Global History

Discover the 50 key developments and events that form the backbone of the story of humanity. People often complain that in history lessons at school they were taught just a few topics — the Romans, the Tudors, the Nazis — and how they have no idea about what happened in between. Offering stimulating outlines of key developments in the history...

Betrayal charts the dramatic collapse of the post-1945 international system. Ours is now a world in which Trump's America has endorsed Putin's land-grab in Ukraine, painted Europe as an enemy, and toppled and kidnapped Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro. Meanwhile, an anti-western alliance has taken shape featuring China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Countries find themselves in an uncertain and dangerous...

As the populist right gains political legitimacy and the backlash against feminist movements grows, pay and health inequalities are worsening, and misogyny has taken on new insidious digital forms, gender equality is as contested and uncertain as it has ever been. How did we get here? And why, despite over a century of protest, has more progress not been made?...

It has been claimed that around 14,500 wars have been fought since 3,500 BC. Humanity has only experienced 300 years of peace on Earth. During the twentieth century, more people in total were killed in wars than during any previous century. Relatively, though, we kill each other less often now. Are we gradually becoming more peaceful? Regardless of the number...

At some point around two million years ago, we discovered that we could exchange one thing for another. Since then, humans have continued trading and exchanging things throughout economic history. Clever humans also invented capital, which we used to shape our whole economic system. In this information-packed, entertaining, eye-opening book, Kjell A. Nordström guides us from the collaborative origins of...

Newly revised and updated Shortlisted for the 2025 Moore Prize in Human Rights Writing Prosecuting the Powerful isn't just compelling and very moving, it has all the force of a well-crafted thriller. I literally couldn't stop reading it,' John Simpson, BBC World Affairs Editor 'A compelling account of a revolutionary moment in history,' Philippe Sands, The Spectator 'Powerful, timely and...

With the end of the Cold War and the triumph of globalisation, many believed that nationalism was now a thing of the past; instead, the opposite is true. The essays in this anthology are based on the Engelsberg Seminar in 2017, where different kinds of identity formation were considered. How does a nation emerge? How is unity achieved in an...

Technology is at the heart of the human story. In an era of transformation, comprehending what drives these changes means understanding the history of man's relationship with technology. In this anthology of essays, world-leading historians, academics and writers explore innovation, industry and the economy, warfare and espionage, culture and communication, and what it means to be human in the era...

A chilling global history of the human shield phenomenon—now with urgent new reflections on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. 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...

Hoof Beats helps readers see the drama even in the grass eating. . . . Taylor has written that too-rare work that is as authoritative as it is legible to the lay audience. —New York Times Journey to the ancient past with cutting-edge science and new data to discover how horses forever altered the course of human history. From the...

The history of collecting natural history specimens touches upon many aspects of our past. The fascination with nature was at least as important for its view of humanity as for science. One telling example is the Timm Collection at Engelsberg Ironworks, created by the ironworks proprietor Gabriel Casper Timm and his son Paul August in the nineteenth century. Throughout their...

How history is written: an anthology of classic texts from Thucydides and Machiavelli to Nietzsche and E.H. Carr. The admonition that we should learn from history is a well-known truism, but what does that actually mean? In other words, what is history? This anthology compiles the best-known discussions of the topic. From Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Machiavelli's Discourses,...

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A Waterstones Best Nature & Travel Writing Book 2025 'Educational, smart and funny’ Richard Osman ‘This book is superb’ Charlie Brooker ‘Brilliant. Fascinating. Hilarious.’ Jonn Elledge, bestselling author of A History of the World in 47 Borders The debut book from the YouTube sensation and all-round cartographical nerds, The Map Men! Hello, we're the Map Men,...

As the clock strikes the end of the war, the time begins to turn towards a new age - the one we call now. This shift does not happen overnight, from one day to the next; instead, the world vibrates for a number of years. People try to find their way back to homes that are no longer there, or...

An epic tale of war, revolution, economic crisis, and social transformation told through the story of twelve historic soccer games, with a gallery of unexpected heroes, thwarted tragedies, and stunning, world-changing results... Soccer has always intersected with history—sometimes during an anonymous match, sometimes in a major world final—because, from the sport's beginning in 1848, echoes of what's happening off the...

