Books of the Year 2023

‘This is how economic history should be done’

Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University and author of Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton, 2023)

Meticulously researched and written with flair, Ekaterina Pravilova’s The Ruble: A Political History (Oxford) is the story of how monetary policy, seemingly the most impersonal of forces, resonated throughout an immense and diverse empire touching every aspect, from daily life to high politics and the social imagination. An unequalled introduction to modern Russia, this is how economic history should be done.

Christopher I. Beckwith’s The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (Princeton) spans the world from China to the Danube, joining revolutions of military technology and social practice with equally profound breakthroughs in the human mind – Plato, Zoroaster and the Buddha. Prodigiously learned, the book is full of hitherto unthought-of connections across the northern steppes. Not everyone will agree with Beckwith, but all will be challenged by his book which turns the classical world as we know it inside out.

The Ruble: A Political History
Robert Darnton
Oxford, 576pp, £30.99
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The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China
Christopher I. Beckwork
Princeton, 416pp, £35
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‘Lyrical and iconoclastic by turns’

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford and author of Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers (Allen Lane, 2023)

Four centuries after Shakespeare’s First Folio left the Jaggards’ print shop in the Barbican, the British Library have produced a beautiful facsimile of one of their copies, complete with the original volume’s bright red gold-tooled binding. Uncluttered by introduction or commentary, this lovely book is as close as most of us will ever get to the real thing.

Moving from page to the stage, Callan Davies’ refreshing book What Is a Playhouse? England at Play 1520-1620 (Routledge) re-examines an economy of fun. If the First Folio put the plays firmly in the study, Davies examines them in the context of the entertainments of their time, including gambling, sport, drinking and bear-baiting.

Finally, Joe Minden’s collection Poppy (Carcanet) thinks anew about the tropes of war poetry, and about the relationship between literature, memory and history: lyrical and iconoclastic by turns, this is a poet to look out for.

Shakespeare's First Folio
William Shakespeare
British Library, 912pp, £125
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What is a Playhouse?: England at Play, 1520-1620
Callan Davies
Routledge, 230pp, £35.99
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Poppy
Joseph Minden
Carcanet, 112pp, £11.99
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‘A refreshing reappraisal’

Sheila Miyosh Jager is Professor of East Asian History at Oberlin College, Ohio and author of The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Belknap Press, 2023)

Chiang Kai-shek led the Republic of China for almost 50 years from 1926. Drawing on his diaries and unused Russian archives, Alexander V. Pantsov’s Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-shek, China, 1887-1975 (Yale) is a refreshing reappraisal of a man who was neither the corrupt fascist of standard historiography nor the tragic hero of more recent positive reassessments.

During a gloomy period, it is good to have a reminder that the US has survived periods of tumult and self-doubt. Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (Mariner) paints a picture of America in the years following its entry into the war. Patriotic frenzy, strikes, race riots and anarchist bombings unleashed a wave of political repression which taught a later generation of liberals that it was better to absorb some radical ideas than to reject them altogether.

Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-shek, China, 1887-1975
Alexander V. Pantsov
Yale, 736pp, £30
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American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis
Adam Hochschild
Mariner, 432pp, £12.99
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‘Empires were neither devilish slaughterhouses nor philanthropic charities’

Pratinav Anil is Lecturer at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and author of Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77 (Hurst, 2023)

With an unenviable ringside view of the culture wars, I’ve had to slog through many a dispiriting polemic on the British Empire this year. Yet as some histories have shown – such as Nandini Das’ account of London’s froward, foppish first ambassador to India, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury), and Matthew Parker’s history of the British Empire at its territorial zenith, One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink (Abacus) – empires were neither devilish slaughterhouses nor philanthropic charities but rather precarious, parsimonious things.

I also enjoyed Tamson Pietsch’s brilliant The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge (Chicago), in which a rogue university professor sets up a college at sea. Posh brats are also up to no good in John Brewer’s whimsical Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions (Yale) on romance and revolution in 19th-century Naples. Hot stuff.

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
Nandini Das
Bloomsbury, 480pp, £30
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One Fine Day: Britain's Empire on the Brink
Matthew Parker
Abacus, 625pp, £25
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The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge
Tamson Pietsch
Chicago, 331pp, £32
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Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions
John Brewer
Yale, 664pp, £30
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‘A vibrant long-term narrative’

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

‘The future is not what it used to be’, quips Richard Fisher in The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time (Wildfire. His lively manifesto for the Anthropocene Age investigates diverse attitudes towards time and the human tendency to favour short-term rewards. For our world to survive, he insists, we must take action now: tomorrow will be too late.

An equally vibrant long-term narrative is Aarathi Prasad’s Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses (William Collins), which glides effortlessly between Neolithic sculpture, insects and the tantalising lure of fabricating smart materials with medical applications. In contrast, Maria Smilios focuses on a single but shameful episode in US history. The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis (Little, Brown) evocatively relates the stories of black nurses recruited to care for white sufferers from tuberculosis during the Great Depression.

