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1492 was 'the year the world began', argues the author, because at that point the human race, which had developed divergently on separate continents, became convergent with the meeting of Europe and the Americas, followed by the establishment of modern globalisation. Columbus set sail with a letter of introduction to the Great Khan of China, the last of whom had actually been unseated over a century earlier, in 1368. That kind of distance would not be possible again. We are encouraged in the West to have a firmly Eurocentric view of 1492 - the year of the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, as well as Columbus sailing the ocean blue - but this expanded my horizons usefully. It was also the era of the Aztec, Maya and Inca empires, the Ming Dynasty, the rise of Russia under Ivan the Great, the Ottoman Empire, the Songhay Empire in Africa, and Mamluk Egypt. around the corner are the Mughals and the Saffavid Dynasty in Persia. Clearly too much to cover in one volume, so Fernadez-Armesto provides much local colour. He clearly relishes being contrarian, dismissing the Florentine Renaissance as just one of a series of recoveries of antiquity going back to the fifth century (not a new thesis, though - Panofsky says this in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art). There's a resistance to Great Men and Big Patterns. History is just stuff happening. I enjoyed this book most for its array of curious detail: in Russia you could be executed on the orders of the Patriarch for not believing the world was about to end; Columbus's great achievement was discovering the winds that could blow you from the Canaries to the Bahamas (to him the Indies) and then back again on the South Atlantic. There's an evocative description of Shen Zhou painting 'The Night Vigil' in war-ravaged Japan. The chapter on Africa is particularly strong, Indochina gets more cursory attention and I don't remember much if anything on Burma. But you can't have everything, and what is here is richly enjoyable. For a book on how the world evolved from this point, replacing the Professor's lack of moral commentary with an impassioned tone, a good follow-up would be Chomsky, Year 501.