Global History

In one hundred and twenty pages, The End of the Ottoman Empire and the Forging of the Modern Middle East provides a compelling account of the shaping of the modern Middle East, and the critical part played in that process by the Ottoman Empire, even as it fell apart. It offers a mine of background information for anyone wishing to...

The first comprehensive guide to Elizabethan ideas about the mind What is the mind? How does it relate to the body and soul? These questions were as perplexing for the Elizabethans as they are for us today—although their answers were often startlingly different. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed the mind was governed by the humours and passions, and was susceptible...

A new history that overturns the received wisdom that science displaced magic in Enlightenment Britain—named a Best Book of 2020 by the Financial Times In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions, and fairies was commonplace. Among both educated and ordinary people, the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. Yet in the eighteenth century,...

The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of antislavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. However, James Oakes's brilliant history of Lincoln's antislavery strategies in The Crooked Path to Abolition reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of antislavery for Lincoln was the Constitution...

The Corrupting Sea is a history of the relationship between people and their environments in the Mediterranean region over some 3,000 years. It offers a novel analysis of this relationship in terms of microecologies and the often extensive networks to which they belong.

In roughly five decades between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. However, friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalysed a global battle over "the Chinese Question": would the United States and...

The Second World War was the greatest conflict in history. This book provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the causes of the war, ideal for all students of the period. The author charts the complex route from the failed peace following the First World War through the rise of right-wing radicalism in Italy and Germany, to the outbreak of...

The untold story of how the Dutch conquered the European book market and became the world's greatest bibliophiles—“an instant classic on Dutch book history” (BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review) "[An] excellent contribution to book history."—Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books The Dutch Golden Age has long been seen as the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, whose paintings captured...

The surprising story of the wine industry's role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire. "We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen," stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony's best...

Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of Communism over seventy years. "Revolutions,...

Provides a look at the origins of the culture wars of modern America and the political and economic transformation of the U.S. republic. This book tells, in clear and lively prose, how Americans struggled with modernity in both its cultural and economic forms between the start of World War I and the end of World War II. It focuses on...

This thematic history of the world from 1780 to the onset of the First World War reveals that the world was far more 'globalised' at this time than is commonly thought. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 - 1914 explores previously neglected sets of connections in world history. It reveals that the world was far more 'globalised', even at...

A major new investigation into the Bhutto family, examining their influence in Pakistan from the colonial era to the present day "Students of geopolitics and South Asia will find this a valuable book."—Kirkus Reviews “Fluently written, impeccably researched and never short of extraordinary insights, this is a landmark publication.” —Farzana Shaikh, Literary Review The Bhutto family has long been one...

The Belt and Road City offers an exploration of how the Belt and Road Initiative seeks to shape international order, through politics and infrastructure, with China at its centre. Over the past decade, China has put infrastructural and urban development at the heart of a strategy aimed at nothing less than the transformation of international order. The Belt and Road...

A wide-ranging and original introduction to the Anthropocene (the Age of Humanity) that offers fresh, theoretical insights bridging the sciences and the humanities From noted environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, The Anthropocene and the Humanities focuses on the original concept of the Anthropocene first proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in their foundational 2000 paper. It undertakes a broad investigation...

A bold new account of the Age of Revolution, one of the most complex and vast transformations in human history “A fresh and illuminating framework for understanding our past and imagining our future. Powerfully argued and engagingly written, Patrick Griffin’s timely account of revolutionary regime change and reaction shows how a world of empires became our world of nation-states.”—Peter S....

A history of capitalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F....

In the history of the Ottoman Empire, the seventeenth century has often been considered an anomaly, characterised by political dissent and social conflict. In this book, Aslıhan Gürbüz reveals how the early modern period was, in fact, crucial to the formation of new kinds of political agency that challenged, negotiated with, and ultimately reshaped the Ottoman social order. By uncovering...

What was it like to be a soldier on a Napoleonic battlefield? What happened when cavalry regiments charged directly at one another? What did the generals do during battle? Drawing on memoirs, diaries, and letters of the time, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon explores what actually happened in battle and how the participants' feelings...

A Financial Times Best Book of the YearWinner of the Norris and Carol Hundley AwardWinner of the US–Russia Relations Book Prize "The achievement of a lifetime."- Stephen Kotkin, author of Stalin "Naimark has few peers as a scholar of Stalinism, the Soviet Union and 20th-century Europe, and his latest work Stalin and the Fate of Europe is one of his...

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalised peoples. Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered...

In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, "free labor" experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam...

Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You're a writer—what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob...

A pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris, by an award-winning historian of France and the French Empire. In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France's notorious slave-trading...

