British professor Jeremy Black specializes in sweeping overviews of history, charting the key events, major movements, and significant developments of societies as they evolve and interact with one another. Illustrated with period art, artifacts, maps, or photos on every page, these highly visual histories provide an essential grounding in the events that have made our world what it is today.

With an emphasis on the environment, cities, science, politics, and the mechanics of everyday life, Jeremy Black takes us from the birth of agriculture in the Nile Valley through the development of empires in Mesopotamia, the fall of Rome, the advance of science in the Islamic world, the rise of international trade along the Silk Roads, and the conflagration of world wars, among many other topics.