Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.

Karl Marx stated that technological development plays an important role in influencing social transformation and therefore the mode of production over time. This change in the mode of production encourages changes to a society's economic system.

Marx's lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, coined the term "historical materialism" and described it as "that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another."

Although Marx never brought together a formal or comprehensive description of historical materialism in one published work, his key ideas are woven into a variety of works from the 1840s onward. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.

Marx's view of history was shaped by his engagement with the intellectual and philosophical movement known as the Age of Enlightenment and the profound scientific, political, economic and social transformations that took place in Britain and other parts of Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

Enlightenment thinkers responded to the worldly transformations by promoting individual liberties and attacking religious dogmas and the divine right of kings. A group of thinkers including Hobbes (1588–1679), Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), Smith (1723–1790), Turgot (1727–1781) and Condorcet (1743–1794) explored new forms of inquiry, including empirical studies of human nature, history, economics and society. Some philosophers, for example, Vico (1668–1744), Herder (1744–1803) and Hegel (1770–1831), sought to uncover organizing principles of human history in underlying themes, meanings, and directions. For many Enlightenment philosophers, the power of ideas became the mainspring for understanding historical change and the rise and fall of civilizations. History was the gradual advance of the "spirit of liberty" or the growth of nationalism or democracy, rationality and law. This view of history remains popular to this day.

Beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, materialism came to prominence in Western philosophy, especially in opposition to the Cartesian rationalism of philosophers such as Descartes. Notable philosophers expounding materialist views included Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, and John Locke. They were followed by a series of materialists in France in the 18th century such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Claude Adrien Helvétius, and Baron d'Holbach. In the 19th century, the pre-Marxist communists Théodore Dézamy and Jules Gay adopted materialism in their historical analysis of society as well. Marx inherited his materialist philosophy from this Gassendi-Dezamy line of thinkers.

Marx's ideas were also influenced by his reading of Young Hegelian writer Ludwig Feuerbach's 1833 work Geschichte der neuern Philosophie von Bacon von Verulam bis Benedict Spinoza which covered Gassendi's materialist philosophy as well as Gassendi's treatment on materialist Ancient Greek philosophers such as Epicurus, Leucippus, and Democritus.