Book excerpt: This monograph is concerned with the relationships between Maltsev conditions, commutator theories and the shapes of congruence lattices in varieties of algebras. The authors develop the theories of the strong commutator, the rectangular commutator, the strong rectangular commutator, as well as a solvability theory for the nonmodular TC commutator. They prove that a residually small variety that satisfies a congruence identity is congruence modular.