History Future Now

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Global Balance of Power

There are a some really fantastic books in this list, so many in fact that it is hard to know which ones to recommend over the others. But if I had to recommend just a few of the list I would start with the greatest and oldest histories ever written, Herodotus and Thucydides. The Landmark series Landmark Thucydides and The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories are really fantastic; they are well laid out, filled with maps and well translated. Herodotus is the “Father of History” and he coined the word to describe what we now refer to as history. Herodotus starts off with the wars between Persia and Greece and then moves into the beginning of the Peloponnesian War between the allies of Athens and Sparta. Thucydides starts almost exactly where Herodotus ends. The style of writing is quite different. Herodotus is the master of the shaggy dog story and goes off on wild tangents while Thucydides is a far more meticulous historian and is focused. Most of what we know about the ancient world’s characters of that period comes from these two authors so it is good to go to the source material. Thucydides is unbelievably exiting and he puts speeches into the mouths of the key characters to enable the reader to get into their heads.. The wars between Athens and Sparta are fundamentally pointless and by the end of the period the Greeks have battered themselves senseless and they never really recover. There are tremendous parallels with the First and Second World Wars and military strategists prior to the Great War were reading Thucydides for clues about what to do and Thucydides remains compulsory reading in most military academies around the world today. If you had to pick one go for Thucydides.

I would then go for Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years by Jared Diamond. This is one of those “Ah Ha” books and you can look back on your understanding of the world as pre and post Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond is one of the first historians to really look at the impact of geography, climate, disease and domesticatable animal and plant species as a way of understanding human history. It has aged a bit since he wrote it as historians have added to his core ideas but remains a great read. Highly recommended.

To understand warfare you need to read A History Of Warfare by John Keegan. The book is badly structured and is split into a first section, which should be read last, and a second section, which should be read first. Keegan basically breaks warfare down into a series of rock scissor paper combat events with new aggressive technologies being used to defeat old defensive systems and then new defensive systems emerging that require new aggressive techniques to overcome them. Despite the clunky structure it is a brilliant book and also provides a real “ah-ha” moment by the time you have finished with it.

I love ancient history - there are so many parallels with the modern era and the choice here is tremendous. Books on the rise and fall of Rome are great, as are books about the Eastern Roman Empire, which we now call the Byzantine Empire. Of those books, however, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey really stands out, as it is so unexpected. We have all read about the persecution of the Christians by early Roman emperors. But at some point Christianity became the dominant religion of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. Nixey points out that this change did not come about peacefully and the stories that she tells of the wholesale destruction of the pagan world by Christians is frightening and has strong parallels with Islamic Jihadists and Isis today. Great book.

Jumping on a few centuries brings us to David Hackett Fischer’s masterpiece called Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History). Fischer (no relation of mine) describes the history of the various waves of British immigrants to what is now called the United States. The various waves are quite distinct and bring with them cultural characteristics which explain why America is the way brilliantly. This is another “ah-ha” book and thoroughly recommended. Note that it does get a bit detailed at times so feel free to skim a few pages!

William L. Shirer was a reporter in Germany during the rise of the Nazis and left just as the war started. He then came back after the war to continue reporting and interviewed key people in the Nazi regime. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany is his chronicle of that time and is superb. First, it is exquisitely written. Second it is a combination of an eye witness account and a history, so has a contemporary feel and perspective. The book was widely criticised when it came out and traditional historians hated it. But it soon became a best seller and is widely acclaimed by modern historians as the finest account of Nazi Germany ever written. Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by the American politician Patrick Buchanan is not in the same league as Shirer’s book. But it is really interesting as it points out that from the perspective of British power and influence the war with Nazi Germany was a terrible mistake. Britain entered the war as a great power and left it as the lapdog of the Americans.

Switching to another American politician The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Path to Power Vol 1 by Robert A. Caro is also a masterpiece. Caro basically devoted his entire life to chronicling the rise and fall of Lyndon Johnson. Like Shirer, Caro’s prose is sublime. Each word, each sentence, each paragraph is beautifully written. Caro then takes this skill and chronicles the ins and outs of one of the most fascinating and most maligned US presidents.

