'An audacious, entertaining page-turner. Dan Jones covers a thousand years of history with elegance and panache' Dan Carlin, Hardcore History

'Dan Jones is in a class of his own ... Read this book to wrap your head around 1,000 years of history with as much ease and enjoyment as relaxing into a good novel' Professor Suzannah Lipscomb

'A terrifically colourful and compelling narrative history ... Bustling and sizzling with life on every page'Sunday Times

'A badass history writer... to put it mildly' Duff McKagan

Dan Jones's epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built. It is a thousand-year adventure that moves from the ruins of the once-mighty city of Rome, sacked by barbarians in AD 410, to the first contacts between the old and new worlds in the sixteenth century. It shows how, from a state of crisis and collapse, the West was rebuilt and came to dominate the entire globe. The book identifies three key themes that underpinned the success of the West: commerce, conquest and Christianity.

Across 16 chapters, blending Dan Jones's trademark gripping narrative style with authoritative analysis, Powers and Thrones shows how, at each stage in this story, successive western powers thrived by attracting – or stealing – the most valuable resources, ideas and people from the rest of the world. It casts new light on iconic locations – Rome, Paris, Venice, Constantinople – and it features some of history's most famous and notorious men and women.

This is a book written about – and for – an age of profound change, and it asks the biggest questions about the West both then and now. Where did we come from? What made us? Where do we go from here?