Themes in World History
About the Book Series
The Themes in World History series provides exciting, new and wide-ranging surveys of the important themes of world history. Each theme is examined over a broad period of time allowing analysis of continuities and change, and introduces students to historians' methods and debates in their context.
Islam in World History
1st Edition
By Susan L. Douglass, Tom Facchine
November 18, 2025
Islam in World History examines the emergence and development of Islam as a world religion in the Abrahamic tradition, and the unfolding of Muslim society and civilization over fourteen centuries. In contrast to the usual recital of the rise of Islam as a “new” religion, this book looks at the ...
Endemics, Epidemics, and Pandemics in World History
1st Edition
By Benjamin Reilly
October 27, 2025
Epidemics, Endemics, and Pandemics in World History provides a comprehensive account of human interactions with diseases from the stone age to COVID-19. It takes a thematic approach, exploring the two-way relationship between pathogens and human development throughout history. The book argues that ...
Hygiene in World History
1st Edition
By Peter N. Stearns
September 30, 2025
This book offers a global, historical analysis of the changes and continuities in one of society’s basic functions: seeking to protect itself from disease. Hygiene offers an important lens for major aspects of world and comparative history. The volume explores the ways different regions and major ...
Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire
3rd Edition
By Peter N. Stearns
February 26, 2025
The third edition of Consumerism in World History explores the nature of consumerism and its evolution, with particular emphasis on the modern “consumer revolution” and its global scope. The book deals with crucial interpretive issues, such as whether consumerism is a natural human expression or ...
Loneliness in World History
1st Edition
By Katie Barclay
February 11, 2025
This book takes a thematic approach to questions of how to define emotion and loneliness, breaking down loneliness into a range of different dimensions – estrangement, longing, homesickness, isolation – and considers how these phenomena appear across a range of global contexts. Loneliness is a ...
Animals in World History
1st Edition
By Helen Louise Cowie
November 08, 2024
This volume provides a concise synthesis of human-animal relations over time, charting shifting attitudes towards animals from domestication to the present day. It asks how non-human species have shaped human history, and how humans have reconfigured the animal world. Humans have had a long and ...
Water in World History
1st Edition
By Ellen F. Arnold
October 22, 2024
This book takes a thematic approach to the global history of water, covering a wide range of human interactions with water and the ways in which it carries both life and death. Water is one of the most common and valuable natural resources for the survival of individual people and civilizations. As...
Disasters in World History
1st Edition
By Benjamin Reilly
August 27, 2024
Disasters in World History surveys the development of disaster studies as a discipline as well as presenting historical case studies and theories used by historians to understand disasters. Disasters, here defined as the complex interaction between natural hazards and specific human vulnerabilities...
The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History
2nd Edition
By Jeremy Black
February 05, 2024
Now in its second edition, The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History has been updated to include recent scholarship, and an analysis of how debates have changed in light of recent key events such as the Black Lives Matter movement.Primarily focused on the Atlantic Slave Trade, this study places ...
Globalization in World History
4th Edition
By Peter N. Stearns
November 03, 2023
In this fully revised fourth edition, this book treats globalization from several vantage points, showing how these help grasp the nature of globalization both in the past and today. The revisions include greater attention to the complications of racism (after 1500) and nationalism (after 1850); ...
The Environment in World History
2nd Edition
By Stephen Mosley
November 03, 2023
Now in its second edition and refreshed by a decade of new research, The Environment in World History uncovers the deep-rooted causes of interconnected climate, biodiversity, and ecological crises that have brought the environment to the top of the global political agenda in the twenty-first ...
Punishment in World History
1st Edition
By Peter N. Stearns
October 02, 2023
This book focuses on major changes in punishment patterns during the principal phases of world history, tracing continuities, reforms, and regional differences. Punishment in World History studies the official penalties enacted by governments throughout time, chronicling the limited courses of ...