Next up is Samuel P Huntington"‘s classic The Clash Of Civilizations: And The Remaking Of World Order. It started as a Foreign Affairs article in 1993 and he then went on to expand it into a full, relatively short, book. In it he describes a world which was divided up into cultural blocks ranging from Chinese, Islamic, Western, African and so forth. This was quite the contrast with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man which seemed to indicate that western style liberal democracy was going to be the end state for all humanity. While Fukuyama has been debunked, Huntington’s ideas seem to be even more accurate nearly 30 years later.

Finally, I would recommend China Wave, The: Rise Of A Civilizational State by Weiwei Zhang. Zhang is a hard core communist who spent much of his life outside China as a diplomat. He has written a critique of the West and a defence of China’s Communist Party one state solution. A lot of what he says makes sense. But that is not that important. What is more important is that what he says has been thoroughly adopted by the Communist Party and has tremendous support from President Xi. As such it is a great way of understanding China today and where it might go tomorrow.

The full list is as follows:

The End of History and the Last Man

Francis Fukuyama

The Clash Of Civilizations: And The Remaking Of World Order

Samuel P Huntington

Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

Brownworth, Lars

Late Antiquity: Crisis and Transformation

Thomas F. X. Noble,

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History

Edgerton, David

Carnage & Culture

Hanson, Victor Davis

AI Superpowers

Lee, Kai-Fu

The World According to Xi

Kerry Brown

The Third Revolution: Xi Jingping and the New Chinese State

Economy, Elizabeth C.

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

McGregor, Richard

China Wave, The: Rise Of A Civilizational State

Zhang, Weiwei

China Horizon, The: Glory And Dream Of A Civilizational State

Zhang, Wei-Wei

China Imagined: From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power

Lee, Gregory B.

A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin

Simon Jenkins, Penguin Books Ltd

The Shortest History of Europe

John Hirst

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Harari, Yuval Noah

La guerre de Cent Ans (French Edition)

Jean-Louis-Théodore Bachelet, anetADze

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World

Frankopan, Peter

The Big History of Civilizations

Craig G. Benjamin, The Great Courses

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

Macaes, Bruno

The Rise and Fall of Athens (Penguin Classics)

Plutarch

Greece and Rome: An Integrated History of the Ancient Mediterranean

Robert Garland

The Peloponnesian War: Athens and Sparta in Savage Conflict 431-404 BC

Kagan, Donald

Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization

Richard Miles,

The Spartans: An Epic History

Cartledge, Paul

Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization, Volume 3

Will Durant,

Brunelleschi's Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence

Ross King

Florence: The Biography of a City

Christopher Hibbert

The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

Christopher Hibbert

Europe: A History

Norman Davies

City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire

Roger Crowley

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

Tim Marshall

Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West

Michael Scott

Famous Greeks

J. Rufus Fears, The Great Courses

Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor

Kenneth W. Harl, The Great Courses

The Italians

Hooper, John

A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge Concise Histories)

Duggan, Christopher

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Modern Library)

Edward Gibbon

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy

Scott, Emmet

Sir Francis Drake

Sugden, Dr John

A History Of Warfare

Keegan, John

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

William L. Shirer

Fire and Fury

Michael Wolff

The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

Ferguson, Niall

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: A History of Now

Burleigh, Michael

The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (America in the World)

Osterhammel, Jürgen

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Shirer, William L

The Impending Crisis, 1848-61 (Torchbooks)

Potter, David M.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Tuchman, Barbara

The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Gallic Wars and The Civil War

Raaflaub, Kurt

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

Duncan, Mike

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

Nixey, Catherine

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923

Robert Gerwarth, John Banks, Audible Studios

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783

A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

Big History: Our Incredible Journey, from Big Bang to Now (Dk)

DK

The Making Of The Atomic Bomb

Rhodes, Richard

Alexander Hamilton

Chernow, Ron

Landmark Thucydides

Strassler, Robert B

History Future Now

Fischer, Tristan

The History of Rome: The Republic

Mike Duncan, Peter D Campbell

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

Tooze, Adam

What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War

H.G. Wells

Turning Points in Medieval History

Dorsey Armstrong, The Great Courses

A History of Britain: Volume 1

Simon Schama

The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy

Bell, Daniel A.

The Looting Machine

Burgis, Tom

The decline of the West

Oswald Spengler

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Updated Edition)

John J. Mearsheimer

To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949

Ian Kershaw

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories

Strassler, Robert B.

The Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika

Robert B. Strassler

The Landmark Arrian:The Campaigns of Alexander the Great (Landmark (Anchor Books))

James Romm

Landmark Thucydides

Strassler, Robert B

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Woodard, Colin

Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to "On War" (Modern War Studies)

Sumida, Jon Tetsuro

On War (Oxford World's Classics)

Clausewitz, Carl von

Penguin Great Ideas : The Christians and the Fall of Rome

Gibbon, Edward

Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War

Wilson, Peter H.

The Thirty Years War

C. V. Wedgwood

A Short History of Byzantium

Norwich, John Julius

The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

Robert D. Kaplan

The History of the World in Bite-Sized Chunks

Emma Marriott

The Uses and Abuses of History

Margaret MacMillan

Great Maps

Brotton, Jerry

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

Lowe, Keith

Atrocitology: Humanity's 100 Deadliest Achievements

Matthew White

Their Darkest Hour: People Tested to the Extreme in WWII

Laurence Rees

Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
by Jared Diamond
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
 Jared Diamond
Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change

Jared Diamond

The Byzantine Wars

John Haldon

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire

Edward N. Luttwak

The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (Hist Atlas)

McEvedy, Colin

The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations

Haywood, John

When Britain Burned the White House: The 1814 Invasion of Washington

Snow, Peter

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

Davies, Norman

The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War

MacMillan, Professor Margaret

Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914

Max Hastings

Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

Pryor, Francis

Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons

Pryor, Francis

The Romans Who Shaped Britain

Sam Moorhead

Barbara Tuchman: The Guns of August & the Proud Tower (Library of America)

Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

Buchanan, Patrick J.

Triumph Of The Will (DVD) 2010

Leni Riefenstahl

The March Of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

Wertheim Tuchman, Barbara

War From The Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics

Emile Simpson

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century

George Friedman

Peter the Great: The compelling story of the man who created modern Russia, founded St Petersburg and made his country part of Europe (Great Lives)

Robert K. Massie

Rome: An Empire's Story

Greg Woolf

The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome

Robin Lane Fox

Byzantium: The Early Centuries: The Early Centuries v. 1

John Julius Norwich

The Passage of Power

Robert A Caro

Megachange: The world in 2050 (Economist)

The Economist

Big History: From Big Bang to the Present

Stokes Brown, Cynthia

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom

Tom Holland, Andrew Sachs

Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West

Tom Holland, Andrew Sachs

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals

Niall Ferguson

The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

Peter Heather

Why The West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and what they reveal about the Future

Ian Morris

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Timothy Snyder

Caesar: The Life of a Colossus

Adrian Goldsworthy

The Histories: Bks. 1-3 (Loeb Classical Library)

Tacitus

Histories: Bks. 4-5 (Loeb Classical Library)

Tacitus

The Histories: Bks. 1-3 (Loeb Classical Library)

Tacitus

Histories: Bks. 4-5 (Loeb Classical Library)

Tacitus

Lives of the Caesars: v. 2 (Loeb classical library)

Suetonius

The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000

Chris Wickham

The Works of Julius Caesar: Parallel English and Latin (Forgotten Books)

Gaius Julius Caesar

The Time-traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

Ian Mortimer

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History)

David Hackett Fischer

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin

America's Three Regimes: A New Political History

Morton Keller (Author)

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power

Robert Dallek (Author)

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Path to Power Vol 1

Robert A. Caro (Author)

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent Vol 2 (Pimlico)

Robert A. Caro (Author)

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

William Taubman (Author)

Stalin: A Biography

Robert Service (Author)

The West's Last Chance: Winning the Clash of Civilization

Tony Blankley (Author)

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Thomas E., Jr. Woods (Author)

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

Mark Steyn (Author)

The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation

Ian Mortimer

The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050

MacGregor Knox (Editor), Williamson Murray (Editor)

The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815

N.A.M. Rodger

Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life

Kathleen Dalton

President Nixon: Alone in the White House

Richard Reeves

President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime

Lou Cannon

Lincoln

David Herbert Donald

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom

Conrad Black

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate

Robert A. Caro

Washington: The Indispensable Man (A Back Bay Book)

Flexner/James

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Walter Isaacson

Supreme Command: Soldiers,Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime

Eliot A. Cohen

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 1): Audio CDs [AUDIOBOOK]

Edward Gibbon, et al

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

Joseph Ellis

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Herbert P. Bix

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