This divergence, in terms of civilisation and power, is what forms the ‘great divide’. In The Great Divide, Watson sets himself an even more daunting task: he tries, by tracing human history from origins to the early modern period, to account for why the New World (North, Central and South America) has diverged from the Old. It was an accessible, although lengthy, guide to not only the great names-Goethe, Gauss, Kant, Einstein-but also managed to include a host of relatively minor figures, while making sense of the whole. His previous work, The German Genius (2010) did an admirable job surveying the extraordinary florescence of German intellectual thought from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Peter Watson is an intellectual historian, who writes big, ambitious books.
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