This is valuable, Patrick. Would you also be able to share your favourites from among the books you mentioned / authors you interviewed in the "Rise of the Modern World" iteration of Tides? There were lots you mentioned in the various podcast episodes, but I never had a chance to write down the names (usually listening while driving...)
Totally with you about Tooze's The Deluge. It's very very good, as is the rest of his opus. Right now, I'm reading William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, about the British East India Company and the establishment of the Raj, which was far from the monument to enlightened imperialism its defenders (yes, they exist and several are in the UK government) it's cracked up to be. It's beautifully written, too. Roger Crowley's Accursed Tower is on top of the to-read pile and I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into that. Sadly, Tony Judt's Post War - Europe since 1945 is going to have to wait until I get some more powerful glasses. The print on the paperback edition is tiny. In the fiction category, I'm on the closing pages of Guinevere Glasfurd's The Year Without Summer, set in 1816 after the eruption of Mount Tambora cancelled summer a world away in Europe and featuring, among others, Mary Shelley and John Constable. Fascinating and beautifully writtten.
Hi Patrick. Love your podcasts and your posts. Thanks for the list! I read "Against the Grain" two or so years ago. It's a really fascinating book and I was very intrigued by the contrarian view to the "agriculture as the birth of civilization" narrative that the author presents. Totally agree with you that whatever the author's main goal or message with the publishing of the work, it's a tremendous source of knowledge and expertise. I've read the following books over the last 6 months and I've found them extremely engaging and interesting:
- "By Desert, Steppe, and Ocean - The Birth of Eurasia" by Barry Cunliffe
- "The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans" - by David Abulafia
- "Collision of Worlds - A deep history of the fall of Aztec Mexico and the forging of New Spain" by David M. Carballo
Keep up all the awesome work, look forward to your next posts and podcasts!
It's weird, given my interests, that I've never read one of Barry Cunliffe's books; I have "Europe Between the Oceans" on my shelf but haven't gotten to it yet. What did you think of the title you read?
I really enjoyed "By Desert, Steppe and Ocean". A pretty decent chunk of the book, maybe the first quarter of it if not more, focuses on the cultures and remains of peoples in the period ~30k BC to the first major agrarian settlements (which you're covering now in Tides of History), mostly in the great Asian steppe areas, but also in Europe. This focus highlights how the connectivity of the Eurasian continent goes way way back, to the way goods and technologies began dispersing and forming the early networks that eventually became the Silk road and others. Super fascinating and enlightening for me, since I knew little about peoples and cultures of pre-agrarian settlements. The book covers history through to the the early 15th century, focusing a lot on the overland networks and the steppe-vs-settled modes of trade and tribute. I recall the narrative being pretty engaging and light on deviations from what the archaeology and source texts indicate, but in a way that keeps each chapter connected to the grand scope of history the book covers. The book also has tons of maps and photos that enrich the narrative.
My only knock is that the time the books spends on early pre-history very sparsely covers developments in China, though that may just be due to lack of sources.
Alright so this recommendation might be a bit specialist, but for anyone who is interested in Indigenous history from Indigenous perspectives, I would recommend "Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk". For those who don't know, the Beothuk are considered the only Indigenous people in what is now Canada (more specifically, Newfoundland and Labrador) who were completely "wiped out." This was an argument made by the colonial governments of both the province and the federal government in order to perpetuate the empty land myth. The government was able to argue that since there were 'no more Indians' there was no need to create and implement Indigenous policy in the province. Tracing Ochre is a collection of essays by both Indigenous authors and non-Indigenous scholars working in conjunction to argue against the traditional scholarship in relation to the Beothuk and Indigenous perspectives on both historic and modern issues in Newfoundland Labrador.
The way of the teacher is that you don't actually read anything over the school year because you don't have time so I don't have anything right now that I'm really reading. Over the summer, however, I read two fascinating books.
The first was SPQR the history of the early Rome by Mary Beard which is very good. The second was The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabella Wilkerson which is about the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to Northern Cities. Another very good book.
