History Book Reviews

A History of the Ottoman Empire offers a comprehensive survey of Ottoman history in broad contours. Its author, Douglas A. Howard, Professor Emeritus at Calvin University, defies misconceptions and prejudices about...

“It was the most terrible conflict that anyone could remember. Entire kingdoms were mobilised for combat. Slaughter fit to stupefy poets was visited on the ranks of the rival combatants" (3). Tom Holland’s first lines of Athelstan...

Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar is a deeply researched book, exploring every avenue of the history of sugar. It is a book that historians, academics, and scholars alike will appreciate, as it does...

Adrian Goldsworthy is one of the most steadily prolific classical antiquarians writing today. Having received his DPhil in ancient history from Oxford, Goldsworthy has spent the past 30 years producing...

Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard and the Bancroft Prize-winning author of the Empire of Cotton (2015), assembles a staggering amount of primary and secondary research on several continents. He...

In Conquering Chaos: Alexander the Great’s Wisdom for Leading in Disruptive Times, Steve Muscato attempts to synthesise the lightning-fast military conquests of the 4th century...

When discussing an academic book on mapping, one might expect a text laden with lists of geological and geographical features of places that are barely depicted beyond soils and sediments. However...

The reader is greeted with an iconic photo, likely recognizable from any lower division textbook or online article, of men waiting in line for a meal. The photo is misleading for two reasons...

A conundrum of history books is that some great research is written in an uninteresting fashion, and some beautifully written tomes are filled with errors in their research or lack citations...