Global History

An incisive and engaging account of post-Soviet Russia—showing how and why the country has come into confrontation with the West The escalation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered the most violent conflict seen on European soil for decades. Millions of people have been displaced, and thousands killed. As the conflict continues, many in the West are seeking...

A pioneering politician and diplomat, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–1990) was an Indian icon, admired worldwide for her brilliance and glamour. Eleanor Roosevelt called her “the most remarkable woman” she had ever met. Madame Pandit, as she was widely known, moved in elite global circles even as she worked to improve the lives of millions. She traded quips with Winston Churchill,...

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent...

"Essential reading." - Erika Lee, author of The Making of Asian America "A broadly thought-provoking book." - Asian Review of Books "Fascinating… While expertly summarising and engaging existing historical studies, the author also indicates new avenues of research… [This] book thus stands as a bellwether for shifting trajectories of analysis that invite micro-historical follow-up." - H-Net Reviews "[This book] offers...

A wide-ranging new history of the Baltic Crusades and their legacy Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, crusading armies unleashed a relentless holy war against the last pagan societies in northern Europe, particularly in the Baltic Sea region. Led by Catholic rulers, churchmen, and, most importantly of all, the warrior monks of the Teutonic Order, they sought to expand Christendom...

A bottom-up story of the fishworkers, whalers, First Nations, merchantwomen, oceans, and animals who together made a new colonial world in the early Atlantic In the early decades of the sixteenth century, mariners from across Europe forged a vast seasonal fishery along the coasts of the northwest Atlantic. Long before there was Newfoundland or Canada, Europeans called this floating colony...

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin's Soviet Union during the 1930s in different waves of mass repression. Under violent interrogation, many were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Rather than save their lives, as the interrogators had promised, confession was usually the last step to their execution. Very few of those arrested eventually refused to...

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...

A consideration of how modern revolutions have employed tropes of classical antiquity. Despite its Latin etymology, "revolution" in its modern understanding arguably did not exist in antiquity, and revolution as we know it today is considered by many theorists to be a term born in modernity. While they certainly had times of momentous political upheaval, the Greeks and Romans tended...

A seminar, a sixteenth-century heretical text, and the art of slow reading—this is historical research as you've never seen it before. Patience Games: A Seminar on the 'Benefit of Christ' invites readers into the unpredictable world of scholarly discovery, where interpretation is not a straight path but a labyrinth of dialogue revision. At the heart of this book is a...

Why did Catholicism attract so many unlikely converts in Britain during the twentieth century? The twentieth century is understood as an era of growing, inexorable secularism, yet in Britain between the 1890s and the 1960s, there was a marked turn to Rome. In the first half of the century, Catholicism became an intellectual and spiritual fashion attracting more than half...

A groundbreaking history that explores how human desires have affected our relationship with the natural world, and why this is a cause for hope. Donald Worster looks back over 200,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens to show how human nature, especially the drive for food and sex, has responded to environmental conditions throughout history. Examining how this process led from...

An environmental history of chemical photography through the lens of its deep connections to empire and industry. Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism, chemical photography's emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of empire, coal, and chemistry and from the archives...

Yemen is the dark horse of the Middle East. Every so often it enters the headlines for one alarming reason or another—links with al-Qaeda, kidnapped Westerners, explosive population growth—then sinks into obscurity again. But, as Victoria Clark argues in this riveting book, we ignore Yemen at our peril. The poorest state in the Arab world, it is still dominated by...

A study of Indian indentured labour in Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad that explores the history of indenture's normalisation. In this book, historian Jonathan Connolly traces the normalisation of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain...

A lively, engaging history of The Great War written for a new generation of readers In recent years, scholarship on World War I has turned from a fairly narrow focus on military tactics, weaponry, and diplomacy to incorporate considerations of empire, globalism, and social and cultural history. This concise history of the first modern, global war helps to further broaden...

In 1918, Woodrow Wilson's image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread throughout Italy, filling an ideological void after the rout of Caporetto and diverting attention from a hapless ruling class. Wilson's popularity depended not only on the modernity of his democratic message, but also on a massive propaganda campaign he...

"The wonders and curiosities of the Islamic imagination await discovery by a new generation of readers in this superb and very enjoyable book by Travis Zadeh."-Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The astonishing biography of one of the world's most influential books. During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyā' Qazwīnī authored what became one...

Explore an insightful and original discussion of the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. In Why Rome Fell: Decline and Fall, or Drift and Change?, celebrated scholar of Roman history Dr. Michael Arnheim delivers a fascinating and robust exploration of the causes of and reasons for Rome’s fall in the West. Steeped in applications of elite theory to...

2023 PROSE Award in European History "An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon." - Washington Post "Reveals how prestigious natural scientists once sought physical explanations, in vain, for a social identity that continues to carry enormous significance to this day." - Nell Irvin Painter, author of The...