I liked SPQR a lot - great treatment of the recent archaeology on Roman Italy, nice discussions of domestic and non-elite life. Mary Beard is on my dream list of people I'd like to interview.
Students enjoy having a different medium to perform basic research, especially the students who aren’t great readers. These podcasts are so well produced that students find Tides to be more engaging than other options.
I usually wish that every episode of Tides came with a detailed bibliography, so this is great. Right now I'm reading Chris Wickham's "The Inheritance of Rome" from the Penguin History of Europe series. For a volume that covers the entire Dark Ages in a single book, I've found it really interesting and in-depth. I think it's fascinating that, for a period that is often thought of as one of chaos and fracture, the major players were highly "centralized", for lack of a better term. The Carolingians, Byzantium, and the Abbasids were all proper empires and it's only when the medieval period begins that decentralization really takes off.
I feel like diving into the entire series would be unsustainable, given the length of my reading list right now, but Wickham makes me want to try. Do you have any thoughts on Neil Price's "Children of Ash and Elm" or Camilla Townsend's "Fifth Sun"? It's a coin flip right now for which one I start next.
I have "Children of Ash and Elm" on my Kindle right now but haven't started it yet - Dan Jones suggested it to me after reading a review copy, so it comes highly recommended; I've really enjoyed "Fifth Sun" as well. I don't think you can go wrong with either.
Tooze's book is excellent. But, the thing Tooze explained, that I had not previously understood, was how badly Wilson botched the Armistice negotiations. WWII's peace objectives [unconditional surrender, occupation, 4 successor entities] was what should have happened at the end of WWI. The failure was Wilson's doing.
Just finished "You are all free," about the events leading directly to the abolition of slavery in Saint Domingue (Haiti), then "Black Spartacus," which specifically examines Toussaint Louverture. Really enjoyed both. Been a few years since Mike Duncan's series on the Haitian Revolution and it was...just as sad and eye opening to return to it.
Hi-I’ve put White’s book on my list. I’ve just finished Caste-The origins of Our Discontent. Brilliant, brilliant. It reframes discussions around race in this country and goes a long way to explain current events-I’ve been a reader for close to 70 years and would be hard put to name a book that has reframed an issue more successfully. By the way, I grew up 30 miles upriver from you in Ellensburg. Enjoyed your piece on your high school classmates. Similar to your experience. I’m one of those who escaped to the Seattle area. It took me a year of attending UW to realize Yakima wasn’t a big city. Came as a bit of a shock.
This is a good list, thanks for sharing. I've been slowly working through the Oxford Histories, but I haven't gotten to the Gilded Age.
However, I'm not sure I would consider Against the Grain a magnum opus for Scott. I think Seeing Like a State has had the most impact on the field, and Weapons of the Weak re-framed a lot of discussions in political science away from elite-focused explanations.
I've been working through Sarah Igo's The Known Citizen, a really good history of privacy in the United States, and especially one that moves away from some of the more common discourses around privacy as simply absence of surveillance.
I'm also finally getting to Polayni's Great Transformation, which I have avoided for too long. And then Sun-ha Hong's new Technologies of Speculation, which is looking at how the technology is changing how we think of knowledge, and what the desire for quantification has done to our understanding of epistemology in a broad sense.
I'm fascinated by the Thirty Years' War (and so am hoping that someday when you return from prehistory, you will relent and do some episodes on it). Someone got me to read C.V. Wedgewood's one volume history, which was just a joy to read. There's something compelling about the story of these rulers who didn't have sufficient resources to pay their armies, gathering them up, setting them at each other, and then watching them go rogue when they weren't paid.
When you announced that you weren't going to get to the Thirty Year's War in your early modern series, I decided to look for something that would give more modern scholarship. I got Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy, but I have to say it was a disappointment. As a stylist, he's fine, at the paragraph-to-paragraph level, but the book fell into the "one damn thing after another" trap, and didn't leave me with anything much. Also, the maps were inadequate to orient the reader, and the narrative didn't keep the reader oriented about the cast of characters (who the heck is "the Duke"? -- there are more dukes than you can shake a stick at!). Also, after your excellent discussions with the composite characters, it was disappointing to go back to a narrative that just had events with little attention to the lived experience of people at the time.
