100 books like How to Hide an Empire

By Daniel Immerwahr,

Here are 100 books that How to Hide an Empire fans have personally recommended if you like How to Hide an Empire. Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference

April Biccum Author Of Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire: Marketing Development

From my list on empire as a particular kind of politics.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in empires began as an undergraduate taking a course in International Political Economy. We were asked to view poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ in the historical perspective of European colonization but asked to see development economics as something entirely new. I couldn’t see the difference. I have since become fascinated not just by the world historical recurrence of this particular type of politics, but also why our understanding of it is occluded through repeated framing of global politics via the nation state. Unless we understand this global history we are at risk of misdiagnosing contemporary problems, and repeating historical patterns. Moreover, we can’t build a world that is truly non-imperial without sustained comparative study.

April's book list on empire as a particular kind of politics

April Biccum Why did April love this book?

This book is part of a new genre of global history and provides enough of a historical sweep to acquaint the non-historian with a view that is not dominated by the nation state as its unit of analysis and Europe as the apex of world historical change. 

It’s an accessible work that fills in a lot of gaps in world historical knowledge that often exist because our myths of historical change (like modernization or development) keep us focused on ‘the west’ and ‘the state’.

From my point of view, it’s no longer politically acceptable to be ignorant of history in India, Africa, or the Middle East, by way of example, before European colonization. Viewed through the lens of empire, world history looks very different, and this book shows how doing so is a myth-busting exercise.

By Frederick Cooper, Jane Burbank,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Empires in World History as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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 remarkable look at how empires relied on diversity to shape the global order. Beginning with ancient Rome and China and continuing across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine empires' conquests, rivalries, and strategies of domination--with an emphasis on how empires accommodated, created, and manipulated differences among populations. Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires…


Book cover of War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.

Amy's book list on books about twenteith-century U.S. History that make you rethink something you thought you already knew

Amy J. Rutenberg Why did Amy love this book?

This book is probably the first scholarly book that blew my mind and pushed me to want to know what else I had always gotten wrong.

Where, like most people I know, I had always thought that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was just a thing that happened because of “war,” this book made it clear why it happened.

The US and Japan, both diplomats and everyday people, did not choose to understand each other. Different world views, different assumptions, and plain old racism led the US and Japan into a horrific, bloody conflict with long-lasting consequences.

By John W. Dower,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked War Without Mercy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.”

In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.”
 
Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret…


Book cover of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.

Amy's book list on books about twenteith-century U.S. History that make you rethink something you thought you already knew

Amy J. Rutenberg Why did Amy love this book?

We live in a time when personal convenience seems to trump everything else. So how is it that virtually the entire Black community of Montgomery, Alabama, stayed off the city buses for over a year in the mid-1950s?

The first three chapters of this book answer that question in a completely new way that made the realities of the Jim Crow South and the dangers of the struggle for racial justice snap into focus for me. The boycott was tangentially about segregation on buses, but really, argues McGuire, it was a fight for bodily integrity, safety, and self-respect.

Because it deals with rape and sexual assault, this can be a hard book to read, but it literally gave me a different understanding of what “equality” means.

By Danielle L. McGuire,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked At the Dark End of the Street as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Here is the courageous, groundbreaking story of Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor—a story that reinterprets the history of America's civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed against Black women by white men.

"An important step to finally facing the terrible legacies of race and gender in this country.” —The Washington Post

Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of…


Book cover of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.

Amy's book list on books about twenteith-century U.S. History that make you rethink something you thought you already knew

Amy J. Rutenberg Why did Amy love this book?

If you’ve ever wondered about where the terms “coming out,” “tea room,” or “fairy” came from, this book has the answers. But more importantly, this book showed me the extent to which my preconceived notions about the relationship between gender and sexuality were simply wrong.

Chauncey’s careful and readable reconstruction of gay communities in early twentieth-century New York illustrates very clearly that ideas of masculinity and deviance and the meanings attached to sex between men are socially constructed and change over time.

His story also showed me how much history can hide in plain sight and how there are still so many stories left to tell.

By George Chauncey,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Gay New York as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century

Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how…


Book cover of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.

Amy's book list on books about twenteith-century U.S. History that make you rethink something you thought you already knew

Amy J. Rutenberg Why did Amy love this book?

Generally speaking, I hate anything that hints at theory. But this slim volume, which investigates the relationship between states of war and how we understand time, is grounded solidly in reality and does not require mental gymnastics to understand.

Using the examples of World War II, the Cold War, and the Global War on Terror, Dudziak made me rethink how we define when it’s “wartime” vs. when it’s “peacetime” and why that matters. Her argument is about how war has not been a time out of time or aberration, so treating war as a period when different rules apply has real consequences.