Ketchup seems iconically American, but the word comes from a Southeast Asian anchovy sauce, and today it is made largely from Chinese tomato paste. Japan's beloved ramen arose from the meeting of Chinese noodles and American wheat flour before attaining worldwide popularity in both gourmet and convenience-food forms. The baguette is mythologized as a product of the French Revolution, but...

An enjoyable, accessible exploration of the legacy of ancient Greece today, across our daily lives and all forms of popular culture. Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like “pandemic,” a Freudian state of mind like the “Oedipus complex,” or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of...

History, suggests Robert Gildea, "is a battlefield." Questions of power, rights, identity, and nationhood always have an ancient and modern historical dimension, and countries still go to war over their interpretation of history. Yet accounts of history are just as prone to fabrication as fake news, so how can we tell good history from bad? How can history be critical,...

What is Early Modern History? offers a concise guide to investigations of the era from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and serves as an entry-point to larger questions about how we divide and organise the past and how the discipline of history has evolved. Merry Wiesner-Hanks showcases the new research and innovative methods that have altered our understanding of this...

The Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted primarily of Jewish prisoners forced by the Germans to facilitate the mass extermination. Though never involved in the killing itself, they were compelled to be “members of staff” of the Nazi death-factory. We Wept Without Tears, translated for the first time into English from its original Hebrew, consists of interviews with the very few surviving...

The extraordinary account of the Cuban people’s struggle for survival in a post-Soviet world In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this period. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Cuban leaders, thinkers, and...

This volume is a unique, multi-authored social history of war from the third millennium B.C.E. to the tenth century C.E. in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Europe (Egypt, Achaemenid Persia, Greece, the Hellenistic World, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic World, and early Medieval Europe), with parallel studies of Mesoamerica (the Maya and Aztecs)...

In War and Conflict in the Middle Ages, Stephen Morillo offers the first global history of armed conflict between 540 and 1500, or as late as 1800 CE, an age shaped by climate change and pandemics at both ends. Examining armed conflict at all levels, and ranging across China and the central Asian steppes to southwest Asia, western Europe, and...

Unifies writings by leading scholars on various aspects of the 1923 Irish general election. After eleven arduous months, on May 24, 1923, the guns fell silent, and the Irish Civil War finally came to an end. Twelve weeks later, all adults aged twenty-one or over—regardless of social status or gender—cast their vote in the state's first general election. The 1923...

A much-needed behind-the-scenes survey of an emerging Asian power The eyes of the West have recently been trained on China and India, but Vietnam is rising fast among its Asian peers. A breathtaking period of social change has seen foreign investment bringing capitalism flooding into its nominally communist society, booming cities swallowing up smaller villages, and the lure of modern...

Russia's large-scale invasion on the 24th of February 2022 once again made Ukraine the focus of world media. Behind those headlines remain the complex developments in Ukraine's history, national identity, culture, and society. Addressing readers from diverse backgrounds, this volume approaches the history of Ukraine and its people through primary sources, from the early modern period to the present. Each...

Provides an engaging narrative account of modern European history, featuring new chapters on modern Europe and the post-Cold War world Twentieth-Century Europe: 1900 to the Present provides a concise and accessible review of the significant themes and major events that shaped European history from the beginning of the twentieth century. This student-friendly textbook places Europe in a global context as...

In Towards the Light, A.C. Grayling tells the story of the long and difficult battle for freedom in the West, from the Reformation to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the battle for the vote to the struggle for the right to freedom of conscience. As Grayling passionately affirms, it is a story—and a struggle—that continues to this day...

The often-violent conflicts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were sparked by the pursuit of freedom of thought. In time, this drive led to bitter fighting, including the English Civil War. Then came revolutions in America and France that swept away monarchies for more representative forms of government, making possible the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, and the...

The first book to weave Eurasia together through the perspective of the oceans and seas "A detailed account of the growing importance of the Chinese, Indian, and Russian navies and how this competition is playing out in waters stretching from the Indo-Pacific area to the Arctic and the Mediterranean." —Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs "It is a must-read for scholars,...

In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Pope Pius VII shared a common goal: to reconcile the church with the state. But while they were able to work together initially, formalizing an agreement in 1801, relations between them rapidly deteriorated. In 1809, Napoleon ordered the Pope’s arrest. Ambrogio Caiani provides a pioneering account...

Those They Called Idiots traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to the nineteenth-century asylum and care in today's society. Using evidence from civil and criminal courtrooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art, and caricature, it explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the...

A pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics Circle Award winner. In eighteenth-century France, writers emerged as a new kind of power. They stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the Bourbon monarchy. Whether scribbling in dreary garrets or philosophizing in salons, they exerted so much influence...

