Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

By Patricia Crone

This book offers a blueprint for a world now lost, focusing on such crucial issues as the role of politics and religion, and how communities developed social hierarchies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780746906

Patricia Crone

Patricia Crone is Mellon Professor of Islamic history at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA. She is the editor of Oneworld's Makers of the Muslim World series.

Reviews for Pre-Industrial Societies

[juha_26 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Crone does an outstanding job in explaining and justifying the institutions of pre-industrial societies. This, of course, is delivered with the cost of generalizations, but given the lucid picture of societies I am certainly willing to pay that price. This is a very good introduction to pre-modern world as a "what-was-it-like".

[wunder-62679 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well, this book will make it a lot harder to believe the societies and economies in sword and sorcery fantasies. It breaks down how pre-industrial societies actually worked, all around the world, and especially how we can misunderstand them using models from the modern, industrial world.

The scope is tremendous, nearly 10,000 years of societies in Europe, Asia, India, Arabia, Africa, and the Americas. A small part of this could be a lifetime of study.

I have the 2003 edition, but I don't think there is much different between the editions, mostly some material near the end about the modern world. They seemed to have switched to a low-budget proofreader around page 150, because there was about one typo per page for a bit. And one later page had two versions of two different lines, oops! But none of that interfered with what I learned from the book.