Fans pick 100 books like Visions 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.

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.

World historical and comparative work on empire is on the rise and what they demonstrate is as a particular type of politics, empires exhibit certain patterns. That is the contention of Julian Go’s comparative work on the US and the UK. 

These are cases that have been compared before but instead of comparing them contemporaneously, Go makes a point of comparing them along their ‘hegemonial arc’ of rise and decline. 

Go demonstrates through comparison with Britain that a racial politics of differentiation and incorporation in the Westward expansion of the original 13 colonies is a common imperial pattern. This claim is corroborated by other cases as demonstrated by the works of Kumar and Burbank and Cooper. 

When read in combination with Immewahr and Kumar, Julian Go’s book shows what was typical empire building in American westward expansion (such as the racialized politics of differentiation and tutelary governance) and atypical and… show more.

I highly appreciate this book. Based on meticulous historical research, it has contributed to rethinking and reappraising the long widely disqualified League of Nations.

The failure of the League of Nations’ peace project had been sealed at the Lausanne Conference a hundred years ago, and the League’s Covenant did no longer figure in the Lausanne Treaty. But the need of a convincing global and democratic peace project is today no less topical than it was after the Great War, before the rise of the Nazis.

This is, in my opinion, the best short history of Russia (only about 100 pages). It’s full of unexpected ideas, provocative and challenging.

It was published in 2003 and is written from the perspective of a Russia in decline (Russia of the 1990s, before Putin), but nevertheless offers a brilliant analysis of why the country has tended toward isolationism and xenophobia. It is thus almost predictive of Putin’s recent break with the West. I have assigned it to classes and recommend it to friends.

Conventional histories blame Germany for starting the First World War by “turning a Balkan Quarrel into a European war.” McMeekin shows both Germany and Austria-Hungary wanted a quick, isolated Austrian-Serbian war. It was Russia that wanted a general European war in order to seize Constantinople and the Bosporus Straits and give Russia access to the Mediterranean. Therefore, the Russians wanted France and Great Britain to tie down Germany, while Russia crushed the Austrians and seized the Balkans and the Bosphorous. And the Russians knew about the Serb plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in advance. McMeeken’s archival research in proving his case is impressive.

Not strictly centered on translation and not exactly a conventional book, this collection of essays is often considered the birthplace of the now widely-used (though often misunderstood) concept of “cultural translation.”

Bhabha is a notoriously demanding author, and reading this book can, at times, feel like entering a conversation already in progress. Bhabha will move from Salman Rushdie, through Joseph Conrad or Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida, often within the space of a single paragraph or page. But Bhabha’s intellectual rigour justifies the effort. This challenging but rewarding book unleashes the radical potential of translation studies.

For Bhabha, translation transcends mere linguistic or even cultural exchange to become a tool for grappling with cultural transformation and difference more generally. It is a way of thinking about resistance and religion, innovation and imitation, politics and power. This book was love at first sight for me, and although I… show more.

A collection of very short but incredibly interesting and illuminating essays, this book inaugurated the field of study we might call “feminism and empire.” Strobel and Chaudhuri gathered up the most important histories written to that date that explained how nineteenth and twentieth-century feminism emerged from colonialist contexts all over the world. Asking the question “what difference does gender make?” each author teases out the importance of gender for colonial travel and politics in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Reading this book made me want to contribute to that kind of historical understanding of gender, modeling for me what an “intersectional feminist” method of historical investigation might look like.

I ran across this book recently and it resonated with my attempts to expand how we think about the relationship between past and present. In my own thinking about Rome and America, I wanted to move away from just talking about analogies. Storey opens up a way of thinking about the relationship between Rome and America that departs from analogies and explores how America incorporated a Roman logic of empire, not by recalling a past but by grafting itself onto a constellation of images and metaphors that connect past with present. The book is challenging, but opens up a different way of thinking about history.