From the eighteenth-century revolutions to 1914—a scholarly approach between political-economic analysis and social and cultural history in a continuous dialogue between the text, written sources, images, maps and graphics. On the one hand, the guide deals with the profound transformations of commerce, consumption and production, which overturned the established economic and demographic equilibriums typical of the traditional agrarian economies in the West; on the other hand, it examines the evolving notions of political sovereignty, which developed after the trauma of the two political revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century (in America and France), before arriving at a definition of the basic traits of the nascent mass societies. While focusing primarily on the West, two chapters in the book are entirely given over to the description of the transformations in the world outside of Europe and the United States, from the period of European colonialism and imperialism, to the religious revivals that swept through the Islamic countries, and through India, China and Japan, to the birth of the first anti-colonial movements, in which original religious identities and anti-western sentiment merged. Another ample section is reserved to the description of the reasons for the political, administrative and religious crisis of the Ottoman Empire, from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to its final collapse in the early years of the twentieth.