Now I am reading Golo Mann's *deeply* eccentric Wallenstein: His Life Narrated, and enjoying it much more. Certainly not for everyone, and it doesn't give much of a sense of the lived experience of the great mass of the populace, but it gives a better felt understanding (in my opinion) of how the whole mess first spun out of control, and took so long to converge to a peace that the vast majority of the participants wanted to see. Still haven't gotten to his assassination, though! I suppose I should read the Schiller book, if I can find a decent translation.
Wedgewood's book is a genuine masterwork of narrative history, part of a tradition of big-scale political/military history that's not nearly as salient today. Love it.
Yikes RE Wilson's book on the Thirty Years War. I read his "Heart of Europe" on the Holy Roman Empire and had precisely the same impression - he obviously knows the specialist work, his arguments themselves aren't objectionable, but his organization of the material is, uh, not great.
Love the book recommendations! My pandemic reading list has essentially been curated by Tides of History. I'd be interested in your thoughts on Scheidel's Escape from Rome, and God's Shadow by Alan Mikhail
I love this idea of sharing book ideas, thanks Patrick. I'll be picking up Tooze's and Against the Grain. But this will just add to my ever-growing stack of books that I can't keep up with!
The last book I finished was Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership. Right now I'm reading Tom Rick's book Fiasco on the Iraq war, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in what went wrong there from a political standpoint and on the ground militarily. I'm also slowly but surely getting through Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
After those I can go in a few different directions; I'm torn between Guns, Germs and Steel, Sapians and Spengler's Decline of the West. Or else to completely change it up and for some light reading I have Conn Iggulden's fiction series on the War of the Roses.
Thank you for this post, Patrick. Please continue to share your reading lists with us. I thoroughly enjoy and am always looking forward to your reading recommendations- episodes on your podcast so I am really grateful for these extra tidbits.
For what it’s worth, for my non-dissertation work, I am currently reading Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust and Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America, which I find utterly absorbing and disturbing - just the right things to wade through in these “great” times.
At times, I feel like it's a catalogue of atrocities in the vein of King Leopold's Ghost, though Bailyn manages to break the relentless misery and suffering and tidy that up with some really good prose. Some other times, it's like the non-fiction version of Philipp Meyer's The Son.
Thanks for sharing this list Patrick! I've just finished 'Unravelling the Double Helix' by Gareth Williams, which tells the story of how DNA came to be understood from the discovery of the "nuclein" (via puss-covered bandages in a German castle) to the final scramble in 1953 - and the consequences of that moment when it all clicked into place.
Next on my list is Rebecca Wragg Sykes's 'Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art'. She was on Dan Snow's History Hit podcast recently and her new book sounds fascinating.
I think these books discussions are a valuable addition to your posts, Patrick. I just finished “Cosmos Crumbling” by Robert H. Abzug. There are some major limitations to the book but one strength is a convincing demonstration of reform movements during the 2nd Great Awakening steering American thought to think of the poor and addicts as individual moral failures rather than people experiencing temporary setback or a failure of the system that caused their situation. I’m using part of “Against the Grain” and Jared Diamond’s essay “Worst Mistake in Human History” with my high schoolers soon.
This is valuable, Patrick. Would you also be able to share your favourites from among the books you mentioned / authors you interviewed in the "Rise of the Modern World" iteration of Tides? There were lots you mentioned in the various podcast episodes, but I never had a chance to write down the names (usually listening while driving...)
For sure! I can absolutely come back to that.
