The ancient Greek world is being recast from an isolated entity to one of many hybrid cultures in Africa and in the East.

The constant rise and fall of Bronze age societies was a product of their wasteful, crisis ridden nature. But in the barbarian periphery around 1300 BCE an industrial revolution had begun that was to ...

Neil Faulkner looks at the centuries following 1000 BCE when the scale of civilisation and empire exploded as the productivity of iron tools boosted the surpluses available to Iron Age empire-builders...

Neil Faulkner looks at the growth of the Mauryan Empire which at its zenith encompassed almost the whole of what is today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Neil Faulkner looks at the origins of the Ch'in Empire - short-lived, created by conquest and terror and characterised by extreme centralisation, military-style exploitation, and murderous repression.

Neil Faulkner looks at the radical participatory democracy which began in Athens between 510 and 506 BCE and spread to virtually every city-state in the Aegean.

Neil Faulkner looks at the defeat of the democratic empire centred around Athens in a protracted counter-revolution led by Greek aristocrats, Macedonian kings, and Roman viceroys.

Rome represented a unique fusion of Greek-style citizenship with Macedonian-style militarism. The result was the most dynamic imperialist state in the ancient world.

Neil Faulkner looks at the Roman Revolution - a complex, distorted, century-long process of class struggle.

Neil Faulkner explains how the Roman Empire entered its terminal crisis as its military imperialism came up against geographical, economic, and sociological barriers to expansion.

Neil Faulkner looks at how the growth of private property altered the position of women - from occupying a central role in society to suffering what Engels called ‘the world historic defeat of the fem...

Neil Faulkner examines how the three great monotheistic religions produced by the contradictions of the ancient world owed their extraordinary power to their origins in the myths and rituals of the op...

Neil Faulkner charts the transformation of the Huns from tribal nomads into continent-straddling militarists.

This week Neil Faulkner describes the rise and explosive spread of the third great monotheistic religion, where compassion, charity, and protection became moral imperatives - Islam.

Islam created a single overarching allegiance throughout the Arab-ruled world yet the Middle East came to be a divided region of weak and unpopular states. Neil Faulkner looks at the conflicts that la...

More than half a millennium separated the fall of India’s Mauryan Empire in the late 3rd century BCE (before the common era) from the rise of the Gupta Empire in the early 4th century CE (common era)....

Neil Faulkner examines China's imperial history, where for two millennia political revolution did not lead to social transformation, but simply to the replacement of one dynasty by another.

The early civilisations of the Americas were limited by its geography - in only two areas did urban revolution occur and civilisations develop: in parts of Mesoamerica, and in the Central Andes.

Why Europe? Why was it that the second great transformation in human existence - the development of capitalism and industrial society - was pioneered on the western edge of the Eurasian land-mass?

Following the collapse of the Roman Empire Western Europe became a politically fragmented region of warring states from which a radically new social, military, and political order developed.

Despite dominating western Europe in the 11th century by the 14th century Feudalism was faced with a crisis that generated a wave of revolutionary struggle. Neil Faulkner looks at the causes and outco...

This week Neil Faulkner looks at the rise of the first ruling classes as the surplus created through the increasing productivity of human labour allowed a section of society to live without producing.

This week Neil Faulkner looks at the spread and development of ancient city civilisations around the world, each governed by a new ruling class of priests, city-governors and war-leaders.

Slavery was common practice and an integral component of ancient Greece throughout its rich history, as it was in other societies of the time including ancient Israel and early Christian societies.