Millennium is the most exciting sort of popular history. The narrative of Millennium begins in Japan in the year 1005 with a visit to the author of The Tale of Genji ... the same place it ends 990 years later.

In between, it follows the civilizations of the world - from the eleventh-century Caliphate of Cordova to fourteenth-century Mesoamerica to fifteenth-century Russia to twentieth-century America - tracking the geographic drift westward of historical initiative from the eastern shores of the Pacific to the Atlantic and back again. In a single chapter, this book moves from the founding of the Ming Dynasty to sixteenth-century Amsterdam to the empires of the Inca and Aztec.

Dazzlingly written, scrupulous in its scholarship, Millennium is a book on a grand scale, with more ambition, erudition, relevance, and enduring interest than any popular history ever written.