The Global Condition

William Hardy McNeill is known for his ability to portray the grand sweep of history. This book is a classic work for understanding the grand sweep of world history in brief compass. Now with a new foreword, the book brings together two of McNeill's popular short books and an essay. The Human Condition provides a provocative interpretation of history as a competition of parasites, both biological and human. McNeill discusses shifting patterns of microparasitism and macroparasitism and how they affected and continue to affect human history. McNeill uses the term “macroparasites” in a metaphorical sense to refer to the subsets of the human race that included rulers and bureaucrats, and, at times, military men. Macroparasitism can thus be defined as exploitative relations among groups and classes of human beings. The Great Frontier questions the notion of “frontier freedom” through an examination of European expansion. Formulated in the late 1880s, Turner's argument postulated a connection between the wide open spaces of the American frontier and the democratic culture and rugged individualism of American society. The concluding essay speculates on the role of catastrophe in our lives. McNeill discusses catastrophes as a recurrent phenomenon in human history and one that can never be banished from human experience.