Volume 29, Number 21 & 22 · January 20, 1983
Command Performances
By John Keegan
The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000
by William H. McNeill
University of Chicago Press, 405 pp., $20.00
Professor William McNeill, of the University of Chicago, is a prodigy among living historians. Two world histories crown his achievements, one so called and the other bearing a title that implies a confidence in our civilization rare among intellectuals today.[*] The same confidence sustains him in his treatment of smaller and less universal subjects—though almost any subject acquires, at Professor McNeill's hands, a largeness and sweep more timid men would shrink from giving it. His history of Venice is subtitled 'Hinge of Europe,' his regional survey of the borderlands where Ottoman, Romanov, and Hapsburg empires met is called Europe's Steppe Frontier, while his examination of the function of disease as an advance guard of population movements in history is called Plagues and Peoples. And heavy though the conclusions are that he lays upon these specialist studies, the skill with which he treats them lends him a charmed life in the barbed and acerbic world of professional historiography. Oxford University, a Mrs. Grundy in its attitude toward historians of wide horizons, elected him George Eastman Visiting Professor in 1980, and he retired from his own great university as professor emeritus with many honors.
Review, 2889 words
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