The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time
Richard Fisher
Wildfire, 352pp, £25
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Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses
Aarathi Prasad
William Collins, 368pp, £22
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The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis
Maria Smilios
Little, Brown, 448pp, £35
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‘A fascinating study of legends and popular belief’

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford and columnist at History Today

The book that gave me the most to think about this year was Francis Young’s Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge), which traces the history of belief in fairies, elves, landscape spirits and other ‘godlings’ from the pre-Roman period up to the end of the Middle Ages. It’s a fascinating study of legends and popular beliefs which have historically often been marginalised or misunderstood.

A very different strand of medieval belief is explored by Michelle P. Brown in Bede and the Theory of Everything (Reaktion). Brown takes an integrated view of Bede’s life and work as a historian, scientist, scribe, poet and translator. She argues that for Bede all these fields of study were as richly interconnected as the intricate artwork of the Lindisfarne Gospels: his was a view of history ‘grounded in an appreciation of long time and space and the interconnectivity of all things’.

Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings
Francis Young
Cambridge, 350pp, £30
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Bede and the Theory of Everything
Michelle P. Brown
Reaktion, 312pp, £16.95
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‘This wry scholarly autobiography excels in its pen portraits’

Michael Ledger-Lomas is Author of Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown (Oxford, 2021)

As Peter Brown’s histories of antique Christianity have been models for my explorations of Victorian religion, I was gripped by Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton). This wry scholarly autobiography excels in its pen portraits of scholars who have influenced Brown, from Mary Douglas to Michel Foucault.

Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-1849 (Allen Lane) confirms his standing as a maestro of contingency. His panoramic book presents the European revolutions as a ‘particle collision chamber’ for peoples and movements, which generated new ideologies and forms of governmentality.

Stephen Bown’s Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada (Doubleday) shows how the Canadian Pacific Railway strengthened imperial Canada by linking its two coasts. This model popular history offers Canadians a coherent but unillusioned narrative about how their state came to be, which emphasises the ruthlessness as well as the ambition of its architects.

Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
Peter Brown
Princeton, 736pp, £38
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Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-1849
Christopher Clark
Allen Lane, 896pp, £35
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Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada
Stephen Brown
Doubleday, 416pp, £25

‘Makes artful use of records, recounting matters as mundane as travel permits, tax investigations and deportations’

Amrita Malhi is Researcher at Flinders University and the Australian National University

Kalyani Ramnath’s Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962 (Stanford) is an important examination of the way the Second World War and subsequent decolonisation broke the circuits connecting South and Southeast Asia – circuits in which hundreds of thousands of mobile Indians lived their lives. Through the lens of law, and her own family’s flight from Burma, Ramnath recounts how the Japanese occupation forced many of these Indians to ‘return’ to India, complicating their claims to citizenship in the newly independent states that emerged after the war. Ramnath makes artful use of records, recounting matters as mundane as travel permits, tax investigations and deportations to show how ordinary people experienced decolonisation as a rupture that restructured lives lived ‘around and across’ the Indian Ocean.

Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962
Kalyani Ramnath
Stanford, 308pp, £25.99
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‘Brilliantly combines technical knowledge and historical insights’

Rhiannon Ash is Professor of Roman Historiography at Merton College, University of Oxford

When is a tree not a tree? When Annalisa Marzano offers her vibrant and perceptive study of the cultural and political dimension of Roman arboriculture, exploring the movement of plants from one part of the empire to another as a way to understand key aspects of Roman imperialism, culture and identity. In Plants, Politics, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge), Marzano brilliantly combines technical knowledge and historical insights to deliver a unique study of the era of the principate of Emperor Augustus and beyond.

T. Corey Brennan’s The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome’s Most Dangerous Political Symbol (Oxford) is a wide-reaching, ambitious book presenting a global history of fasces (‘an assemblage of wooden rods, typically about a meter and a half long, bound by leather straps together with a single-headed axe – the equipment needed to inflict either corporal or capital punishment’). Brennan covers a vast sweep of time, moving from their Etruscan origins in antiquity to the revival of the symbol in fascist Europe.

Plants, Politics, and Empire in Ancient Rome
Annalisa Marzano
Allen Lane, 380pp, £90

The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome’s Most Dangerous Political Symbol
T. Corey Brennan
Oxford, 288pp, £26.49
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‘Raises interesting questions about how we use historical evidence’

Nandini Das is author of Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury)

I have been thinking a lot about life-writing and biographies recently. Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man by Peter K. Andersson (Princeton) is a fascinating look at Will Somer, Henry VIII’s court fool. It is a book that makes a great case for looking at history through those who are often disregarded, but also raises interesting questions about how we use historical evidence – particularly when that evidence is of the non-traditional sort (in Somer’s case his afterlife in Tudor jest-books and drama).

Then there is Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock (Bloomsbury), which places the eccentric, volatile writer of The Blazing World against the backdrop of all the political and intellectual turmoil of her time.

And I can’t wait for readers to see Ruby Lal’s Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale), out early next year, which will shed new light on our understanding of the lives of pre-modern Islamic women travellers.

Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man
Peter K. Andersson
Princeton, 224pp, £22
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Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish
Francesca Peacock
Bloomsbury, 384pp, £27.99
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Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan
Ruby Lal
Yale, 280pp, £22
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