This volume contains the updated and expanded lecture notes of the 37th Saas-Fee Advanced Course organised by the Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy. It offers the most comprehensive and up to date review of one of the hottest research topics in astrophysics - how our Milky Way galaxy formed. Joss Bland-Hawthorn & Ken Freeman lectured on Near Field Cosmology - The Origin of the Galaxy and the Local Group. Francesca Matteucci¿s chapter is on Chemical evolution of the Milky Way and its Satellites. As designed by the SSAA, books in this series ¿ and this one too ¿ are targeted at graduate and PhD students and young researchers in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. Lecturers and researchers entering the field will also benefit from the book.

Joss Bland-Hawthorn holds the Federation Fellow Professorship at the Institute of Astronomy, School of Physics, University of Sydney. He is doing research on near-field and far-field cosmology and is also working in instrument science. Kenneth Charles Freeman is Duffield Professor of Astronomy in the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Mount Stromlo Observatory of the Australian National University in Canberra. His research interests are in the formation and dynamics of galaxies and globular clusters. He received several international awards. Francesca Matteucci is associate professor at the University of Trieste, Italy, where she teaches Stellar Physics. Her field of research is the chemical evolution of galaxies of different morphological type, supernova rates and supernova progenitors.