《全球通史》首开由历史学家运用全球观点囊括全球文明而编写的世界历史的先河。
本书分八个部分，四十四个章节，主要讲述了世界历史的进化，世界文明的发展及其对现代社会的影响。作者着眼于全球，侧重于那些有影响的、促进历史发展的历史事件，其中包括原始社会、欧亚大陆的古代文明、欧亚大陆的原始文明、欧亚以外的世界、地区分割后的世界、西方世界的崛起、西方人统治的世界、西方的衰落与成功等八个主要的部分。重点突出，主题鲜明，着重有三个主要的问题，即（1）欧洲扩张的根源；（2）欧洲扩张前的儒家文化、穆斯林和其它非欧洲的世界；（3）欧洲扩张的各个历史时期：伊比利亚时期，荷兰、法国、英国时期，沙俄时期。
上册的主题是1500年以前，诸文明各自发展、间或碰撞的历史。下册讲述的是1500年以后，全球化趋势日兴加速的状况。
斯塔夫里阿诺斯的这部潜心力作自1970年初版问世以来，赞誉如潮，被译成多种语言流传于世，可谓经典之中的经典。本书不断再版，融入了时新的研究成果，收录数百幅生动珍贵的图片和脉络清晰的地图，使这部名著在内容和体系上更加完善。作者文笔隽永，笔力深厚，才思横溢，整部著作风格前后一贯，令您在颇具历史韵律的行文中思接千载、视通万里。
英文版简介
Each age writes its own history. Not because the earlier history is wrong, but because each age faces new problems, asks new questions, and seeks new answers. This precept is self-evident today when the tempo of change is increasing exponentially, creating a correspondingly urgent need for new history posing new questions and offering new answers.
Our own generation, for example, was brought up on West-oriented history, and naturally so, in a West-dominated world. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were an era of Western hegemony in politics, in economics, and in culture. But the two World Wars and the ensuing colonial revolutions quickly ended that hegemony, as evidenced by the disappearance of the great European empires from the maps of the world. The names and the colors on the maps changed radically, reflecting the new world that had emerged by the mid-twentieth century.
Slowly and reluctantly we recognized that our traditional West-oriented history was irrelevant and misleading in this world. A new global perspective was needed to make sense of the altered circumstances. The transition from the old to the new was achieved, albeit with much soul searching and acrimony. By the 1960s the reality of the shift was evident in the emergence of the World History Association, in the appearance of the Journal of World History, and in the publication of the first edition of this text.
This brings us back to our original question: Why publish a new edition for the twentieth-first century, only a few decades after the first edition? The answer is the same as the answer given to justify the first edition: a new world requires a correspondingly new historical approach. The postcolonial world of the 1960s necessitated a new global history. Today the equally new world of the 1990s, and of the twentieth-first century, requires an equally new historical approach. The new world of the 1960s was in large part the product of the colonial revolutions. The new world of the 1990s , as Pope Pius VI noted, is the product of the “magic influence of science and technology”. The pervasiveness of this influence is evident in the “gigantic problems” it has created in all aspects of our lives. For example, students of the late twentieth century doubtless remember their daily prostration under their wooden desks, probably wondering what protection those flimsy structures could offer against nuclear bombs.
The generation of students had to face up to not only new dangers to human life, but also to unprecedented peril to the mother Earth which had given birth to that life. Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau has warmed: Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the twentieth century than in all previous human history. Likewise the environmental organization Worldwatch Institute concluded in 1989: By the end of the next decade the die will pretty well be cast. As the world enters the twentieth-first century, the community of nations either will have rallied and turned back the threatening trends, or environmental deterioration and social disintegration will be feeding on each other.
作者简介：
斯塔夫里阿诺斯（L. S. Stavrianos，1913—2004），美国著名历史学家，加州大学历史系荣休教授，“全球史观”的倡导者。因其杰出的学术成就，荣获古根海姆奖、福特天赋奖和洛克菲勒基金奖。他一生学术成果斐然，生前共出版了《1453年以来的巴尔干各国》《全球分裂：第三世界的历史进程》《全球史纲：人类历史的谱系》等18部颇具影响的著作。
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