100 books like The Roman Predicament

I was in my first year of college when I witnessed (via news reports) the “Battle of Seattle,” where anti-globalization protestors shut down a negotiating round of the World Trade Organization.

Watching the news from Seattle made me want to study the politics of the international economy. Seattle seems to have had a similarly big impact on Slobodian since it pops up in the introductory and concluding chapters of Globalists.

Slobodian’s book tells the story of how a group of dissident economists and lawyers, mainly centered in Geneva, rewrote the postwar international rules to legally “encase” market-based transactions. This effort, which included the creation of the WTO in 1995, made markets more seamlessly globalized. But it also put the increasingly powerful market forces beyond democratic mechanisms of regulation and control, spurring backlash. 

My own book title is explicitly an homage to this book, which tells the story of the sterling standard in its heyday. 

It is my dream that readers will put my book next to this one on their bookshelves, reading mine as a continuation of the story that DeCecco tells so masterfully. He is more economic historian, and I am more historian of economic ideas, so the books are different (and his original was in Italian), but they can be read as in conversation with one another. 

This is another book that I look forward to rereading, now that I know more, and engaging more deeply and systematically.

When Nixon took the dollar off gold in 1971, Kindleberger thought it was the end of the dollar system, and maybe even the beginning of a new depression, in parallel with the 1931 collapse of the sterling system. 

He was wrong about that, and the reason was the resilience of the global banking system, which basically refused to abandon the dollar even though the dollar had abandoned it! 

This book tells the story of the rise of the Eurobond market, the capital market counterpart to the offshore Eurodollar market, which grew up organically in the 1970s and after. 

One of the things I like most about this book is that the author is a practitioner, so the story is told from the point of view of one who was there.

This book tells the story of the global expansion of the dollar system after the collapse of Bretton Woods from the perspective of the BIS, the global central bank.

Created in 1930, as a last-ditch effort to backstop the sterling system (among other reasons), the story of the BIS runs parallel to the story I tell in my book.  This morning in class I asked my students, most of them international relations majors, if any of their other courses had mentioned the BIS, and not a single hand went up. Hence this recommendation!

Kindleberger worked at the BIS 1939-1940 and might well have made it his permanent home had not World War II intervened, and sent him back home to the Fed.  

Many histories of Rome end in the second century that period in which Edward Gibbon judged “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”. But there is a great deal of Roman history after that. Rome survived a great military crisis in the third century. The next generation of emperors based themselves near the frontiers to ward off future attacks. Machado’s extraordinary book tells the story of the City of Rome after the emperors had gone, returned into the hands of an aristocracy fascinated by its past but also committed to Roma Aeterna (Eternal Rome). Using statues and inscriptions and archaeology and a mass of little read ancient literature, Machado paints a vivid picture. Far from the new centres of power, the Roman aristocracy rebuilt, repaired, and steered the city through religious transformations, barbarian sacks, and beyond the fall of the western empire.

This is a great read on the way that Rome became an empire. It puts the whole story of the city of Rome and what it developed into (i.e. the biggest power of the ancient world and a paradigm for many empires that followed) into context and into the history of the Mediterranean world. The book is so useful to read because it is well written and contemporary, but it also helps us to understand Hannibal. This is because Rome's version of Carthage and Hannibal is the only version that we have to deal with, Hannibal in many ways becomes a reflection of Roman ideas of their own imperialism.

This is the only book on the list that relates directly to my main topic of research, but that is a strong recommendation in itself. In truth, there are lots of books about ‘late antiquity’ (or ‘the later Roman Empire’), and many of them are very good indeed. But they also tell a familiar story in familiar ways: they discuss politics, military actions, transforming towns, and (increasingly) plague and climate change. Sessa’s book deals with all of these themes in some way, but flips the whole thing on its head. This book looks at the period from the bottom up, thinking about the lived experiences of women and children, of country-dwellers, and those who inhabited the less glamorous corners of the empire. Reading this made me think again about lots of topics that I thought I knew well. It is also accessibly written and introduces a sometimes complex period very… show more.

The later period of Greek history, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, is considerably less well known that the history of Classical Greece, but it was a fascinating period that radically changed the society and culture of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. This book covers the period of Alexander's conquests, the fragmentation of his empire into multiple kingdoms after his death, and the Roman conquest and domination of the Greek world.

It outlines the rise and fall of dynasties and kingdoms, the Roman conquest, and the transformation of the region, firstly by the Greek culture promoted by Alexander and his successors, and then by Roman rule. It provides an accessible and informative narrative of a period in which the Middle East and Greek world underwent transformational changes.

There are a great many novels about Roman emperors, and even a few about the rulers of the later age – Gore Vidal’s Julian, for example – but this one stands out for its originality. The emperor of the title is Constantine, one of the towering figures of Roman history, and incidentally quite important in my own books too. The novel covers the two months leading up to the battle of Milvian Bridge in AD312, but rather than giving us a panoramic view of the military campaign in Italy, Thubron chooses to tell the story as a collection of letters and diary entries. So we get the internal thoughts and reflections, ambitions and fears of a range of protagonists: Constantine himself, his wife Fausta, a Christian bishop, and several competing imperial ministers and servants. The central dilemma is the emperor’s own crisis of faith, which will lead up to his… show more.

Dr. Crawford, a specialist in ancient history and religion, offers a detailed and readable account of the life and reign of Constantine's longest surviving son and successor in the mid-4th century (A.D. 324-361). Often criticized by ancient sources and modern scholars alike for not being as great a soldier as his father and for favoring Arian-leaning bishops, the author tries to rehabilitate the reputation of Constantius as a capable ruler in difficult times.