Dr. Christopher M. White, an associate professor of Latin American history and director of graduate studies in the history department at Marshall University, has written a book that provides the reader with a new roadmap of world history, according to one reviewer.
A Global History of the Developing World is a 288-page book that will be released in both paperback and hardback Sept. 18 by Routledge. The book has 12 chapters and is organized into four thematic units, each containing one chapter on Asia, Latin America and Africa.
According to the book description on the Routledge Web site, these units cover different commonly-experienced phenomena among the peoples of the developing world: imperialism, nationalism, globalization and development.
The first three are chronological, while the last surveys and analyzes the scholarly debates over the causes of development and underdevelopment. Through these chapters White presents a wide-ranging study of the major themes in studies of the developing world, including slavery, imperialism, religion, free and fair trade, democratization and economic development.
The book provides a comprehensive history of the developing world based on the author’s profound knowledge of economic and social history over the last six centuries,” said Katsushi Imai, a well-known economic development specialist from the University of Manchester in the UK. “The reader is not only provided with a new roadmap of World History but also with an alternative way of understanding key contemporary issues, such as global poverty or inequality. This book is highly recommended for students and their teachers in both social science and history.”
A Global History of the Developing World centralizes the struggle for self-determination in an attempt to understand how the current nation-states have been formed and what their future may hold. Although concentrating on the modern era, its scope is broad: it covers geography, ancient and modern history, economics, politics and recent events.
White said it took about two years to actually write the book, but many years of research based on travel to mostly Latin America, including places such as Peru, Mexico, Cuba and Central America.
“But also based on teaching a class for the past seven years at Marshall,” said White. “I have taken lots of notes down through the years and added to my lectures and kind of built the class up into the foundation of what the book became.”
The book includes detailed profiles of key figures as well as maps and illustrations.
At Marshall, White teaches courses on Latin America, the developing world and U.S. foreign relations. He also is the author of Creating a Third World: Mexico, Cuba, and the United States during the Castro Era (New Mexico, 2007), as well as The History of El Salvador (Greenwood, 2008).
