The Human Web is a unique contribution to historical study because of its grand scale and its transcendence of Eurocentrism and nation-state-contained analysis. The text compresses human history from the Paleolithic stone age to the 20th century into approximately 320 pages by explaining the emergence, expansion, and consolidation of human networks. The authors show how human societies organized on multiple levels, ranging from hunter-gatherer groups to the modern globalized human community. In between were villages, urban centers (and their surrounding hinterlands), confederations of steppe nomads, empires that transcended the boundaries of today’s national borders, and the nation-states that constitute the fundamental units of contemporary global politics.

By wresting historical study from nation-state-contained analysis, the authors illustrate the importance of cross-cultural and across-border exchanges in driving historical progress and shifting concentrations of power. The attention to cultural exchange or diffusion and shifts in power signify a critical departure from Eurocentrism. Eurocentric perspectives emphasize the dominance of European nations in a way that suggests their preeminence developed in a vacuum. Centering Europeans as key actors in historical progress, Eurocentrism relegates peoples of other regions to passive roles, rendering them useful in the historical narrative only in the ways that Europeans acted on them to consolidate power.