Famous historian McNeill dies at 98

New York: William H. McNeill, the prize- winning scholar who wove the stories of civilisations worldwide into the landmark The Rise of the West and helped pioneer the history of disease and epidemics in Plagues and People, died at age 98.

McNeill died Friday at his home in Torrington, Connecticut, according to Steve Koppes, associate news director at the University of Chicago, where McNeill was a professor emeritus.

McNeill wrote more than a dozen books, notably The Rise of the West, published in 1963 and greeted by the New York Times as “the most stimulating and fascinating” work of world history ever released.

It won the National Book Award, sold well despite exceeding 800 pa- ges and later was ranked No. 71 by has the Modern Li- brary among the 20th century’s best Englishlanguage non- fiction books.

The title of McNeill’s book was a direct challenge to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. But The Rise of the West, its narrative extending from the Paleolithic Age to the present, was also born out of a Freudian struggle with McNeill’s hero and father figure Arnold Toynbee, then the reigning scholar of world history. Toynbee believed that civilisations of the East and West had essentially developed independently and their stories were separate. McNeill countered that they were very much part of one story, one of “contacts and “exchan- ges” and the triumph of Western innovation over the stagnation of Muslim and Chinese culture.