How many people, whether students or teachers, actually read history texts all the way through? I should confess that this is the first world history text I have read from cover to cover (from page 1 to page 1056). It was worth it! This is a large book, rich in ideas, in images, in information, in new perspectives. The 200 beautifully designed maps alone are worth the entry price. In addition, the reader will find a varied selection of primary sources in the accompanying CD, original illustrations based on extensive picture research (which means that the pictures really are new), a glossary, invaluable timelines, provocative questions, lists of further reading, and helpful chapter summaries. Indeed, this is such a rich book that a short review cannot do it justice. Instead, I will comment on those features of The world that I found most valuable or most interesting.

Let me get some criticisms out of the way immediately because I want to concentrate on the book's virtues. Specialists will find minor errors of fact or nuance in this, as in any other world history text. A map on p. 497 implies that Muscovy controlled the entire Volga region by 1505, which is fifty years too early, and the text on p. 498 reinforces this impression. Also on p. 498, we read that Timur (Tamerlaine) ‘could justly claim to be descended from Genghis Khan’. In some sense, yes, but he was not in the direct line of descent, and this mattered. It explains why he had to settle for the title of ‘Emir’ rather than ‘Khan’, claiming legitimacy either through marriage to Chinggisid princesses (as a küregen or son-in-law of Chingissids) or through his control of Chingissid puppets. The sheer scope of world history makes it almost impossible to avoid such errors, and anyone who writes world history (I include myself) has committed them. But, with minor exceptions, this is an accurate and reliable guide to world history. The book also has some flat passages, where the infectious, bubbling enthusiasm and the extraordinary eye for vivid detail that characterize most of the writing are briefly absent. Once again, what is astonishing is how few such passages there are.

I have not used The world as a teacher, so I cannot tell from experience how classroom-friendly it is. (Those looking for more on this question might want to explore the H-World symposium on The world, held in the spring of 2008.) Its structure, with thirty chapters divided evenly around 1500 CE, is geared to the standard North American world history course structure. My guess is that those students looking for a carefully laid-out grid of information, which they can master more or less by rote, will struggle with the book because it assumes some historiographical sophistication. As the author warns: ‘No one reading this book should expect to be instructed in straightforward facts or to acquire proven knowledge’ (p. xiv). What readers will find is a clear authorial voice, offering an interpretation of world history. ‘History’, writes Fernández-Armesto, ‘is woven from carefully selected strands, … twisted together into yarn, stretched into stories’ (p. xliv). It is not about the past as such, but rather about the past as we can reconstruct it through evidence. And, as a good Collingwoodian, Fernández-Armesto concedes that history is less about the world as it was than about the world as people imagined it to be. Consequently, he argues, history is ‘an art, not a science’ (p. xlv). These assumptions, stated loud and clear in the author's introduction, mark The world as more than a conventional history text. It is, rather, one author's rich, sophisticated, and sometimes idiosyncratic interpretation of world history. Although it will pose difficulties for weaker students, The world's historiographical sophistication, conveyed through the enthusiastic, vivid, and engaging voice of the author, is the book's first great virtue.

The world's second great virtue is that it is rich in information and a delight to read. It draws on the insights, ideas, hypotheses, and perspectives of a rich body of previously published work in world history. Fernández-Armesto's early work was on the early history of the Spanish Empire, beginning with a 1982 study of the conquest of the Canary Islands. Since then, by my reckoning, he has produced at least thirteen books on world history alone, as well as numerous publications on more detailed topics, and several edited collections. He has never avoided the big topics. His books include Pathfinders: a global history of exploration, which won the 2007 World History Association book prize; Food: a history (2001); Civilizations (2000), a global history organized by distinct environmental regions; Truth: a history (1997); and Millennium: a history of the last thousand years (1995). Fernández-Armesto is always worth reading, even when you disagree with him. Who can resist a global history of food that almost succeeds in persuading you that molluscs may provide the key to the history of domestication? After all, as he points out in The world, ‘They are an efficient food, self-packaged in a shell for carrying and cooking’ (p. 53). And of course they can't run fast, so rounding up snails is a more leisurely activity than rounding up horses or cattle: ‘They can be herded without the use of fire, any special equipment, personal danger, or the need to train leashed animals or dogs to help’ (p. 54).

