The most recommended modern history books

I like a good wine (though Madeira isn’t one of my favorites). I like even more a book that tells me about wine—and about many other things that I had not previously connected to wine. That’s what Oceans of Wine does and does magnificently.

David Hancock is a pioneering scholar who has taught us to understand the Atlantic Ocean “world” as an interconnected space of exchanges that remade all the individuals and societies surrounding it. In this book, he shows how merchants in Britain, Portugal, and British North America transformed Madeira from a rather ordinary wine into a transatlantic bestseller.

Like most of my favorite historians, Hancock has dug up a treasure trove of unexplored sources to write a big story in a wholly new way.

This is much the best recent book on business. It shows the changing shapes of companies in the era of platforms, complex supply chains and more. Its greatest value is to remind us that great companies are essentially an expression of collective intelligence, and that their longevity depends on loving what they do. It documents many examples where firms forgot this, pursued short-term profit and ended up destroying their value - not just Enron but also others like Boeing or Deutsche Bank. Its also a healthy alternative to naive views of companies as nothing more than collections of contracts. Anyone with any role in business or finance should read it, and will learn far more than from 99% of airport books on business.

Kenya was an exotic territory for British colonial interests in the late 19th century. For reasons almost impossible to understand today, the British decided to build a railroad from Mombasa, the seaport on the Indian Ocean, through the Kenyan savannah, to Kampala, a city of some riches in the far interior of what is now Uganda. The story of the building of the railroad at the end of the 19th century is hair-raising, thanks to Miller’s classic history, as imported Indian workers had to endure predatory lions, harsh climates, and raging rivers to forge across the frontier. That the railroad to nowhere was completed is a tribute to those Indian workers and their intrepid British overseers.

Today, one can take the train from Mombasa to Nairobi, some three hundred miles distant, either in the daylight, hoping to spy some wildlife, or in a sleeping berth at night. I… show more.

In Unwanted Visionaries Radchenko reveals the very different ways the Cold War ended in Asia, not with the jubilant breaching of the Berlin Wall and largely peaceful transitions of power, but with the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Vietnamese departure from Cambodia. 

When one mentions German Resistance, the name Claus Maria Schenk von Stauffenberg springs to mind for all the right reasons. Whereas the other Peter Hoffmann book on my list looks at the German Resistance as a whole, this more intimate account of Claus von Stauffenberg’s background and aristocratic upbringing focuses on his biography, particularly his close relationship with his brothers Berthold and Alexander, their formative years, their association with the circle of the poet Stefan George and their political, military and professional development, which led them to take leading positions against Hitler’s tyranny.

One of the great debates in the history of WWII is how Hitler took power in Germany and how many Germans knew and supported Hitler’s mass murder of political opponents, Jews, Poles, Roma, and “defectives.”

In 28 short, easy-to-read chapters, each a free-standing essay, Evans unpacks this debate with magisterial detail about Germans before, during, and after WWII.

I am always fascinated by gender history and women’s experiences in the past. Churchill’s book puts women front and center and considers how medical practitioners understood women’s bodies and health and what women experienced as patients. The book covers traditionally feminine conditions – gynecological and obstetrical issues – but also looks at disorders that affected both men and women, including smallpox, and mental health – hysteria and hypochondria. I like the way this book thinks through all aspects of women’s experiences, how their disorders were understood, who they sought treatment from, and how those treatments were adapted to the specifics of the female body (menstruation and lactation).

With a razor sharp eye Wolmar (author of many other excellent books on railway history) concentrates his focus on the machinations of the establishment of the world's first railway built under the ground. Overcoming the travails of unbuilt fantasy concepts, the Victorians fear of the dark, finances and the problems of running steam trains in tunnels, London's City Solicitor Charles Pearson, managed to get the first route, the Metropolitan Railway, built and opened by January 1863. Wolmar unpicks the struggles to expand the line, private capitals, a rush to build more lines and the eventual nationalisation of the system in 1948.

JaHyun Kim Haboush passed away in 2011 and was a leading historian of Korea. Her book, The Great East Asian War was published posthumously with the help of her husband, William Haboush’s editing. Although I do not work on Korea, I found this book extremely helpful in understanding the premodern roots of Korean nationalism. Haboush argues that Koreans began to get a sense of national identity when Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea in 1592-1598. She carefully shows how this sense of nation emerged by focusing on language and other symbolism. I teach this book in my East Asian History class and students find it both informative and enlightening. In some ways, it supplements Wang Hui’s discussion of early modernity in China.

Peter Gay was a child in Nazi Berlin in the 1930s. I read his book to see what life was like there while writing my third novel, much of which takes place in Nazi Berlin. Gay was an academic historian but this memoir is deeply personal, laced with self-deprecating humour. His assimilated life (he and his father were staunch atheists) was relatively unaffected by the regime until 1933 when he became a Jew overnight by law. The Nazis quickly stripped the Jews of all rights, culminating in the violent Kristallnacht in 1938. He and his parents managed to escape to the U.S. six months later. Many of his relatives were killed. The underlying question in the book: why didn’t his family—and by extension other Jewish families—leave right after 1933 when Nazi plans became clear?