The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View

William Hardy McNeill

Princeton University Press, 1980 - Civilization. - 81 pages

World history and human ecological development are viewed in relation to the concept of parasitism, looking at the organisms that compete with man for food as well as the human groups who seize or demand power and services from other groups

About the author

Born in Canada, William H. McNeill was chairman of the Department of History at the University of Chicago and one of the editors of the Readings in World History Series published by Oxford University Press. His one-volume "A World History," which gives equal space to Asia and the West, was greeted as a work of major importance by such recognized historians as Arnold Toynbee, Hans Kohn, Geoffrey Bruun, Stringfellow Barr, and John Barkham. Toynbee has acclaimed McNeill's "The Rise of the West," which took nine years to write, as "the most lucid presentation of world history in narrative form that I know." It won the 1963 National Book Award for history and the Gordon J. Laing Prize of the University of Chicago.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View; Bland-Lee lecture series delivered at Clark University, 1979; Bland-Lee lecture series; Chester Bland--Dwight E. Lee lectures in history; Princeton Studies on the Near East
• Author: William Hardy McNeill
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1980
• ISBN: 0691053170, 9780691053172
• Length: 81 pages