How do the world's societies differ from each other? What were the reasons for change in the past, and do they help us in predicting change in the future? This stimulating text encourages students to ask these and other questions.

Daniel Chirot explains how states and agriculture combined to create the world's classic civilizations. He shows how the UK, a marginal agrarian civilization on the edge of Europe, produced through the industrial revolution changes which transformed the world.

The last two sections delineate the chronic unsolved problems of the modern era, develop a simplified model of how societies work and how the study of social change can contribute to the resolution of societies' most important problems.