The Universal History (complete title: A Universal history, from the earliest account of time. Compiled from original authors; and illustrated with maps, cuts, notes, &c. With a general index to the whole. ) was a 65-volume universal history of the world published in London between 1747 and 1768. Contributors included George Sale, George Psalmanazar, Archibald Bower, George Shelvocke, John Campbell and John Swinton.
It was one of the first works to attempt to unify the history of Western Europe with the stories of the world's other known cultures. As a major historical synthesis on, among other subjects, European colonial activities during the modern era, the Modern Part of a Universal History (1754-1765) can be considered, according to one specialist, Guido Abbattista, as a precursor of the famous abbé Guillaume Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes (1770-1780), of which it was one of the most important, even if not acknowledged, sources.
Famous quotes containing the words universal and/or history:
“The exuberant fertility of the universal will.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)