Analytical reviews - Assignment Example

His approach is to focus on the major ideas that bind a civilization together, rather than territorial advance through conquest or any technical achievements. Book 1 focuses on the geneses of civilizations and their disintegration. He does not have a universal explanation for this process, but rather explains how each civilization faces its own challenges and comes up with its own solutions. The variation in different outcomes is to be expected, and decline comes when a civilization ceases to produce the necessary resilience to face whatever problems it encounters.

A similar undertaking was done by the German historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) but with a more pessimistic approach, looking at contemporary Western civilization and foreseeing its downfall. His book Decline of the West was written just before and during the First World War, which no doubt colored his view of things somewhat, given the slaughter of thousands of soldiers and civilians in the first fully mechanized war in human history. Spengler conceived of civilizations as all following the same general pattern of rise, reign and fall, and proposed that this is a natural life cycle, much the same as that of a biological organism.

He covers a much smaller range of civilizations, in a range of nine, culminating in Western civilization which he sees as being in a state of decline. An interesting and possibly prophetic perspective is given on the Islam and the Arab nations, (volume 2, pp. 191-193) which he regards as having been stopped in its tracks in ancient times by the advance of Graeco-Roman civilization. Spengler died before the worst of Nazi atrocities occurred and this may explain his rather pro-German stance. His approach is too broad-brush to contribute much to our understanding of history and both his work and Toynbee’s more extensive study suffer from too much emphasis on philosophy and culture, and too little understanding of economic factors.

Both authors also writer from a western perspective, and of the two Toynbee is the least objective, since he interprets moral issues from a strong Judeo Christian perspective. Their great contribution to the field of history is that they extended the perspective beyond national boundaries and tried to analyse things on a grander scale, even though they did not achieve a fully global perspective. Part 2: Culture and development. In the introduction to his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations David Landes takes a global perspective and argues that an age of division between East and West in world history has now been replaced by a division between North and South.

He contrasts the wealthy developed world (largely northern and western) with the less developed southern half of the globe and tries to work out why this is the case. Two common hypotheses are rejected as too easy, namely that the western nations were superior in ability and industriousness, which gave them an edge over other nations, or conversely the western nations were more ruthless and greedy (p. xxi). Landes concludes that there is an element of truth in both, and that “Things are always more complicated than we would have them” (p xxi) and proceeds with a Eurocentric approach, having acknowledged this fact at the very outset.

Paul Gootenberg in the introduction of his book Andean Cocaine: