Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vi

1 The Sense of a Beginning 1

2 The Origins of Capitalism 16

3 Revolutions and Social Movements 31

4 Empires 56

5 States 72

6 Inequality 86

7 Gender and the Family 104

8 Culture 115

9 Predicting the Future 128

Notes 142

References 146

Index 157

About the Author

Richard Lachmann is professor of the sociology of culture and comparative/historical sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is author of States and Power and Capitalists in Spite of Themselves, winner of the 2003 American Sociological Association's Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, the 2002 Barrington Moore Best Book Award Honorable Mention from the American Sociological Association's Comparative Historical Sociology Section, and 2001 Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association's Political Sociology Section.

Reviews

Petitions for a sociology that takes social change as itscentral object. Revue francaise de science politique "Richard Lachmann's excellent, readable short survey of historicalsociology gets to the heart of the enterprise: understanding theongoing transformations that have created the world in which welive. Lachmann provides incisive reviews of the major fields ofresearch to which historical sociologists have contributed. Thebook will be a very useful text for those who would bring theconcerns and approaches of historical sociology to the largerdiscipline - who want to historicize sociology in order to renderit more vital and more grounded." Ann Shola Orloff, Northwestern University "One of the major contributors to the 'historical turn' in latetwentieth-century social sciences guides us through a fascinatingjourney in a discipline. By examining exemplary works in differentsociological domains, Lachmann skillfully sketches the variedconcerns of historical sociology. Written in a readable andengaging style, What is Historical Sociology? is a mustread, and not just for those interested in (historical)sociology." Roberto Franzosi, Emory University