The Paths of Civilization: Understanding the Currents of History

This work spans the development of civilizations from their remotest origins to the present day. It examines the term 'civilization' with reference to culture, socio-economic structure, ethnicity and statehood. Socio-economic scenarios help the reader to explore the ways in which individual civilizations - through world views, styles of life and responses to the environment that each bear their own signature - struggle, merge, submerge in the flow of the currents of history.

JAROSLAV KREJCÍ was born in 1916 in what, two years later, became Czechoslovakia. After studying law and economics at the Charles University in Prague he was employed in the State's economic institutions. As his views clashed with those of the Czechoslovakian communist regime he was made a political prisoner (1954-60). In 1968 (The Prague Spring) he returned to academic work. When the Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia, Krej?í, with his wife Anna, went into exile and settled in England, where Lancaster University awarded him, in 1976, a full professorship and, in 2000, an honorary doctorate for literature. Since 1990 he has also been active in the Czech republic; in 1998 President Vaclav Havel presented him with the Medal of National Merit and in 2003 he was awarded a special prize from the Czech Foundation for Literature.