General and world history

A richly detailed history of the Bacris and the Busnachs, two renowned Jewish families whose influence and reputation shook the capitals of Europe and America.At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bacri brothers and their nephew, Naphtali Busnach,...

The assassination in Istanbul in 2007 of the author Hrant Dink, the high-profile advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, reignited the debate in Turkey on the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenians. Many Turks subsequently reawakened to their...

After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally and economically? In Post-Imperial Possibilities, historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental...

"We're better off for having these men among us."-Wall Street JournalBefore 9/11, the rugby team at West Point learned to bond on a sports field. This is what happened when those 15 young men became leaders in war. Filled with drama, tragedy, and...

Following one woman's voyage across the Antarctic, this elegant debut confronts the dark history of the whaling industry and the mystery of one young whaler's death against the backdrop of the vast Southern Oceans."Urgent and moving."-Publishers Weekly...

"Few artists are also historians, and few historians have the talent to illustrate the people and events they study. [Gordon Miller's] paintings of ships under sail, wrecked on a lee shore, in storms and in cities are luminous."-Pacific YachtingIn...

A powerful case for democracy and how it can adapt and survive - if we want it to.Is democracy in trouble, perhaps even dying? Pundits say so, and polls show that most Americans believe that their country's system of governance is being...

How eighteenth-century literature depended on misinterpretation-and how this still shapes the way we readReading It Wrong is a new history of eighteenth-century English literature that explores what has been everywhere evident but rarely talked about:...

How the utopian tradition offers answers to today's environmental crisesIn the face of Earth's environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won't save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound...

With exuberant wit, Elena Passarello casts her gaze on famous historical animals, crafting an essay collection organised as medieval bestiary.Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each...

In his hair-raising adventures across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Chris Thorogood treads a death-defying path over cliffs, up erupting volcanoes, through typhoons, and out into the very heart of the world's vast, green wilderness. Along...

From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning historian, the colourful, dramatic story of Charles Darwin's journey on HMS Beagle that inspired the evolutionary theories in his path-breaking books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.When...

This book tells the stories of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who made a courageous stand against the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the first modern genocide. Foreigners and Ottomans alike ran considerable risks to bear witness...

For years, a small unit of France's national police known as 'The Office in Charge of the Fight Against Crimes Against Humanity' has been discreetly chasing down war criminals.As the head of the thirty-person team, Colonel Eric Emeraux has investigated...

Will our past imitate our future?"The purpose of this book is threefold: to explain what makes civilisation civilization what it is; to show what we are in danger of losing in the event of collapse, and to point the way toward renewal."There is a...

Navigations re-examines the Portuguese voyages of discovery by placing them in their medieval and Renaissance settings. It shows how these voyages grew out of a crusading ethos, as well as long-distance trade with Asia and Africa and developments in...

Who do we look up to? Christ the Saviour is no more. In the modern West, the life of the most significant figure in the history of the culture is assumed to be obsolete. What remains?Quite a lot, actually. In this groundbreaking work, acclaimed...

Tracing the origins of modern political thought through three sets of arguments over history, morality, and freedom.In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by...

The Kew Sketch Journal is a stunning celebration of Kew Gardens and the local area through the eyes of artist and designer Charles Leon. Through this unique perspective, Charles shares with the reader the human relationship with buildings, built by...

Assassins have been killing the powerful and famous for at least three thousand years. Personal ambition, revenge, and anger have encouraged many to violent deeds, like the Turkish sultan who had nineteen of his brothers strangled or the bodyguards who...

As late as the last quarter of the twentieth century there were expectations that Islam's political and cultural influence would dissipate as the advance of westernization brought modernization and secularization in its wake. Not only has Islam...

Power to them meant everything. It was founded on courage, which begot honour. And by this courage and for this honour they fought to the death.The Shogun's Last Samurai Corps tells the thrilling story of the Shinsengumi - the legendary corps of Samurai...

Edward Seidensticker's A History of Tokyo 1867-1989 tells the fascinating story of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to the largest and the most modern city in the world. With the same scholarship and sparkling style...

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist Clara Johnson Award FinalistAs hundreds of thousands of displaced people sought refuge in Europe, the global relief system failed. This is the story of the volunteers who stepped forward to help.In 2015, increasing...