Checkers, backgammon, chess, and Go. Poker, Scrabble, and bridge. These seven games, ancient and modern, fascinate millions of people worldwide. In Seven Games, Oliver Roeder charts their origins and historical importance, the delightful arcana of their rules, and the ways their design makes them pleasurable. Roeder introduces thrilling competitors, such as evangelical minister Marion Tinsley, who across forty years lost...

Sacred Kingship in World History has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. This collaborative and interdisciplinary book recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspectives. Editors A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern present a theoretical framework for understanding sacred kingship,...

This book is an attempt to coax Roman history closer to the bone, to the breath and matter of the living being. Drawing from a remarkable array of ancient and modern sources, Carlin Barton offers the most complex understanding to date of the emotional and spiritual life of the ancient Romans. Her provocative and original inquiry focuses on the sentiments...

Barbie Zelizer reveals the unique significance of the photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany after World War II. She shows how the photographs have become the basis of our memory of the Holocaust and how they have affected our presentations and perceptions of contemporary history's subsequent atrocities. Impressive in its range and depth and illustrated...

Red Flags by George Magnus is authored by a trusted economic commentator who offers a penetrating account of the threats to China's continued economic rise. Under President Xi Jinping, China has become a large and confident power both at home and abroad, but the country also faces serious challenges. In this critical take on China’s future, economist George Magnus explores...

In this book, leading cultural anthropologist Anton Blok sheds new light on the lives and achievements of pioneers who revolutionised science and art over the past five centuries, demonstrating that adversity rather than talent alone was crucial to their success. Through a collective biography of some ninety radical innovators, including Erasmus, Spinoza, Newton, Bach, Sade, Darwin, Melville, Mendel, Cézanne, Curie,...

The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social...

How succession in authoritarian regimes was less a competition of visions for the future and more a settling of scores “Joseph Torigian’s stellar research and personal interviews have produced a brilliant, meticulous study. It fundamentally undermines what political scientists have presumed to be the way Chinese Communist and Soviet politics operate.”—Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine The political successions...

In this masterful history, Eli Zaretsky reveals the power of Freudian thought to illuminate the great political conflicts of the twentieth century. Developing an original concept of political Freudianism, he shows how twentieth-century radicals, activists, and intellectuals used psychoanalytic ideas to probe consumer capitalism, racial violence, anti-Semitism, and patriarchy. He also underscores the continuing influence and critical potential of those...

In this compelling social history, William R. Pinch tackles one of the most important but most neglected fields of the colonial history of India: the relation between monasticism and caste. The highly original inquiry yields rich insights into the central structure and dynamics of Hindu society—insights that are not only of scholarly but also of great political significance. Perhaps no...

What happened on the last day of the Great War? Each year since, we have marked the end of the war with tributes and remembrance, solemnity and respect. But as Peace at Last reveals, the first Armistice Day in 1918 was entirely unprecedented and extraordinary. Upon hearing the news of the peace, crowds of people took to the streets, scaled...

The period between the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and US annexation (1893–98) is often framed as an inevitable step of American expansion—but it was never a foregone conclusion. By pairing the intimate and epic together in critical juxtaposition, Christen T. Sasaki reveals the unstable nature not just of the coup state but of the US empire itself. The...

The period between the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and US annexation (1893–98) is often framed as an inevitable step of American expansion—but it was never a foregone conclusion. By pairing the intimate and epic together in critical juxtaposition, Christen T. Sasaki reveals the unstable nature not just of the coup state but of the US empire itself. The...

The Cold War reconsidered as a limited nuclear war “Inexorable clarity and care for his fellow humans mark Robert Jacobs's guide to the Cold War as a limited nuclear war, whose harms disfigure any possible future.”—Norma Field, author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End In the autumn of 1961, President Kennedy somberly warned Americans...

The complete history of Northern Ireland from the Irish Civil War to Brexit “A wonderful book, beautifully written. . . . Informative and incisive.” — Irish Times After two decades of relative peace following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the Brexit referendum in 2016 reopened the Northern Ireland question. In this thoughtful and engaging book, Feargal Cochrane considers the...

To the extent that we worry about the future, we tend to do so with the apprehension that something may go terribly wrong. Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity is animated more by the apprehension, what if everything should go terribly right? That foreboding indelibly coloured the outlook of Friedrich Nietzsche and Alexis de Tocqueville—two thinkers seldom paired....

Widely regarded as today’s foremost American Jewish historian, Jonathan D. Sarna had a huge impact on the academy. Sarna’s influence is perhaps nowhere more apparent than among his former doctoral students—a veritable “Sarna diaspora” of over three dozen active scholars around the world. Both a tribute to Sarna and an important collection in its own right, New Perspectives in American...

