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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A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (2016) by Joel Mokyr
The Economist magazine recently held up “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy” (2016) by Joel Mokyr as one of the three most outstanding books of all time in explaining the emergence of global capitalism. That’s pretty high praise. Mokyr’s writing is dense and scholarly, yet it remains remarkably lucid and accessible.…
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