The Price of Civilization - The Complete Boxset

The Price of Civilization: The Complete Collection

A boy crawls through a tunnel a thousand feet beneath the hills of Laurium, hauling silver ore in the dark. He will not see daylight again. The silver he mines will fund Athens's navy. The navy will win the war. The war will be called the birth of Western democracy.

His name is not recorded.

The Price of Civilization is a six-volume history of the ancient world told from the bottom — from the tunnels and the fields and the arenas, from the ledgers where human beings were listed as property and the laws that made it orderly. Greece, Rome, China, India, Korea, Africa: in each of these civilisations, greatness was built on bondage. Each volume reconstructs exactly how — the economics, the violence, the bureaucracy, and the intimate daily reality of lives owned by others.

What emerges is not a simple story of victims and monsters. It is something harder and more important: a portrait of how human societies have always found ways to make the unthinkable normal, and how the monuments we still admire were paid for.

The complete collection includes: Chains & Laurels, Bone & Chains, Chains & Lotus, Celadon & Chains, Gold & Chains, and Bread & Chains.

The glory was real. So were the chains.