behavior. Encounters with strangers and neighbors were only occasional, and seldom brought anything new to local attention that required or invited changes in existing habits.... Gossip, discussion, dance and ritual lost none of their power over local community life when cities and civilizations arose. So local communities remained fundamental.... All the same, their autonomy eroded. Messages from outside compelled attention, often imposing compulsory labor, or payment of rents and taxes. With such burdens came stories of the wonders of urban living.... [As well]...connections between local elites and urban centers...drove the expansion of civilization to new ground, because local cheiftans often chose to set their followers to work producing some sort of raw material that city folk wanted. In return, they got city-made luxuries and used them to exhibit their own power and importance.”
(McNeill & McNeill, p.42)

One of the major advantages of documenting networks - rather than their nodes - is that this approach forces us to consider both sides of relationships, instead of merely the most powerful and/or well-documented. The following summary quotation in particular shows how a general pattern can be clearly perceived from a macrohistorical perspective, that would otherwise be obscured by the overwhelming dominance of urban literate elites in our sources.


“As contrasting pastoral, agricultural, and urban ways of life defined themselves throughout western Eurasia after 3500 B.C.E., trading and raiding connected each with the others...and governed political and military affairs for millennia. City dwellers and herdsmen were comparatively few but nonetheless enjoyed systematic military advantages over the village majority. Pastoralists specialized in protecting their flocks and herds. This inculcated military habits, since repelling human raiders was always more difficult than keeping animal predators at bay. In addition, pastoralists’ mobility made it possible to assemble raiding forces quickly whenever worthwhile targets beckoned. Farmers’ stored grain was a perennial target, though negotiated peaceable exchanges of animal products for grain and luxuries from urban workshops was always an alternative. The military advantages of urban dwellers arose from their access to superior (originally bronze) weapons, and their capacity to support specialized warriors.... Overall, farming villages bore the brunt.... In effect, herders together with professional soldiers and rulers of agrarian states established an informal but effective market in protection costs.... After about 2500 B.C.E. this sort of protection market subordinated peasants and sustained urban civilizations across subsequent millennia almost until the present.”
(McNeill & McNeill, pp.49-50)

Another key advantage of the macrohistorical perspective is that it is the natural standpoint from which to conduct broad comparative enquiries. And, although these are ruled out of bounds by the current pieties of cultural relativism, this does not make them disappear...instead, it allows crudely schematic popular understandings to reign unchecked in all but the most rigorous academic forums - hardly a useful outcome. Similarly, “postmodern” critiques of theories of origins can be more sensibly replaced by macrohistorical models that take for granted a lack of neat beginnings & the crucial importance of continuing processes in all “originating” events.

see link 1, please, for more




"A brilliant synthesis of world history by distinguished father-and-son historians, organized around the theme of unfolding webs of human connection. All of humanity today lives in a "unitary maelstrom of cooperation and competition," and the global spread of ideas, information, and experience constitutes the overarching structure of human history. William McNeill is one of the great masters of world history, and J. R. McNeill has pioneered the study of environmental history. The collaborative result is a vivid and illuminating vision of the human experience spanning 12,000 years. The first human webs of our distant ancestors were formed through the rise of speech, migration, and primitive agricultural groupings. Metropolitan webs became integrated into the "old world web" connecting Eurasia and North America, and in the last century, local and regional webs have merged into an increasingly dense cosmopolitan web. Driven by the search for efficiency and advantage, humans have engineered increasingly complex social organizations creating the wealth and power -- but also the inequality and societal antagonisms -- on display today."

By the 1990s, U.S miners moved about 4 billion tons of rock per year, and the world figures was about five times that. "All this mining corroded the lithosphere with a warren of underground shafts and chambers, and after the appearance of the requisite earth-moving machinery, pockmarked the earth's surface with thousands of huge open pits, mainly in the United States, Russia, Germany, and Australia.

Pulse One: Eroded soil ends up in reservoirs and lakes, affecting aquatic life. It silts up shorelines, harbors, and river channels, requiring dredging. The first pulse came when agriculture in the Middle East, India, and China emerged from the river valleys and spread over former forest lands. This occurred slowly, say between 2000 B.C to 1000 AD, as states, economies, and population grew- and as iron tools made clearing forest easier. Where ever existing vegetation was cut or burned to make way for crops or animals, faster erosion resulted. China's loess plateau typifies the first pulse. Some 40 million people live in an area the size of France; it is one of the worlds most eroded landscapes; soil consist of windborne deposits from Mongolia; before cultivation forests cover most of the loess plateau; by 1990 soil erosion carries off 2.2 billion tons of topsoil a year; the soil in the Dahe gave it the name "Yellow river".

Pulse Two: The second global surge in soil erosion came with the frontier expansion of Europe and the integration of world agricultural markets. The pulse began with the European conquest and the Euro-African settlements; thickly settle mountainous regions of the Andes and Central America's agricultural terraces fell apart and soil erosion spurred; cultivators would leave fields bare and hoofed animals loosened up more soil; European settlers had the power to move populations into marginal lands, such as steep lands where the soil was unstable; the lands came under the plow; in Rhodesia, Africa, white farms introduced plows and commercial agriculture plant wheat, tobacco, coffee, and other crops; the create a spate of erosion in Kenya and Rhodesia; people huddle in smaller area and made it more tempting to farm unstable soils; soil erosion accelerated promoting tree cutting; more incentive for cash crop increase pressure to produce; cattle and soil husbandry caused over grazing problems; Canals, railroads, steamships, and telegraphs knitted the world markets together making sense to plow up North America praire, run tens of thousands of sheep over lower slopes of New Zealand Southern Alps in order to sale to burgeoning urban populations far away. Plain development had its affects: dust storms in Saskatchewan darkened the skiess as 3 to 4 million hectares of prairie land was completely destroyed.

Third pulse. The third pulse gathered in the 1950s. Populations experienced an unprecedented level of health and survival. "Demographic growth, often together with state policies and land tenure patterns, spurred land hunger and land clearing, even on steep and marginal lands. Lowland peasants migrated to highland regions, mountain peasants invaded rainforests, and still others colonized semiarid lands. Once, ingrained agronomic knowledge and familiar animals and technology often proved inappropriate to new settings." "Technology changes in agriculture, specifically the adoption of heavy machinery, led to soil compaction after 1930, and especially after 1950, as tractor grew in size. " Soil compaction inhibit plant growth. Industrial pollution and heavy use of nitrogen fertilizers after 1960 led to soil acidification, especially in Europe. By 1990 soil irrigation had salinization 7% of the world's land.

Soil degradation now effects one third of the world's land surface; a quarter of the earths cultivate land area; about 2 billion hectacres; 430 million hectacres are irreversible destroyed; in China, 1978 erosion forced the abandonment of 31 percent of the arable land; the US loses 1.7 billion tons to erosion each year; a cost of $150 per person."

Answer 2

Two pretty but ditsy American girls are on a road trip through Europe. In Germany, they end up alone at night with a broken car in the woods. They search for help and find an isolated villa. The next day, they awaken to find themselves trapped in a terrifying makeshift basement hospital along with a Japanese man. An older German man identifies himself as a retired surgeon specialized in separating Siamese twins. However, his three "patients" are not about to be separated but joined together in a horrific operation. He plans to be the first person to connect people via their gastric systems. By doing so, he plans to bring to life his sick lifetime fantasy, the human centipede.