Books of the Year 2024: Part 2

If you haven’t yet read the History Today Books of the Year Part 1, you can find it here.

‘His brilliance, compassion and sharp humour lives on inside it’

Karma Nabulsi is Senior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford

This year has seemed beyond words. Years ago, doubting words existed to convey any of the terrible history of the Palestinian people, the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury told me: ‘Karma, there are words for everything.’ Khoury died in September this year, but his most recent work, Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea (Archipelago) will appear in English this November. Like his masterpiece Gate of the Sun (1998), it shows how the history and experience of the 1948 Palestinian Catastrophe (the Nakba) can be most powerfully conveyed through fiction. His brilliance, compassion and sharp humour lives on inside it.

But this year has also been a time of small miracles. We were so glad to welcome a new generation raising their voices for justice on university campuses. They were recently joined by a slightly older member – and not a moment too soon. In The Message: Writing and the World (Hamish Hamilton) the ghosts of Senegal speak to a son of Africa turned student of Palestine: welcome, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

• Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea
  Elias Khoury
  Archipelago Books, 417pp, $24

• The Message: Writing and the World
  Ta-Nehisi Coates
  Hamish Hamilton, 240pp, £18.04
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

‘Brilliantly interweaves poignant individual stories with astute factual analysis’

Patricia Fara is Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and columnist at History Today

‘There is no such thing as Society’, declared Margaret Thatcher, the inventor of heritage politics who is being increasingly blamed for the parlous condition of modern Britain. In Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth (Allen Lane), the philosopher Ingrid Robeyns features the Iron Lady as the right-wing ideologue who introduced the neoliberal capitalism that has dramatically widened the gulf between the desperately poor and the obscenely wealthy. Refreshingly, as well as exposing today’s dire situation, she also suggests steps that individuals – me, you – can take to address it.

Coming from a different angle, English lecturer Helen Charman exposes Thatcher as the Bad Nanny who snatched far more than milk from the British citizens under her care. Charman’s Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood (Allen Lane) brilliantly interweaves poignant individual stories with astute factual analysis, ranging from the consciousness-raising movements of the 1970s to modern austerity drives and target setting.

• Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
  Ingrid Robeyns
  Penguin Books Ltd, 336pp, £23.75
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• Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood
  Helen Charman
  Penguin Books Ltd, 512pp, £28.50
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‘Quinn’s sparkling narrative seeks to persuade us that some 4,000 years of voyages and global encounters made us what we are’

Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King’s College London

What do we mean when we talk about ‘the West’? It’s a hot topic these days. Hard on the heels of The West: A New History of an Old Idea by Naoíse Mac Sweeney last year comes Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History (Bloomsbury). Debunking the idea of a ‘West’ that’s often pitted against ‘the Rest’, Quinn’s sparkling narrative seeks to persuade us that some 4,000 years of voyages and global encounters made us what we are.

It’s not often that a celebrity from the world of the arts ends up making history as a revolutionary hero abroad. But that’s what happened to Lord Byron, the poet who died 200 years ago this year, while helping the Greeks to win their independence. In Byron: A Life in Ten Letters (Cambridge), Andrew Stauffer weaves the poet’s own words into a narrative that gets inside the mercurial mind of his subject.

• How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History
  Josephine Quinn
  Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 576pp, £28.50
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• Byron: A Life in Ten Letters
  Andrew Stauffer
  Cambridge University Press, 300pp, £23.75
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‘Tales of exploration and derring-do are hard to resist’

Martha Vandrei is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter

A book about mathematics is maybe not one with immediate appeal to a humanist. But as someone who is interested in the muddled histories of knowledge and the social networks that cohere around ideas, I delighted in the eclecticism of personalities and preoccupations in Philip Beeley and Christopher Hollings’ edited collection Beyond the Learned Academy: The Practice of Mathematics, 1600-1850 (Oxford).

Peter Forshaw’s Occult: Decoding the Visual Culture of Mysticism, Magic and Divination (Thames & Hudson) is part alternative world history, part coffee-table book. I found it entirely by chance and was immediately taken by the detailed visual analyses, then sucked in by the histories of occult topics like alchemy and astrology. The book is genuinely illuminating for anyone not familiar with occult histories, or practices of the disciplines of the past.

Tales of exploration and derring-do are hard to resist, and even more so when they are true. In The Wide Wide Sea: The Final, Fatal Adventure of Captain James Cook (Michael Joseph) Hampton Sides casts Cook’s life against a backdrop of global currents in exploration and cultural exchange, but it’s just a thrilling tale in and of itself.

• Beyond the Learned Academy: The Practice of Mathematics, 1600-1850
  Philip Beeley and Christopher Hollings
  Oxford University Press, 933pp, £35
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Occult: Decoding the Visual Culture of Mysticism, Magic and Divination
  Peter Forshaw
  Thames & Hudson Ltd, 256pp, £23.75
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• The Wide Wide Sea: The Final, Fatal Adventure of Captain James Cook
  Hampton Sides
  Michael Joseph, 432pp, £23.75
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‘Impressively researched, drawing on vast archival resources’

Paulo Drinot is Professor of Latin American History at University College London

Patricio Simonetto’s A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina (University of Texas Press) is a groundbreaking study of ‘people whose lives crossed the boundaries of gender’ that deserves a broad readership beyond the field of Latin American history. Impressively researched, drawing on vast archival resources and spanning the whole of the 20th century, the book puts trans history in dialogue with the history of nation-building and focuses attention on the importance of embodiment practices of gender transition – including medically mediated sex change but also the use of prosthetics, clothes, hairstyles and make-up – in everyday struggles for citizenship and inclusion.