This amazingly wise and nimble collection investigates the horrors inflicted on so-called 'witches' of the pastThe Witch of Eye unearths salves, potions, and spells meant to heal, yet interpreted by inquisitors as evidence of evil. The author describes...

A handwritten serial number inside a neglected Broadwood square piano built in 1807 launches a captivating quest to uncover the remarkable history of these now almost forgotten musical instruments.

Nightclub, theatre, creative hub, party place, and one of the most important venues in Scotland, Britain and Europe: for almost 25 years, The Arches was the beating heart of Glasgow.In 1991, former punk-turned-theatre director Andy Arnold walked into the...

What do you get when dare-devil Jihadists, mad English missionaries and proud, stubborn, warring natives meet in a clash?Nigeria.Formation: From Jihad to Amalgamation tracks the unlikely series of events and characters that turned a collection of...

There's No Story There is about the lives of conscripted workers at Statevale, an enormous rural munitions factory somewhere in England during the Second World War.The workers are making shells and bombs, and no chances can be taken with so much...

The creation of large new tracts of forest, together with the development of a modern wood processing sector, was the single biggest transformation to occur in the Scottish countryside during the twentieth century. While the environmental and landscape...

We all know about giving and receiving gifts: they can be touching or puzzling, either strengthening bonds of friendship or becoming a burden. Gifts are an integral part of human societies and this volume explores how, over the centuries, books and...

Succulents, especially cacti, are the current focus of serious ecological studies but also the darlings of designers and style influencers. Their endearing, characterful looks have given them the status of trendy 'plant pets'.But succulentomania is not...

The vocabulary of past times, no longer used in English, is always fascinating, especially when we see how it was pilloried by the satirists of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class...

This book is a treasure-trove of cartographical delights spanning over a thousand years. Each map is accompanied by a narrative revealing the story behind how it came to be made and the significance of what it shows. The chronological arrangement...

Japan's post-war armed forces are a paradox, both embarrassing remnants of the past and valuable repositories of experience. This book charts the development of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) from 1954 as both unorthodox military institutions and...

In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at...

There is more to St Helena than an exiled emperor; the tiny island in the middle of the wild South Atlantic Ocean has a rich garden heritage and an extraordinarily diverse flora, both exotic and endemic. This was the consequence of St Helena being the...

The legendary music impresario (and producer of bands likeThe Yardbirds and Wham!)tells his life story in a series of mesmerisingly candid vignettes.Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom: Lessons from a Dissolute Lifeis the book Simon Napier-Bell's fans have always...

As Nelson Mandela said, 'a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.' Shadowland tells the sometimes inspiring, often painful stories of Germany's prisoners, and thereby shines new...

Three rulers from the House of Orange-Nassau reigned over the Netherlands from 1813 to 1890: King William I from 1813 to 1840, King William II from 1840 to 1849, and King William III from 1849 to 1890. Theirs is an epic tale of joy and tragedy, progress...

Virginia Woolf's novel famously begins - 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' Of course she would: why would anyone surrender the best part of the day to someone else? Flowers grace our lives at moments of celebration and despair. 'We...

The giving of gifts has been associated with diplomacy from ancient times to the present. Press coverage tends to focus on examples which highlight cultural differences between giver; where a gift is perceived as excessive, sometimes with connotations of...

As early as the third century, St Maurice-an Egyptian-became leader of the legendary Roman Theban Legion. Ever since, there have been richly varied encounters between those defined as 'Africans' and those called 'Europeans'. Yet Africans and African...

The emotion and trauma of the Partition are buried deep, but Aanchal Malhotra has found a way to recover them. Through the possessions saved by her own great-grandparents as they fled their homes, she discovers the unique power of such objects: to unlock...

Invented History, Fabricated Powerbegins with an examination of prehistoric beliefs (in spirits, souls,mana,orenda) that provided personal explanation and power through ritual and shamanism among tribal peoples. On this foundation, spiritual power...

An intellectual history of sovereignty that reveals how the Habsburg Empire became a crucible for our contemporary world order.Sprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty. The...

This book presents rare evidence about the lives of three African women in the sixteenth century--the very period from which we can trace the origins of global empires, slavery, capitalism, modern religious dogma and anti-Black violence. These features...

A Bittersweet Heritage unearths the slavery-tainted history of Britain's manors, ports, roads and countryside, and powerfully explains what this legacy means today.The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives...