Well, this book will make it a lot harder to believe the societies and economies in sword and sorcery fantasies. It breaks down how pre-industrial societies actually worked, all around the world, and especially how we can misunderstand them using models from the modern, industrial world.

The scope is tremendous, nearly 10,000 years of societies in Europe, Asia, India, Arabia, Africa, and the Americas. A small part of this could be a lifetime of study.

I have the 2003 edition, but I don't think there is much different between the editions, mostly some material near the end about the modern world. They seemed to have switched to a low-budget proofreader around page 150, because there was about one typo per page for a bit. And one later page had two versions of two different lines, oops! But none of that interfered with what I learned from the book. ( )

Truly an ambitious book: Patricia Crone tries to give a cross-section of pre-industrial societies. What she certainly succeeds in is showing how different these societies were from later industrial and post-industrial societies. The breadth of her perspective is also meritorious: almost 5,000 years of human history, spread over the whole world. But she clearly gets stuck in various methodological and epistemological problems.
This book originally appeared in 1989, and although this is the 3rd updated edition (published in 2015, just before her death), it contains only minor changes; for example, the bibliography has only 2 works after 1988. The recent historiographical approaches of Global, Transnational, Interconnected and Big History clearly have made this book very dated.
More on that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3367961876 ( )

Crone does an outstanding job in explaining and justifying the institutions of pre-industrial societies. This, of course, is delivered with the cost of generalizations, but given the lucid picture of societies I am certainly willing to pay that price. This is a very good introduction to pre-modern world as a "what-was-it-like". ( )