The Recurring Dark Ages

Reviews / Votes

Dr. Chew's long awaited sequel to World Ecological Degradation provides the reader with new insights on the contemporary environmental crisis by providing a broad, long-range perspective on the interactions between natural changes and cultural changes. Interdisciplinary in scope, rich in theory and data, The Recurring Dark Ages helps the reader understand globalization in historical perspective. -- Bill Devall, author, Deep Ecology and Living Richly in an Age of Limits Sing Chew offers groundbreaking insights for anyone seeking help in understanding the uneven course of the history of human culture in the context of nature. By a fine analysis of the times often discounted in world histories, Sing Chew provides a masterful new way of seeing the import of the interaction of human societies and the forces of the natural world. -- J Donald Hughes, University of Denver, and editor, The Face of the Earth Recurring Dark Ages takes ecological disasters based on systematic long-term overexploitation back to the beginnings of urban life and early industrialization in the Bronze Age. Sing Chew thus situates Dark Ages in a long-term historical perspective linked to the operation of an ancient world system. The book provides an original historical framework for understanding Dark Ages past and present. -- Kristian Kristiansen, Goteborgs Universitet; coauthor with Thomas B. Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society This could be a fascinating romp through world history; each chapter whizzes across space and time in lightening fashion....The strength of this approach is the way it synthesizes and presents so much information about the ingenuity of diverse communities and their efforts to produce and trade across large distances and on changing ecological terrains, and it does so with a novel and persuasive analytic frame. * Contemporary Sociology * The world system has evolved and continues to do so. The question is what drives this evolutionary process. Sing Chew has developed a substantial argument built around intermittent and, hitherto, poorly understood Dark Ages. Chew shines an analytical light on the phases of deterioration that we usually ignore while favoring the periods of growth and expansion. Yet it is unlikely that you can have one without the other. -- William Thompson, Indiana University, Bloomington, and past president of the International Studies Association