Books of the Year 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
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• 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
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• Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War
  Kit Kowol
  Oxford University Press, 352pp, £30
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‘Where this leaves Native American Indian treaties, defined as binding within the Constitution as a text, is an open and troubling question’

Joy Porter is University of Birmingham 125th Anniversary Chair and Professor of Indigenous and Environmental History

Jonathan Gienapp’s Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale) reminds us that America’s founding generation acknowledged both written and unwritten sources of law, including natural and moral law. This makes the US Constitution much more amenable to change and alignment with present ideas of public good. However, where this leaves Native American Indian treaties, defined as binding within the Constitution as a text, is an open and troubling question. As thinking develops, it matters that Indian treaties are accorded at least the same weight today as on the day they were signed.

How Indian treaties have impelled American extractive industries, and how coal development became part of the Navajo Nation’s expression of sovereignty, is explained in Andrew Curley’s Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (University of Arizona Press). It’s complicated, and importantly Curley neither romanticises the Navajo, their oral traditions, nor what it takes to balance t’aa hwo aji t’eego – the Navajo ethic of responsibility to do what is needed – and the imperative to survive within capitalism on ancestral lands.

• Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique
  Jonathan Gienapp
  Yale University Press, 361pp, £25
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• Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation
  Andrew Curley
  The University of Arizona Press, 232pp, £107

‘A persuasive account of how the polis came to be’

Mirela Ivanova is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield and author of Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople (Oxford University Press)

My book of the year is John Ma’s Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity (Princeton), a meticulously researched history of the peculiar political phenomenon of the autonomous city state, ruled by an elite class of peers who shared resources to achieve common goals. Ma’s magnum opus offers a persuasive account of how the polis came to be, and the book does well to dwell on its liberatory political possibilities without losing sight of the fact the polis was also ‘a patriarchy, an enslavement society, a nativist organization, and a polity haunted by the model of an urban aristocracy’. An extraordinary achievement. 

I also enjoyed Zrinka Stahuljak’s Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press), which asks us to rethink medieval translators and all the social and political roles they served beyond simply rendering meaning from one language into another.

• Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity
  John Ma
  Princeton University Press, 736pp, £42
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• Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature
  Zrinka Stahuljak
  The University of Chicago Press, 357pp, £28
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‘Essentially a forensic study of the last week of Tsar Nicholas II’s reign’

Donald Rayfield is author of ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate (Reaktion)

Anna Reid’s compelling A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (John Murray) is the first coherent account of the disastrous allied intervention in the Russian Civil War (1918-21): a warning never to intervene in others’ civil wars.

Lucy Ash’s passionate The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin (Icon) convinced me that Pussy Riot’s 2012 sacrilege in the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was far more Christian than anything the Russian Orthodox Church has said or done over the last 80 years.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs (Hachette) is essentially a forensic study of the last week of Tsar Nicholas II’s reign and the shenanigans of grand dukes, generals, parliamentarians and officials by which his train, and his reign, were brought to a halt.

• A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution
  Anna Reid
  John Murray Press, 384pp, £23.75
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• The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin
  Lucy Ash
  Icon Books, 384pp, £23.75
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• The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs
  Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
  John Murray Press, 560pp, £23.75
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‘It’s tough to find a new angle on Tudor history but Nicola Clark has an excellent one’

Catherine Fletcher is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of The Roads to Rome: A History (Bodley Head)

Andrew C. McKevitt’s excellent Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (The University of North Carolina Press) traces the present-day gun culture of the United States, not to its mythologised founding, but to the mass import of military surplus weapons after the Second World War. This flood of cheap firearms prompted calls for gun control well before the emergence of the Black Panthers. New readings of the Second Amendment, emphasising an individual right to arms, emerged after the 1968 Gun Control Act as gun rights activists sought to head off further restrictions.

It’s tough to find a new angle on Tudor history but Nicola Clark has an excellent one in The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens (W&N). Clark explores the lives and fates of the ladies-in-waiting who witnessed the drama of the Tudor court, with a sharp eye for the different ways they navigated the ebbs and flows of fortune.

• Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America
  Andrew C. McKevitt
  The University of North Carolina Press, 320pp, £20.95
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• The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens
  Nicola Clark
  Orion Publishing Co, 320pp, £20.90
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‘Historians of sexuality will be reckoning with this book for decades’

Joseph Hone is Reader in Literature and Book History at Newcastle University and author of The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime That Fooled the World (Chatto & Windus)

A new book from Noel Malcolm is always an event and Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 (Oxford) does not disappoint. Combining polyglot archival virtuosity with perspicacious revisionism and literary elegance, Forbidden Desire is a work of breathtaking ambition and accomplishment, ranging from the frozen shores of Scandinavia to the piazzas of Venice and the Ottoman court. Historians of sexuality will be reckoning with this book for decades. And for the rest of us, the book is a wonderful opportunity to see the maestro at work. Not to be missed.

Another deeply enjoyable book, very different though equally grounded in meticulous archival research, is Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman’s Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (Yale). There are fascinating nuggets on every page and, for those wishing to enter the great game, a map of London safehouses, an index of codenames and a potentially handy recipe for poison…

• Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750
  Noel Malcolm
  Oxford University Press, 608pp, £25
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• Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration
  Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman
  Yale University Press, 368pp, £19
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‘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