World History

Philip D. Curtin. e World and the West: e European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv + 294 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-77135-1.

Reviewed by David M. Fahey (Department of History, Miami University)

Published on H-World (December, 2001)

Case Studies in Modern World History: A Method for World History Teaers?

Case Studies in Modern World History: A Method for

World History Teachers?

Now retired from teaching at Johns Hopkins, Philip

D. Curtin continues to contribute to historical scholarship.

He is a respected pioneer in world, comparative

and Atlantic history, as well as the history of Africa and

of the Caribbean, and has worked with methodologies as

diverse as demography and the history of ideas. His graduate

students, particularly those from his middle years at

the University of Wisconsin, have earned prominence in

the young field of world history. For instance, they include

Ross E. Dunn, the editor of e New World History:

A Teacher’s Companion and several of the contributors to

it. [Ross E. Dunn’s book recently was reviewed for HWorld

by J.B. Owens.] e anthology features an article

by Craig A. Lockard about Philip Curtin and the “Wisconsin

School” of comparative world history.

As a world historian, Curtin is not identified with a

single magnum opus but instead with several books that

in different ways transcend conventional geographical

limits. Typically they are collections of essays related to

a theme and based mostly on secondary sources. is is

the case for Cross Cultural Trade in World History (1984),

e Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (1990; 2nd ed.,

1998), and the book under review. In books such as these

Curtin does not develop an elaborate theory. His contributions

are more subtle: aempts to reinterpret sometimes

familiar data through new contexts. e World and

the West (a highly traditional title) starts like the kind of

book...