Totally with you about Tooze's The Deluge. It's very very good, as is the rest of his opus. Right now, I'm reading William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, about the British East India Company and the establishment of the Raj, which was far from the monument to enlightened imperialism its defenders (yes, they exist and several are in the UK government) it's cracked up to be. It's beautifully written, too. Roger Crowley's Accursed Tower is on top of the to-read pile and I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into that. Sadly, Tony Judt's Post War - Europe since 1945 is going to have to wait until I get some more powerful glasses. The print on the paperback edition is tiny. In the fiction category, I'm on the closing pages of Guinevere Glasfurd's The Year Without Summer, set in 1816 after the eruption of Mount Tambora cancelled summer a world away in Europe and featuring, among others, Mary Shelley and John Constable. Fascinating and beautifully writtten.
"The Anarchy" is so great - I should cover it in a future installment here. "Accursed Tower" is a fun read as well.
This podcast interview with Adam Tooze might be of interest: https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/adam-tooze-on-world-order-then-and
Thanks. I'll get to it now!
Strongly recommend “Post War”. It’s great
I can see an audiobook in my future
Hi Patrick. Love your podcasts and your posts. Thanks for the list! I read "Against the Grain" two or so years ago. It's a really fascinating book and I was very intrigued by the contrarian view to the "agriculture as the birth of civilization" narrative that the author presents. Totally agree with you that whatever the author's main goal or message with the publishing of the work, it's a tremendous source of knowledge and expertise. I've read the following books over the last 6 months and I've found them extremely engaging and interesting:
- "By Desert, Steppe, and Ocean - The Birth of Eurasia" by Barry Cunliffe
- "The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans" - by David Abulafia
- "Collision of Worlds - A deep history of the fall of Aztec Mexico and the forging of New Spain" by David M. Carballo
Keep up all the awesome work, look forward to your next posts and podcasts!
It's weird, given my interests, that I've never read one of Barry Cunliffe's books; I have "Europe Between the Oceans" on my shelf but haven't gotten to it yet. What did you think of the title you read?
I really enjoyed "By Desert, Steppe and Ocean". A pretty decent chunk of the book, maybe the first quarter of it if not more, focuses on the cultures and remains of peoples in the period ~30k BC to the first major agrarian settlements (which you're covering now in Tides of History), mostly in the great Asian steppe areas, but also in Europe. This focus highlights how the connectivity of the Eurasian continent goes way way back, to the way goods and technologies began dispersing and forming the early networks that eventually became the Silk road and others. Super fascinating and enlightening for me, since I knew little about peoples and cultures of pre-agrarian settlements. The book covers history through to the the early 15th century, focusing a lot on the overland networks and the steppe-vs-settled modes of trade and tribute. I recall the narrative being pretty engaging and light on deviations from what the archaeology and source texts indicate, but in a way that keeps each chapter connected to the grand scope of history the book covers. The book also has tons of maps and photos that enrich the narrative.
My only knock is that the time the books spends on early pre-history very sparsely covers developments in China, though that may just be due to lack of sources.
Alright so this recommendation might be a bit specialist, but for anyone who is interested in Indigenous history from Indigenous perspectives, I would recommend "Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk". For those who don't know, the Beothuk are considered the only Indigenous people in what is now Canada (more specifically, Newfoundland and Labrador) who were completely "wiped out." This was an argument made by the colonial governments of both the province and the federal government in order to perpetuate the empty land myth. The government was able to argue that since there were 'no more Indians' there was no need to create and implement Indigenous policy in the province. Tracing Ochre is a collection of essays by both Indigenous authors and non-Indigenous scholars working in conjunction to argue against the traditional scholarship in relation to the Beothuk and Indigenous perspectives on both historic and modern issues in Newfoundland Labrador.
The way of the teacher is that you don't actually read anything over the school year because you don't have time so I don't have anything right now that I'm really reading. Over the summer, however, I read two fascinating books.
The first was SPQR the history of the early Rome by Mary Beard which is very good. The second was The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabella Wilkerson which is about the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to Northern Cities. Another very good book.
I liked SPQR a lot - great treatment of the recent archaeology on Roman Italy, nice discussions of domestic and non-elite life. Mary Beard is on my dream list of people I'd like to interview.
