General and world history Books

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...

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...

On 8 March, 1965, 3,500 United States Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade made an amphibious landing at Da Nang on the south central coast of South Vietnam, marking the beginning of a conflict that would haunt American politics and society...

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...

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...

For many in Israel and elsewhere, Benjamin Netanyahu is anathema, an embarrassment; yet he continues to dominate Israeli public life. How can we explain his rise, his hold on Israeli politics, and his outsized role on the world's stage?In Bibi, Anshel...

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...

The revolutionary Wilhelm Steinitz(1836-1900) considered himself to be in the vanguard of an emerging, late-19thcentury 'Modern' school, which embraced a new, essentially scientific vitalityin its methods of research, analysis, evaluation, planning,...

The Tudor Book of Days is a beautifully designed perpetual diary for keeping important dates, events and seasonal notes in a personal day book. The diary pages have a week in a double page spread and list important Tudor events by month and by day. Space...

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized...

Lessons from History is a joyful romp through the obscurest parts of the past. The annals have been scoured for overlooked figures and events that nonetheless made an impact, and within these pages they are brought hilariously and often poignantly back...

A sweeping overview of world affairs and, especially having come across the name of William Yandell Elliott, Professor of Politics at Harvard through the first half of the 20th century. Sean found that Elliott had created a kindergarten of Anglo-American...

When the Clyde Ran Red paints a vivid picture of the heady days when revolution was in the air on Clydeside. Through the bitter strike at the huge Singer Sewing machine plant in Clydebank in 1911, Bloody Friday in Glasgow's George Square in 1919, the...

The Russian Civil War of 1917-1920, out of which the Soviet Union was born, was one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. The collapse of the Tsarist regime and the failure of the Kerensky Provisional Government nearly led to the...

Tea has a rich and well-documented past. The beverage originated in Asia long before making its way to seventeenth-century London, where it became an exotic, highly sought-after commodity. Over the subsequent two centuries, tea's powerful psychoactive...

A suspenseful, authoritative account of how the battle against a mid-century polio epidemic sparked a revolution in medical care.Americans knew polio as the 'summer plague'. In countries further North, however, the virus arrived later...

For readers of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire and Mark Kurlansky's Salt.The story of orchards is a human story. It is also a story of how humans have bent and shaped nature to our tastes and desires for millennia.In Taming Fruit, award-winning...

WINNER of the 2020 Ernest Scott Prize for HistoryShortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2019 (read more here)In1970 homosexuality was...

Andrew Tink's superb book tells the story of Australia in the twentieth century, from Federation to the Sydney 2000 Olympics. A century marked by the trauma of war and the despair of the depression, balanced by extraordinary achievements in sport,...

The Cold War was a turbulent time to grow up in. Family ties were tested, friendships were torn apart and new beliefs forged out of the ruins of old loyalties. In this book, through twelve evocative stories of childhood and early adulthood in Australia...