It won the National Book Award, sold well despite exceeding 800 pages and later was ranked No. 71 by the Modern Library among the 20th century's best English-language nonfiction 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.

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Toynbee believed that civilizations 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 "exchanges" and the triumph of Western innovation over the stagnation of Muslim and Chinese culture.

"Indeed, world history since 1500 may be thought of as a race between the West's growing power to molest the rest of the world and the increasingly desperate efforts of other peoples to stave Westerners off," wrote McNeill, who also cautioned that another civilization could yet overtake the West.

McNeill was criticized for writing too favorably of the West and would acknowledge flaws. In a "retrospective essay," he noted that "The Rise of the West" was in part influenced by the Cold War and the United States' post-World War II ascendance. He underestimated the Chinese, "gave undue attention to Latin Christendom" and showed "scant concern for the sufferings of the victims of historical change."

He faulted the scholarship of the time, but also "the bias" of his education and "personal idiosyncrasies" that led him to favor stories of Western success. But he welcomed disagreement. The past, he was sure, would be captured with ever greater "precision, richness, and accuracy beyond anything previously possible."