I have long been discontented with the field of comparative economic systems and this book is the result of my efforts to show what I think this discipline should be about.

In the twentieth century, comparative economists focused too narrowly on industrialized economies and paid little attention to preindustrial societies. Because these latter societies have been rapidly disappearing, we are losing an important part of our potential subject matter. Comparative economists also have few overarching approaches to deal usefully with a wide variety of market and nonmarket economies in a coherent fashion. Although case studies of an enormous number of market and nonmarket economies are available, the literature is so rich and varied that it is difficult to gain perspective. What is necessary, of course, is to look at a large number of societies with different types of economic systems with the same analytic tools. In dealing with preindustrial economic systems, this also requires a considerable familiarity not just with economics but with history and anthropology as well.

For several decades, I have been writing in my mind a book that would analyze foraging (hunting, gathering, fishing), agricultural (herding, planting), and industrial/service economic systems with a unified analytic approach that would take advantage of the rich factual information on these economies now at hand – the kind of book that nineteenth-century social scientists tried to write without adequate factual materials and case studies.