Category: Early Modern Europe
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The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987) by Simon Schama
“Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution” (1989) was the first book I ever read by Simon Schama. It was sometime around 2008. I was mesmerized; I could hardly put it down. It seemed as though I had just found a new favorite historical writer, someone as graceful and penetrating as Robert Massie. I immediately…
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The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (2022) by James Belich
“The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe” (2022), by New Zealand historian James Belich – co-founder of Oxford’s Centre for Global History – is a bold, sweeping, and revisionist exploration of how a medieval catastrophe transformed the fate of an entire continent. In nearly 500 pages, Belich’s argument ranges…
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The Armada (1959) by Garrett Mattingly
When Garrett Mattingly’s “The Armada” was first published in 1959, it became an immediate sensation – not just among historians, but among general readers. It won the National Book Award and quickly carved out a reputation as one of the most engaging works of narrative history ever written. Even today, over half a century later,…
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Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (2007) by Dava Sobel
Sometimes there is an obvious answer to a complex problem, but there is a missing piece that confounds even the greatest minds and resists the efforts of large-scale government programs to develop a solution. Such was the case of a reliable and accurate method for calculating longitude in the first centuries of European naval mastery…
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The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (1988) by Geoffrey Parker
During the 1990s, discussions about a new “military revolution” shaped by advances in the Information Age dominated defense intellectual circles. Yet the concept of a “military revolution” as a transformative historical process actually dates back much further—to a seminal 1955 lecture by British historian Michael Roberts titled The Military Revolution 1560-1660. Building on and revising…
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The Grand Strategy of Philip II (1998) by Geoffrey Parker
“The Grand Strategy of Philip II” is a rare book. On the one hand, it is a convincing scholarly reassessment of Spanish imperial policy during the pivotal late 16th century. In that sense, the book is written to the high standards of the academy: exhaustive primary research – much of it in the original Spanish,…
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Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World (2008) by Roger Crowley
Is Roger Crowley’s “Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Conquest for the Center of the World” a substantive and groundbreaking piece of sixteenth century history? No. Is it an engaging story wonderfully told? Absolutely. The author breaks the narrative into three equally weighted parts. The first sets…
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