The diptych Histories of Solitude: Colombia, 1820s-1970s and Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s (Routledge) is an impressive undertaking. Edited by Ricardo López-Pedreros and Lina Britto, these two volumes bring together over 40 scholars. In some 1,000 pages, the books offer a rich panoramic perspective on the history of Colombia from independence until the present that interrogates exceptionalist narratives of the country’s experience of democracy.

• A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina
  Patricio Simonetto
  ‎University of Texas Press, 320pp, £39

• Histories of Solitude: Colombia, 1820s-1970s
  Ricardo López-Pedreros and Lina Britto
  Routledge, 503pp, £135
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• Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s
  Ricardo López-Pedreros and Lina Britto
  Routledge, 542pp, £135
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‘An unorthodox history of South Asia in the 20th century interwoven with the author’s family memories, favourite films and sweet treats’

Peter Mandler is Professor of Modern Cultural History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

I recommend three ingenious blends of serious historical research, family history and affecting personal memoir. Moving from east to west: first, Joya Chatterji’s Shadows At Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Vintage), an unorthodox history of South Asia in the 20th century interwoven with the author’s family memories, favourite films and sweet treats. Then, Or Rosenboim animates the women in her Bukharan merchant family through their recipes as they move from Samarkand to Jerusalem in Air and Love: A Story of Food, Family and Belonging (Picador). And finally, Guardian journalist Julian Borger’s I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust (John Murray) tracks the fates of eight Jewish children in Vienna whose parents sought refuge for them in Britain via adverts in the Manchester Guardian in the summer of 1938 – one of those children was his father and one of them, I confess, was mine.

• Shadows At Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century
  Joya Chatterji
  Routledge, 864pp, £28.50
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• I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
  Julian Borger
  John Murray Press, 3044pp, £19
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‘I found myself shaking my head in anger’

Emily Cockayne is Associate Professor in Cultural History at the University of East Anglia and author of Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters (Oxford University Press)

I have long been a fan of Sarah Wise and was eager to get my hands on The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away a Generation (Oneworld). I found myself shaking my head in anger at the histories of people locked away under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. With her usual panache, Wise manages to find humanity in the darkest places and tells an important story with understanding and wit.

Agnes Arnold-Forster’s Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion (Picador) was also a revelation – a well-crafted book that will leave the reader thinking about the rose-tinting of memories long after they have finished it.

I also much enjoyed Madeleine Pelling’s deft narrative of 18th-century rebellion in Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Profile). Pelling uses specific examples of graffiti as springboards into wider social and political stories from the Georgian period.

• The Undesirables: The Law that Locked Away a Generation
  Sarah Wise
  Oneworld Publications, 352pp, £20.90
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• Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion
  Agnes Arnold-Forster
  Pan Macmillan, 272pp, £20.90
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• Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain
  Madeleine Pelling
  Profile Books Ltd, 352pp, £23.75
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‘The story of its formation is delivered in a manner that genuinely seems unsurpassable’

Rhys Griffiths is Co-Editor of History Today

Indonesia is habitually introduced in international media as the world’s fourth most populous – or largest Muslim – country, but a report this year offered a novel and depressingly modern shortcut for impressing upon readers the nation’s magnitude: Indonesians are now thought to be the world’s foremost consumers of microplastics. The country was also the subject of one of the year’s best books. Indonesia’s complicated construction – as geographically and historically unlikely a nation-state as you are likely to find on an up-to-date map – is one of the reasons it is so fascinating; the story of its formation is delivered in a manner that genuinely seems unsurpassable by David Van Reybrouck in Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World (Bodley Head).

On the other side of the erstwhile konfrontasi, Malaysia is a young nation without a unifying revolutionary past. What holds Malaysia – a racially divided consociational country – together, asks Hafiz Noor Shams in The End of the Nineteen Nineties (Matahari). How can civic nationalism (‘Malaysianess’) defeat ethnic nationalism (‘Malayaness’)? Economic prosperity, he says, of the type the country enjoyed in the final decade of the 20th century. And when that passes? Colonial-era faultlines loom again.

• Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
  David Van Reybrouck
  Vintage Publishing, 656pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• The End of the Nineteen Nineties
  Hafiz Noor Shams
  Matahari Books, 360pp, £11.13

‘This lively book invites readers to ‘eavesdrop’ on the republican revolution’

Jackie Eales is President of the British Association for Local History and Professor of Early Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University

Susan Doran’s From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I (Oxford) traces the excitement generated by the arrival of the new monarch and the importance of his early initiatives, including peace with Spain and his desire to unite England and Scotland as Great Britain. James emerges as a sympathetic figure facing significant religious, financial and political problems left at Elizabeth’s death.

