100 books like How the West Came to Rule

Having long wondered about how our world has been shaped by such commodities as tea, coffee, and sugar, I was fascinated by this carefully researched study of how cotton has shaped our world since the first cotton clothing 5,000 years ago in (what is now called) Pakistan.

The great thing about this book is its global reach, following cotton around the world as folks learned how to use it. While this is serious academic research, the author’s ability to relate local lives and key individuals to the broader forces shaping the globalizing cotton market keeps the story humming along.

I learned how British military power was key to Britain’s ability to relocate the global heart of cotton textile production from India to Manchester, boosting European wealth by deindustrializing India—a reminder that who wins and loses crucially depends on political power, not just market forces.

I found this to be such a fun read, trying to solve a geographical mystery. I knew that China was a seafaring country before Europe, but this transformed my understanding.

Drawing on his experience as a sailor, Menzies reinterprets Chinese naval documents to narrate how its "treasure ships"—much bigger than Columbus’ boats—visited Asia, Africa, Australia, and possibly North America long before 1492. Before Europeans became colonizers, the Chinese Emperor decided to stop such explorations. Before 1492, China was more prosperous and sophisticated than Europe, but the Chinese emperor’s decision left the global playing field open for Europe to exploit.

Amitav Ghosh is my favorite novelist; drawing on rich historical knowledge, he draws you into the lives of South Asians and how these are shaped by global events.

This novel, the second in a trilogy, is highly relevant for this list. Set in the late 1800s, he reconstructs the interconnected lives of Indian merchant entrepreneurs shipping opium from Afghanistan to China for the British and the European merchants in Canton (Guangzhou) using this to access the Chinese economy, also narrating how Hong Kong was transformed into a European-occupied free enterprise island.

It set me thinking about the lives of all those drawn into Britain’s successful attempt to undermine Chinese prosperity by creating extensive opium dependence in China (like US dependence on fentanyl). Known as the ‘Opium Wars,’ this drug dependence undermined China’s economy and autonomy, gave Britain access to China’s valuable tea, and set the table for Europe to advance… show more.

I found this book eye-opening; it forced me to rethink what I knew about Europe’s success.

We think of Europe (and the US) as being successful because of its culture, religion, democratic capitalism, and/or climate. Blaut challenges such Eurocentrist presumptions by documenting Europe’s geographical good fortune. It was much easier to reach the Americas from Europe than from its 15th-century Asian competitors (China and India), enabling Europe to overtake these by exploiting the Americas.

I came to realize that Europe’s prosperity, and that of its former white colonies (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), was due to good luck, not simply European initiative.

Gold has fascinated humanity for a considerable swathe of history, and it continues to do so today.

I saw this book online and immediately had to get it. I already knew that the creation of modern money as debt was fundamentally rooted in war and geopolitics, but I did not know the extensive history of how gold and war were interconnected over 500 years. 

I think that this is a captivating study for anyone who is interested in the links between war, gold, and geopolitical capitalism. 

A fascinating and essential read for explaining how we arrived at where we are today. 

These days, the word fascist is pretty quickly pulled out as a handy insult. Orwell warned even back in the 1940s that the term was used so much that it was becoming meaningless. But when I listen to some of the race-obsessed autocratic leaders lurking in today's politics, I’m convinced “fascist” is a tailor-made description rather than an easy epithet.

I love this book because it helped me get past the hesitation with using that word and is, to my mind, the ultimate philosophical dissection of today’s fascism. For philosopher Alberto Toscano and the thinkers he discusses, fascism is a process at the heart of capitalism itself, "a dynamic that [even] precedes its naming."

His book describes the many aspects of fascism from well beyond Europe in the early twentieth century. If we look around, we can see the percolations of this process producing and reproducing "the racial fantasy of… show more.

This book made me want to study with Lynn Hunt. 

Divided into “The Poetics of Power” and “The Sociology of Politics,” the better known first half explores rhetoric, symbolic forms of political practice, and imagery in novel ways that have influenced both my scholarship and my teaching. 

But I was even more struck by the second part where Hunt considered the backgrounds, age, occupations, and experience of Revolutionary political actors in four French cities as a way to understand the political geography of the Revolution, networks, culture brokers, and the emergence of a new political class. 

This approach shaped my dissertation and first book, but, more importantly it made me think about the link among and between cultural influences, socio-economic backgrounds, and the lived experience to understand the French Revolution.

A tour de force! This is an amazing book that takes a historical view to explain the story of women’s exclusion from public life and the physical and epistemic violence they experienced through the witch trials in Europe.

I would never have put these two elements together–bringing witch trials into view to help us understand the exclusion of women from the political economy of everyday life. This, Federici argues, led to the restructuring of household relations and the role of women in them, which in turn reflected the changing needs of society with the rise of capitalism.

I found this book illuminating and inspiring as it also tells us about the struggles of women against the shifts in their roles. 

Though sometimes described as a “textbook,” this authoritative, lucidly written, and altogether reliable synthesis—covering much of Europe—is actually a fine way to learn about the guild masters who dominated pre-industrial labor. Their paradoxical condition comes through clearly: employers and employees, they were at once seamlessly integrated into the social hierarchy and ruthlessly exclusionary toward outsiders. They touted a timeless, divinely sanctioned order, while also being true wheelers and dealers for their own honor and interests, leading to levels of entrepreneurship and inequality amongst their own ranks that would surprise many.

American Empire is a magisterial book from one of the founders of the field of global history—and the person most responsible for starting me on my career path as a historian.

This doorstopper of a book by one of the preeminent historians of our age will take you on a globe-trotting journey of the American Empire. The growth of Gilded Age capitalism plays an important part within it, as do the rival European powers.