From the Akkadian Empire to modern America, Paul Strathern maps the history of the world through the stories of its ten greatest empires. Combining an impressive breadth of knowledge and accuracy of detail with masterful writing, Paul Strathern identifies connections across four millennia of history and sheds light on significant cultures—from the Mongols and the Yuan Dynasty to the Aztecs and the Ottomans, as well as the more modern great empires: the British, the Russian, and later Soviet, and the American.

Above all, the book reveals how the human ambition for imperial greatness, wherever it has manifested— from Roman emperors to Hitler— always stems from the fantasy of a utopia and the dream of immortality. Each empire contains the seeds of its own destruction.

So what constitutes any social progress? Who benefits and who suffers from it? Paul Strathern reminds us that the progress of humanity takes many and varied forms and that—perhaps— the systems we consider given today do not necessarily dictate the future course of civilization.