Okay, the world of monoculture is not literally flat: plants differ, and so do regions, climates, soils, commodities, etc. But for all their diversity, the crises of monocultures have a few recurring features, and so do responses to these crises. The monocultures of our planet share a baseline of similarities that this project uses as the backbone for a world history. You can get pretty far by focusing on common patterns in the ways people deal with environmental challenges. The principal investigator has used this approach to write an environmental history of the modern world, and the MaMoGH project is a sequel to this monograph. If we conceive of the modern world as a giant, planetary-sized vortex, how does something get built in these roaring waters?