The book pushed me to rethink how and when I silo ideas, time, and events and how dangerous silo’ing can be.

By Mary L. Dudziak,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked War Time as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When is wartime? On the surface, it is a period of time in which a society is at war. But we now live in what President Obama has called "an age without surrender ceremonies," when it is no longer easy to distinguish between wartime and peacetime. In this inventive meditation on war, time, and the law, Mary Dudziak argues that wartime is not as discrete a time period as we like to think. Instead, America has been engaged in some form of ongoing overseas armed
conflict for over a century. Meanwhile policy makers and the American public continue to view…


Book cover of Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order

April Biccum Author Of Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire: Marketing Development

From my list on empire as a particular kind of politics.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in empires began as an undergraduate taking a course in International Political Economy. We were asked to view poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ in the historical perspective of European colonization but asked to see development economics as something entirely new. I couldn’t see the difference. I have since become fascinated not just by the world historical recurrence of this particular type of politics, but also why our understanding of it is occluded through repeated framing of global politics via the nation state. Unless we understand this global history we are at risk of misdiagnosing contemporary problems, and repeating historical patterns. Moreover, we can’t build a world that is truly non-imperial without sustained comparative study.

April's book list on empire as a particular kind of politics

April Biccum Why did April love this book?

This book is another example of the way that shifting our gaze to empires instead of states provides a radically different perspective. 

In this book Jason Sharman takes on the Military Revolution Thesis, an approach to state formation in Europe which hives it off from its deeply imperial context and argues that the modern state is the product of a series of ‘rational’ decisions made through war. 

Instead, what Sharman shows is that war making in Early modern Europe was just as external as it was internal and that Europeans had to contend with powers to their east and south that were far more powerful militarily and economically. 

The disciplines of political science and international relations tend to treat the formation of the modern state system as if the rest of the world was incidental, irrelevant, or non-existent. 

This is another entry in a new genre of historical writing that…

By J. C. Sharman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Empires of the Weak as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How the rise of the West was a temporary exception to the predominant world order

What 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, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a decisive advantage in war over other civilizations from 1500 onward. In contrast, Empires of the Weak argues that Europeans actually had no general military superiority in the early modern era. J. C. Sharman shows instead that European expansion from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries is better…


Book cover of Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World

April Biccum Author Of Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire: Marketing Development

From my list on empire as a particular kind of politics.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in empires began as an undergraduate taking a course in International Political Economy. We were asked to view poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ in the historical perspective of European colonization but asked to see development economics as something entirely new. I couldn’t see the difference. I have since become fascinated not just by the world historical recurrence of this particular type of politics, but also why our understanding of it is occluded through repeated framing of global politics via the nation state. Unless we understand this global history we are at risk of misdiagnosing contemporary problems, and repeating historical patterns. Moreover, we can’t build a world that is truly non-imperial without sustained comparative study.

April's book list on empire as a particular kind of politics

April Biccum Why did April love this book?

This is another engaging and accessible contribution to global history and comparative work on empires.

This book is great because of its focus on a few important case studies and because Kumar makes the excellent point that if you focus exclusively on the modern contemporary territorial configuration of Russia, Britain, or the US, you will miss the long patterns of imperial expansion out of which the modern core is a consolidation. 

This raises the possibility of a revision of the epitaph above to read: empires make states, and states make empires. Of particular value is Kumar’s focus on the politics of governing different peoples differently particularly when imperial expansion incorporates different faith communities as happened in the Russian case. 

This is yet another book that demonstrates how much more sense can be made of global politics when viewed through the lens of empire.

By Krishan Kumar,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Visions of Empire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What the rulers of empire can teach us about navigating today's increasingly interconnected world The empires of the past were far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and have much to teach us about navigating our own increasingly globalized and interconnected world. Until now, most recent scholarship on empires has focused on their subject peoples. Visions of Empire looks at their rulers, shedding critical new light on who they were, how they justified their empires, how they viewed themselves, and the styles of rule they adopted toward their subjects. Krishan Kumar provides panoramic and multifaceted portraits of five major European empires--Ottoman,…


Book cover of Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present

April Biccum Author Of Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire: Marketing Development

From my list on empire as a particular kind of politics.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in empires began as an undergraduate taking a course in International Political Economy. We were asked to view poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ in the historical perspective of European colonization but asked to see development economics as something entirely new. I couldn’t see the difference. I have since become fascinated not just by the world historical recurrence of this particular type of politics, but also why our understanding of it is occluded through repeated framing of global politics via the nation state. Unless we understand this global history we are at risk of misdiagnosing contemporary problems, and repeating historical patterns. Moreover, we can’t build a world that is truly non-imperial without sustained comparative study.