From the bestselling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, an exploration of the influence of leaders in politics, business, sport and religion. We often read history as the biographies of 'great men' who shaped the world. But are leaders, whichever field they are in, really that influential? Should CEOs be given large bonuses when a company performs well? Why, when...

Embark on a guided tour of 30 of the most dangerous and mysterious locations that we simply cannot stay away from. Have you ever visited a forest or an abandoned building and gotten a bad vibe? There are places that are rife with rumours of hauntings, monsters, and sinister phenomena that can’t be explained. And there are just as many...

An extraordinary account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination, from the author of Rubicon. "A galloping tour of Christianity's influence across the last 2,000 years." — New York Times Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one...

An extraordinary account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination, from the author of Rubicon. "A galloping tour of Christianity's influence across the last 2,000 years." --New York Times Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular...

An updated version of the classic, definitive account of the Burma campaign in World War 11.

'Cuts through the noise to give the reader geopolitical clarity' TIM MARSHALL 'Shines powerful light on the state of contemporary geopolitics . . . Profound' ANDREW ROBERTS 'Wide-ranging and provocative' FIONA HILL 'Simms is one of the most knowledgeable and formidable analysts of how the Great Powers will shape the new order' RANA MITTER From an acclaimed historian, a sweeping...

From actor, comedian, writer, and host of the hit history podcast SNAFU, Ed Helms brings you an absurdly entertaining look at history's greatest screwups, complete with lively illustrations. History contains a plethora of insane screwups—otherwise known as SNAFUs. Coined during World War I, SNAFU is an acronym that stands for Situation Normal: All F*cked Up. In other words, "things are...

From the award-winning author of American Sirens and A Thousand Naked Strangers comes a real-life thriller about the most daring rescue in air-medical history. As contagions spring up around the world, this story of outbreaks and the people who fight them resonates more than ever. July 2014. Two American medical volunteers who joined the fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak...

A blueprint for rescuing our fragile democracy by harnessing AI Democracy is in retreat at home and abroad. Our institutions and our politics are more broken than ever. At this delicate moment, artificial intelligence has burst onto the scene, a powerful technology that holds as much potential to bolster democracy as to harm it. But we have stopped treating democracy...

AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR A compelling and timely study of what drove history's most influential civilisations... the book comes with impeccable timing... An entertaining and informative read for anyone interested in the forces that shape how civilisations progress - Financial Times Deftly punctures popular misconceptions... Could a history book be more timely? - The Economist Engaging and persuasive...

'The world's most successful history podcast ... Holland and Sandbrook have pretty much reinvented popular history for the modern age' THE TIMES 'The history publishing phenomenon of my lifetime' NEW STATESMAN From the award-winning podcast The Rest is History and Sunday Times bestselling authors Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook comes a riotous deep dive into history’s biggest heroes and most...

"In his joyful new book, Aldo Cazzullo invites us, through sparkling prose, to dive into some of the greatest stories ever told." —James Martin, SJ, New York Times bestselling author of Work in Progress and Learning to Pray A #1 bestselling sensation in Italy As a way of connecting with his dying father, Aldo Cazzullo picks up the Bible and...

An unforgettable story of survival and resilience in the death camps of World War II. A miracle unfolded on October 9, 1944, at Auschwitz. Amidst the gas chambers and crematoria, a ragtag group of Jewish boys, aged thirteen to seventeen, were marched naked into Crematorium 5, their names already crossed out in Nazi ledgers as “gestorben,” or “dead.” They would...

The Mongol Empire changed the world, but early chronicles of its conquests, written from regional perspectives and widely dispersed, could not convey its far-reaching significance. The Khan and the Unicorn details how historians from different cultures collectively rediscovered their common past and transformed the scattered records of Chinggis Khan’s conquests into world history. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as...

Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands. The First Social Democracy is...

