Fans pick 100 books like A Rural Economy in Transition

This book offers a magisterial survey of the last 10,000 years and puts human history firmly in its full environmental context. There are many different ways of writing about the past, but historical writing is above all about how and why things change over time, about the causal dynamics underlying how societies, economies, and cultures work and transform. But in order to achieve this historians have first of all to establish a narrative – their own particular narrative – and it is their critical analysis of the ways in which this narrative can be constructed that helps us understand the past and that can help inform our understanding of the present. This book succeeds wonderfully in this fundamental task.

“Collapse” is a term frequently bandied about in the press and popular as well as academic historical writing. Middleton’s book, well-informed by the palaeoenvironmental, archaeological, and documentary evidence shines a powerful light on some of the pervasive myths about supposed historical collapses, many of which were not at all what the term might suggest. He challenges us to think carefully and critically about what we really know about a past civilisation before we rush into easy judgements. His book made me rethink many of my own assumptions on the subject and undoubtedly influenced my own work.

Another synthesis of the ‘Dark Ages’ Europe, this one from the Penguin History series. An easy, but thorough read, painting a broad canvas from Ireland to Byzantium, and from the last days of Rome to the last days of Anglo-Saxon England, shines the light on the centuries that, while still seen as shrouded in the darkness of violence and barbarism, are in fact the true cradle of the European civilization as we know it today.

Oliver Rackham is to historical landscape ecology what W.G. Hoskins is to landscape history.

More than anyone else, Rackham had the vision to understand that the pattern of woods, fields, hedges, moors, and marshes that defines the English countryside, although seemingly natural, was in fact created by a delicate and constantly shifting balance between human intervention and geological, climatological and ecological influences. 

The Chiltern beechwoods I’ve enjoyed walking in since childhood, for example, exist partly because the timber was valuable for the chair-making industry that once flourished there, while the species-rich hay meadows of Swaledale that entranced me on a recent cycle tour were part and parcel of the local dairy-farming tradition, and have been put at risk by its decline.

Rather than following a chronological order or a political narrative, Wickham, the leading British historian of the Early Middle Ages, takes a thematic and regional approach to the transformation of the Roman world across the Mediterranean.

His dense comparisons of the economic and social structures of specific regions, both some like Denmark and Ireland that were never part of the Roman Empire, as well as core regions around the entire Mediterranean, highlight the diversity already existing within the Roman Empire and the differing fates of these regions as they emerged from its disappearance.

For two centuries, Europeans have tried to find in the peoples of the early Middle Ages the ethnic origins of their own nations.

The Franks were the most successful of these peoples, appearing first as a minor group along the lower Rhine but ultimately, under Charlemagne, creating a vast empire that encompassed much of what had been the Roman Empire in the West.

However, in this extraordinary book Reimitz shows how protean Frankish ethnic identity was across this period.

Relying on close readings of historical texts and their manuscript transmission, constantly amended, re-edited, and transformed, he shows how Frankish identity was constantly disputed and renegotiated, ultimately moving far from classical notions of ethnicity to an imperial identity and then to a notion of the Franks as one of a number of Christian peoples chosen by God to rule the West.

This book is a rich source of information about how certain attire, especially the “string skirt” and its variants, has traditionally been drafted in Europe to promote women’s health and fertility, a tradition that we can trace back, through evidence, for some 20,000 years. Wonderfully illustrated, the data here range from Greece and Turkey in the south, through Central Europe to Latvia and Norway in the far north, as well as occasionally deep into Eurasia. And of course, such apparel was particularly donned for dancing on occasions where the wearer would be seen by all. (Being a show-off runs deep in humanity!)

Price traces religious concepts of Asia Province from their origins as Greek colonies to the changes adapted and introduced by Rome through Augustus’ Imperial Cult. This text highlights religious life in one of the major provinces. The advantage of this book is that Price coordinates the history with the latest archaeological excavations in Turkey

Illustrated with many of the sketches made by Le Corbusier during his legendary 1911 ‘Journey to the East,’ when he travelled from northern Europe down to the Middle East, Kortan’s book examines the lessons possibly the greatest architect and urban designer of the twentieth century learnt from the traditional Ottoman architecture of Istanbul and Anatolia, including its poetic relationship between inhabitation and spatial organisation. This book is in Turkish, English, and French.

All these books have reinforced my understanding of architecture as a universal language of place-making shared by all cultures around the globe, and as the richest and endlessly fascinating expression of our relationship with the world in which we find ourselves…

This short book inspired me to become a historian of Persian-Greek relations, and my own first book sought to build on its foundations. It contains a series of lectures by a great scholar of ancient history and languages, reflecting on the partnership between two ancient powers that were less foreign to one another in cultural and political terms than often supposed. Rather than focusing on Xerxes’ invasion and Thermopylae, it explores the worldviews, communication methods, and diplomatic practices of Spartan elites and Persian officials over the century that followed, brilliantly tracing how the Spartans and Persians crafted their Peloponnesian War alliance and overcame a number of disputes to complete the peace of 386, which provided autonomy for Greeks outside Asia while consolidating Persian rule over Greeks in Asia Minor.