The aim of this book is to give students of complex pre-industrial societies an understanding of the constraints under which such societies have operated and the uniformities to which the constraints have given rise. No attempt is made to analyse the specific organization of any one society, let alone all of them, and history is reduced to the role of providing examples. The book endeavours to tell its readers what sort of patterns they should expect to find in the past, not what sort of patterns they will actually find in their particular fields. It is motivated by the consideration that pre-industrial societies evidently should not be approached in the light of modern presuppositions, but that modern students cannot be expected to know which of their own usually unconscious presuppositions they ought to forget. The book thinks away some essential features of industrial civilization and spells out the implications of their absence.