An interpretative history of global urbanity in the 1920s and 1930s, from the vantage point of Bombay, London, and Shanghai, that follows the life of business tycoon Victor Sassoon. In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai. In the early twentieth century, these cities were at...

The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs, from its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic. For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was...

"An extraordinary achievement." -David Edgerton, Literary Review "A remarkably researched, comprehensive, and indispensable book for everyone who wishes to understand how sugar and the sugar industry have shaped the world in which we live." -Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find...

A portrait of empire through the biographies of a Native American, a Pacific Islander, and the British artist who painted them both Three interconnected eighteenth-century lives offer a fresh account of the British empire and its intrusion into Indigenous societies. This engaging history brings together the stories of Joshua Reynolds and two Indigenous men, the Cherokee Ostenaco and the Ra‘iatean...

Meet today's almost fascists and learn the warning signs to intercept them on the road from populism to dictatorship. With The Wannabe Fascists, historian Federico Finchelstein offers a precise explanation of why Trumpism and similar movements across the world belong to a new political breed, the last outcome of the combined histories of fascism and populism: the wannabe fascists. This...

A history of the elaborate and brilliantly sustained World War II intelligence operation by which Hitler’s generals were tricked into giving away vital Nazi secrets “A great book.”—Michael Goodman, BBC History Magazine “An astonishing story of wartime espionage.”—Robert Hutton, author of Agent Jack At the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London...

As seen on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS Forget the world that came before. The author of American Vertigo serves up an incisive look at how COVID-19 reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society. With medical mysteries, rising death tolls, and conspiracy theories beamed minute by minute through the vast web universe, the coronavirus pandemic has irrevocably altered societies around...

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a generation of Ottoman Greeks was caught up in radical social and political changes, including the period of reforms known as Tanzimat. The Ottoman Greek press was both a product and an agent of these changes. The Uses of Oppression follows the development of the Ottoman Greek press from its birth in...

As in many postcommunist states, politics in Ukraine revolves around the issue of national identity. Ukrainian nationalists see themselves as one of the world’s oldest and most civilised peoples, as “older brothers” to the younger Russian culture. Yet Ukraine became independent only in 1991, and Ukrainians often feel like a minority in their own country, where Russian is still the...

This book chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to...

This book chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to...

In this remarkable book, Albert Baiburin provides the first in-depth study of the development and uses of the passport, or state identity card, in the former Soviet Union. First introduced in 1932, the Soviet passport took on an exceptional range of functions, extending not just to the regulation of movement and control of migrancy but also to the constitution of...

A narrative history of the unlikely Maoist rebellion that terrorised Peru even after the fall of global Communism. On May 17, 1980, on the eve of Peru's presidential election, five masked men stormed a small town in the Andean heartland. They set election ballots ablaze and vanished into the night, but not before planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the...

The surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today's European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But...

The Sea in the Middle presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centred on the Mediterranean and emphasises the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged...

Can a drop of perfume tell the story of the twentieth century? Can a smell bear the traces of history? What can we learn about the history of the twentieth century by examining the fate of perfumes? In this remarkable book, Karl Schlögel unravels the interconnected histories of two of the world's most celebrated perfumes. In tsarist Russia, two French...

From the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century, the Sikh community transformed from a relatively insignificant religious minority to an elevated position of kingship and empire. Under the leadership of Guru Gobind Singh (1661–1708), Sikh elites and peasants began to align themselves with discourses of power and authority, and within a few decades Khalsa Sikh warriors conquered some...

The eighteenth century was a time of cultural friction: individuals began to assert greater independence and there was a new emphasis on social equality. In this surprising history, Lynn Hunt examines women's expanding societal roles, such as using tea to facilitate conversation between the sexes in Britain. In France, women also pushed boundaries by becoming artists, and printmakers' satiric takes...

How did the Nazis imagine their victory and the subsequent ‘Thousand-Year Reich’? Between 1939 and 1943, the Nazi imperial Utopia started to take shape in the conquered areas of Eastern Europe. These regions were brutally emptied of their inhabitants, who were displaced, reduced to slavery, and, in the case of the Jews and a considerable number of Slavs, murdered. This...

A new and original history of the forces that shaped the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism,...

Lucas Haasis found a time capsule: a complete mercantile letter archive of the merchant Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens, who lived in 18th century Hamburg. Luetkens travelled to France between 1743-1745 in order to become a successful wholesale merchant. He succeeded in this undertaking via both shrewd business practice and proficient skills in the practice of letter writing. Based on this unique...

The Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet in 1959 after its occupation by China and established a government in exile in India. There, Tibetan leaders aimed to bring together displaced people from varied religious traditions and local loyalties under the banner of unity. To contest Chinese colonisation and stand up for self-determination, Tibetan refugees were asked to shed regional allegiances and...