In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been known that this transition stemmed from Europe's increasing exchanges with India, Persia, and the Arabic world. Yet, much remains to be understood about how Indo-Arabic numerals—and the practical arithmetic they enabled—actually spread across Europe. As Raffaele...

In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Field knew nothing about telegraphy, electricity, ships, or oceans, and science itself still lacked a universal theory of electricity. But he believed that wiring the world for near-instantaneous communication would bring...

From an acclaimed archaeological writer, a worldwide history of hunting “Offers a comprehensive, authoritative history tracing hunting’s influence on culture and society through the ages.”—Bill Heavy, Wall Street Journal Hunting is one of humanity’s most ancient and universal activities. It has been embedded in every facet of our lives, shaping social bonds, power hierarchies, and interactions with the spirit world....

Faith in Disguise follows Martín Tirado, a white Puerto Rican digital historian and research assistant to Fe Verdejo, an Afro-Venezuelan scholar curating an exhibition in Chicago on enslaved and freed Black women in Latin America. As Martín becomes increasingly enmeshed in Fe's intellectual and erotic orbit, his role as subordinate and interpreter exposes the entanglement of race, power, and desire...

We live in an age of counterrevolution. Liberal elites around the world are weaponising their fascistic narratives, creating political enemies of the 'other' as a means of consolidating even more power and wealth. While scapegoating minorities is nothing new, we have never seen it happen quite like this before. Today, global capitalism is financialised, tech-driven and violently mercantilist. This collection...

A major new history of revolutionary Iran, from the 1940s to the present Iran's revolution in 1979 shook the world. The Pahlavi dynasty came crashing down, and the Islamic Republic rose in its place. But what led to this seismic event? How did the revolutionary movement gain such strength? And what has its legacy been for modern Iran? In this...

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualise human beings in terms of populations. Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies. Here, traders, officials, notaries, and ship captains began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of...

Thomas Asbridge's remarkable new book reveals the global impact of humanity's greatest natural disaster, and the terrible human cost of this calamity. In the mid-fourteenth century, a lethal plague struck the medieval world, causing unimaginable suffering and destruction. This terrifying pandemic - the Black Death - was unquestionably one of history's defining episodes, yet a critical feature of its progress...

Multi-million copy bestselling author Terry Deary shows you the history of the world through the eyes of Mr and Mrs Peasant (and their good friend Monsieur Guillotine...). A globetrotting, laugh-out-loud popular history for fans of David Mitchell. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the rich and powerful always look after their own and the working people are always revolting....

A unique map-led history of the world's most important civilizations Witness the rise and fall of ancient empires and forgotten cultures, and their epic stories with this unique map-led history. From Mesopotamia's thriving trade hubs to the spectacular cities of the Inca, such as Machu Picchu, Civilizations Map by Map charts the rise and fall of more than 90 pioneering...

A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics. At a time when we are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability and morality of the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence. John Cassidy...

New York Times Readers' Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century The tenth anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling phenomenon that cemented Yuval Noah Harari as one of the most prominent historians of our time—featuring a new afterword from the author. One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one....

Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Devil in the White City, delivers a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd...

The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller The Global #1 Bestseller After more than seventy years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in a two-part memoir. Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only woman to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the...

Herodotus is not only known as the father of history, as Cicero called him, but also the father of ethnography. As well as charting the historical background to the Persian Wars, his curiosity also prompts frequent digression on the cultures of the peoples he introduces. While much of the information he gives has proved to be astonishingly accurate, he also...

The great claim was that Marxism, as put forth in the Communist Manifesto, was scientific. Marx and Marxists spoke much of the "false consciousness" of people whose arguments are only superficially intellectual. These individuals, though they themselves are unaware of it, are mere projections of class prejudice and thus believe they are acting from religious or other motives while really...

New York Times Best Book of the Year Time Best Book of the Year Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner From journal Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham is a definitive, dramatic account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster — the worst nuclear accident in history — blending historical narrative and deep...

Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944 is the definitive history of World War II's most pivotal battle, a day that changed the course of history. D-Day, June 6, 1944 is the epic story of men at the most demanding moment of their lives, when the horrors, complexities, and triumphs of life are laid bare. Distinguished historian Stephen E. Ambrose...

