100 books like Black Wave

The East India Company was an unusual organization, to say the least, beginning as a conventional international trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and becoming an aggressive colonial power.

Its complicated nature is one of the reasons why the British empire is so poorly understood: people struggle to comprehend how a company could have been imperial. Dalrymple does a great job of explaining it in this incredibly accessible book.

One of my all-time favourite books on Indian history.

A literate history of the economic and religious history of Europe, the Middle East, and adjacent Eursian steppes from fifth century B.C. down to the opening of the twenty-first century. I found the book a delight to read.

The first ten chapters are complementary to my work Empires of the Steppes. Professor Frankopan, however, continues the story to emergence of the global economy based on oceanic trade. The excellent analysis of colonial rivalries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a must reading for understanding the geopolitical role of Eurasia today the Belt and Road initiative of China.

What did the Iraq War look like from the perspective of Iraqis? In most accounts of the Iraq War, Iraqis only feature as terrorists or victims. This book explains how Iraqis felt about the invasion of the country; what relations were like between returning exiles and those who had remained in Iraq all along; and the hopes that Iraqis had for their country. It is really well written and engaging.

I have recommended this novel as it is one of the few to come out of the Iraq war written by an Iraqi writer, telling its story from the point of view of the local Iraqis. 

Hadi, an old junk dealer, dismayed by the hasty burials of incomplete bodies after the daily bombings, puts together a body from the parts he finds. This composite body, he calls “Whatsitsname,” becomes possessed with the soul of a bombing victim and sets about killing those responsible for turning Baghdad into a slaughterhouse.

Blending its style between war fiction, horror, and fantasy, this darkly effective satire of the fatal logic of sectarianism follows Whatsitsname as he expands his scope, claiming: “There are no innocents who are completely innocent, and no criminals who are completely criminal.”

In To Start a War, Robert Draper investigates how it was that the US came to invade Iraq in 2003. A gifted writer, he reveals the paranoia and fear that led to the collecting of ‘intelligence’ that confirmed the biases of senior US officials – but which was often fabricated and false. 

Kanan is an Iraqi exile who was very supportive of the US invasion of Iraq. In The Rope, he provides a fictional account of what happened in the country, placing responsibility for the rise of sectarianism and the descent into civil war at the feet of Iraqi Shia leaders. It’s a brave and honest book. 

Like Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to which this compares in the breadth of scope and depth of knowledge, this is a huge, rich feast of a book and one of the best you can read on World War I as well as on the formative geopolitics of the modern Middle East. Like the greatest of the imperial geographers, David’s scholarship was omnivorous but his original discipline was law: his discussion of the rashly-drawn boundaries that are at the heart of A Peace to End All Peace is without peer.

Full disclosure: David was also a friend who, like his book, was incredibly generous. I owe my book to a particularly compendious footnote in A Peace to End All Peace. It caught my eye and I became obsessed with why I didn’t know more about such an enormous presence, eventually traveling to Britain, France, Israel, and the Isle… show more.

Ferguson shows us a neural network of another sort: the web of offshore finance and international co-investment that culminated in the First World War—not at Sarajevo but in the Middle East, where Great Britain and Germany faced off over railroad access to Britain’s prize possession, India. Wrapped in the thoroughly engaging family history of the far-flung Rothschilds and how they knit themselves together in an empire of their own, Ferguson embeds an equally enthralling history of what he calls “Globalization I,” the 19th-century race to connect the empires established in the preceding age of exploration with their European centers of power by commercial rather than military means, with railway and telecommunications lines as their primary instruments. I am indebted to him for inspiring insights into how, in the years preceding World War I, the great European railway race came down to the finish line, the last and crucial link connecting… show more.

Straddling the boundaries between academic history and historical non-fiction, this book is difficult, if not impossible, to put down and draws the reader into the rich and multifaceted world of Iran’s history, politics, culture, and religion. The book is narrated through the life and lens of an ayatollah who is caught between tradition and modernity, religiosity and secularism, and east and west, much like Iran itself. Seamlessly weaving the past and present, the book reveals the inherent complexities and contradictions of Iranian identity that have been superimposed on a state and society torn between notions and aspirations of divine and popular sovereignty.       

An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer. Honestly, if I was Ben Affleck I would have made a movie based on this book instead of Argo. Kinzer’s book exposes the United States and the UK’s role in creating the Iran of today by detailing Operation Ajax—or the coup that caused the downfall of elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Spoiler alert: it had a lot to do with oil. What’s devasting is to picture what Iran would look like today without foreign intervention in the 1950s.