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 ManFrancis Fukuyama
The Clash Of Civilizations: And The Remaking Of World OrderSamuel 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
Hanson, Victor Davis
Lee, Kai-Fu
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,
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
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
J. Rufus Fears, The Great Courses
Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor
Kenneth W. Harl, The Great Courses
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
Sugden, Dr John
Keegan, John
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
William L. Shirer
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
Rhodes, Richard
Chernow, Ron
Strassler, Robert B
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.
Burgis, Tom
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
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.
C. V. Wedgwood
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
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 yearsby Jared DiamondCollapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive Jared DiamondUpheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and ChangeJared Diamond
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
Sam Moorhead
Barbara Tuchman: The Guns of August & the Proud Tower (Library of America)
Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim
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
Robert K. Massie
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
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)
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
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