"A touching family portrait that also happens to be very, very funny... its appeal is timeless." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post One of the best-loved American memoirs of an oversized family and the parents who held them together - now a Disney+ movie starring Gabrielle Union and Zach Braff. What do you get when you put twelve lively kids together with...

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman proves her talent for seeking out characters at all levels of society in this beautifully repackaged and reissued edition of her grand portrait of 14th-century Europe. A marvelous history of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years' War, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Guns of...

This fascinating history of how, where and why humans swim...is perfect reading for those missing a splash-about during the lockdown. Guardian From the first recorded dip into what's now the driest spot on earth to the recreational swimmers in your local pool, humans have been getting wet for 10,000 years. And for most of modern history, swimming has caused a...

Throughout history, royal dynasties have dominated countries and empires around the world. Kings, queens, emperors, chiefs, pharaohs, czars—whatever title they ruled by—monarchs have shaped institutions, rituals, and cultures in every time period and every corner of the globe. The concept of monarchy originated in prehistoric times and evolved over centuries right up to the present. Efforts to overthrow monarchies or...

World History has rapidly grown to become one of the most popular and talked about approaches to the study of history. World History: The Basics introduces this fast-growing field and addresses key questions such as: What is world history? How do we study a subject with such a broad geographic and chronological range? Why has world history been controversial? Written...

World History: Journeys from Past to Present uses common themes to present an integrated and comprehensive survey of human history from its origins to the present day. By weaving together thematic and regional perspectives in coherent chronological narratives, Goucher and Walton transform the overwhelming sweep of the human past into a truly global story that is relevant to the contemporary...

World History: Journeys from Past to Present uses common themes to present an integrated and comprehensive survey of human history from its origins to the present day. By weaving together thematic and regional perspectives in coherent chronological narratives, Goucher and Walton transform the overwhelming sweep of the human past into a truly global story that is relevant to the contemporary...

Bringing the study of early modern Christianity into dialogue with Atlantic history, this collection provides a longue durée investigation of women and religion within a transatlantic context. Taking as its starting point the work of Natalie Zemon Davis on the effects of confessional difference among women during the age of religious reformations, the volume expands the focus to broader temporal...

This reference source guides the reader through the labyrinth of people and organisations that were involved in the women's suffrage movement, drawing on information from a wide range of archival sources, both local and national. The Women's Suffrage Movement contains over 400 biographical entries on both women and men involved in the movement between 1866 and 1928 and more than...

The Witchcraft Sourcebook, now in its second edition, is a fascinating collection of documents that illustrates the development of ideas about witchcraft from ancient times to the eighteenth century. Many of the sources come from the period between 1400 and 1750, when more than 100,000 people—most of them women—were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and colonial America. During these years,...

Fascism, communism, genocide, slavery, racism, imperialism—the West has no shortage of reasons for guilt. And, indeed, since the Holocaust and the end of World War II, Europeans in particular have been consumed by remorse. But Pascal Bruckner argues that guilt has now gone too far. It has become a pathology, and even an obstacle to fighting today's atrocities. Bruckner, one...

With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope. In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad, and few...

The Routledge History of Disease draws on innovative scholarship in the history of medicine to explore the challenges involved in writing about health and disease throughout the past and across the globe. It presents a varied range of case studies and perspectives on the patterns, technologies, and narratives of disease that can be identified in the past and that continue...

Covering a range of topics in 97 clear and detailed maps, this book explores: Politics - from ancient Egypt and the growth of the Greek city-states, to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Religion - from the spread of Judaism and Christianity to the persecution of the Christians. Military history - from Salamis and Alexander the Great to...

Originally conceived as a military history, this second edition completes the story of the Middle Eastern populations that underwent significant transformation in the nineteenth century, finally imploding in communal violence, paramilitary activity, and genocide after the Berlin Treaty of 1878. Now called The Ottomans 1700-1923: An Empire Besieged, the book charts the evolution of a military system in the era...

