Includes bibliographical references (pages 435-445) and index.

IntroductionPart I: Children of the Ice 1. Humanity From the Ice: The Emergence and Spread of an Adaptive Species, Clive Gamble2. The Mind in the Ice: Art and Thought before Agriculture, Felipe Fernandez-ArmestoPart II: Of Mud and Metal 3. Into a Warming World, Martin Jones4. The Farmers' Empires: Climax and Crises in Agrarian States and Cities, Felipe Fernandez-ArmestoPart III: The Oscillations of Empires 5. Punctured Rupture: Material Life: Bronze Age Crisis to Black Death, John Brooke6. Intellectual Traditions: Philosophy, Science, Religion, and the Arts, 500 BCE - 1350 CE, David Northrup7. Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BC-AD 1350, Ian Morris Part IV: The Climatic Reversal 8. Re-Convergence in a Smaller World: Economic and Ecological Encounters, 1350-1815, David Northrup9. Renaissances, Reformations, and Mental Revolutions: Intellect and Arts in the Early Modern World, Manuel Lucena-Giraldo10. Connected by Emotions and Experiences: Monarchs, Merchants, Mercenaries and Migrants in the Early Modern World, Anjana Singh Part V: The Great Acceleration 11. The Anthropocene Epoch: The Background to Two Transformative Centuries, David Christian12. The Modern World and Its Demons: Ideology and After in Arts, Letters and Thought, 1815-2008, Paolo Luca Bernardini13. Politics and Society in the Kaleidoscope of Change: Relationships, Behaviour, Institutions, Conflicts from the Beginnings of Western Hegemony to the American Supremacy, Jeremy Black Epilogue Further Reading Index

The Oxford Illustrated History of the World is the story of humanity itself, from earliest times to the present day, and the changes-good and bad-which have shaped our world.