Analysis of William Duiker and Jackson Spielvogel's book "The World History" according to Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen

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Cultural integration is an important factor in the history of different civilizations. Ever since the establishment of human civilization, men have interacted cross-culturally for various reasons such as trade. William Duiker and Jackson Spielvogel have heavily emphasized on the importance of such interactions in their book, The World History. Duiker and Spielvogel also notes that these cross-cultural interactions leads to new cartographic visions such as archipelago or matrix. They also portrayed through their writings, their belief of landscapes involvement in shaping a civilization into what it is today.

Duiker and Spielvogel realizes that cross-cultural interactions between people of different civilizations were important. Such contacts were made through trade and conquest. For example, Duiker and Spielvogel mentions the cross-cultural impact that Muslims had on other civilizations through conquest. Arabs put together highly a motivated army led by brilliant generals to conquer and expand their influence (Duiker and Spielvogel, 197). The Arabs did not force any of their conquered subjects to convert to Islam but rather they imposed a poll tax on non-Muslim subjects (Duiker and Spielvogel, 198).

Since Arab rule of their conquered subject was very lenient, most of the conquered subject did not want to return to their former jurisdictional authority (Duiker and Spielvogel, 198). Some of the conquered subjects did accept Islam as their religion and the poll tax requirement was removed from them (Overfield, 256).

Another way to spread cross-cultural impact from one civilization to another according to Duiker and Spielvogel is through trades. Mahayana Buddhism is a perfect example of such phenomenon that they mentioned in their book. "Buddhism was brought to China in the first or second century C.E., probably by missionaries and merchants traveling over the Silk Roads" (Duiker and Spielvogel, 268). Soon this religion began to catch on among common people in China and...