"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike; either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told,...

A study of the downfall of some of history's greatest civilizations discusses the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Viking colony on Greenland, tracing patterns of environmental damage, poor political choices, and other factors in their demise.

Murray Bookchin's frank assessment of the disaster we are heading toward at increasing speed is as much a work of ethics as it is of environmentalism. The four essays that comprise it share the view that, as he puts it, "our ideas and our practice must be imbued with a deep sense of ethical commitment." Whether he is critiquing the market economy, the state, or the idea-common to both capitalists and certain left materialists-that human beings are...

"The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis frames climate change and the Anthropocene as the culmination of a history that begins with the discovery of the New World and of the sea route to the Indian Ocean. Ghosh makes the case that the political dynamics of climate change today are rooted in the centuries-old geopolitical order that was constructed by Western colonialism. This argument is set within a broader narrative about human entanglements...

Book summary by Loudly, this is an abridged version of the original title. In The Great Transformation, a groundbreaking exploration of economic and social history, the origins and consequences of the modern market economy are meticulously examined. This thought-provoking work traces the shift from traditional, embedded economies to the market-driven systems of the 19th and 20th centuries. It delves into how this transformation upended social structures,...

A timely history of the world spanning every continent, religion and era, told through the creation and destruction of 21 Statues. The statues range from the iconic to the unknown, from Hatshepsut in Ancient Egypt to statues destroyed in 2020 including Cecil Rhodes (Cape Town), George Washington (Portland) and Edward Colston (Bristol). Statues represent our ideals and our imperfections, our heroes and our villains, those we love and those we hate....