The history of all society is the history of class struggles. So said Marx and Engels, but we are still accustomed to looking at the past through successive waves of technological change, from stone, to bronze to iron. In this incisive and accessible analysis, Dominic Alexander shows how Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development illuminates how technology and society interact. Going back to the most ancient history of class societies, Trotsky can help us understand the centrality of class struggle, as true today as it was in the Bronze Age.