What and what level do you teach? I use some of Patrick’s podcasts as research suggestions for my high schoolers for World History.
Ben, how do your students respond to the podcasts?
Students enjoy having a different medium to perform basic research, especially the students who aren’t great readers. These podcasts are so well produced that students find Tides to be more engaging than other options.
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.
I usually wish that every episode of Tides came with a detailed bibliography, so this is great. Right now I'm reading Chris Wickham's "The Inheritance of Rome" from the Penguin History of Europe series. For a volume that covers the entire Dark Ages in a single book, I've found it really interesting and in-depth. I think it's fascinating that, for a period that is often thought of as one of chaos and fracture, the major players were highly "centralized", for lack of a better term. The Carolingians, Byzantium, and the Abbasids were all proper empires and it's only when the medieval period begins that decentralization really takes off.
Ahhhh I love "Inheritance of Rome" - it's basically a more accessible version of "Framing the Early Middle Ages," Wickham's masterwork.
I feel like diving into the entire series would be unsustainable, given the length of my reading list right now, but Wickham makes me want to try. Do you have any thoughts on Neil Price's "Children of Ash and Elm" or Camilla Townsend's "Fifth Sun"? It's a coin flip right now for which one I start next.
I have "Children of Ash and Elm" on my Kindle right now but haven't started it yet - Dan Jones suggested it to me after reading a review copy, so it comes highly recommended; I've really enjoyed "Fifth Sun" as well. I don't think you can go wrong with either.
Tooze's book is excellent. But, the thing Tooze explained, that I had not previously understood, was how badly Wilson botched the Armistice negotiations. WWII's peace objectives [unconditional surrender, occupation, 4 successor entities] was what should have happened at the end of WWI. The failure was Wilson's doing.
Just finished "You are all free," about the events leading directly to the abolition of slavery in Saint Domingue (Haiti), then "Black Spartacus," which specifically examines Toussaint Louverture. Really enjoyed both. Been a few years since Mike Duncan's series on the Haitian Revolution and it was...just as sad and eye opening to return to it.
Imperious Grant Rodiek? What a fab group of people here
Yes. I’m the board game designer.
Ha! Great. I just got the Imperious reprint. Like it a lot. I think Patrick would too
Hi-I’ve put White’s book on my list. I’ve just finished Caste-The origins of Our Discontent. Brilliant, brilliant. It reframes discussions around race in this country and goes a long way to explain current events-I’ve been a reader for close to 70 years and would be hard put to name a book that has reframed an issue more successfully. By the way, I grew up 30 miles upriver from you in Ellensburg. Enjoyed your piece on your high school classmates. Similar to your experience. I’m one of those who escaped to the Seattle area. It took me a year of attending UW to realize Yakima wasn’t a big city. Came as a bit of a shock.
This is a good list, thanks for sharing. I've been slowly working through the Oxford Histories, but I haven't gotten to the Gilded Age.
However, I'm not sure I would consider Against the Grain a magnum opus for Scott. I think Seeing Like a State has had the most impact on the field, and Weapons of the Weak re-framed a lot of discussions in political science away from elite-focused explanations.
I've been working through Sarah Igo's The Known Citizen, a really good history of privacy in the United States, and especially one that moves away from some of the more common discourses around privacy as simply absence of surveillance.
I'm also finally getting to Polayni's Great Transformation, which I have avoided for too long. And then Sun-ha Hong's new Technologies of Speculation, which is looking at how the technology is changing how we think of knowledge, and what the desire for quantification has done to our understanding of epistemology in a broad sense.
I'm fascinated by the Thirty Years' War (and so am hoping that someday when you return from prehistory, you will relent and do some episodes on it). Someone got me to read C.V. Wedgewood's one volume history, which was just a joy to read. There's something compelling about the story of these rulers who didn't have sufficient resources to pay their armies, gathering them up, setting them at each other, and then watching them go rogue when they weren't paid.
