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Afroeurasia
The land masses of Africa and Eurasia, together with adjacent islands, as a single spatial entity. The concept of Afroeurasia is useful in the study of both historical and contemporary social phenomena whose full geographical contexts overlap in one way or another the conventionally defined continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. See also Afro-Eurasia.

Agrarian society
A society where agriculture, including both crop production and animal breeding, is the foundation of both subsistence and surplus wealth. To be distinguished from hunter-forager and pastoral nomadic societies.

Agriculture
The intentional cultivation of domesticated plants and animals. Beginning about 12,000 years ago, the development of agriculture permitted unprecedented growth of human population and the ermgence of towns, cities, and the centralized state. Scholars generally agree that agricultural economies developed in several parts of Afroeurasia and the Americas independently of one another.

AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)
A disease in which the immune system is weakened and less able to fight certain infections. AIDS is linked to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Amerindian
A member of any of the native populations of the Americas; an American Indian or Native American.

Animism
A doctrine that the vital principle of organic development is immaterial spirit.

Anti-Semitism
"Term coined in late nineteenth century that was associated with a prejudice against Jews and the political, social, and economic actions taken against them." Jerry Bentley and Herb Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006).

Archaeologist
A professional scholar in a branch of anthropology that documents similarities, differences and change among various human societies of the past. Archaeologists work with the material (physical) remains of societies. T heir work provides the major source of information available on societies that did not have writing systems. Archaeologists also provide evidence that supplements written sources.

Australopithicus/australopithicine
A group of hominid species ancestral to Homo sapiens. Australopithicines were bipedal but had brains about one third the size of modern Homo sapiens. These species appeared in Africa between four and three million years ago and died out about one million years ago. The best-known australopithicine remains are those of the creature named Lucy, who lived in what is today Ethiopia about 3.2 million years ago.

Autarky
A state of economic self-sufficiency. A country's policy of establishing economic self-sufficiency and independence.

B

Barter
The mutual transfer of goods or services not involving the exchange of money. Used as the common form of exchange before the invention of currency. The practice of bartering continues to one degree or another in all modern societies.

Belief system
A combination of ideas, values, and practices that serve a society's cultural needs. Belief systems include all religions, as well as philosophical, ethical, and moral systems.

Big Bang theory
The cosmological theory that the universe began as an infinitesimally small, dense, and hot entity. About 13 billion years ago the universe began to expand and continues to expand today.

Bipedalism
The physical ability, characteristic of the genus Homo, to walk upright on two legs, thus freeing the hands to hold and manipulate objects or tools. "Homo sapiens is a bipedal species."

Black Death
An infectious disease pandemic that spread from Inner Eurasia to China, the Mediterranean basin, and Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. The pandemic may have taken the lives of a quarter to a third of the populations of Europe, North Africa, and Southwest Asia. Scholars have conventionally attributed the pestilence to the infectious microorganism Yersina pestis, which causes plague in both bubonic and pneumonic forms. Recent research, however, has challenged this theory, arguing that modern plague and the disease causing the Black Death are not identical.

Bolsheviks
A group of socialist revolutionaries which Vladimir Lenin led in a successful overthrow of the Provisional Government of Russia in 1917. The Bolsheviks founded the first Communist state in world history.

Bourgeoisie
Literally, people of the bourg, or town. Men and women of the middle class, the mostly urban, affluent, business-oriented class. Historically, this group was situated socially between the landowning, aristocratic ruling class and the common population.

C

Caliph
In Arabic, khalifa. In Sunni Muslim teaching, the successor to the Prophet Muhammad as rightful leader of the Muslim community chosen by a concensus of that community. In the Umayyad (661-750) and Abbasid (751-1258) dynasties, the Caliphs were also the heads of state and transmitted their authority to their descendants.

Cartographer
A person who designs or constructs maps or charts.

Cash crops
Crops grown for sale on the market rather than exclusively for local consumption and subsistence.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
Industrial chemicals that have contributed to ozone depletion in the stratosphere.

Civilization
See Complex Society.

Clan
A form of social and political organization in which the fundamental principle of solidarity is kinship. Clans typically constitute two or more kinship groups within a tribe. Clan organization is common among pastoral nomadic and stateless societies.

Cold War
The ideological, political, and economic conflict and rivalry between the United States and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union and its supporters on the other side. Competition between the two alliances, which continued from the end of World War II in 1945 to the collapses of the Soviet Union in 1991, was carried on by strategies and tactics that did not involve sustained military conflict or, for the most part, the breaking of diplomatic relations.

Collective Learning
The view that the human species has a unique capacity to accumulate and share complex knowledge and to transmit this knowledge from one generation to the next.

Colonialism
The systematic exercise of political and military authority of an intrusive group of foreign origin over the population of a given territory. Often involves the colonizer asserting social and cultural domination of the indigenous population.

Columbian Exchange
The trans-oceanic transmission of plants, animals, microorganisms, and people that followed the establishment of regular contact between Afroeurasia and the Americas in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Because life forms evolved separately in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres for millions of years, these transmissions had far-reaching biological, economic, cultural, and social effects on both American and Afroeurasian societies.

