How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History

masterful and comprehensive synthesis of x thousand years of world history to advance a single important idea about the persistent nature of cross-cultural pollination, pushing back on the convenient tendency to homogenise and make monolithic categories we already know are unstable (in this case, ‘the West'). would have been nice if it fleshed out academic dissensus and debates more, but it would probably double the length of the book without changing the fundamental argument