This book attempts to spell out some of the general differences between the social organization of societies without and with writing and the process of transition from one to the other. It is a ludicrously wide topic, but one that calls for some preliminary treatment as well as a few opening comments. Of necessity I have confined my attention largely to two such situations, one with writing, one mainly without: the Ancient Near East, that is, where writing emerged, and contemporary West Africa, where its uses have proliferated over the last fifty years. Different systems of writing have, of course, different implications in different societies at different times. But there are also important features that a number of these particular contexts have in common and it is to these I have wanted to draw attention.

I am not concerned simply with differences for difference sake. In the first place I am trying to provide a more satisfactory explanation, for myself and for the reader, of certain widely used concepts, sociological and anthropological, historical and commonsense, that have been used to describe the major differences or transitions in the history of human societies. This attempt leads me to shift part of the emphasis put on the means and modes of production in explaining human history to the means and modes of communication. At the same time, I find it necessary to challenge certain notions about the uniqueness of the West as far as the explanation for the emergence of the ‘modern’ world is concerned, since I see some of the pre-conditions more widely distributed than many current theories allow.