Commercial Diaspora
A network of merchants of common origin and shared cultural identity who lived as aliens in foreign towns to serve as agents and cross-cultural brokers for fellow merchants who moved along the trade routes connecting these towns. Examples are the ancient commercial diaspora of the Phoenicians and the medieval diaspora of Jewish merchants in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Also trade diaspora. See diaspora.

Complex Society
A type of society characterized by all or most of the following features: dense population, agricultural economy, cities, complex social hierarchy, complex occupational specialization, centralized state, monumental building, a writing system, and a dominant belief system. To be distinquished generally from hunter-forager, pastoral nomadic, and small-scale agricultural societies. Civilization.

Constitution
The fundamental laws, either written or unwritten, of a political body or state.

Creation Myths
A type of myth that explains how the universe, the earth, life, and humankind came into being. Most societies in history have had creation myths.

D

Darwinism
The theory of biological evolution, including the principle of natural selection, based on the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809-1882).

Demography
The study of the size, growth, density, growth and other characteristics of human populations.

Diaspora
The scattering of a people of distinct regional, ethnic, or religious identity from the original homeland to other parts of the world. A diaspora may result from either voluntary or forced migration. Examples include the Jewish diaspora and the dispersion of people of African descent to the Americas and other regions as a result of slave trade. See Commercial Diaspora.

Divine Right
The theory that the legitimacy of a monarch or other head of state derives from God or other supernatural power. Contrasts with the modern theory that political sovereignty is determined by the will of the people.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)
The material inside the nucleus of a cell which carries genetic information for cellular reproduction.

Domestication
The process whereby humans changed the genetic makeup of plants and animals by influencing the way they reproduced, thereby making them more appealing in taste, size, and nutrition, as well as easier to grow, process, and cook. Humans could not invent new plant species, but they could select plants that possessed certain observable mutations, that is, characteristics that made them desirable. Farmers could tend these mutants in ways that ensured their survival. The domestication of animals through selective breeding followed a similar process.

E

Ecological Niche
The environment within which an organism is adapted to live.

Ecology
The aspect of biology concerned with the relations between organisms and their environment.

El Niño (El Niño Southern Oscillation)
The term describes both warming of the Pacific Ocean off Peru and Ecuador and the much more extensive interactions between sea and air that occur across the equatorial Pacific. An El Niño event involves warm changes in sea surface temperature combined with changes in sea level pressure across the tropical ocean. El Niño events typically last a year to eighteen months and may occur every few years. These events may bring torrential rains and floods to some regions of the world and prolonged droughts to others.

Endemic
Prevalent in or peculiar to a certain area, region, or people, as an infectious disease.

Entrepôt
A city whose commercial activity includes the transshipment or distribution of trade goods.

Entrepreneur
An individual who organizes, runs, and takes responsibility of a business or other enterprise; a business person; an employer; from the French verb entreprendre, meaning "to undertake" some task.

Epidemic
An outbreak of contagious disease affecting a significant portion of the population of a locality. See also Pandemic.

Eukaryotic
A single-celled or multicellular organism whose cells contain at least one nucleus. Animals, plants, and fungi, are all eukaryotes.

European Union
An institutional framework for achieving the economic, judicial, legislative, and social unification of Europe. Formally created in 1993, the European Union evolved from the European Community and earlier post-World War II institutions for cooperation among states.

Extensification
"An increase in the range of humans wouthout any parallel increase in the average size or density of human communities, and consequently with little increase in the complexity of human societies. It involves the gradual movement of small groups into new lands, usually adjacent to and similar to those they have left." (David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], 190). Processes of extensification were characteristic of the paleolithic era in world history. See also Intensification.

F

Farming
The process of growing and harvesting domesticated plants and animals for food, fiber, and other commodities. Farming is characteristic of agrarian societies.

Fascism
A political philosophy, movement, or government that exalts the nation, and often a socially defined race, above the individual and that advocates centralized autocratic government, strict economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition. Derived from the Italian fascismo and referring to a "bundle," "fasces," or "group," specifically to a bundle of birch or elm sticks used in ancient Rome as a symbol of penal authority.

Fertile Crescent
An arc of cultivable land characterized by wooded hillsides and alluvial valleys which runs northwestward along the Zagros Mountains of Iran, loops around the northern rim of the Syrian Desert, and extends southward parallel to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The Tigris-Euphrates and Jordan river valleys are also conventionally considered part of the Fertile Crescent. The earlist physical traces of farming settlements in the world are located in this region. The Ameican scholar James Harvey Breasted invented the term in 1916.

Fossil Fuel Revolution
The extensive use of substances extracted from organic fossils, especially coal, coke, crude oil, and gasoline, as sources of energy. The fossil fuel revolution may be closely associated with the Industrial Revolution, initially with large-scale burning of coal to generate steam and to produce iron and steel in England in the later eighteenth century. In the past century the combustion of fossil fuels has contributed to increasing atmospheric pollution and global warming.

This glossary, derived from World History For Us All, has been reproduced with the permission of San Diego State University.

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