100 books like A Search for Sovereignty

If you want to know the “history” of ye olde pirates, this is the penultimate of pirate history books. A General History of the Pirates was first published in 1724 for a surprisingly eager audience of readers. Daniel Defoe was, (and is), known for his fiction, such as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, so he was a popular author at the time. However, it could not have been predicted that readers were so interested in the details concerning the scourge of the high seas, our beloved “bloodthirsty” pirates. Yet, this book, despite it being a flamboyant and rather colorful embellishment of actual pirate activity, was and remains a popular title. Every pirate fan, and certainly pirate historian, has at least one copy of this text on a shelf or table nearby. I always have my copy close at hand and referred to this text frequently while authoring my book… show more.

I first read Rediker’s work as a graduate student, and from the first pages, I was “hooked.”

Want to understand what made pirates tick? In this book, pirates are recast not as violent, unthinking brutes but as ordinary, sea-going laboring men driven to lawlessness by the brutal demands of expanding Atlantic trade.

I especially appreciated Rediker’s situating pirate behavior and customs within the broader world of maritime life. He argues that these outlawed men created a floating society that was then the most egalitarian and democratic in the Western world.

This study is a model of how to use meticulous archival research – here in the records of the High Court of Admiralty – to make a powerful argument with far-reaching implications: that many of Elizabethan England’s principal merchants and highest-ranking members of the court, including the queen, invested in and profited from extra-legal activities, and that England’s capitalist system was based on theft from European rivals. Andrews’ achievement is to explain clearly the ways the court operated and what its records – depositions and testimonies, complaints and interrogations, and summaries of activities – can tell us. Using information about who was licensed as a privateer and when, how plunder was distributed, and the international disputes caused by the depredations of privateers and pirates, Andrews book exemplifies how economic and naval history can be brought into productive dialogue.

Studies of early modern piracy often either focus on one or two exceptional women – Elizabeth I, Gráinne Ní Mháille, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read – or neglect women altogether. This book challenges assumptions about early modern women’s contribution to and involvement with piracy, exploring how female lives intersected with it in numerous and nuanced ways. Female family members often acted as receivers and dealers of stolen goods: their involvement shows agency in relation to piracy, though female victimization was also common. In fact, partnerships with women were part of the wider patterns of support pirates received from seafaring communities; familial relationships often triggered female involvement since economic integration and domestic connections were linked in the maritime world. Appleby suggests that due to the changing nature of piracy, female agency diminished by the end of the seventeenth century.

My first point of concern is the fact that ideas and concepts are historical products altered in time.

In his book, Professor Andrén provides a historical context for the ideas of Europe and their sources that have emerged over the last two centuries. He neatly shows the historicity of the thoughts as constructs linked to the regional and global conditions of their time.

He highlights the visions of Europe in the 19th century marked by revolutions and unifications; in the first half of the 20th century, marked by wars and crises. He then examines the visions in the second half of the century characterized by the search for peace and prosperity, European integration and a pan-European identity.

Let us navigate from Andrén's point of view that ideas about Europe did not die out, but evolved into more current constructs in modern European history.

As a young reporter in the mid-1990s, I cut my teeth reporting the end of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and the eventual signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement peace deal. That deal was based around a constitutional ambiguity that was rocked by the Brexit vote.

This pithy volume by Queen's University Belfast politics professor Katy Hayward manages to blend absolute concision and with ambition, tracing the history of the Irish border that found itself at the heart of the UK’s often bitter Brexit negotiations with Europe.

Amid so much rhetoric, Hayward trades only in the facts while carefully framing the future choices that Brexit might bring to Northern Ireland.

We know a lot about the hot-button issues surrounding borders – family separations, deportation, smuggling – but borders also have wildly underestimated psychological effects on individuals. Wapner impressively synthesizes data and research collected on the effects of border barriers from some of the most volatile regions in the world including India and Pakistan, Mexico and the U.S., and both sides of the peace lines of Northern Ireland. The mental health issues caused by militarized borders are alarming and almost entirely unrecognized in today’s world; Wapner brings these shocking and revelatory dynamics to light.

While somewhat of a departure from my prior favorites in scope, I love this book because it is a deep dive into a specific stretch of border in 21st-century Central Asia. Though most may be unfamiliar with the myriad complexities at the juncture of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Nick Megoran’s ethnographic treatment offers a window into how borders in the 21st century are lived with and through.

This is because changing a border’s porosity alters the routes, businesses, educational opportunities, and relationships of people on both sides and beyond. Megoran’s book puts you on that border and compels you to think about how the decisions made in capital cities radically affect the citizens at the margins of state territories. 

India’s birth as an independent nation threw its borders into sharp focus due to Partition. Lines were hurriedly scribbled across a map to create multiple new nations and throw most of South Asia into ceaseless turmoil. What I appreciate about the author’s approach is that she travels the length of India’s land borders and captures oral stories of individuals living daily lives in these tense spaces that are highly contested but also largely forgotten. This book is a travelog unlike any other across a part of India that is nearly impossible to visit.

I was drawn to this book for its depth of thought and critical perspective on bordering as a process. Paulina Ochoa Espejo covers the rich ground of political geography, mixing philosophical considerations of human place-making and how borders are integral to that process.

I returned to various chapters of this book whilst writing about other topics and regions. The book pulls readers from their comfortable perspectives and compels both fruitful and necessary reconsiderations of borders.