Australian Book Review Best Book of the Year One of France's most famous historians compares two exemplars of political and military leadership to make the unfashionable case that individuals, for better and worse, matter in history. Historians have taught us that the past is not just a tale of heroes and wars. The anonymous millions matter and are active agents...

A prominent historian provides an engaging on-the-ground account of the everyday authoritarianism that produced the Arab Spring in Egypt. "A visceral and perceptive study of life under autocracy."—Publishers Weekly An unmatched contemporary history of authoritarian politics and an unflinching examination of the politics of historical authority, My Egypt Archive is at once a chronicle of Egypt in the 2000s and...

An incisive account of how Mussolini pioneered populism in reaction to Hitler’s rise—and thereby reinforced his role as a model for later authoritarian leaders "A passionately engaged history of a Mussolini and an Italy caught up in the monstrous gravitational waves engendered by the coming of Third Reich."—Giuseppe Finaldi, author of Mussolini and Italian Fascism On the tenth anniversary of...

A fresh treatment of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, revealing the close ties between Mussolini and Hitler and their regimes From 1934 until 1944, Mussolini met Hitler numerous times, and the two developed a relationship that deeply affected both countries. While Germany is generally regarded as the senior power, Christian Goeschel demonstrates just how much history has underrepresented Mussolini’s influence...

Moving Crops and the Scales of History is a bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the "cropscape"—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a crop. Human efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands...

In Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian questions the claims of Western Marxism and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union...

An introduction to a new way of looking at history, from a perspective that stretches from the beginning of time to the present day, Maps of Time is world history on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the Big Bang, David Christian views the interaction of the natural world with the more recent arrivals in flora and fauna, including human beings....

We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. For love is a complex, bewildering, and ecstatic emotion covering a welter of different feelings and moral judgements. Drawing on poetry, fiction, letters, memoirs, and art, and with the aid of a rich array of illustrations, historian Barbara...

In this long-awaited second edition, Susan Whitfield broadens her exploration of the Silk Road and expands her rich and varied portrait of life along the great pre-modern trade routes of Eurasia. This new edition is comprehensively updated to support further understanding of themes relevant to global and comparative history and remains the only history of the Silk Road to reconstruct...

This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world. In License to Travel, Patrick Bixby takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, you will:...

This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world. Narrow escapes and new starts, tearful departures and hopeful arrivals, unwanted scrutiny in the backrooms of officialdom: some of our most memorable experiences involve a passport. In License to Travel, Patrick Bixby examines the...

Pain, while known to almost everyone, is not universal. The evidence of our own pain, and our own experience, does not provide us with automatic insight into the pains of others, past or present. No matter how self-evident and ubiquitous the sting of a paper cut or the desolation of heartbreak might seem, pain is situated and historically specific. In...

A look at the history of psychiatry's foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people. In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and...

A timely look at the impact of China’s booming emergence on the countries of Southeast Asia “An expert and lucid synthesis of the historical context and recent developments of Southeast Asia’s rich and complex relations with Beijing.”—John Reed, Financial Times Today, Southeast Asia stands uniquely exposed to the waxing power of the new China. Three of its nations border China...

Studying the entangled histories of the areas conceptualised as the Middle Eastern and North Atlantic World in the interwar years is crucial to understanding the two areas' respective and common histories until today. However, many of the manifold connections, exchanges, and entanglements between the areas have not received thorough scholarly attention yet. The contributors to this volume address this by...

A writer’s travels along the legendary yet contested Jordan River—exploring the long conflict over water supply Access to water has played a pivotal role in the Israel-Palestine dispute. Israel has diverted the River Jordan via pipes and canals to build a successful modern state. But this has been at the expense of the region’s cohabitants. Gaza is now so water-stressed...

Conventional narratives of empires and globalisation focus on oceans and coasts, supposing that global connections are seaborne and that historical change proceeds inward from port cities into continental expanses. This book offers a new perspective, examining key inland areas around the world to show how interior regions have shaped global history. Inlands brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts to...

A fascinating and approachable deep dive into the colonial roots of the global wine industry. Imperial Wine is a bold, rigorous history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Here, historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative....

Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and classifying the world's population today. An individual's place of birth or naturalisation determines where he or she can and cannot be and what he or she can and cannot do. Although this system may appear universal, even natural, Will Hanley shows that it arose just a century ago. In Identifying with...

Ice Ghosts weaves together the epic story of the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845, whose two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and their crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice. This narrative intertwines with the modern tale of the scientists, divers, and local Inuit responsible for the recent incredible discoveries of the wrecks. Paul Watson, a Pulitzer...

