The present book proposes a framework for understanding long-term change in world politics in terms of social evolution. ‘Change’deliberately includes the very emergence of world politics as arecognizable realm in its own right within the social world andits constant transformation thereafter. In order to provide such aframework, this book offers a condensed, yet quite far-reaching,reading of what it means to understand change in the social, andtherefore also the political, world in terms of evolution, as well asseveral empirical applications from the realm of world politics. Itis written on the premise that understanding social evolutionaryprocesses is central to understanding historical change. Yet, thereis a difference between the historical and sociological approachesto social evolution. While we maintain that the approaches do notnecessarily stand in mutually exclusive opposition to each other,evolutionary accounts arenotcompatible with some understand-ings of history, particularly those, based on a philosophy of history,that assign meaning to history itself (and therefore come with, forexample,underlying eschatological or teleological motives).Understanding long-term change in world politics in termsof social evolution is, in one respect, a rather simple exercise: itallows historical change to be reconstructed in accordance with thesequence that underliesallkinds of evolution (i.e., not only socialbut also natural evolution): variation, selection and restabilization.In another respect, though, it makes this reconstruction extremelycomplex. It obliges one to see change in a broad societal context,accounting for various timescales,taking the contingency of change and of social structures fully into account and emphasizing thenon-synchronized evolution of linked,but at the same time diverse,social system.