A Reading List for a Time of Confusion

World History

• David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: a Human History of the Oceans (Penguin, 2019)
• Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2019)
• David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (Yale, 2008)
• Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia (Princeton, 2018)
• C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (Blackwell, 2004)
• Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2014)
• David Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence, and Development (Blackwell, 1999)
• Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millenium (Princeton, 2009)
• Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (HarperCollins, 2005)

Empires

• Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton, 2017)
• Krishan Kumar, Empires: A Historical and Political Sociology (Polity Press, 2021)
• Geoffrey Scammell, The World Encompassed: the first European Maritime Empires, c.800-1650 (London, 1981)
• Fernando Cervantes, Conquistadores: A New History (Allen Lane, 2020)
• Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825 (London, 1969)
• Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800 (London, 1965)

The British Empire

• John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (Penguin, 2013)
• Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Penguin, 2004)
• Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (Abacus, 1998)
• Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge, 2010)
• Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-1968 (Cambridge, 2006)
• Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars, 1688-1783 (Longman, 2001)
• Saul David, Victoria’s Wars: Rise of Empire (Penguin, 2006)
• James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (Oxford, 2009)
• John Keay, The Honourable Company (HarperCollins, 1993)
• Saul David, The Indian Mutiny: 1857 (Penguin, 2002)
• David Gilmour, The British in India: A Social History of the Raj (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2018)
• Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj (BBC Books, 1987)
• Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj: Mothers, Wives & Daughters of the British Empire (Thames & Hudson, 2018)
• Keith Judd and Dennis Surridge, The Boer War (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003)
• Avner Offer, ‘Costs and benefits, prosperity, and security, 1870-1914’, Oxford History of the British Empire vol III (Oxford 1999) pp 690-711
• Tirthankar Roy, An Economic History of India 1707-1857 (2^nd ed., Routledge, 2021)
• Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857-2010 (4^th ed., Oxford, 2020)
• Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (Pimlico, 2003)
• Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004)
• Jeremy Black, Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World (Encounter Books, 2019)

For reference

• The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols and Companion Series

Slavery

• Jeremy Black, The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015)
• Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (Picador, 1997)
• David Brion Davies, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, 2006)

For reference

• The Cambridge World History of Slavery (4 vols, 2011-17) — the first survey of the entire history of slavery across the world, from antiquity to the present day
• The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, eds Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (Oxford, 2010)

Britain, Slavery and Abolition

• Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (Oxford, 2007)
• Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (Macmillan, 1975)
• Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006)
• Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (Routledge, 1995)
• Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon, eds., Slavery, Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807-1975 (Brighton, 2006)
• Sian Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade (Chatto, 2009)
• Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (Frank Cass, 1968)
• Neil Falkner, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920 (Yale, 2021)

National histories of the Anglophone World:

• Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge, 2^nd ed., 2006)
• Alvin Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707–2007 (Oxford, 2011)
• N.A.M. Rodger, A Naval History of Britain, 3 vols (Penguin, 1997-2022)
• Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (Penguin, 2015)
• T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: 1700-2007 (Penguin, 2006)
• John Davies, A History of Wales (Penguin, 2007)
• Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1798-2006 (Oxford, 2007)
• Liam Kennedy, Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? (Merrion Press, 2015)
• A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, 1609-1969 (Blackstaff Press, 1997)
• Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia (Viking, 2016)
• Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope:  An Invitation to the Great American Story (Encounter Books, 2019)
• Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Penguin, 2003)
• Paul Moon, Colonising New Zealand: A Reappraisal (Routledge, 2021)
• Viv Nelles, A Little History of Canada (Oxford, 2017)
• John Keay, India: A History (Harper, 2010)

The Twentieth Century

• Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back, Europe 1914-1949 (Penguin, 2016)
• Ian Kershaw, Roller-Coaster: Europe 1950-2017 (Penguin, 2018)

The First World War

• David Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the First World War (Penguin, 2004)
• T.G. Otte, July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 (Cambridge, 2014)
• Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008)
• Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the First World War (Viking, 2021)
• Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (HarperCollins, 2004)
• Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-18 (Cambridge, 2008)
• David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War in the Twentieth Century (Simon & Schuster, 2013)

Interwar

• Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (John Murray, 2001)
• Patricia Clavin, The Great Depression in Europe, 1929-39 (Macmillan, 2000)
• Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1997)
• Robert Service, History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Harvard, 1999)
• Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013)
• Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Scholar Press, 1998)
• Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (Bloomsbury, 2000)
• Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization (Penguin, 2010)
• Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War (Bodley Head, 2019)

For reference:

• Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European international history, 1919-1933 (Oxford, 2005)
• Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933-1939 (Oxford, 2011)

The Second World War 

• John Lukacs, The Last European War, 1939-41 (Routledge, 1977)
• Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945 (Penguin, 2021)
• Philips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge, 2015)
• Evan Mawdsley, The War for the Seas: A Maritime history of World War II (Yale, 2019)
• Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939-45 (London, 1969)
• Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (Allan Lane, 2008)
• Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (Hambledon Continuum, 2006)

Postwar

• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (Vintage, 2005)
• John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (Penguin, 2007)
• Liam Kennedy, Who Was Responsible for the Troubles: the Northern Irish Conflict (McGill-Queens University Press, 2020)

Biographies

• F. Fernandez-Armesto, Columbus (Oxford 1991)
• John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake (Henry Holt & Co., 1991)
• Mark Bence-Jones: Clive of India (Constable, 2016)
• Mary V. Thompson, The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon (University of Virginia Press, 2019)
• John B. Boles, Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty (Basic Books, 2017)
• John Sugden, Nelson: Volume 1: A Dream of Glory (Jonathan Cape, 2004); Nelson: Volume 2: The Sword of Albion (Bodley Head, 2014)
• Zareer Masani, Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist (Bodley Head, 2013)
• David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (Pocket Books, 1996)
• Richard Shannon, Gladstone, 2 vols (Penguin, 1982-99)
• Robert Rotberg, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (Oxford, 1990)
• David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003)
• Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Penguin, 2018)
• Christopher Dummitt, Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King’s Secret Life (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017)
• Bruce Gilley, The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defence of the British Empire (Washington DC, Regnery Gateway, 2021)

Histories for younger readers

• E.H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World [1936] (Yale University Press, 1985)
• Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (Allen Lane, 2010)
• Dominic Sandbrook, The First World War (Particular Books, 2021)
• Dominic Sandbrook, The Second World War (Particular Books, 2021)