Introduction to World History attempts to familiarize students with a global, non-Eurocentric approach to history. The course surveys world history since the fifteenth century, de-centering the West in the process. Its basic question is why and how did Europeans come to dominate the world, and its real goal is to offer a non-Eurocentric answer to that question. Given the geographical and chronological scope of the course, its intent is not to “cover the facts,” but rather to introduce students to the key themes of world history and help them employ these themes as tools with which to answer the question of why the modern world looks the way it does. It is a course, furthermore, that relies heavily upon the idea of contingency, overturning the familiar assumption that the West “rose” because its success and eventual power were inevitable. Students are introduced to the idea that there is nothing inevitable about the world as it is today, that the world is the product of individual decisions which could have been made differently with different consequences.