The Story of Civilization Books in Order

The opening volume surveys early civilization in Egypt and the Near East before turning to India, China, and Japan. Durant explores the economic foundations, beliefs, laws, and cultural achievements that shaped these societies across centuries.

Durant traces Greek civilization from its early roots through Roman conquest, including Crete and the wider Hellenistic world. Political institutions, philosophy, literature, art, and daily life reveal the society behind Greece's enduring cultural influence.

This volume follows Rome from its origins to AD 325, examining government, economic life, literature, art, and morality. The emergence of Christianity brings a growing conflict between religious conviction, imperial authority, and older Roman traditions.

Covering AD 325 to 1300, this volume explores Christian, Islamic, and Jewish civilizations through their religion, politics, and culture. Figures including Augustine, Muhammad, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas anchor its account of medieval intellectual and spiritual life.

Durant surveys Italian civilization from 1304 to 1576, linking artistic achievement with political rivalry, commerce, and religious power. The Medici, Venetian society, the papacy, and artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo feature throughout the account.

This volume follows European civilization from 1300 to 1564, exploring the religious upheavals surrounding Luther and Calvin. Humanism, monarchies, Ottoman expansion, Russian consolidation, and overseas conquest provide the wider setting for the fragmentation of Western Christianity.

Covering Europe from 1558 to 1648, this volume places religious conflict and the Thirty Years' War beside artistic and intellectual change. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rembrandt, Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes illuminate an age of violence and new inquiry.

The Durants examine Europe from 1648 to 1715, with Louis XIV's France at the center of a wider cultural and political survey. Dutch achievement and thinkers including Newton, Leibniz, and Spinoza reveal changing approaches to knowledge.

This volume examines Western European civilization from 1715 to 1756, focusing on the developing conflict between religious authority and philosophical inquiry. Voltaire's age provides the setting for a broad account of political power, society, and intellectual change.

The Durants survey France, England, and Germany from 1756 to 1789, alongside developments elsewhere in Europe from 1715. Rousseau and his contemporaries appear within an account of cultural, intellectual, and political change preceding the French Revolution.

The concluding volume follows European civilization from the French Revolution through Napoleon's fall in 1815. Political upheaval and imperial warfare share space with philosophy, religion, and cultural life as the Durants examine a continent undergoing radical change.