The world's third great virtue is that it really is ‘worldish’. ‘In this book’, writes the author, ‘I try to look at every continent in just about every chapter …’ (p. xlvi). And he really does. Occasionally the attempt to identify global processes can seem slightly forced, as in Chapter 4, when he attempts to identify a global process of political breakdown 3,000 years ago, embracing both Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. At this point, I would have preferred a frank concession that the chronologies of the Americas and Afro-Eurasia are somewhat different. This would have made it possible to discuss directly the curious (and deep) world historical fact that, despite the lack of contact between these worlds, and some important differences in chronology, the large historical trajectories are nevertheless astonishingly similar. But for most of the book the global perspective is handled with great virtuosity. Like Chris Bayly's wonderful study, The birth of the modern world (2003), Fernández-Armesto's book moves with remarkable ease from region to region. More or less at random, I've picked Chapter 11, ‘Contending with isolation: ca. 1000–1200’. It begins with the diary of a Japanese noble lady describing a boat trip along the coast of Shikoku Island; then we are in Greenland, as the Thule Inuit arrive in their walrus-hide boats; then we are with the Scandinavian voyagers who reached the same destination from the opposite direction; next we jump to the American south-west and the Mississippi region, watching the appearance of sedentary communities influenced by the civilizations of Mesoamerica; next we are in the Yucatan, from where we move to Ethiopia, then Cambodia, then India, before returning to Japan and ending up in Western Europe. The effect of these global journeys, usually with unexpected starting points, is to help the reader break free of traditional narratives that exaggerate the importance and typicality of Europe and the great agrarian civilizations of Eurasia. The fine chapter on the ‘Axial age’ (ch. 6), which stays more conventionally within Eurasia, maintains a similar breadth of perspective by focusing not on particular religions or cultures or philosophical traditions but on themes, such as creation or political duty, which were tackled within all the major philosophical and religious traditions of Eurasia.

The wonderful vignettes that open each chapter provide more opportunities to approach familiar topics from unfamiliar angles. Chapter 22, on the Enlightenment, begins not in Europe but with an Indian thinker, Raja Rammohan Roy, who admired Enlightenment thought but also found similar traditions within ancient Indian cultural traditions. Then, characteristically, Fernández-Armesto takes us to northern Finland: ‘To understand what the Enlightenment was like, a good place to start is Kittis in northern Finland, near the Arctic Circle, where a French scientist, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, pitched camp in August, 1736. The light reflected and refracted among the rocks and ice made it seem, he said, “a place for fairies and spirits’ ” (p. 738). Maupertuis was trying to determine whether, as Newton had predicted, the earth was flattened at its poles (it is), by measuring the length of a degree of latitude in northern latitudes and comparing it with the length at the equator. Maupertuis, it turns out, provides not just an original way into the topic but also a wonderful synopsis of the trajectory of the Enlightenment, for he ended up deeply disillusioned by science: ‘Maupertuis’ mental pilgrimage between certainty and doubt, science and speculation, rationalism and religious revelation reproduced in miniature the history of European thought in the eighteenth century’ (p. 740). Chapter 19, on political and social change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, begins with an account of the remarkable career of Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, who consolidated her authority in the 1640s by ‘becoming a man’, personally leading her troops into battle, and dressing her many husbands in women's clothes as royal concubines (p. 635). The opening vignettes provide one of the most enjoyable features of The world. They ensure that, despite the author's clear eye for the large patterns, the reader never loses sight of the individuals, the exceptions, the borderlands. Indeed, much of the book's argument is built up, in pointilliste manner, by stringing together multiple vignettes. (It might be interesting to get students to read just the opening vignettes and see what picture of world history they generate from them.)

The world's fourth great virtue is its determination to place human history firmly within the context of the biosphere. Human relations with the environment are the second of the book's central themes, the first being human relations with other humans (p. xliv). Why is the environmental theme so important? First of all because humans are, after all animals, which means that ‘to understand ourselves thoroughly and to know what, if anything, makes us unique, we have to compare ourselves with other animals. As with other animals, we are best studied in our habitats’ (p. xliii). The second reason for focusing on human relations with the biosphere is the paradox that our astonishing ecological prowess has not necessarily made us more secure: ‘the more we change the environment, the more vulnerable we become to ecological lurches and unpredictable disasters’ (p. xliii). So there is much of importance to learn from seeing human history in its biospheric context. Finally, this theme gives the larger story of The world much of its shape. The book begins with a bipedal African primate that could do little to shape its surroundings. It ends, in Chapter 30, when that same species is causing environmental changes so rapid, so global, and so unpredictable that they threaten its future. The book's last three sentences read: ‘Many of the failed civilizations of the past weakened or wrecked themselves by overexploiting their environments. What are we going to do with the world? It is, so far, the only one we have to live in’ (p. 1050). Those students who read The world with the care that it deserves will not only gain a rich appreciation of the astonishing trajectory of our species and the biosphere that nourished us; they will also find themselves thinking deeply about issues likely to dominate the global politics of the next few decades.