This course introduces students to the basic political and economic facts of human history, seeking both to describe and explain the variation in observed economic and political outcomes across time and space, which also requires a discussion of how to approach identifying causality when studying historical change. Variation that is studied occurs over several dimensions: material well-being; which activities people are engaged in; the scale of economic and political organizations; the degree of centralization of political power; population density; the extent of individual freedom; the geographic range of economic transactions; and the extent to which political systems are democratic.