Readers are offered a brief outline of world history, written by one of the largest Russian oriental historians. The book is written on the basis of a new concept of the course of the historical process developed by the author, radically different from the Marxist one: I. M. Dyakonov believes that this process does not proceed through five phases (primitive communal, slaveholding, feudal, capitalist and communist), but through eight (primitive, primitive communal, early antiquity, imperial antiquity, the Middle Ages, absolutist post-medieval, capitalist and post-capitalist). The book is read with unflagging interest.