Forty-two essays by authors from five continents and many disciplines provide a synthetic account of the history of the social sciences - including behavioral and economic sciences since the late eighteenth century. The authors emphasize the cultural and intellectual preconditions of social science, and its contested but important role in the history of the modern world. While there are many historical books on particular disciplines, there are very few about the social sciences generally, and none that deal with so much of the world over so long a timespan.