The Dynamics of Global Dominance

Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium
Dirk Hoerder
Duke University Press   xxii + 779pp   £76 
ISBN 0-8223-2834-8

These two large books treat of broad and closely related topics that will prove of interest to a wide readership. They are all the more arresting because the two authors proceed from very different assumptions, adopt very different methods and arrive at very different conclusions on how today’s world has come to be framed into a single unit. The differences are partly explained by the distinct academic disciplines of the authors: Abernethy is a comparative social  scientist who seeks, through an appraisal of historical literature, to arrive at a grand theory about the rise and fall of empires, while Hoerder is a labour historian whose ambition is to describe and comprehend what large migratory movements have contributed to the process of globalisation.