The Globe tells the story of humanity's quest to discover the form of the world. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, and from there it spread to Baghdad and Central Asia. In early medieval Europe, Christians debated the matter but long before the time of Columbus, the Catholic Church had accepted that the Earth is round and not flat. However, it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that Jesuit missionaries finally convinced the Chinese that their traditional square-earth cosmology was mistaken. An accessible challenge to long-established beliefs about the history of ideas, The Globe shows how the realization that our planet is a sphere deserves to be considered the first great scientific achievement.

'A tour d’horizon that spans time as well as space, this is a thrilling intellectual adventure story.' – Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind; 'In an age of globalisation, James Hannam’s playful and erudite book reminds us of the global origins of our common understanding of the spherical earth, stretching from Babylon to NASA. A truly all-encompassing book: a wonderful achievement and a delight to read.' – Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps; 'An exploration of one of humankind’s oldest and most profound insights, The Globe is a work of compulsively readable myth-busting. As amiable as it is scholarly, James Hannam’s book uses the history of the spherical Earth to provide a global tour of cosmologies through the ages.' – Philip Ball, author of The Book of Minds

James Hannam is the author of God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (2009). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and lives in Kent.