Fans pick 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.

In a time when industrial policy is no longer taboo, even in the West, I would recommend this book to remember the pivotal role that state policies play in promoting development.

More than being the result of self-made people, crucial innovations like the smartphone result from the research backbone that the state provides.

The book is, therefore, thought-provoking as it debunks myths of state decline during the so-called neoliberal age, although recognises that private firms have acquired excessive power.

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. 

A highly readable tome, Cooper’s account of how the oil politics of the 1970s revolutionized U.S. foreign policy and the Persian Gulf is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about the political landscape of the Middle East. Cooper traces the personal interactions among the Shah of Iran, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, and the House of Saud in the midst of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the consequent oil embargo, the formation of OPEC, and the early stirrings of revolution in Iran. Perhaps most helpful, this book dispels many misperceptions about Iran under the Shah while also showing how the United States played an integral role in weakening his regime prior to the 1979 revolution.

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.

In the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a flurry of books were produced on the ‘new imperialism.’ One of the best was by the Canadian Marxist scholar, the late Ellen Meiksins Wood. What distinguishes capitalist imperialism from its predecessors, Wood argues, “is the predominance of the economic, as distinct from direct ‘extra-economic’—political, military, judicial— coercion.”

By relying on the imperatives of the market, capitalist imperialism has been able to shed most of the visible trappings of older forms of empire, including its network of territorially based colonies overseen by regionally based armies and administrators: “Capitalism has extended the reach of imperial domination far beyond the capacities of direct political rule or colonial occupation, simply by imposing and manipulating the operations of the capitalist market.”

Even though capitalist imperialism relies primarily on market-based coercion rather than the direct use of force to police its interests, Wood is… show more.

A classic from Australia’s greatest contributor to the theory of international politics. One needs a coherent framework within which to place current events, and Bull’s perfectly titled book provides it.

Yes, world politics is anarchical because there is no ‘global cop.’ But anarchy does not mean chaos. There is enough order in the international realm to consider it a ‘society’ with its own store of conventions, rituals, and traditions—a humane but skeptical book that disdains simple solutions to world affairs. 

I love stories about America at its best, its most uplifting, its most inspiring, and I can’t imagine anyone telling the story of the Berlin airlift and what he calls “America’s finest hour” in more gripping detail than Andrei Cherny in The Candy Bombers.

With style and elegance, he takes you into the White House, where Truman decides to save West Berlin from Stalin’s attempted conquest, and he puts you in the cockpits of the pilots who delivered food and other necessities on a round-the-clock basis to the desperate people of that city. How good is this book? I wish I had written this book myself.