This overview of world history summarizes how the modern world has been shaped from the year 1500 onwards. Exploring the major changes over the past five hundred years, Woodruff explains to what extent global forces have been responsible for shaping both the past and the present.

In his effort to understand the whole, the complexity, and the diversity of the past, he shifts his focus to the entirety rather than the parts, concentrating on the relationships between states, as the increasing convergence and interdependence of nations justify the adoption of a broader, more pluralistic perspective.

The book discusses the rise and fall of empires and cultures, showing how many of the problems of the modern world are a legacy of Western domination. The author is convinced that we are in a critical transitional stage of world history, in which the world is no longer shaped exclusively according to the perceptions of Western modernism, but increasingly based on the values of all cultures.

With the shift of geopolitical and geoeconomic power towards Asia and the growing global influence of religious fundamentalism and revolutionary nationalism, the need for a global perspective is more urgent than ever. In this comprehensive study, the approach, thematic and chronological, is necessarily personal, temporal, and locational.

It is understood that only in historical terms can we comprehend the transformation of the modern world.

• William Woodruff is emeritus professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

• Loukianos Chasiotis is an associate professor of modern and contemporary history at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.