When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.

Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memo...

This new and now unabridged English translation of Huizinga’s Autumntide of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen) celebrates the centenary of a book that still ranks as one of the most perceptive and influential analyses of the late medieval period. Its wide-ranging discussion of fourteenth and fifteenth century France and the Low Countries makes it a classic study of life, culture, and thought in medieval society.

The translation of the original text captures the impact of Huizing...

Any democracy perishes by itself. After all, all power-structures are part of boom-and-bust cycles.

Q. Why, then, didn't our democracy collapse already?

A. Because our dying democracy is anxiously kept in a vegetative state.

Q. By whom?

A. By the wealth- & power holders, the top 0.01 percent, the dominant class who, in fact, have always held power. Indeed, democracy, in the end, always amounts to an elite (Robert Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy, 1911). For when an interest group seizes po...

ROBERT FISK HAS BEEN REPORTING FROM THE MIDDLE EAST WITH INCOMPARABLE DEPTH AND UNDERSTANDING…AND EXTRAORDINARY COURAGE' NOAM CHOMSKY

In this final work from renowned journalist Robert Fisk, he picks up reporting on the Middle East where his internationally bestselling The Great War of Civilisation left off.

‘In his attentive, careful, detailed, historically grounded reporting — and in this remarkable posthumous book, which deserves to be widely read — the voices of people demanding f...

An epic history of how the so-called 'barbarians of the steppes' shaped the modern world.

?A rollercoaster of historical narration' History Today

'This is a history of epic scope that brings together the empires of the steppe land with the caravan cities of the Silk Road and imperial China' Martyn Rady, author of The Middle Kingdoms

'A sweeping account of forty-five centuries of nomadic tribes' Gillian Tett, Financial Times

'Flips the script to present the booted, felt-c...

Vitéz Andris Kursietis has been a researcher of military history for over fifty years, using resources that span the globe. His latest book, “Slava Ukraini!”, contains the military biographies of almost 280 generals and admirals who served Ukraine during the four-and-a-half years of its struggle for existence, between 1917-1921, with an appendix that includes senior officers serving in the Ukrainian National Army in 1945, and those officers promoted by the Ukrainian government in exile.

...

How did South Africa turn out the way it did? In Moederland - 'Motherland', in Afrikaans - Cato Pedder takes us on an eye-opening journey across four centuries, tracing the country's turbulent past and the rise and fall of apartheid (and her family's charged legacy) through the lives of nine very different women.

KROTOA is Khoikhoi translator to the newly arrived Dutch East India Company

ANGELA, a former slave from Bengal, climbs the ladder of settler society

ELSJE arrives from Germany aged 3...

Emphasising context, connections and long-term trends, A History of Korea illuminates both the distinctiveness and universality of one of the world's oldest cultures. Assuming no prior knowledge, Hwang guides readers from early state formation and the dynastic eras to the modern experience in both North and South Korea. Structured around episodic accounts, each chapter begins by discussing a defining moment in Korean history in context, with an extensive examination of how the events and them...

For most of its modern history, India was fated to be on the receiving end of cultural influence from other civilisations. But this isn't the complete story. A full millennium earlier, India's major cultural exports - religion, art, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, language and literature - were shaping civilisations, traveling as far as Afghanistan in the West and Japan in the East.

Out of India came pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and ma...

A fascinating and surprising history of the world told through the lines people have drawn on maps, by the 'charming and outstandingly nerdish' author of The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way....