The best books on big ideas in world history

This is a brilliant and transformative book about the imaginary social components that constitute a worldview. I suppose you could quibble about the archaeological choices he made to illustrate his points, or disagree with a certain nuance of his interpretation on early theories on the evolution of our species, but that would be missing the point. This is a work of depth and understanding that should change your outlook on culture in general, and the internalized assumptions of own culture specifically, by placing it within a greater context of humanity and social evolution. I know it is a cliche, but this book really should be on your list if you want provocative insights into human culture, past and present – how the veneer of assumptions that keeps complex societies functioning (hierarchy, power and status) changes over time and place, but the underlying principles remain remarkably similar – how we as a species imagine our world – the taboos and the reasoning behind most of the institutions that we accept without question and how they could compare to other and past societies, showing the similarity of purpose and the profoundly different civilizational assumptions. Comparing a stone-age hunter gatherer witchdoctor to a besuited lawyer first made me laugh, then it made me think. If you want to be forced to really ponder our society and civilization and how it compares to others, this is vital and indispensable reading.

The central premise of Metropolis is that cities have been the great incubators of new ideas in politics, religion, and technology. Wilson argues convincingly that cities are humanity’s greatest invention since they created the necessary ingredients to creating most other inventions. He covers dozens of major urban developments from around the world since the dawn of history thousands of years ago. From the world’s first city, Uruk, in present-day Iraq nearly 5000 years ago, we are taken on a tour of fascinating cities that during their heyday were great centers of culture, learning, commerce, science and shows how they contributed to global history in a unique way at a key juncture in time. Athens, Baghdad, London, New York, Amsterdam, and Paris – they all have fascinating pasts that reflected and helped to develop the modern world. There is certainly a lot of information to digest but it is presented in a revealing and interesting format that gives a sense of how each city functioned, what made its heartbeat and why it was influential. He also doesn’t shy away from the negative aspects of urbanization, from crime to disease to pollution and the difficulty of obtaining food and supplies. This is a big idea book that will leave you with a new appreciation for the unusual variety of human expression and ingenuity, as amplified by our 7000-year experiment with a manufactured urban environment.

The English East India Company under Robert Clive became the greatest corporation in the world, rivaled, possibly, only by the Dutch East India Company. It is also one of the most storied businesses, its rise, and expansion so improbable, violent and spectacular that it nearly defies credulity. The East India Company was so dominant and so all-pervading that its history has been used as the model for countless fictional conglomerates in novels and films. Its power became so titanic that it ended up, by accident and the seemingly fearless or foolhardy actions of Clive, as the government of millions of people in what is today the nation of India. The inherent conflict of interest of a shareholder-driven corporation being responsible for managing an entire sub-continent, subsuming the interests of the people and overall society beneath its desire for increased commerce and profit, is one of the fascinating ideas of the Company and its history. The Company was basically the foundation of the British Empire, its corporate independence restricted, and its management structure taken over by the British government after many generations of corporate rule. Some of the Company’s directors and investors became staggering rich on the plunder extracted from its monopoly, their mansions dotting the countryside of England and Scotland. The Anarchy is a great book, so compelling in subject matter and grandiose personalities, and so well written it will redefine for the reader the notion of corporate over-reach and show how destructive and corrosive monopolies can be. One of the best books I’ve read in ages.

I loved this book because opened my eyes to a seemingly inconsequential topic that I knew nothing about, but arguably had significant cultural influence of the development of the United States. Perhaps most importantly Shorto brings the era alive with the stories of the unusual people who built early Manhattan literally from the ground up. Ever wonder where Wall Street, Harlem, and the Bronx get their names? I had no idea that Dutch Manhattan was such a vibrant place before the British took it over, or the divergent cultural values of the Dutch that were a foil to the narrow worldview of the more northerly Puritan colonists in New England, such as the concept of freedom of religion. But Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch West India Company managed the entire colony as a business interest, a private corporate land holding, denying settlers civil representation and ruling somewhat autocratically. He refused to relinquish his or the Company's dictatorial powers and pursued policies counter to the interests of the colonists (refusing to fund schools and a hospital, etc.) yet all the while transforming the settlement into an important port and commercial hub for the surrounding region and for the trans-Atlantic trade. As a result of Stuyvesant’s authoritarian tendencies that were at odds with the more liberty-minded attitude of the Dutch settlers, when British warships entered the harbour in 1664 during the third Anglo-Dutch war and offered the people of New Netherlands representative civil government if they surrendered, the entire militia laid down their arms without firing a shot. That is worth thinking about.

The pre-Columbian world was far more varied and richer in terms of environment and culture, than people realize. Deploying new discoveries and research in archaeology, ecology, and history, Mann brings this lost world alive and shows how by the time many European explorers and travellers reported on what they saw in the “New World,” it had already undergone a staggering and destructive transformation, primarily at the hands of infectious disease. Whole civilizations had collapsed, with population declines of up to 80 percent in some regions. Economies were disrupted or destroyed, cities, towns, and farms abandoned, the remnants to be discovered centuries later during excavations and painstakingly pieced together. Using all the latest research and collected knowledge, he exhumes the mystery of this time period revealing the complexity and diversity, and shows that the notion of North America as being sparsely populated by technologically primitive and primarily nomadic hunter-gatherer societies was a recent transformation that occurred rapidly after the first contact with Europeans in the late 15th century, once European seafarers first crossed the Atlantic unleashing world-shattering and hitherto unknown pathogens on unsuspecting advanced civilizations from the Maya and Aztecs and into North America. Realizing how complex, advanced and heavily populated, and urbanized the pre-Columbian world was is vital to gaining an accurate appreciation for world history, and how the vagaries of fate and unintended consequences are often the greatest drivers of history.