Fruit of Friendship: Portraits by Mary Beale (Paul Holberton), edited by Ellie Smith and Lawrence Hendra, tells the remarkable story of Beale’s career as a professional artist to the Restoration court, contextualising her life and network of patrons. This exhibition catalogue is beautifully illustrated with both society portraits and intimate depictions of family and friends.

The 1650s are often neglected in favour of the dramatic events of the civil war-driven 1640s. Alice Hunt’s Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660 (Faber) redresses the balance with aplomb as she charts the challenges of rule without a king. This lively book invites readers to ‘eavesdrop’ on the republican revolution through the speeches, letters and diaries of the time.

• From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I
  Susan Doran
  Oxford University Press, 656pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Fruit of Friendship: Portraits by Mary Beale
  Ellie Smith and Lawrence Hendra
  Paul Holberton Publishing Ltd, 160pp, £57
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• Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649–1660
  Alice Hunt
  Faber & Faber, 512pp, £23.75
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‘The written word does not always convey vividly and humanly enough the suffering of a people that has been going on for more than a century’

Ilan Pappé is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies

The tragedy of Palestine and its people has been told and retold in a huge number of books. But the written word does not always convey vividly and humanly enough the suffering of a people that has been going on for more than a century. Two books in 2024 examine that painful history in graphic and pictorial ways. Teresa Aranguren has collected photographs that reconstruct a lost Palestine in her moving Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (Haymarket). The book is testament to a thriving Palestinian society entering the age of modernity and nationalism before it was destroyed in 1948.

The destruction of that society is represented in a collection of more than 200 infographics in Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation (Haymarket) edited by Jessica Anderson, Aline Batarseh and Yosra el-Gazzar. Together, both books bear witness to a Palestinian victimhood and resilience that is still denied by too many in the West.

• Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba
  Teresa Aranguren
  Haymarket Books, 240pp, £33.25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation
  Jessica Anderson, Aline Batarseh and Yosra el-Gazzar
  Haymarket Books, 392pp, £38
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‘Riveting, resonant and – as always – a historical masterclass.’

Helen Castor is author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Allen Lane)

An indispensable book of the year is the one that accompanies the best exhibition of the year. Medieval Women: Voices and Visions (British Library) is edited by Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison, curators of ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ at the British Library. Gorgeously illustrated and full of extraordinary detail, the essays build into a superb overview of the multiplicity of women’s lives – half the medieval population, too often left out of sight and out of mind, historically speaking.

Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France (Allen Lane) – a new history of the Capetian kings of France –combines remarkable scholarship with headlong narrative verve and an eye for telling human detail. It’s a treat of a book.

I can claim no expertise in the history of Germany and Poland, but I will always read anything Tim Blanning writes, and Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco (Allen Lane) is everything the title promises and more: riveting, resonant and – as always – a historical masterclass.

• Medieval Women: Voices and Visions
  Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison
  British Library Publishings, 256pp, £33.25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France
  Justine Firnhaber-Baker
  Allen Lane, 448pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Augustus The Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco
  Tim Blanning
  Allen Lane, 432pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

‘A remarkable consideration of how historians understand war’

Hazem Kandil is Professor of Historical and Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge

War was the subject of three particularly erudite books this year. Two are rather ambitious in scale, offering a sweeping account of conflict across the globe and through the millennia, to arrive at different conclusions. The ancient refrain of ‘only the dead have seen the end of war’ is a good summary of Richard Overy’s sentiment in Why War? (Pelican), though he emphasises the changing forms of warfare, all the way to cyberwar. Michael Mann’s On Wars (Yale) is more hopeful that humanity can stop the madness – but only if rulers stop listening to unscrupulous advisers.

Most intriguing is Perry Anderson’s Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War (Verso), a remarkable consideration of how historians understand war. Examining six interpretations of the outbreak of the First World War by historians who come, or came, from the combatant nations, this immensely gratifying book proves that historians have always struggled to understand why we fight, let alone how we can stop.

• Why War?
  Richard Overy
  Pelican, 385pp, £20.90
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• On Wars
  Michael Mann
  Yale University Press, 616pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War
  Perry Anderson
  Yale University Press, 400pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

‘Any new book by William Dalrymple is a literary event’

Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford and author of The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Allen Lane)

Classicist Josephine Quinn turns the triumph of the West on its ear in her magisterial How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History (Bloomsbury). Eschewing the ‘civilisations’ approach favoured by Western thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Samuel Huntington, she argues instead that progress is a result of connections between people. She builds her case by highlighting the contributions of merchants and thinkers, poets and potters, in Mesopotamia, Persia, India, West Africa and China across four millennia.

Any new book by William Dalrymple is a literary event, and his latest, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury), is no exception. The ‘Golden Road’ of the title refers to the lines of transmission of Indian science, philosophy and religion across a vast ‘Indosphere’ linking the Red Sea to the Pacific from 250 BC to AD 1200. His focus is squarely on the Indianate world and the ideas that radiated from the sub-continent.
 

• How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History
  Josephine Quinn
  Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 575pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
  William Dalrymple
  Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 400pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)