FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL PRIZE FOR HISTORY ‘Not only deserves the description “epic”, in its true sense, but the term “masterpiece” as well’ Independent

The first truly global history of work, an upbeat assessment from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the present day

Charts world history from the dawn of civilisation to the modern culture we live in today. From the origins of homo-sapiens to the release of Nelson Mandela, from the French Revolution to the Space Race, this book presents an exploration of the human timeline up to and including modern Islam, the world wide web, and the global financial crisis.

Over the last half century, sub-Saharan Africa has not had one history, but many. Histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. They have involved a continuing process of decolonization and state-building, conflict, economic problems but also progress and the perpetual interplay of structure and agency.

This new view of those histories looks in particular at the relationship between territorial, economic, political and societal structures and human agency in the complex an...

Wonderful . . . a thoughtful discussion of what made [the Greeks] so important, in their own time and in ours. Natalie Haynes, Independent"