20th Century History

At the centre of this extraordinary historical narrative are two linked themes: the grinding down of the aborigines during the long rivalries of the quest for El Dorado, the mythical...

The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk with over $1 billion in gold and silver-and one man's obsessive quest to find it-from the Sunday Times bestselling...

An original history of the most enduring colonial creation, the city, explored through ten portraits of powerful urban centers the British Empire left in its wake At its peak, the...

In her captivating memoir Through the Leopard's Gaze , Njambi McGrath details the harrowing circumstances of her life as a young girl in Kenya, who one fateful night was beaten...

'A first-class work of reporting [and] a work of compassion for Indigenous peoples everywhere' BENJAMIN MOSER, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of SONTAG 'A non-fiction novel of modern conquest, capitalism and murder...

First Australians is the dramatic story of the collision of two worlds that created contemporary Australia. Told from the perspective of Australia's first people, it vividly brings to life the...

From Jamaica to Charleston, Sierra Leone to Bombay, China to Australia, back to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, this is the story of the heiresses. Their assets, the product of...

Consent to the obliteration of Gaza has created an enormous gulf in the global moral order. History will record how Western governments and large sections of their elites have supported...

Rome - Urbs Roma : city of patricians and plebeians, emperors and gladiators, slaves and concubines - was the epicentre of a far-flung imperium whose cultural legacy is incalculable. How...

Violence was a constant on all colonial frontiers, from the British expansion into the Australian and African continents, to the expansion of the United States and the Napoleonic Empire's many...

The Great Wall of China - stretching from the arid rises of Gansu province to the cold waters of the Bohai Sea - remains an enduring symbol of Chinese might....

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aisha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues...

Violence was a constant on all colonial frontiers, from the British expansion into the Australian and African continents, to the expansion of the United States and the Napoleonic Empire's many...

From Jamaica to Charleston, Sierra Leone to Bombay, China to Australia, back to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, this is the story of the heiresses. Their assets, the product of...

A compendium of fascinating and evocative new writing on railway travel and history. Telling of little known journeys and uncovered histories on railway routes around the world - from the...

A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it - KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering The orange we know, waxed in vats, gathered in red netting and stacked...

Many now claim that Western countries should pay reparations to former colonies for the lasting damage they caused, especially through slavery. To what extent is the argument about damage correct...

'I was so thirsty for the prize of academia, so thrilled to defy the fates, that I suffocated my own history and culture, my Burmese heritage and my mother's language....

The author emphasizes the selected nature of the facts provided by historical texts, and demonstrates the historicity of fiction. She calls into question assumptions about the end of nationalism implicit...

A moving account of how war is remembered - and by whom 'Impressive. A hundred individual histories, skillfully assembled, built into a poignant meditation on why they still matter' David...

It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all...

"An engaging romp." - New York Times Book Review "A haunting, quietly devastating excavation of a story we should all know but don't: how a surfing legend became the target...

In a series of legal battles starting in 1882, South Asian Muslims made up of modernists, traditionalists, reformists, Shias and Sunnis attempted to modify the laws relating to their places...

A fierce and moving account of the genocide practised by the Spanish colonialists Bartolome de Las Casas was the first and fiercest critic of Spanish colonialism in the New World....

' Riveting. This highly readable and entertaining book ... finally sets the record straight on the history of the Koh-i-Noor ' Tarquin Hall, Sunday Times ' Dynamic, original and supremely...

THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020 LONGLISTED FOR...

'Written in gorgeous, sparse prose, We Survived the Night reads like a novel. [...] A book I've been waiting my whole life to read.' Tommy Orange, author of There ThereAs...

To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This...

In 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished local hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. In an...

A reappraisal of the tumultuous Partition and how it ignited long-standing animosities between India and Pakistan "Eloquently discusses the making of India and Pakistan after British rule on the subcontinent...

'A first-class work of reporting [and] a work of compassion for Indigenous peoples everywhere' BENJAMIN MOSER, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of SONTAG 'A non-fiction novel of modern conquest, capitalism and murder...

From award-winning booze correspondent Henry Jeffreys comes this rich and full-bodied history of Britain and the Empire, told through the improbable but true stories of how the world's favourite alcoholic...

For decades, Hong Kong has maintained precarious freedom at the edge of competing world powers. In City on the Edge, Ho-fung Hung offers a timely and engaging account of Hong...

From the late 19th century, when the Raj was at its height, many of Britain's best and brightest young men went out to India to work as administrators, soldiers and...

'A first-class work of reporting [and] a work of compassion for Indigenous peoples everywhere' BENJAMIN MOSER, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of SONTAG 'A non-fiction novel of modern conquest, capitalism and murder...

Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder, many...

Five hundred years after Columbus's first voyage to the New World, the debate over the European impact on Native American civilization has grown more heated than ever. Among the first-and...

From the 2023 David Unaipon Award winner comes this powerful, poignant poetry collection that celebrates and reclaims Indigenous voices and language. Writing with a tender love for her Yugambeh language,...

Snow leopards and Cossacks can both be dangerous. But to young British officers in India in the nineteenth century there was only one thing more exciting than shooting wild game...

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING FINALIST SHORTLISTED FOR THE WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARDS 'One of the best memoirs I've read in years' SATHNAM SANGHERA 'Beautifully...

How did early European artists of Australia and New Zealand perceive the Maori? What sort of images of Maori society and culture did they create? What ethnic preconceptions lay behind...

The Chief and the Empire uncovers the extraordinary true tale of Te Tai Tokerau rangatira Te Pahi - the first influential Maori leader to cross the Tasman - whose curiosity...

Chin Peng joined the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) in January, 1940, as a 15 year old schoolboy. His commitment to the communist cause, the pre-war anti-colonial struggle against Britain...

The transatlantic slave trade is often seen as separate part of British history: a module in a history course, a chapter in a book. But - from the maps we...

The story of the sixteenth-century's epic contest for the spice trade, which propelled European maritime exploration and conquest across Asia and the Pacific Spices drove the early modern world economy,...

Brilliantly reconstructed from contemporary narratives, The Last Outlaws is both a gripping work of historical true crime and a richly revealing examination of our nation at its birth. The Chant...