100 books like Patterns of Empire

This book is part of a new genre of global history and provides enough of a historical sweep to acquaint the non-historian with a view that is not dominated by the nation state as its unit of analysis and Europe as the apex of world historical change. 

It’s an accessible work that fills in a lot of gaps in world historical knowledge that often exist because our myths of historical change (like modernization or development) keep us focused on ‘the west’ and ‘the state’.

From my point of view, it’s no longer politically acceptable to be ignorant of history in India, Africa, or the Middle East, by way of example, before European colonization. Viewed through the lens of empire, world history looks very different, and this book shows how doing so is a myth-busting exercise.

This book is another example of the way that shifting our gaze to empires instead of states provides a radically different perspective. 

In this book Jason Sharman takes on the Military Revolution Thesis, an approach to state formation in Europe which hives it off from its deeply imperial context and argues that the modern state is the product of a series of ‘rational’ decisions made through war. 

Instead, what Sharman shows is that war making in Early modern Europe was just as external as it was internal and that Europeans had to contend with powers to their east and south that were far more powerful militarily and economically. 

The disciplines of political science and international relations tend to treat the formation of the modern state system as if the rest of the world was incidental, irrelevant, or non-existent. 

This is another entry in a new genre of historical writing that… show more.

This is another engaging and accessible contribution to global history and comparative work on empires.

This book is great because of its focus on a few important case studies and because Kumar makes the excellent point that if you focus exclusively on the modern contemporary territorial configuration of Russia, Britain, or the US, you will miss the long patterns of imperial expansion out of which the modern core is a consolidation. 

This raises the possibility of a revision of the epitaph above to read: empires make states, and states make empires. Of particular value is Kumar’s focus on the politics of governing different peoples differently particularly when imperial expansion incorporates different faith communities as happened in the Russian case. 

This is yet another book that demonstrates how much more sense can be made of global politics when viewed through the lens of empire.

I’ve read thousands of books on US history (for real). Many have made me rethink the narratives I learned in high school and college, but this is the only one that made me rethink what we mean when we say “US History.”

I can’t count the number of times this book made me say, “Wow!” out loud. As just a taste, Immerwahr writes that by 1940, 1 in 8 Americans lived outside of the states themselves, Asians constituted the largest American minority, the center of population was in New Mexico, and Manila was one of the country’s largest cities.

All of what I thought I knew changed once I included the reality of the American empire.

This is a polemic and pretends to be none other but it serves as an antidote to the apologists of Empire. Why is it needed? You can’t read the Ibis trilogy and not understand the exploitation of the East India Company. The first war of independence (1857) failed and was brutally put down. There were attempts at reform and not all legacies of the Raj are regrettable, my Victorian maverick works on the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. But the tendency in the UK is to highlight the positives and ignore the racism, the famines, the massacres, and the horrors of the manner in which we left India. Once readers know the consequences of the Raj, they will understand the origins of South Asian immigration to the UK and will get a glimpse of how others see us, warts and all. 

Unfamiliar Fishes, is one of my favorite contemporary examples of travel writing because it is funny. Vowell turns her travelogue about Hawaii into a full history told with a quirky sense of humor. Nothing escapes her wit – from the greed of the early Americans who took over the island to the tourists like her trying to discover it under the layers of manufactured culture. She ends up loving the place, of course, like all the best travel writers.

I am an academic writer, but I admire when someone is able to write a thoughtful book that is accessible to a popular audience. Are We Rome? made a big splash and launched a cottage industry of comparisons (and debates about comparisons) of America to Rome. In exploring parallels between Rome and America, Murphy serves up dire warnings about how America’s worldview could portend its own demise. My latest book approaches the question of Rome and America in a different way, but tries to blend scholarship with a more accessible style that everyone might find interesting. 

Louis’s excellent, and now classic work, should play a far larger role in discussions of the meanings of imperialism and anti-imperialism than has been the case in recent years. Drawing on a deep grasp of British foreign policy and domestic politics, Louis examines what he calls the “grand strategy of non-intervention and conciliation” that leaned heavily towards the existing Arab regimes. Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and especially Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and other leading officials in the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office, believed that a Jewish state in Palestine would antagonize the Arabs and lead to a decline in British influence in the Middle East. Louis draws attention to Richard Crossman and other British critics of the policy of preserving Britain’s imperial role in Palestine. It is one of those indispensable works of scholarship regarding these events.

The relationship between intelligence and policy and how various countries employ intelligence organizations are two important topics that are not fully explored. Wagner’s book looks at the role played by British intelligence in Palestine during the interwar period---a role that went beyond what many consider intelligence functions. As Wagner explains, British intelligence not only informed policymakers’ thinking but was also involved in the execution of policy in the Palestinian territory during this period. This combined, no better yet intertwined, history of British policy and intelligence during this important period is something that intelligence and regional scholars should read. 

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.