In this edition, the history of the East is presented from deep antiquity to the present day within a single authorial concept. The core idea is that for thousands of years the traditional East and societies of the Eastern type were structurally different from the ancient-bourgeois West and societies of the Western type. This difference was slowly overcome under the influence of Europeans—especially during their active industrial-colonial expansion into the world beyond the West. During Westernization, as an equivalent of modernization that had been unfolding since Antiquity, the countries of the East transformed, and their characteristic structure of power—property in its various modifications, including feudal fragmentation—gradually, not immediately, not everywhere and not in the same way, became closer to Western liberal-democratic models, which contributed to the formation of a bourgeois class throughout the non-European world. Westernized peoples, taking on the appearance of mixed-type societies, received a chance to become societies of the Western type while preserving their religious-civilizational traditions—provided those traditions fit into Western standards in a non-contradictory way, which was most successfully achieved in the countries of the Far Eastern Chinese-Confucian civilization. Volume One examines the history of ancient and medieval (up to the 19th century) states and societies of Asia and Africa. It assesses the features and political development, the formation of the structure of power and property relations in the non-European world, and provides description and analysis of the historical path, traditions, and specificity of the religious-civilizational values of various peoples. For university students, school and college teachers, and for everyone interested in the history of humankind and world civilizations.