General and world history Books

A colorful, comprehensive, and authoritative account of Machiavelli's life and thoughtThis is a colorful, comprehensive, and authoritative introduction to the life and work of the Florentine statesman, writer, and political philosopher Niccolo...

How British authorities and Indian intellectuals developed ideas about deviant female sexuality to control and organize modern society in IndiaDuring the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian...

*World Magazine, Honourable Mention, Accessible History Book of the Year*Why have most modern revolutions have ended in bloodshed and failure-and what lessons they hold for today's world of growing extremism. Why have so many of the iconic...

A history of modern European cultural pluralism, its current crisis, and its uncertain futureIn 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in their countries. Over the past decade, a growing consensus...

From acclaimed historian Michael Brenner, a mesmerizing portrait of Munich in the early years of Hitler's quest for powerIn the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I and the failed November Revolution of 191819, the conservative government of...

The gripping story of an explosive turning point in the history of modern IndiaOn the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids...

Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia's artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country's socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of...

The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl...

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows...

Thoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated, Weimar Germany brings to life an era of unmatched creativity in the twentieth century-one whose influence and inspiration still resonate today. Eric Weitz has written the...

The first complete biography of an influential historian whose dramatic life intersected with many great events and thinkers of the twentieth centuryThis is the first complete biography of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963), an influential German-American...

How the rise of the West was a temporary exception to the predominant world orderWhat accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The conventional answer asserts that superior technology,...

The Spectre of Warlooks at a subject we thought we knew - the roots of the Second World War - and upends our assumptions with a masterful new interpretation. Looking beyond traditional explanations based on diplomatic failures or military might, Jonathan...

The unknown history of deportation and of the fear that shapes immigrants' livesConstant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first...

In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a wealth of...

From the author of the national bestseller The Sleepwalkers, a book about how the exercise of power is shaped by different concepts of timeThis groundbreaking book presents new perspectives on how the exercise of power is shaped by different notions of...

The most comprehensive and up-to-date exploration of one of the most important religious orders in the modern world.Since its founding by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus - more commonly known as the Jesuits - has played a critical role...

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally...

The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily...

One of BBC History Magazine's Best Books of 2020Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much...

How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent ageThis pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low...

From the acclaimed author of The Gunpowder Age, a book that casts new light on the history of China and the West at the turn of the nineteenth century.George Macartney's disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing...

Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip...

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India's greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A...

Turkish republicanism is commonly thought to have originated with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, and understood exclusively in terms of Kemalist ideals, characterized by the principles of secularism, nationalism,...

A gripping history of the polar continent, from the great discoveries of the nineteenth century to modern scientific breakthroughs.]Antarctica, the ice kingdom hosting the South Pole, looms large in the human imagination. The secrets of this vast frozen...

How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth centuryAfter Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military...

A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jurgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves...

How technological advances and colonial fears inspired utopian geoengineering projects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.From the 1870s to the mid-twentieth century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and...

When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano's massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting...

How the conflict between political Islamists and secular nationalists has shaped the history of the modern Middle East In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically...

Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a general phenomenon? Why didn't racism appear in Europe before the fourteenth century, and why did it flourish as never before in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why did the twentieth...

The first comprehensive history of how Jews became citizens in the modern worldFor all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the...

The Killing Season explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century--the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965-66, leaving some five hundred thousand...

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday livesThe Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this...

Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on...

In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories--from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address--to show how American...

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of...

A history of unparalleled scope that charts the global transformation of Christianity during an age of profound political and cultural changeChristianity in the Twentieth Century charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an...

A panoramic history of rules in the Western world.Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of...

They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the...

Has Europe's extraordinary postwar recovery limped to an end? It would seem so. The United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Italy, and former Soviet Bloc countries have experienced ethnic or religious disturbances, sometimes violent. Greece, Ireland, and Spain...

This book brings together some of today's most exciting scholars of Irish history to chart the pivotal events in the history of modern Ireland while providing fresh perspectives on topics ranging from colonialism and nationalism to political violence,...

Empires--vast states of territories and peoples united by force and ambition--have dominated the political landscape for more than two millennia. Empires in World History departs from conventional European and nation-centered perspectives to take a...

Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it's time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the...

When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for 'a new Bretton Woods' to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of...

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's Russia.Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured...

Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom, for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture was so dominated by the power of the state...