Reilly, Kevin. *Readings in World Civilizations*. 2 Vols. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. Paper: $18.62 per volume

reviewed by Jeffrey Sommers, Northeastern University jsommers@lynx.neu.edu

Reilly claims to offer a social and cultural history of the world. He delivers on his promise, and in the process gives an economic and political history too. Each volume has roughly 350 pages, containing 16 chapters. Each chapter contains three to five short offerings split between scholarly articles on the topic and primary source documents. This is a nice idea, and works well in practice, furnishing a balance of invaluable insights from the primary documents and contextual analysis from scholars' essays. The articles are short, and not as comprehensive as found in survey texts, but then again survey texts often just repeat a World History course's lecture.
His compact volumes contain few illustrations, charts, or maps. He has one illustration at the beginning of each of six sections covering his two volumes. Additionally, he begins each of the six sections with a one page time-line.
Maps are only provided on the cover of these two volumes. The first volume encompasses the era from antiquity to 1500. Reilly uses a nice 1450 Catalan world map, showing Spain's knowledge of the world at this time. Considering China's dominant position during the period covered, it would have been nice to show a Chinese map, as they tended to give a different perspective on space than their Western counterparts. Such a map could have been useful for class discussion. The second volume contrasts nicely with the first in its use of a cartagram, showing the size of states relative to their population, and coloring each by its rate of population growth. Each map alone gives students much to ponder.
Each volume provides a traditional table of contents, explaining in "one damn thing after another" fashion what is in the book. Reilly also provides topical and geographical contents sections. I suspect that these are intended to take the place of an index, which this book lacks. Considering the nature of his work, an index is not as necessary as it would be in a narrative survey book, yet an index would not be superfluous.
Some may find fault with Reilly's periodization. He lessens the time examined in each ensuing section, with the first one covering two thousand years, and the last less than a hundred. This makes sense, since we know less the further we go back in time, and maybe, depending on how we define history, we have been making "more" history per unit of time as we progress. Periods end almost arbitrarily at 1000 B.C., 500, 1500, 1750. I found this helpful in contributing to understanding that the world's structures do not operate in synchronization, converging on convenient end dates. This serves to show the human role in constructing historical periods. He begins the first chapter of his second volume, "The Early Modern World," at 1500. Some might find it fashionable to begin this, as does Janet Abu-Lughod, at the 13th or 14th century, but 1500 is fine. He breaks from his periodization model in his last chapter, where he pinpoints 1914 as the beginning of a new period. Perhaps in a Fredric Jameson sense, cycles of history come around so quickly that their increasingly tightening beginning and end dates are more visible.
Reilly assumes people had history before civilization. His first chapter, "Hunters and Gatherers," employs an interview of a southern African !Kung woman's childhood, which was sufficiently removed from the modern world to give us an insight into how we all lived at one time. She relates family life in a way recognizable to anyone in the present.
He finds useful documents for use from quite far back. Insight is offered into a socially conservative strand in Babylonia roughly 4000 years ago by examining the Hammurabi law code. Reilly offers comments and questions at the beginning of every reading. With the Hammurabi law code, I can't help but think he's directing students to reflect on less tolerant elements of contemporary society. This gives history relevance to undergraduates, and hopefully the rest of us too.
I learned from Reilly's social history that the Japanese pioneered the novel. He gives eight pages of the 1000 year old Japanese story, *The Tale of Genji*. With elements of modern fiction, it provides continuity from the past to the present, tells us something about elite women of Japan (that they were wealthy enough, had sufficient leisure and education, and had enough power in society to produce art). He has many such documents and articles displaying non-Western innovation in areas students may assume derived from Western culture.
Reilly gleaned a 1971 essay from William McNeill's *A World History* to describe the impact of the Mongols from 1000 to 1500. The article includes a section on China's role in the world at this time. I know McNeill has since rethought this in light of China's hegemony during this time, and I wonder if McNeill would have rewritten this section if given the opportunity. Furthermore on China, the included Lynda Shaffer essays are superb.
In the section on African Civilizations before 1500, I hoped to see the story of Mansa Musa. Instead, Reilly provided the story of the North African traveller Ibn Battuta, who made his way to Mali in 1352. I think students profit more from the Mansa Musa story. Ibn Battuta's travels are interesting, but lacking in sense of the material development of the society. To be fair, Reilly says he's giving us a social and cultural history, but it's nice when he gives us selections which combine this with economic and political history.
I would like to have seen essays explicitly connecting patterns over time. You can cobble some of his selections together to see patterns, and Reilly's comments and questions preceding each reading sometimes guide students to see trends over time. I would like, though, to have this made more explicit.
Textbooks often offer much bulk, but little substance. Reilly's volumes, like good writing, say much in little space. The combination of primary source documents and essays, matched with his questions and comments, encourage critical thining. I would not use these volumes for distance learning, but do highly recommend his book as a complement to a lecture-oriented World History course.