History & Politics

Tamerlane, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Manchus, the British, the Soviets, the Japanese and the Nazis - all built empires they hoped would last forever: all were destined to fail. This book shows how their empire building created the world.

Started to worry about just how hot our world is going to get, and whether you can do anything about it? As the effect of climate change grows by the day, so does the amount of hot air and bluster spouted by politicians and businessmen on what we should do about it. Using investigative journalism, this work presents facts and inspiring ideas.

This is a new, improved translation of the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Adorno and Horkheimer aimed "to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

Talented historian Maya Jasanoff offers an alternative history of the British Empire. It is not about conquest - but rather a collection of startling and fascinating personal accounts of cross-cultural exchange from those who found themselves on the edges of Empire.

There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It considers themes in the history of discrimination. It provides analysis of proto-racism and prejudices toward particular groups of foreigners in Greco-Roman world.

Sifts through the works of a score of contemporary Arab chroniclers of the Crusades, eyewitnesses and often participants in the events. This book retells their stories in their own style, giving us a vivid portrait of a society rent by internal conflicts, and shaken by a traumatic encounter with an alien culture.

Fascism was the major political invention of the twentieth century and the source of much of its pain. How can we try to comprehend its allure and its horror? Is it a philosophy, a movement, an aesthetic experience? What makes states and nations become fascist?

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped with the experience. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest.

Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured empires across Europe and Asia, they have also inspired revolution - Gandhi's salt march in 1930 began the overthrow of British rule in India.

*A controversial but optimistic book about humanity's increasing co-operation and our technological future