Holy War: How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations

Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire

Julian Sancton · 384 pages

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Silvia Federici · 285 pages

India's Struggle for Independence

Bipan Chandra · 600 pages

1421: The Year China Discovered America

Gavin Menzies · 649 pages

This volume presents the author's assertion that the fleets of Chinese Admiral Zheng visited the Americas prior to European explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that this same Chinese fleet circumnavigated the globe a century before the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan. The author presents a series of vignettes describing his travels around the globe, examining what he claims is evidence for

The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000

John Tutino · 512 pages

Unfamiliar Fishes

Sarah Vowell · 256 pages

From the bestselling author of *The Wordy Shipmates*, comes an examination of Hawaii, the place where Manifest Destiny got a sunburn. Many think of 1776 as the defining year of American history, when we became a nation devoted to the pursuit of happiness through self-government. In *Unfamiliar Fishes*, Sarah Vowell argues that 1898 might be a year just as defining, when, in an orgy of imperial

American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

David E. Stannard · 358 pages

For four hundred years - from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s - the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as one hundred million people. I

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

David Treuer · 512 pages

Stolen Continents: 500 Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas

Ronald Wright · 424 pages

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Charles C. Mann · 631 pages

From the author of 1491 -- the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas -- a deeply engaging new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher C

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Mike Davis · 467 pages

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British

Jeremy Paxman · 356 pages

The influence of the British Empire is everywhere, from the very existence of the United Kingdom to the ethnic composition of our cities. It affects everything, from Prime Ministers' decisions to send troops to war to the adventurers we admire. From the sports we think we're good at to the architecture of our buildings; the way we travel to the way we trade; the hopeless losers we will on, and the

In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines

Stanley Karnow · 494 pages

This book is an account of America's imperial experience in the Philippines from 1898 to 1946. Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, has now written an enthralling account of an almost forgotten subject: America's imperial experience in the Philippines. Panoramic in scope, profound in its perceptions and compassionate in its human portraits, In Our Image is an exciting, heroic, tragic, col

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War

James D. Bradley · 387 pages

In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous twenty-one year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name.In 2005, a centu

Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India

Lawrence James · 722 pages

"This is the story of one of the wonders of the modern world. In less than a hundred years, the British made themselves masters of India. They ruled it for another hundred, departing in 1947, leaving behind the independent states of India and Pakistan." "None of this, however, was planned. A series of emergencies in the eighteenth century transformed the East India Company into the most formidable

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia

Pankaj Mishra · 368 pages

A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent's anticipated rise to dominance. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkers are seen as outriders from the main a

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

David S. Landes · 650 pages

David S. Landes tells the long, fascinating story of wealth and power throughout the world: the creation of wealth, the paths of winners and losers, the rise and fall of nations. He studies history as a process, attempting to understand how the world's cultures lead to - or retard - economic and military success and material achievement. Countries of the West, Landes asserts, prospered early thro

Civilization: The West and the Rest

Niall Ferguson · 402 pages

What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six "killer applications"?that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six thing

Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

Arthur Herman · 736 pages

In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, bestselling historian Arthur Herman sheds new light on two of the most universally recognizable icons of the twentieth century, and reveals how their forty-year rivalry sealed the fate of India and the British Empire.They were born worlds apart: Winston Churchill to Britain's most glamorous aristocratic family, Mohandas Gandhi to a pious middle

Occupied America

Rodolfo Acuña, Rodolfo Acuna · 428 pages

The Journals

James Cook · 672 pages

The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain's Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Mutiny, Shipwreck, and Discovery

Martin Dugard · 294 pages

The Year is 1500. Christopher Columbus, stripped of his title Admiral of the Ocean Seas, waits in chains in a Caribbean prison built under his orders, looking out at the colony that he founded, nurtured, and ruled for eight years. Less than a decade after discovering the New World, he has fallen into disgrace, accused by the royal court of being a liar, a secret Jew, and a foreigner who sought to

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

Alex von Tunzelmann · 440 pages

"The stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 liberated 400 million Indians from the British Empire. One of the defining moments of world history had been brought about by a tiny number of people, including Jawaharlal Nehru, the fiery prime minister-to-be; Gandhi, the mystical figure who enthralled a nation; and Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the glamorous but unlikely couple who had been dispatched to

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain

John Darwin · 478 pages

The enormous influence of the British Empire cannot be escaped. It has shaped the world in countless ways, repopulating continents, carving out nations, imposing its language, technology and values. For perhaps two centuries its existence, expansion, and final collapse could be seen as the single largest determinant of historical events.