ABSTRACT
The developments described by Childe, what Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel and others labeled the “civilization package,” provide the infrastructure that makes possible an agricultural surplus, increased population, differentiated work, and the invention of civilization. The pattern was replicated in the first half of the 20th century by the automobile industry, which generated demand for petroleum, window glass, steel, rubber, asphalt, roads, bridges, repair shops, and roadside services. The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century had a similar take-off effect. A social institutions approach requires identifying the key institutions, broadly defined, that shape human history, and comparing developments between different regions and different time periods. Its strengths are that it adjusts for the differences in chronologies and rates of development in the different regions of the world and that it focuses on life as lived by most of the world’s people.