Early modern Venice was an exceptional city. Located at the intersection of trade routes and cultural borders, it teemed with visitors, traders, refugees, and intellectuals. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that such a city should foster groups and individuals of unorthodox beliefs, whose views and lifestyles would bring them into conflict with the secular and religious authorities. Drawing on a...

Comprised of a wide breadth of scholarly materials and diverse articulations, The Holocaust: Memories, Research, Reference will help you guide others in Holocaust research and show you how you can avoid contributing to the popularisation and trivialisation of the Holocaust. You’ll find in it poems by the prolific American poet, Lyn Lifshin; an essay by Arnost Lustig; work by Roselle...

The Global 1980s takes an international perspective on the upheaval across the world during the long 1980s (1979–1991) with the end of the Cold War, a move towards a free-market economic system, and the increasing connectedness of the world. The 1980s was a decade of unimaginable change. At its start, dictatorships across the world appeared stable, the state was still...

The 1920s is often recognised as a decade of fascism, flappers and film. Covering the political, economic and social developments of the 1920s throughout the world, The Global 1920s takes an international and cross-cultural perspective on the critical changes and conditions that prevailed from roughly 1919 to 1930. With twelve chapters on themes including international diplomacy and the imperial powers,...

This book is more than a description of the imperial spread of public school games: it is a consideration of hegemony and patronage, ideals and idealism, educational values and aspirations, cultural assimilation and adaptation, and perhaps most fascinating of all, the dissemination throughout the empire of the hugely influential moralistic ideology athleticism. The author's purpose is to capture some of...

Whilst terms such as Lebensraum are commonly associated with National-Socialist ideology of the 1930s and 40s, ideas of racial living space were in fact generated in the previous decades by an international geographic community of explorers and academics. Focusing on one of the most influential figures within this group, Sven Hedin, this is the first study that systematically connects the...

A new edition of the seminal text by the father of modern economics. First published in 1919, John Maynard Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace created immediate controversy. Keynes was a firsthand witness to the negotiations of the Paris Peace Conference, as an official representative of the British Treasury, and he simultaneously sat as deputy for the Chancellor of...

Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices of early modernity brings to light the emergence of the early modern global south. Young proposes a new set of terms with which to understand the racialized imaginary inscribed in...

The first of its kind, a unique exploration of the history of human conflict, Essential Histories is the most comprehensive and fascinating study of human conflict ever undertaken. Leading historians from around the world have been commissioned to write 42 accessible and definitive guides to every major war throughout history, with an emphasis on the people who fought and the...

Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia was an immensely influential book that attempted to describe the entire world across all of human history and analyse its constituent elements of geography, history, ethnography, zoology and botany. First published in 1544, it went through thirty-five editions and was published in five languages, making it one of the most important books of the Reformation period. Beginning...

Culture does not become culture until it is consumed. This is the interpretation of early modern social history presented in this text. Contributors from North America and Europe explore topics such as the formation of a culture-consuming public, the development of a literary canon, the role of consumption in the formation of the modern state, elite and popular forms of...

The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir (1160-1233AD), entitled al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh, is one of the outstanding sources for the history of the mediaeval world. It covers the whole sweep of Islamic history almost up to the death of its author and, with the sources available to him, he attempted to embrace the widest geographical spread; events in Iraq, Iran and further East...

A detailed and comprehensive study of the Celts from the first evidence of them in the archaeological and historical record to the early post-Roman period. This volume looks at archaeology, language, literature, towns, warfare, rural life, art, religion and myth, trade and industry, political organisations, society and technology. It draws together material from all over pagan Celtic Europe and includes...

Volume 4 of the Cambrdige Modern History series covering the The Thirty Years' War.

In January of 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. For a year afterward, news of this discovery spread outward from California and started a mass migration to the gold fields. Thousands of people from the East Coast aspiring to start new lives in California financed their journey West on the assumption...

The early Arab conquests pose a considerable challenge to modern-day historians. The earliest historical written tradition emerges only after the second half of the eighth century—over one hundred years removed from the events it contends to describe—and was undoubtedly influenced by the motives and interpretations of its authors. Indeed, when speaking or writing about the past, fact was not the...