A superficial civi-lizational similarity, for example, is the appearance of monumental pyramid-type structures. Of course there are many surface similarities between the Old and New worlds, both in terms of civilisations and the environments they formed and grew in. To this extent the book is an argument about global environmental history as it relates to grand, large-scale trends in human history. The causes of the Great Divide are as much natural as social.
The diversity of this list is a clue to the sources of Watson's overall argument. Like the German Genius, then, The Great Divide is necessarily a work of synthesis, pulling together scholarship from a host of disciplines: anthropology, comparative theology, archaeology, climatology, biology, geology and history. This divergence, in terms of civilisation and power, is what forms the 'great divide'. In The Great Divide, Watson sets himself an even more daunting task: he tries, by tracing human history from origins to the early modern period, to account for why the New World (North, Central and South America) has diverged from the Old. It was an accessible, although lengthy, guide to not only the great names-Goethe, Gauss, Kant, Einstein-but also managed to include a host of relatively minor figures, while making sense of the whole. His previous work, The German Genius (2010) did an admirable job surveying the extraordinary florescence of German intellectual thought from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Peter Watson is an intellectual historian, who writes big, ambitious books.
This article is published with open access at Peter Watson: The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New
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