100 books like The Guardians

This volume makes clear that without knowing the Lausanne Conference we cannot understand how the Middle East became the crisis-ridden hotspot it is today.

Carefully prepared, this is a reader-friendly history book with an excellent introduction. Its main theme is the challenge of world peace after the First World War which was followed by wars in Anatolian Turkey.

In Lausanne, diplomacy endorsed victorious ultranationalism and dictatorship. It gave factually up the League of Nations’ project of international peace by law, not force.

Twenty experts develop a rich variety of perspectives on the pivotal moment that was the 1922-3 Lausanne Conference for Europe and the Middle East. 

Although partisan and perspectival (pro-British), this book offers invaluable insights into the “Lausanne moment.”

Its author was an insider of the post-Great War Paris conferences and the final Conference of Lausanne. Based on contemporary notes of the author and further material, this book is a main source for the research on the Lausanne Near East Peace Conference.

This is a personal account from the decade preceding the Lausanne Treaty.

Jakob Künzler and his wife were stationed in the Swiss Hospital in Urfa, Mesopotamia, and witnessed the destruction of the Armenians at close hand. As disturbing as is Künzler’s sober report, at the same time it is a declaration of love for a turbulent land of different languages, religions, and the people who live there.

This very impressive documentary novel tells the true story of a Kurdish mother and child surviving famine after the massacre of Kurdish Alevis in Dersim, Turkey.

Most scholars today consider the 1937-8 military campaign in that region in Northeastern Anatolia a genocide. It was the last one in a series that accompanied the making of the post-Ottoman Turkish nation-state, whose birth the Lausanne Treaty had certified in 1923.

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.

The late Huntington, a longtime Harvard professor, states early in this book that “people use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity.”

As people from different cultures and civilizations began interacting with each other in our increasingly globalizing world, Huntington predicted that they would clash over deep collective identities. Way back in the early 1990s, long before 9/11, Huntington predicted that clashes between the Muslim world and the secular West were the most likely.

Cultural-religious identity matters, no question about it. My only gripe is that he devoted just a few sentences to how civilizations could promote peace. Classic political science: All dismal diagnosis, with little constructive hope!

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 devoured this book from beginning to end, and the rest of my life was no more than an irritating distraction until I could return to it again. It really does have everything I have ever wanted in a novel. It’s profound, thought-provoking, addictive, moving, heartbreaking, political, and a damn good story. 

It explores so many themes that are dear to my heart: the power of language for good and for evil, the exploitation of colonialism and empire, dark academia, politics, and the joys and heartbreak of friendship, all wrapped in an utterly compelling world of magical realism.

Honestly, I’m slightly obsessed with how good it is, and I’m heartbroken I can’t ever read it for the first time again.

I appreciate books that challenge my preconceptions. Grimmer-Solem does that by insisting that we understand German Weltpolitik before WWI not as an aberrant or markedly aggressive outlook, but as a normal response to the pressures and opportunities of turn-of-the-century world politics. The German search for colonies, spheres of influence, and a large navy were comparable to other nations—notably the United States. Such policies are unsurprising in a world where globalization has made developed nations dependent on intercontinental trade but where possibilities for future commerce and investment seemed to be closed off by the imperial scrambles of the late nineteenth century, notably Britain’s vast acquisitions in Africa, and by muscular US assertions of the Monroe doctrine.