As the sixteenth century progressed, Britain gained mastery over naval design, building fast and maneuverable galleons that could threaten Spain’s warships. The decisive showdown came in 1588, when the Spanish monarch decided to invade Britain to put down the upstart nation. The effort failed disastrously, with Britain’s defeat of the Spanish

A puzzling and counterintuitive finding, based on archeological and anthropological evidence, is that hunters and gatherers seem to have had better nutrition, fewer diseases, more varied diets, less strenuous labor, and longer lives than contemporaneous farm households.2 The evidence includes the larger stature of nomadic populations compared with

Despite Rome’s dominance of technology and population, the political stability of the Roman Empire waned over time. In 285 CE, the Roman emperor Diocletian divided the rule of the vast empire between the Eastern Roman Empire ruled from Byzantium, later Constantinople, and the Western Roman Empire ruled from Rome. While the governance of the Roman

We can suppose that there will be eight major regional groupings: North America, South America, European Union, African Union, South Asia, East Asia, Commonwealth of Independent States, and Western Asia. These eight regional groupings could begin to constitute the core of global diplomacy. Currently, the UN is an organization of individual member

Throughout history, it has been important to understand the threats arising from globalization (disease, conquest, war, financial crises, and others) and to face them head on, not by ending the benefits of globalization, but by using the means of international cooperation to control the negative consequences of global-scale interconnectedness.

As of today, there are 193 UN member states, covering nearly the entire world population. Yet in important operational ways, the UN remains a twentieth-century institution guided by rules laid down by the United States in 1945. Most importantly, at the end of World War II, the five victorious allied powers (the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and

Columbus stumbled upon the Americas (figure 6.2), though he still believed he had reached India. Vasco da Gama, for his part, sailed from Lisbon and made it to India and back in 1498–99 (figure 6.3). The race was now on, initially between Portugal and Spain, to earn the spoils from these two historic breakthroughs. More fundamentally, these two

The 1510s are certainly among the most remarkable years of human thought in modern history. In 1511, the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam published his satirical critique of the church, In Praise of Folly. In 1513, Nicola Machiavelli of Florence published The Prince, his handbook of power for European princes. In 1514, Nicolaus

consider the very wise statement of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as the supreme allied commander in World War II. Eisenhower liked to say that “plans are useless, but planning is everything.” He meant that specific plans will not be followed in practice because unexpected circumstances will surely arise, yet planning—the logical