100 books like The Word and the Sword

This highly readable, best-selling book explains how the West’s free-market economies grew rich while others stagnated. (1) The West provided the freedom to innovate in products processes and organizations while other societies resisted these activities. (2) The West’s diffusion of economic power from a centralised political sphere to a decentralized economic sphere was essential in establishing and maintaining this freedom. (3) The West’s market-based institutions allowed successful innovators to earn large gains while unsuccessful innovators and non-innovating firms suffered losses. (4) The growth of Western science nurtured economic growth produced by innovators who were typically well-versed in engineering and Newtonian mechanistic science.

This is an important book that attacks head-on the mythology in American culture about the inherent superiority of the private sector over the public sector. 

It documents the many public sector investments, inventions, and innovations that created many of the things that we all use in our daily lives. It shows how, despite decades-long attacks on government, we actually can point to a unique and valuable role that government action has played, and continues to play, in meeting public needs. 

Mazzucato is one of the most important thinkers on this subject and has written a number of books that I’d also recommend if this was a longer list. 

When we began our research on our book, we were surprised to read challenges to the conventional view we had been taught that the Middle Ages were a time of largely stagnant Western societies. The source of this new view is in several books, including the one recommended here. Gimpel challenges the traditional view writing instead: “The Middle Ages introduced machinery into Europe on a scale no civilization had previously known.” He goes on to chronicle the ingenuity that architects, engineers, and other technicians devoted to innovations in agriculture, light industry, construction, and mining ̶ innovations that anticipated, and were often credited to, later figures of the Renaissance.

Using the modern view of science, many economic historians have sought to diminish the effects of science on the technologies in the 18th and 19th centuries. This wonderful book by a sociologist documents how science, as it was then practiced, pervaded the whole structure of British society, from preachers teaching that Newton had revealed the architecture that God had imposed during creation, to a journal teaching Newtonian science to women. As Jacob puts it: “The role of science…was not that of general laws leading to the development of specific applications. Instead it…[provided] the theoretical mechanics and the practical mathematics that facilitated technological change. Brought together by a shared technical vocabulary of Newtonian origin, engineers and entrepreneurs…negotiated…the mechanization of workshops or the improvement of canals, mines, and harbours.

Although first published in 2004, this book continues to be my primary reference for anything related to messaging, event processing, and integration architecture.

The patterns described in this book are still highly relevant today, and are explained in a clear and concise manner that makes each one easy to understand and implement. Because you will encounter these patterns everywhere, this timeless book is a must-read book to better recognize and understand these patterns. 

Under what conditions will Americans support a president when he sends the nation to war? By looking at how the American public responded to the Korean and Vietnam wars in unprecedented breadth and depth, this is the question Mueller seeks to answer in arguably the most important book of the past half-century (or more) on American public opinion regarding war. This was one of the books that first got me interested in understanding why Americans respond the way they do to military conflicts, how presidential leadership, good and bad, can influence public support when American troops are in harm’s way.

This is my go-to reference book about American public opinion on all things foreign policy. Holsti is one of the most important public opinion scholars of the 20th Century and arguably this is his most important book. I assign it in all of my undergraduate classes on the subject. He explains not only what the public believes about foreign policy—through case studies ranging from international trade to all major U.S. military conflicts in the post-World War II era—but also does a brilliant job of synthesizing decades of research on human information processing, learning, and ideological reasoning to explain in straightforward terms why people react to events the way they do. He also explains the (substantial) differences between the foreign policy views of elites and average citizens

The mass media arguably play a critical intervening role between public opinion and foreign policy. Yet I’ve found that it is much harder to explain how the media, or public opinion, exert such influence than it is to determine what the public thinks or why. This book offers one of the most compelling explanations I’ve found for when and how the media can influence foreign policy, by serving as the intermediary between voters and their leaders. Importantly, Entman shows how media framing of events can influence public support for presidential foreign policy initiatives. It offers a comprehensive and persuasive delineation of the interplay between the media, the public, and political leaders, which I teach every year to my students. 

A mix of memoir and international relations analysis, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in religion and international relations.

Albright—Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration—discusses the secular biases that permeated US foreign policy and how they left us unprepared for the seeming resurgence of religion after the end of the Cold War. Her reflections range widely, from African politics to al-Qaeda.

She’s a bit more optimistic about the world than I am, but this is an essential starting point for any exploration of how states incorporate religion into their foreign policy. As I discuss in my book’s introduction, her work was one of the inspirations for my study.

I have chosen this work for the Egyptology list because Ancient Egypt must be ideally analyzed into a regional context, which overpasses its borders. In this sense, the present work is a magnificent example of how all the cultures of the Near East were integrated within a network of more or less fluid contacts.

Professor Liverani's work shows the mastery of the great scholar who knows all the sources and analyzes them from a new diplomatic, economic, anthropological, and political perspective.