How has the world changed in the last century? As we look back across a hundred years of turbulence, Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of what the twentieth century has meant to people throughout the world.

Progress and Barbarism analyses the fundamental forces of population, industry and their consequences for the environment. It traces the rise and fall of empires, the impact of nationalism, examines domestic politics from all political perspectives, and considers the darker side of history in the growing repressive power of states across the world and the most terrible of twentieth-century crimes - genocide. Progress and Barbarism is a provocative and challenging interpretation of twentieth-century history, combining a global sweep and an eye for detail and individual experiences.