The Penguin History of the World

The Growth of Venice as a Mediterranean Power

Kiev Rus

The Mongol Empires

South-eastern Europe c. 1400

Ottoman Expansion

Charlemagne’s Europe

Christendom before the Islamic Conquest

The Medieval Empire

Christendom in the Eleventh Century

Muslim India

German Eastward Expansion

The Crusader Wars

European Universities Founded before 1500

Mughal India

European Trading Stations and Possessions in Africa and Asia c. 1750

Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe

Europe (Treaty of Westphalia 1648)

The Beginning of the Ottoman Retreat in Europe

Russian Expansion 1500–1800

The Growth of British Power in India 1783–1804

Exploration of the Americas

British Atlantic Trade in the 1770s

Economic Resources of the British American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century

Africa in the Early Modern Era

Christian Missionary Activity in Africa and Asia in the Nineteenth Century

The Emergence and Consolidation of the United States

Napoleonic Europe

Europe in 1815

Russian Expansion to 1905

The Winning of the Far West

The Slavery Problem in the United States

The American Civil War 1861–5

The British Empire (and Protected Territories) 1815–1914

South America after Independence

British India 1858–1947

Africa in 1880

Partitioned Africa: Areas of European Domination in 1914

Qing Empire in 1759

Japanese Expansion 1895–1942

Major Religions of Asia in the Early Twentieth Century

Imperial Expansion in South-East Asia

Migration from Europe in the Nineteenth Century

Europe in 1914

World War I, 1914–18

Russia in 1918

China 1918–49

Ottoman Decline and the Emergence of Modern Turkey 1683–1923

Europe during World War II

Proposed UN Partition of Palestine 1947

Post-war Germany and Central Europe

The Post-war Recovery of Eastern Asia and Population Pressure in South and East Asia

The Post-Ottoman Near and Middle East

Decolonization in Africa and Asia

Contemporary Latin America

Post-war Europe – Economic and Military Blocks

The Soviet Union and Its Successors

Preface to the Sixth Edition

John Roberts was a remarkable historian, whose one-volume history of the world is probably the finest ever produced in English. When I first read it, as a teenager growing up in a small town, I was struck by the scope of it all: Roberts does not just recount history, he tells it; he presents the great outline of human development without losing track of the big stories that drove it forward. He has an eye for the unexpected, for the sudden departures, for that which needs explanation because it does not fit easily with what went before. He believes, deeply, in the human capacity for change and transformation, while never making history teleological, never believing that one part of our history points only to one possible outcome. Roberts understands the complexity of history, but also the need to tell it simply, so that the largest possible number of people get the chance to reflect on what has created the world we live in today. In sum, he was the kind of historian I wanted to be.

I was therefore very pleased when, many years later, Penguin asked me to attempt a completely revised sixth edition of Roberts’s masterpiece. In 2007, after John Roberts died, I wrote an updated fifth edition: it turned out to be a very difficult task, since my work had to consist of adding small pieces to an unfinished revision that the author himself had carried out, just prior to his death in 2003. It made me want to do a fully revised version, which – while being as true as possible to the author’s intentions – took our historical knowledge forward in directions Roberts could not possibly have been aware of when he did his work. What you are reading now is therefore much more than an update; it is a reworking of the text based on new knowledge and new interpretations. It is, I hope, a new world history for a new century.

The first edition of this book appeared in 1976, after Roberts had begun work on it in the late 1960s. It was well received both in Britain and in America, and some reviewers already then called it ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘an unrivalled world history for our times’. Some saw it as too ‘academic’ to win over a larger audience (one reviewer felt that it was too ‘difficult’ for his undergraduate classes). Others criticized it – in line with the mood of the times – for being too ‘elitist’ or too focused on the rise of the West. But the general reading public appreciated Roberts’s power of synthesis and composition; his History was a best-seller from the very beginning, and has since sold more than half a million copies. It was the readers, not the reviewers, who made it the predominant history of the world in print today.