In my book I proposed to use the term 'regime' for all more-or-less structured processes that make up big history. I defined a regime in its most general sense as 'a more or less regular but ultimately unstable pattern that has a certain temporal permanence',6 a definition which can be applied to human cultures, human and non-human physiology, non-human nature, as well as to organic and inorganic phenomena at all levels of complexity. By defining 'regime' in this way, human cultural regimes thus became a subcategory of regimes in general, and the approach allowed me to look systematically at interactions among different regimes which together produce big history. I later recognised that my 'regimes' are very similar to Jantsch's 'process structures'."