1688: A Global History

by John E. Wills

Ebook, 2002

Status

Available

Call number

NN 4350 W741

Collection

Publication

W. W. Norton & Company (2002), 348 pages

Description

"In his brief, focused chapters, Jack Wills also shows us ordinary life in the world of 1688. We join the great caravans of Muslims on their annual pilgrimage from Damascus and Cairo to Mecca, witness the suicidal exaltation of Russian Old Believers, and walk the pungent streets of Amsterdam. There we enter the Rasp House, where vagrants, beggars, and petty criminals labored to produce powdered brazilwood for the local dyeworks. And we meet hitherto unnoticed but unforgettable characters: Constantine Phaulkon, a Greek adventurer whose efforts to advance French interests as well as his own with the court of Siam ended in betrayal and a grisly death; and Dona Teresa, a beauty at fifteen, whose chaste loves stirred local legend in the wild mining town of Potosi." "Told with verve, color, and insight, Wills's book captures an historical moment in which the world seems both strange and familiar, when the global connections of power, money, and belief were ushering in the modern age."--Jacket.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member TimothyBurke
I loved the idea of this book: it reminded me of something I once heard Jonathan Spence describe in a lecture, that there is a moment between 1575 and 1700 where the entire world is linked in a new way, but that for the most part, Western Europe is not really dominant over this new world-system.
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Exploring that moment through the prism of a single year seems like a fantastic idea. I'm also very partial to a more microhistorical, cultural-history take on world history. For all of that, however, this book just doesn't quite gel together as well as I expected it to. I'm not sure why. It may be that Wills just doesn't give it enough structure, or that the writing is less engaging that it needs to be, or that his selection of narratives from 1688 ends up feeling like one damn thing after another as opposed to some golden thread of connections.
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LibraryThing member jorgearanda
Reading history often feels disjointed --we focus on one event, or one culture, without considering the wider, global view of which it is part. Wills' book is extremely fresh in that it attempts the opposite: it's a historical snapshot of 1688, with stories from all over the world, and the result
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is almost fantastic: Pirates, samurais, Sor Juana, Newton, Louis XIV, the Dutch East India Company, they're all here, and they were all there, living through the same days and years.

The book loses strength near the end, and it's too forgiving of religiousness, considering the number of wars and deaths it caused even in just that one year. Still a good read.
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LibraryThing member Steve38
A good idea but not well executed. The history of the world in 1688. A year chosen not at random. For someone from the UK the year of the Glorious Revolution when William the protestant replaced James the catholic. The author tours the world telling us what happened round about the year 1688.
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Interesting enough and well enough researched. But its a series of unrelated sketches. There's no attempt to draw threads together. It is biased towards Europe directed there no doubt by reasons of language and access to sources. Nowhere near as good as it should have been.
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Language

Original publication date

2001

Physical description

348 p.; 8.3 inches

ISBN

0393322785 / 9780393322781
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