April's book list on empire as a particular kind of politics

April Biccum Why did April love this book?

World historical and comparative work on empire is on the rise and what they demonstrate is as a particular type of politics, empires exhibit certain patterns. That is the contention of Julian Go’s comparative work on the US and the UK. 

These are cases that have been compared before but instead of comparing them contemporaneously, Go makes a point of comparing them along their ‘hegemonial arc’ of rise and decline. 

Go demonstrates through comparison with Britain that a racial politics of differentiation and incorporation in the Westward expansion of the original 13 colonies is a common imperial pattern. This claim is corroborated by other cases as demonstrated by the works of Kumar and Burbank and Cooper. 

When read in combination with Immewahr and Kumar, Julian Go’s book shows what was typical empire building in American westward expansion (such as the racialized politics of differentiation and tutelary governance) and atypical and…

By Julian Go,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Patterns of Empire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Patterns of Empire comprehensively examines the two most powerful empires in modern history: the United States and Britain. Challenging the popular theory that the American empire is unique, Patterns of Empire shows how the policies, practices, forms and historical dynamics of the American empire repeat those of the British, leading up to the present climate of economic decline, treacherous intervention in the Middle East and overextended imperial confidence. A critical exercise in revisionist history and comparative social science, this book also offers a challenging theory of empire that recognizes the agency of non-Western peoples, the impact of global fields and…


Book cover of Rabette Run

Stephen Bentley Author Of Operation George: A Gripping True Crime Story of an Audacious Undercover Sting

From my list on grounded crime fiction.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was a cop for fourteen years and a barrister in the UK for another fourteen years appearing in criminal trials. I've seen and heard enough real cops, lawyers, and criminals to last me a lifetime and more. It left an indelible mark on my own writing and reading preferences. I love true crime but also good crime fiction with realistic characters, settings, and plausible storylines. There's a thread that connects me to most of the authors whose books I have recommended. They're either former lawyers with investigative experience or experienced journalists with experience of a crime beat. Chandler is the exception, but I must say he would've probably fitted right into the police forces.

Stephen's book list on grounded crime fiction

Stephen Bentley Why did Stephen love this book?

Not only did this novel remind me of Lewis Carroll's works, but it also reminded me of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and other works of theirs in their hallucinogenic-inspired songs and albums. Rippington himself is aware of that in his writing as he references both Alice in Wonderland and the phrase 'magical mystery tour.'

So far, I may have misled you because this book is a real thriller. It travels along at the speed of sound and though the things happening to Emerson Rabette are fantastic, they are so believable at the same time. That's difficult to do as a writer but Mr. Rippington manages it with ease and much panache.

By Nick Rippington, Emma Mitchell (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Rabette Run as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What the readers are saying...
★★★★★ The perfect escapist read for our times
‘★★★★★ The sort of book you ‘watch’ while reading... utterly brilliant
★★★★★ If possible, I would have awarded this 10 stars. This book is much more than amazing.
★★★★★ The author, Nick Rippington, himself describes it as "Alice in Wonderland... with guns." Well, he's right and it's not hype.

Graphic designer Emerson Rabette is forced to use the London Underground to get to a meeting with his employers. There's a problem, as he's terrified of the tube. He is no ordinary commuter and this is no ordinary…


Book cover of Liddypool

Spencer Leigh Author Of Little Richard: Send Me Some Lovin'

From my list on the Beatles.

Why am I passionate about this?

We all know Little Richard’s great hits like "Long Tall, Sally", "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly" and Little Richard’s life was as wild as his records. It’s excess all areas as Spencer Leigh tells the story of Little Richard in Send Me Some Lovin. It is a biography of someone who transformed popular music. Spencer Leigh was born in 1945 and hearing Little Richard for the first time in 1956 changed his life. He is a world expert on the Beatles and he has written a series of music-based biographies – Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel – all of which are full of facts and opinions.

Spencer's book list on the Beatles

Spencer Leigh Why did Spencer love this book?

A mammoth tome about all the locations around the young Beatles in Liverpool.

Wonderful details and some very good recommended walks by someone who really knows the area and what he is writing about. Only trouble is, the book is so heavy you can’t take it with you on those walks.

By David Bedford,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Liddypool as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Liddypool, The Birthplace of The Beatles, the critically acclaimed book to concentrate solely on the history of The Beatles from their experience of living and growing up in Liverpool, has been released in its third and expanded edition. Covering their rise from childhood in the 1940s and obscurity to their triumphant civic reception at Liverpool Town Hall on 10th July 1964, when the city said goodbye to the Fab Four, author David Bedford uses local knowledge and eyewitness testimony to chart every band member and name-change and lineup, from The Quarrymen to The Beatles: the real story of the "Fab…


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