Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism...

On February 21, 1803, Colonel Edward (Ned) Marcus Despard was publicly hanged and decapitated in London before a crowd of 20,000 for organizing a revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow King George III. His Black Caribbean wife, Catherine (Kate), helped to...

An experienced, multi-faceted historian shows how revisionist history is at the heart of creating historical knowledge“A rallying cry in favor of historians who, revisiting past subjects, change their minds. . . . Rewarding reading.”—Kirkus Reviews“A...

A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the WestThe Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe?...

Once dominated by vast empires, the world is now divided into close to 200 independent countries with laws and constitutions proclaiming human rights--a transformation that suggests that nations and human rights inevitably developed together. But the...

"This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and...

The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first centuryThe Princeton Guide to Historical Research provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age,...

"History" occupies a central, yet ambiguous position in both eighteenth-century studies and postmodernism. Making History (together with its companion volume, Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century) is a collection of essays...

Scholars, librarians, students, and database vendors have all applauded the increase in access to rare, old, venerated, and obscure texts that has resulted from the rise of electronic resources. Almost everyone associated with any branch of cultural...

The perfect introduction to the Irish story-a story wrapped in mythology and legend.Since its very origins, Ireland has become the home for a successive series of invaders-the Celts, Christians, Vikings, and Normans. And despite deprivation, desperation,...

New York Times bestselling author Malachy McCourt offers an authoritative and engrossing one-volume chronicle of Ireland from pre-Christian times to the present, told with Irish flair by the gifted storyteller.The pages are populated with figures from...

A succinct and comprehensive history of the development of citizenship from the Roman Empire to the present dayCitizenship, Inequality, and Difference offers a concise and sweeping overview of citizenship's complex evolution, from ancient Rome to the...

Rome of the Caesars, Constantinople of the Emperors, and Moscow of the Tsars were also the Rome of St. Peter, the Constantinople of the Patriarchs, and the Moscow of the Orthodox Metropolitans. These were cities on earth that aspired to heaven, kingdoms...

In History Out of Joint, Sande Cohen considers the ways in which historical narratives summon up a past and lay down a future in the ever-multiplying intellectual debates of contemporary public culture. As competing factions advance contradictory...

A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the YearIn 1746, Samuel Johnson undertook the Herculean task of writing the first comprehensive English dictionary. Imagining he could complete the job in three years, Johnson in fact took more than eight, and the...

In this luminous portrait of Paris, the celebrated historian gives us the history, culture, disasters, and triumphs of one of the world’s truly great cities. While Paris may be many things, it is never boring. From the rise of Philippe Auguste through...

Discover how humans created their world from the objects they left behind - from the US Constitution to the first iPhone - in DK's latest history book.From the beginning of human history, the one thing that has defined us is our talent for making things,...

The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger...

In this major, paradigm-shifting work, Kojin Karatani systematically re-reads Marx's version of world history, shifting the focus of critique from modes of production to modes of exchange. Karatani seeks to understand both Capital-Nation-State, the...

What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The conventional answer asserts that superior technology, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a...