A work of history, but also about art and architecture, trade and commerce, travel and exploration, economics and politics, this is above all a book about people and how, over the millennia, they have managed to live closely together. From the origins...

Faced with an endless supply of mass-manufactured products, we find ourselves nostalgic for goods bearing the mark of authenticity--hand-made tools, local brews, and other objects produced by human hands. Archaeologist and medieval historian Alexander...

“Staggeringly ambitious.”―New Internationalist“One of the finest historians on the left.”—John Newsinger, author, The Blood Never DriedRejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Neil Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary...

An Economist Best History Book 2017“History as it should be written.”—Barry Cunliffe, Guardian“Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilization and political order.”—Walter Scheidel, Financial...

"Before prehistoric humans began to cultivate grain, they had three main methods of acquiring food: hunting, gathering, and fishing. Hunting and gathering are no longer economically important, having been replaced by their domesticated equivalents,...

A comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society throughout history, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel–driven civilization."I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next 'Star Wars' movie. In...

Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout.NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling,...

Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological AssociationCo-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science AssociationIn a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the...

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanovs—and one of our pre-eminent historians and a prizewinning writer—comes an inspiring, horrifying, and accessible collection of short, entertaining, and vivid life stories about the giant characters...

One of the most influential experts on military history and strategy has now written his magnum opus, an original and provocative account of the past hundred years of global conflict. The Changing Face of War is the book that reveals the path that led to...

The masterful account of Britain’s reshaping as a modern nationIn 1530 England was a backward economy. Yet by 1780 she possessed a global empire and was on the verge of becoming the world’s first industrialized power. This book deals with the intervening...

Around 200,000 years ago, a man--identical to us in all important respects--lived in Africa. Every person alive today is descended from him. How did this real-life Adam wind up father of us all? What happened to the descendants of other men who lived at...

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traces the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century notion of digital organisms. Step by step--from Jacques de Vaucanson and his Digesting Duck, through Karl Marx's...

A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global historyThe Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s,...

A leading scholar of Jewish history's bracing and challenging case for the role of the historian today Why do we study history? What is the role of the historian in the contemporary world? These questions prompted David N. Myers's illuminating and...

A concise survey of the culture and civilization of mankind, The Lessons of History is the result of a lifetime of research from Pulitzer Prize–winning historians Will and Ariel Durant.With their accessible compendium of philosophy and social progress,...

"A detailed and provocative study of how capital has changed since the 1980s and its effects on the working class and political parties in the USA." — Scottish Left Review On New Terrain challenges...