A chilling global history of the human shield phenomenon. From Syrian civilians locked in iron cages to veterans joining peaceful indigenous water protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, from Sri Lanka to Iraq and from Yemen to the United States, human beings have been used as shields for protection, coercion, or deterrence. Over the past decade, human shields have...

This book examines the history of the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) and through it offers a new account of the humanitarian movement in modern Japan. Michiko Suzuki argues that contrary to its typical portrayal, the JRCS was not wholly subordinate to the government and the Imperial Family, nor was it derivative of Western values and institutional models. Instead, the...

How Food Made History covers 5,000 years of global history, tracing the changing patterns of food production and consumption that have molded economic and social life and contributed fundamentally to the development of government and complex societies. It charts the changing technologies that have increased crop yields, enabled the industrial processing and preservation of food, and made transportation possible over...

A pioneering history of cross-cultural knowledge that exposes enduring fractures in unity across the world’s largest continent. The nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spread printing across Asia to bring Bibles to the colonised. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications revolution: the maritime public sphere...

A sustained analysis of the ways in which oral testimonies of survivors contribute to the understanding of the Holocaust, Holocaust Testimonies also aims to shed light on the forms and functions of memory as victims relive devastating experiences of pain, humiliation, and loss. Drawing on the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, the author shows how oral...

The extraordinary story of the Popish Plot and how it shaped the political and religious future of Britain. In 1678, a handful of perjurers claimed that the Catholics of England planned to assassinate the king. Men like the “Reverend Doctor” Titus Oates and “Captain” William Bedloe parlayed their fantastical tales of Irish ruffians, medical poisoners, and silver bullets into public...

An innovative history that shows how the religious idea of the heathen in need of salvation undergirds American conceptions of race. If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping...

Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History S-USIH Book Award, Society for U.S. Intellectual History Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians "A fascinating book… Gin Lum suggests that, in many times and places, the divide between Christian and 'heathen' was the central divide in American life." - Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker "Offers a dazzling range...

An American Interest Book of the Year "Khan has unravelled the mystery of Chinese grand strategy, showing why insecurity lies at the root of Chinese power projection. Readers will not find a shrewder analysis as to why the Chinese act as they do." - Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Revenge of Geography "The essential guidebook to the evolution of...

Greek and Roman Slaveries explores the foundational role of slavery in Greek and Roman societies, impacting nearly all aspects of their economic, social, political, and cultural practices. The book provides a rich collection of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological sources, many of which are unfamiliar. Covering a chronological span from the archaic period to late antiquity, it encompasses regions like...

Goering's Man in Paris is a charged biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the postwar art world. “[Petropoulos] brings Lohse into sharper focus, as a personality and axis point from which to explore a network of art dealers, collectors and museum curators connected to Nazi looting. . . . What emerges from Petropoulos’s research is...

This short book offers a clear and engaging introduction to the history of humankind, from the earliest movements of people to the contemporary epoch of globalization. Cowen traces this complex history in a manner which offers both a compelling narrative and an analytical and comparative treatment. Drawing on a new perspective on global history, he traces the intersection of change...

South Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim, raised under an anticommunist dictatorship, turned to Marxian thought to explain his country's development, even as he came to struggle with its Eurocentrism. As a transnational scholar working in postcommunist Poland, Lim recognised striking similarities between Korean and Polish history and politics. One realisation stood out: Both Korea and Poland—at once the "West" for Asia...

An accessible synthesis of the prescient best seller exploring seventeenth-century catastrophe and the impact of climate change First published in 2013, Geoffrey Parker’s prize-winning best seller Global Crisis analyzes the unprecedented calamities—revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, and regicides—that befell the mid-seventeenth-century world and wiped out as much as one-third of the global population, and reveals climate change to be the...

How to account for decades of worldwide war, revolution, and human suffering in the seventeenth century? A master historian uncovers the disturbing answer. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides – the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa....

An epic in the tradition of Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China and Jill Lepore's These Truths, Helmut Walser Smith's sterling work promises to redefine our perception of German history. For nearly a century, conventional historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression, its nineteenth-century ascent accompanied by militarism and brought to...

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history—the first comprehensive volume to go well beyond World War II—challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than twentieth-century historians have imagined. Smith's...

A concise yet comprehensive account of the roles and influences of gender over the millennia, featuring new and updated content throughout. Gender in History: Global Perspectives, Third Edition explores the construction and evolution of gender in many of the world’s cultures from the Paleolithic era to the COVID pandemic of the twenty-first century. Broad in geographic and topical scope, this...

"In its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein's study stands alone."—Noam Chomsky "No one who ventures an opinion on Gaza... is entitled to do so without taking into account the evidence in this book." —The Intercept The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated places in the world. More than two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees,...