European history

Britain and Russia maintained a frosty civility for a few years after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. But, by the 1820s, their relations degenerated into constant acrimonious rivalry over Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia the Great Game and, towards...

An examination of how the Jews real and imagined so challenged the Christian majority in medieval Europe that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways.In medieval Europe, Jews were not passive victims of the...

The Scots have always had a reputation for clarity of thought and also for the vigour with which it is put into words.This collection spans the entire gamut of a nation's recorded thought and experience from Roman Scotland to the present day. It...

Early historic Scotland - from the fifth to the tenth century AD - was home to a variety of diverse peoples and cultures, all competing for land and supremacy. Yet by the eleventh century it had become a single, unified kingdom, known as Alba, under a...

An enriching collection of classical writings about how ancient Romans made and thought about moneyAncient Romans liked money. But how did they make a living and sometimes even become rich? The Roman economy was dominated by agriculture, but it was...

A sweeping new account of ancient Greek culture and its remarkable diversity.Covering the whole of the ancient Greek experience from its beginnings late in the third millennium BCE to the Roman conquest in 30 BCE, Out of One, Many is an accessible and...

The story of the Roman Empire's enormous wine industry told through the remarkable ceramic storage and shipping containers that made it possibleThe average resident of ancient Rome drank two-hundred-and-fifty liters of wine a year, almost a bottle a day,...

Who was Rome's greatest general, statesman, and nation-builder: Caesar or Pompey?Few people have had as many words written about them down through the centuries as Julius Caesar - the brilliant general who made Queen Cleopatra of Egypt his mistress. He...

"Gretchen Starr-LeBeau's Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition provides an excellent introduction to Habsburg Spain's most reviled and misunderstood institution. Drawn from archival sources and modern scholarship, this concise study presents the long...

Peter Hainsworth's sparkling, eminently readable new English translation ofThe Book of the Courtier, Baldesar Castiglione's (14781529) literary and philosophical masterpiece, captures all the nuance, stylistic flair, and humor of this...

Like her much-loved heroine Emma Woodhouse, Jane Austen 'played and sang'. Music occupied a central role in her life, and she made brilliant use of it in her books to illuminate characters' personalities and highlight the contrasts between them.Until...

Wales boasts a stunning array of castles, the most per square mile of any country in Europe, from the earliest stone fortifications at Chepstow to the 19th-century folly of Castell Coch and from the splendor of Caernarfon, Beaumaris, Conwy and Harlech,...

This book is a revelatory book on the Irish "famine". A misnomer if ever their was one. The book dissects the well known story with, a razor sharp intellect, new novel historical knowledge and with the passion of a fired up writer, on top of his game. He...

Revered across the globe as an author of compelling novels, journalism, and essays that came to define the twentieth century, George Orwell was anunmatchedpolitical visionary, shining a light on the insidious nature of propaganda. Yet this chronicler of...

Imperial conquest and colonisation depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these...

A history that reframes the Bolsheviks' unprecedented attempts to abolish private property after the revolutions of 1917 The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia's governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval...

From 1884 to 1914, the world's fourth-largest overseas colonial empire was that of the German Kaiserreich. Yet this fact is little known in Germany and the subject remains virtually absent from most school textbooks.While debates are now common...

The history of British Islam and British Muslims is a growing area of interest among historians and the general public. But, whilst Muslim women have featured in some research, their lives and experiences prior to the present day have remained obscure,...

In February 1910, the young woman who would become Virginia Woolf played the most famous practical joke in British military history. Blackening her face and masquerading as an African prince, with friends she conned her way onto the Dreadnought, the...

The European Union is often seen as a cosmopolitan rejection of violent nationalism. Yet the idea of Europe has a long, problematic history - in medieval times, it was synonymous with Christianity; in the modern era, it became associated with 'whiteness'...