试图解释人类近期历史总体方向的著作包括：Daniel Chirot, Social Change in the Twentieth Century (New York,1977);Augus Maddison, Dynamic forces in Capitalist Development: A Long Run Comparative View (Oxford, 1991); Joseph M.Kitagawa, The Quest for Human Unity: A Religious History (Minneapolis, 1990); Trevor I.Williams, Science: A History of Discovery in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1990); Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: The Great Transition (New York, 1964); William H. McNeill, The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View (Princeton, 1980); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Enpansion of Europe ,900—1900 (Cambridge, 1986);B. L. Turner II,ed., The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years (Cambridge,1990); Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society (Garden City, N. Y., 1954); 和Alfred D.Chandler,Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
国际政治由下列著作进行了富有洞见的论述：A. J. P. Tailor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848—1918 (Oxford, 1987); Norman Rich, Great Power Diplomacy, 1814-1914 (New York, 1992); Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Power: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1989); Hugh tinker, Race, Conflict and the Internation Order: From Empire to United Nations (London, 1977); 和Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985).
关于帝国主义，经典的马克思主义解释是Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York, 1939). 关于其它观点，见：Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Theroies of Imperialism (Chicago, 1982); Woodruff D. Smith, European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chicago, 1982); Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981); 和Philip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approache