John Coatsworth Knihy

Perdue illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China's frontier expansion.

The first textbook to present world history via social history, drawing on social science methods and research. This interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and comparative textbook is authored by distinguished scholars and experienced teachers, and offers expert scholarship on global history that is ideal for undergraduate students. Volume 2 takes us from the early modern period to speculation about the world in 2050, visiting diverse civilizations, nation-states, ecologies, and people along the journey through time and place. The book pays particular attention to the ways in which ordinary people lived through the great changes of their times, and how everyday experience connects to great political events and the commercial exchanges of an interconnected world. With 75 maps, 65 illustrations, timelines, boxes, and primary source extracts, the book enables students to use historical material and social science methodologies to analyze the events of the past, present, and future.

In the Cold War era, a Russian spy and his boyhood friend decide to defect to the West by crossing the North Sea to Yorkshire, where their protagonist, Walter Searby, is charged with discovering what lies behind three bodies found on the beach in the same area. Searby is worried about possible infiltration of SIS. He recruits his own spies from guests at a small hotel, a one-time Jewish cockney petty-crook, an ex-colonial police inspector and a widowed author of soft pornography, who develops a crush for the master spy. In liaison with the local police force, which is prepared to turn a blind eye to his methods, the mystery of the three bodies is solved and the landing of iron curtain agents brought to an end.

Part II then investigates the problem of finding our real information need during information searches, and how our exceptional ability to frame our interactions with the world blocks us from finding the information we really need.