Best Books of 2024: Part 2

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

‘An impressive showcase of this up-and-coming historian’s research’

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor of History and Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA

Nir Shafir’s debut The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press) is an impressive showcase of this up-and-coming historian’s research. By focusing on controversies regarding innovation in the Ottoman world – whether it be medicine, coffee, tobacco or prayer – as expressed through a flourishing pamphlet literature, Shafir has produced an excellent and vital cultural history.

The distinguished Portuguese historian Jorge Flores has been a prolific contributor to the literature on the early modern Iberian world. Only recently has his work begun to appear in English. In Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World (University of Pennsylvania Press) he explores official and unofficial dealings between networks of spies, diplomats, and cultural go-betweens, succeeding – remarkably – in finding their elusive traces in the archives.

• The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire
  Nir Shafir
  Stanford University Press, 410pp, $75

• Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World
  Jorge Flores
  University of Pennsylvania Press, 344pp, £54

‘His brilliance, compassion, and sharp humor live 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 humor live 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
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood
  Helen Charman
  Penguin Books Ltd, 512pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

‘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

• How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History
  Josephine Quinn
  Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 576pp, £28.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Byron: A Life in Ten Letters
  Andrew Stauffer
  Cambridge University Press, 300pp, £23.75
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

‘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
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

‘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
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s
  Ricardo López-Pedreros and Lina Britto
  Routledge, 542pp, £135
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

‘An unorthodox history of South Asia in the 20th century interwoven with the author’s family memories, favorite 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, favorite 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