Charles Tilly (1929 2008) held faculty appointments at the Universities of Delaware, Harvard, Toronto and Michigan, and the New School University, and finished his career as the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. His over 50 books and monographs cover a wide terrain but from his first historical work, The Vendee (1964), to his last uncompleted manuscript, Cities in World History, his work focused on large-scale social change and its relationship to contentious politics, (especially in Europe since 1500). His writings deal with the history of contention but also with urban history and the study of historical migration patterns. His principal works include: The Contentious French (1986), Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990 1990 (1990), European Revolutions 1492 1992 (1993), Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, AD 1000 1800 (1994), Contention in Great Britain 1758 1834 (1995), and Contentious Performances (2008). A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Ordre des Palmes Academiques, he received numerous international prizes and honorary degrees.

Identities, Boundaries and Social Ties offers a distinctive, coherent account of social processes and individuals' connections to their larger social and political worlds. It is novel in demonstrating the connections between inequality and de-democratization, between identities and social inequality, and between citizenship and identities. The book treats interpersonal transactions as the basic elements of larger social processes. Tilly shows how personal interactions compound into identities, create and transform social boundaries, and accumulate into durable social ties. He also shows how individual and group dispositions result from interpersonal transactions. Resisting the focus on deliberated individual action, the book repeatedly gives attention to incremental effects, indirect effects, environmental effects, feedback, mistakes, repairs, and unanticipated consequences. Social life is complicated. But, the book shows, it becomes comprehensible once you know how to look at it.