Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : childhood in world history -- Childhood in agricultural societies : the first big changes -- Childhood in the classical civilizations -- Childhood in postclassical world history : the impact of religious change -- Debating childhood in the premodern west -- Forces of change and the modern model of childhood : developments in the west, eighteenth century to 1914 -- Alongside the modern model : the pressures of colonialism -- Modern childhood in Asia : Japan adapts the new model -- Childhood and communist revolutions -- Childhood in the affluent societies, twentieh and twenty-first centuries -- The dislocations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries : children face war and violence -- Globalization and childhoods -- Conclusion : childhoods from past toward future.