When you announced that you weren't going to get to the Thirty Year's War in your early modern series, I decided to look for something that would give more modern scholarship. I got Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy, but I have to say it was a disappointment. As a stylist, he's fine, at the paragraph-to-paragraph level, but the book fell into the "one damn thing after another" trap, and didn't leave me with anything much. Also, the maps were inadequate to orient the reader, and the narrative didn't keep the reader oriented about the cast of characters (who the heck is "the Duke"? -- there are more dukes than you can shake a stick at!). Also, after your excellent discussions with the composite characters, it was disappointing to go back to a narrative that just had events with little attention to the lived experience of people at the time.
Now I am reading Golo Mann's *deeply* eccentric Wallenstein: His Life Narrated, and enjoying it much more. Certainly not for everyone, and it doesn't give much of a sense of the lived experience of the great mass of the populace, but it gives a better felt understanding (in my opinion) of how the whole mess first spun out of control, and took so long to converge to a peace that the vast majority of the participants wanted to see. Still haven't gotten to his assassination, though! I suppose I should read the Schiller book, if I can find a decent translation.
Wedgewood's book is a genuine masterwork of narrative history, part of a tradition of big-scale political/military history that's not nearly as salient today. Love it.
Yikes RE Wilson's book on the Thirty Years War. I read his "Heart of Europe" on the Holy Roman Empire and had precisely the same impression - he obviously knows the specialist work, his arguments themselves aren't objectionable, but his organization of the material is, uh, not great.
Love the book recommendations! My pandemic reading list has essentially been curated by Tides of History. I'd be interested in your thoughts on Scheidel's Escape from Rome, and God's Shadow by Alan Mikhail
Haven't read God's Shadow, but really enjoyed Escape from Rome. Not an easy read but a worthwhile one.
I love this idea of sharing book ideas, thanks Patrick. I'll be picking up Tooze's and Against the Grain. But this will just add to my ever-growing stack of books that I can't keep up with!
The last book I finished was Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership. Right now I'm reading Tom Rick's book Fiasco on the Iraq war, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in what went wrong there from a political standpoint and on the ground militarily. I'm also slowly but surely getting through Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
After those I can go in a few different directions; I'm torn between Guns, Germs and Steel, Sapians and Spengler's Decline of the West. Or else to completely change it up and for some light reading I have Conn Iggulden's fiction series on the War of the Roses.
Thank you for this post, Patrick. Please continue to share your reading lists with us. I thoroughly enjoy and am always looking forward to your reading recommendations- episodes on your podcast so I am really grateful for these extra tidbits.
For what it’s worth, for my non-dissertation work, I am currently reading Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust and Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America, which I find utterly absorbing and disturbing - just the right things to wade through in these “great” times.
How have you found "The Barbarous Years"? It's on my maybe list.
At times, I feel like it's a catalogue of atrocities in the vein of King Leopold's Ghost, though Bailyn manages to break the relentless misery and suffering and tidy that up with some really good prose. Some other times, it's like the non-fiction version of Philipp Meyer's The Son.
Thanks for sharing this list Patrick! I've just finished 'Unravelling the Double Helix' by Gareth Williams, which tells the story of how DNA came to be understood from the discovery of the "nuclein" (via puss-covered bandages in a German castle) to the final scramble in 1953 - and the consequences of that moment when it all clicked into place.
Next on my list is Rebecca Wragg Sykes's 'Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art'. She was on Dan Snow's History Hit podcast recently and her new book sounds fascinating.
I think these books discussions are a valuable addition to your posts, Patrick. I just finished “Cosmos Crumbling” by Robert H. Abzug. There are some major limitations to the book but one strength is a convincing demonstration of reform movements during the 2nd Great Awakening steering American thought to think of the poor and addicts as individual moral failures rather than people experiencing temporary setback or a failure of the system that caused their situation. I’m using part of “Against the Grain” and Jared Diamond’s essay “Worst Mistake in Human History” with my high schoolers soon.