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Following in the wake of his groundbreaking War in the Age of IntelligentMachines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical developmentover the last one thousand years. More than a simple expository history, A ThousandYears of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophyof history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F?lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derivedfrom the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see historyas an arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces theconcrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations inthe last millennium.De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to humansocieties: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is theself-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will ofhuman history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleologyand naive notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministicsource of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source ofall concrete forms in the West's history are shown to derive from internalmorphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energyitself.