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Introduction Since ancient times, Chinese has cultivated a respect for history and a wind of exploration. In the official history of the past dynasties, there are not only detailed records of the history of the country, but also descriptions of the surrounding and even more distant worlds. With the development of the times and the advancement of science and technology, we have a more detailed and accurate understanding of today's world. However, instead of being weakened, the desire to explore yesterday's world has become stronger. This is because there is a growing awareness that all the major problems affecting survival and development today have historical roots. For example, how did the diversity of human cultures come about? How did nation-states and their borders and territorial sovereignty evolve to this day? Why is it so easy for Europe to integrate into an organization like the EU, while Asia is so hard to do? Why is peace in the Middle East and even Palestinian-Israeli relations so difficult to resolve? Why...... To find the right answers to these questions, and to scientifically predict and grasp the future based on these answers, it is inseparable from the study and exploration of world history. Scientific research tells us that life on Earth originated about 3.9 billion years ago. Australopithecus that could walk upright existed about 5.5 million to 1 million years ago. Humans may have been born from one or more of Australopithecus. The evolution of human society is carried out in the form of acceleration. At first, small advances in toolmaking technology measured in the hundreds of thousands of years, but in the grinding stone age, the rate of evolution accelerated to thousands of years. In the era of industrial civilization, the rate of evolution has been measured in decades or years. Nevertheless, our human development is still at the beginning of its own history or in its childhood, compared with the time of the evolution of life on Earth and the future history of mankind. Therefore, we need to have a sense of reverence for history. History is an indispensable subject in national education. The process of nature is called natural history. The process of the formation and development of human society is human history, which is the sum of the activities carried out by people from generation to generation. History can be divided into several stages according to different classification criteria. If the progress of tools or productivity is used as the standard, world history can be divided into Stone Age, Metal Age, Machine Age and other stages; Based on civilization or cultural form, it can be divided into pre-civilization era of gathering and hunting, agricultural civilization and nomadic civilization, and industrial civilization; Taking social formation as the standard, human history can be divided into prehistoric society, slave society, feudal society, capitalist society, socialist society, and so on. As a form of human self-knowledge, the value of history lies in satisfying people's spiritual development needs. If human beings had no history, we would not know who we were, where we came from, where we are now, where we are going, let alone what we have done and what we should do, and we will lack even a sense of time and language, and we will regress to the state of purely animal ancestors who acted only by instinct. Although history, reality and the future are three independent concepts of time, in real life, the three are an inseparable whole. History is the reality of the past, reality is the continuation of history, and the future is a projection of reality. Reality is gone, and it exists only in our remembrance of the past. Without our remembrance, without our historical reconstruction, the past would not exist, and the future is only unknown, and history is the only basis for people to judge reality and predict the future. At present, large-scale achievements in the study of world history at home and abroad are not uncommon, including the three Cambridge histories (Cambridge Ancient History, New Cambridge Medieval History, and New Cambridge Modern World History), as well as the newly published large-scale multi-volume "World History" compiled by Chinese himself. In addition, there are many works on world history on a smaller scale, ranging from single-volume to two-volume, three-volume, six-volume, and series of books, and so on. But for the convenience of learning, people also need a concise, easy-to-understand reading book that also contains the latest results of world history research. A Concise Reader of World History was written to meet this need. The participants in the writing of this book are well-known scholars who have been engaged in the study of world history for many years. The history told in the book can be traced back to prehistoric times. In terms of content, it covers the origin and evolution of human beings after the abdelion of apes two or three million years ago; the emergence of civilization and the formation of states; the rise and fall of dynasties and wars on all continents; the essence of science and art and the influence of religion; The environment, counter-terrorism and the new challenges facing humanity today, among others. It not only has an overall grasp of the process of human history, but also a thematic exposition of major historical events and the care of the times, so that readers can clearly, systematically, coherently and concisely understand the overall context and main issues of world historical development. Chinese history is an indispensable part of world history. When describing the development process of human history, the reader naturally integrates the relevant content of Chinese history, so that people can see the position of Chinese civilization in human history more clearly, and at the same time, it also inspires people to think deeply about their own history from a global perspective. For example, the book writes that Zheng He's voyage to the West in the 15th century of China's Ming Dynasty opened the prelude to the era of human exploration, but failed to become a pioneer in leading the development of world history in the future. Today, China is striding toward the world with unprecedented confidence and speed. More and more Chinese go abroad to contact and interact with foreign civilizations; More and more domestic and foreign capital and commodities are flowing and circulating inside and outside China; More and more international affairs require China's participation and voice. Therefore, the world needs to understand China more than ever, and China needs to understand the world comprehensively and deeply. Not only to understand the world today, but also to understand the world yesterday in a deeper way. May Concise World History Reader become a good companion for you to understand the world, know yourself, communicate with China and foreign countries, and enrich your knowledge. Wu Yin, October 2014（AI翻译）
