Top Books of 2024: Part 1

‘Courageous, morally complex history – and superb scholarship’

Nile Green is Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA and author of Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (W.W. Norton)

In the mid-1500s, the Roshaniyya preached to the people of the Afghan highlands that Allah had spoken to them in their lowly Pashto language. No previous researcher has tackled the arcane manuscripts of these messianic mystics, who moulded Afghanistan’s Islam four centuries before the Taliban. By entering the inner world of the ‘illuminated ones’, William E.B. Sherman’s Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands (Fordham University Press) paints a numinous picture of a land whose history and faith remain poorly understood.

In January 1964 the Zanzibar Revolution saw the brutal ethnic cleansing of the island’s Arab population by militant followers of a Ugandan activist. Having originally built their wealth on slaveholding, the Arabs found themselves in a desperate position when British rule ended the previous December. Drawing on Arabic and Swahili memoirs by exiled survivors, Nathaniel Mathews’
Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship Between East Africa and the Gulf (University of California Press) explores the legacies of dispossession and expulsion that were the companions of decolonisation. This is courageous, morally complex history – and superb scholarship.

• Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands 
  William E.B. Sherman 
  Fordham University Press, 320pp, £27.99 
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• Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship Between East Africa and the Gulf
  Nathaniel Mathews 
  University of California Press, 358pp, £42 
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‘Lyrical writing movingly evokes a world we have lost’

Justine Firnhaber-Baker is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews and author of House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France (Allen Lane)

Within living memory most people were peasants – people who worked the land and who were almost inevitably poor and powerless. Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants: A Personal History (Allen Lane) draws on his family’s roots in rural Ireland, but is as much a collective ethnography of European peasantries over the past two centuries and a philosophical reflection on time and memory as it is a personal history. Joyce’s lyrical writing movingly evokes a world we have lost.

The attention paid to ordinary people in John H. Arnold’s The Making of Lay Religion in Southern France, c.1000-1350 (Oxford University Press) makes it stand out among histories of medieval religion. Writing a history ‘from below’ of developments often exclusively viewed as imposed ‘from above’, Arnold mines the archives of the Languedoc to show how lay people and their communities shaped – as well as suffered – a watershed moment in Christian doctrine and practice.

• Remembering Peasants: A Personal History
  Patrick Joyce
  Penguin Books Ltd, 400pp, £25
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• The Making of Lay Religion in Southern France, c.1000-1350
  John H. Arnold 
  Oxford University Press, 544pp, £149.50 
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‘Illuminates everything it touches’

Chris Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge

Three books stand out for me this year; they are all in different ways about complexity. Lauren Benton’s They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press) explores the many kinds of violence that proliferated in the space between all-out war and all-out peace, refreshing and deepening our understanding of the history of empire.

James Brophy’s magisterial Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe (Oxford) illuminates everything it touches, bringing the world of printing houses, bookshops and struggling writers to enthralling life and exposing the tensions between commerce, dissent and censorship that shaped the 19th-century public sphere.

Perry Anderson’s Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War (Verso) takes a new look at the trans-generational debate over the origins of the First World War. Anderson’s forensic analysis of a selection of historians shows how politics, ideology and emotion have shaped our efforts to understand how this catastrophic event came about.

• They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence
  Lauren Benton
  Princeton University Press, 304pp, £35
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• Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe
  James M. Brophy
  Oxford University Press, 480pp, £118.45
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• Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War
  Perry Anderson
  Verso Books, 400pp, £28.50
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‘A compelling argument for regarding Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay as the single most important Indian woman of her time’

Chitralekha Zutshi is Professor of History at William & Mary and author of Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir (Yale University Press)

Nico Slate’s The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India (University of Pittsburgh Press) is a riveting biography of an extraordinary Indian woman: anti-colonial revolutionary, activist for the rights of the marginalised, institution-builder, people’s representative, writer, artist, world traveller and leader of the Global South, who refused to be contained by labels and social expectations. Slate makes a compelling argument for regarding Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903-88) as the single most important Indian woman of her time.

Deborah Sutton’s Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the Imperial Imagination, 1800-1946 (State University of New York Press) is a fascinating exploration of the intricacies of British imperial engagement with the Hindu temple from the emergence through to the end of colonial rule in India. Sutton takes us on a journey of bureaucratic and legal entanglements, destruction and resistance as the colonial state sought to define, control and subjugate this central site of devotion in Indian society.

• The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India
  Nico Slate
  University of Pittsburgh Press, 352pp, £35
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• Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the Imperial Imagination, 1800-1946
  Deborah Sutton
  State University of New York Press, 294pp, $99

‘An account of a war which is still far too neglected in English-speaking countries’

Yuan Yi Zhu is Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Law at Leiden University

In 1992 Deng Xiaoping, China’s octogenarian paramount leader, toured its southern provinces to bolster the market reforms which he had spearheaded but whose future was in doubt after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre which he had ordered. Jonathan Chatwin’s The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future (Bloomsbury) is an elegant and evocative history of Deng’s month-long tour, which has since acquired mythological status in China and affected the lives of hundreds of millions, including my own.

This year has been especially good for military history. I learned much from Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War (Viking), an account of a war which is still far too neglected in English-speaking countries.

My final recommendation is made speculatively, since N.A.M. Rodger’s The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 (Allen Lane) is still days away from publication as I write these words. But we have waited 20 years for the final instalment of his trilogy on the naval history of Britain from the seventh century to the 20th, and I have no doubt it will be just as thrilling as the two previous volumes.

• The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future
  Jonathan Chatwin
  Bloomsbury Publishing, 200pp, £21.99
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War
  Nick Lloyd
  Viking, 704pp, £28.50
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• The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945
  N.A.M. Rodger
  Allen Lane, 976pp, £38
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‘For the first time, does not neglect the perspective of the pagan Lithuanians themselves’

Francis Young is author of Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press)

The Teutonic Knights Strike East: The 14th-Century Crusades in Lithuania and Rus’ by William Urban and Darius Baronas (Pen & Sword) brings together two of the most important historians of (respectively) the Baltic Crusades and medieval Lithuania, making possible a history of the Teutonic Order’s campaign against the unconverted Baltic peoples that, for the first time, does not neglect the perspective of the pagan Lithuanians themselves.

Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War by Kit Kowol (Oxford) is a remarkable history of the Conservative Party during the Second World War that explores the lengths wartime Conservatives were willing to go to in order to imagine a Tory future for the postwar nation. Kowol shows that radical and utopian visions of postwar construction were not just the preserve of the Left, and that in spite of their crushing defeat in the 1945 election Conservatives could be just as visionary and creative.

• The Teutonic Knights Strike East: The 14th-Century Crusades in Lithuania and Rus’
  William Urban and Darius Baronas
  Pen & Sword, 336pp, £23.75
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)