world history essay topics

world history essay topics

Exploring Key Events and Themes in World History

1. Introduction to World History as a Field of Study

The nearly universal appeal of this approach has given rise to a new field of research that transcends national boundaries. When the discussion of what we now call “world history” or “world system” began in Europe around 2500 BC, it was forged in political, sociological, and cultural terms. This section offers time and space to reflect on the range of topics that world historians study, from the rise of agriculture and technology to the origins of the state, the human impact on land, the evolution of the major world zones, and the transformation of the world by globalization, the world’s deepening integration. The encounters bring to the fore how civilizations and cultures interact, either through conflict or over time as overarching themes and salient points, pulling the participants from across the boundaries of the separate sessions.

World history is the field of study that emerged after specializing in biographies and national histories gave way to the exploration of global structures, dynamics, and interconnections of all sorts. Rather than a field of study, world history is better understood as an approach for working through the implicit and explicit relationships between events, people, and the spaces they inhabit. It underscores the view of all things. This section traces the major arguments and subjects in world history, a relatively new and exciting field of study that appeals not only to the scholar but to a much wider audience.

2. Ancient Civilizations and the Birth of Human Societies

Mesopotamia, in the region of modern-day Iraq, is often called the “cradle of civilization.” As opposed to earlier hominids, Homo sapiens created agricultural societies and cities. An agricultural surplus allowed the growth of political and religious hierarchies and intellectual and economic specialization. Writing systems, such as cuneiform, developed in these urban areas to allow communication over time and space. This recording was important for political control of their surroundings and for the rise of a kind of religious state. Elaborate stories of gods and control of the environment were written down as well as the earliest epics, literary narratives passed on by writing. Flood stories are well attested; they may have originated with the observance of catastrophic regional floods. These Sumerian flood epics eventually merged into the more familiar Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh.

3. The Rise and Fall of Empires: From Rome to the Ottoman Empire

The road to Romans like accomplishments were paved by the Greeks. The greatest aim of the early Greeks was to provide literacies based upon solid truths. In the process, writers, philosophers, and sciences discovered universities, all aimed at the initial aim of a true education. What was learned by this effort of seriously questioning man’s relationship to truth was science, law, and debate. In respect for each other’s dedication to an idea, and to man’s refusal to give up his search for the truth, the Greeks were one of the introduction to man’s attempt to define civilization. Where the Greek greatness was culture, of the mind and the spirit, Rome’s strength was in the organization of society into a working, ruling body. It was the Greeks who laid down the patterns of life, both public and private. In a competition as fierce as no other, power and wealth redrew this landscape to accommodate the one who worked the hardest, or provided the largest service to the most people.

The Roman Empire was one of the most civilized societies in the history of the world, and it spread not only civilization but law, what was then new ideas of government, and a sane way of looking at the world to the peoples of the western Mediterranean. Rome produced vast libraries of opportunity, and was a leader in architecture, sculpture, and engineering. For every Greek philosopher or thinker, Rome produced vast libraries of opportunity, and was a leader in architecture, sculpture, and engineering. Citizens of Rome could not only create wealth, they could increase direct political power by direct political control through their representative assemblies, a control that the early Athenians could give to no one. When Greek citizens no longer controlled the machinery of the state, their only escape was a physical one.

4. Global Encounters and the Age of Exploration

Once the new stories became embedded in the learned world of medieval academe, discussion of them quickly spread through merchants throughout the Old World. These merchants shared the information with the seamen of the day, and voyagers sailed in search of the places featured in the so-called truthful stories. The great athletic land of the “Amazons”, strange kinds of animals and fruits, birds, and terrain could be found in literature. These combined to bring seamen to adventurous fantasies and quench their thirst for tales told by real people in far-off locales. In the process, new maps were drawn, and newly explored uncharted territories usually were given names similar to the wreaths that existed in the mythological landscapes. Wild animals and savage people described in the written accounts were drawn upon the art. Indeed, some of these appealing, fantastic creatures and lands from the well-established stories were quite often faked, unleashed, and heartfelt.

In the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese began to venture out into the Atlantic. In the first years of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards also began to explore the ocean routes. The adventures of some of these early voyagers seemed more like fairy tales than the tales usually found in factual history books. But in the fifteenth century, many fabulous legends and myths had taken on the nature of “factual” events. This was because medieval scholars had been searching the ancient writings written by classic Greek and Roman authors to gather factual information on other lands. In doing so, they found many mythical creatures and events that had no more to justify their existence than fiction. They often honestly took them for fact and used them to justify their own religious beliefs, as well as to denounce the lack of civilization of the people who lived beyond known continents’ borders.

5. The Impact of Revolutions and Wars on the Modern World

These revolutions ranged in character from antislavery movements epitomized by Emperor Haile Selassie’s victory over Italy and the US civil war (1861-65) to those that sought a communist or racial state encompassing peasants and laborers. Unlike previous uprisings, eighteenth and nineteenth-century revolutions involved either significant shifts in state power to the victors or a wider scale of political mobilization. Some revolutions, such as the European, Russian and Chinese, had formidable consequences. They were associated with the establishment of communist states with centralized power, one-party fiefdoms, state communication, modern schooling, rapid population, and industrial growth, but often with severe hardship and steeply escalating, criminal, and institutionalized violence. Such as the Great Depression and the two world wars (1914-46) hastened the demise of a more limited range of autocratic states that exposed their own incoherence.

Revolutions upset established orders and result in fast and wide-ranging change. The modern era has been marked by a series of popular revolutions that together have shifted the center of global economic and political power from Northern Eurasia to remote areas of Asia and Latin America. The most far-reaching consequences resulted from the elevation of common people as a political and economic force. Popular revolts have, in turn, acted as a spur to economic development and transformed the composition and structure of states.