World into Globe III: Global History and the West’s Universalizing Process

This contribution to World into Globe seeks to explicate how Western civilization came to be focused on the working-out of an inherent universality and equality among all humans toward the creation of a common humanity. Initially, there are the original deposits of universalization by Christianity and Classical culture that matured with empire. The medieval papacy extends natural law to the Mongols. The further extension after the sixteenth century in the mechanism of European sea power will make the world a single village – the human community. Despite the violent impact of peoples upon peoples in the empire building, colonialism, imperialism, and even racism of the nineteenth century, the fact of mankind emerges; the word is coming to connote the firm inclusion of women in all respects. No other civilization but the Western thinks and works beyond itself.