The Politics of Love explores the entanglement of emotions, social movements, and science in reconfiguring human and nonhuman relations. As Darwin's evolutionary theory informed the development of sexual science and the sex reform movement between the 1890s and the 1920s, sex reformers emerged as a group of diverse and culturally influential professionals. This group included doctors, psychologists, artists, political activists,...

An important revisionist history that casts eighteenth-century British politics and imperial expansion in a new light “An important book . . . . Vaughn has greatly added to our understanding of Britain’s empire and politics.”—Journal of Modern History In this bold debut work, historian James M. Vaughn challenges the scholarly consensus that British India and the Second Empire were founded...

A major new assessment of the “vanished kingdom” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—one which recognises its achievements before its destruction. Richard Butterwick tells the compelling story of the last decades of one of Europe’s largest and least understood polities: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Drawing on the latest research, Butterwick vividly portrays the turbulence the Commonwealth experienced. Far from seeing it as a...

The untold story about how the internet became social, and why this matters for its future “Whether you’re reading this for a nostalgic romp or to understand the dawn of the internet, The Modem World will delight you with tales of BBS culture and shed light on how the decisions of the past shape our current networked world.”—danah boyd, author...

Immanuel Wallerstein's highly influential, multi-volume opus, The Modern World-System, is one of this century's greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

In April 1859, at age fifty, Shinohara Chüemon left his old life behind. Chüemon, a well-off farmer in his home village, departed for the new port city of Yokohama, where he remained for the next fourteen years. There, as a merchant trading with foreigners in the aftermath of Japan's 1853 "opening" to the West, he witnessed the collapse of the...

The surprising story of Iran’s transformation from America’s ally in the Middle East into one of its staunchest adversaries "An original interpretation that puts Iranian actors where they belong: at center stage." — Michael Doran, Wall Street Journal “An extraordinary account... Deeply nuanced and eloquent.” — Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post Offering a new view of one of America’s most important,...

This vivid reconstruction of one man's life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power. The Jew Who Would Be King tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs—a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to become a ruthless warlord and slaveholder. Isaacs' thrilling journey begins with his shipwreck on the shores of Zululand and proceeds...

One of the "10 Must-Read Histories of the Palestine-Israel Conflict" — Ian Black, Literary Hub, on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The new edition of the acclaimed text that explores the issues continuing to define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Numerous instances of competing, sometimes incompatible narratives of controversial events are found throughout history. Perhaps the starkest example of such...

[A] smart take on modern Chinese nationalism (Foreign Policy). Bill Hayton tells the story of how China came to think of itself as China—and what it means for our world today. In this compelling and highly-readable account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems—the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea—were born in the struggle...

An explication of how global decolonization provoked profound changes in American political theory and practice. In The Internal Colony, Sam Klug reveals the central but underappreciated importance of global decolonization to the divergence between mainstream liberalism and the Black freedom movement in postwar America. Klug reconsiders what has long been seen as a matter of primarily domestic policy in light...

A sweeping history of southeastern Europe from antiquity to the present that reveals it to be a vibrant crossroads of trade, ideas, and religions. We often think of the Balkans as a region beset by turmoil and backwardness, but from late antiquity to the present, it has been a dynamic meeting place of cultures and religions. Combining deep insight with...

The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as...

The God That Failed is a classic work and crucial document of the Cold War that brings together essays by six of the most important writers of the twentieth century on their conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism. In describing their own experiences, the authors illustrate the fate of leftism around the world. André Gide (France), Richard Wright (the...

The Global Prehistory of Human Migration by Immanuel Ness was previously published as the first volume of The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. This work is devoted exclusively to prehistoric migration, covering all periods and places from the first hominin migrations out of Africa through the end of prehistory. This book presents an interdisciplinary coverage of the topic, including scholarship...

The story of globalisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang. Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier in Zhapu. A wave...

The definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonisation in the Americas. Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain's Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading...

“I have seen yesterday. I know tomorrow.” This inscription in Tutankhamun’s tomb summarises The Fifth Beginning. Here, archaeologist Robert L. Kelly explains how the study of our cultural past can predict the future of humanity. In an eminently readable style, Kelly identifies four key pivot points in the six-million-year history of human development: the emergence of technology, culture, agriculture, and...

Played on frozen ponds in cold northern lands, hockey seemed an especially unlikely game to gain a global following. But from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the sport has drawn from different cultures and crossed boundaries––between Canada and the United States, across the Atlantic, and among different regions of Europe. It has been a political flashpoint within countries and...

The Experience of History is a lively and passionate introduction to the field that encourages students to seek and appreciate history inside the classroom and beyond. This work: Defines history as a discipline and the role of historians within it Addresses the analytical and critical thinking skills needed to engage with the past Discusses a variety of important topics in...