2024/25 reading list

You may wish to dip into one or two of the following:

John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (2007) – a comparative approach

Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (1995)

Ashley Jackson, The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction (2013)

Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 (2008)

The most adventurous can also look to explore the five volumes of:

Wm. Roger Lewis (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998-2012) – available as ebooks via the University Library

If you feel like a novel, then the following is recommended:

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984)

For a way in to the period covered by the course – late antiquity / the early middle ages – the following works are useful entry points (and are available as ebooks through EUL):

• Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes & Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World (2011)
• Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (2012) [various essays]
• Philip Rousseau (ed.), A Companion to Late Antiquity (2009) [various essays]
• Julia M.H. Smith, Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History, 500-1000 (2005) - ebook
• Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (2009)

There is no single book that adequately covers marriage, family and gender precisely across the span covered by the course, but the following works provide useful entry points (and are also available as ebooks through EUL):

• David d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (2005)
• Valerie Garver, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World (2009), ch.2
• Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)
• David Hunter, ‘Sexuality, marriage and the family’, in Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity Volume 2: Constantine to c.600 (2007), pp. 585-600
• Ruth M. Karras, Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (2012)
• Emma Southon, Mary Harlow and Chris Callow, ‘The family in the late antique west (AD 400-700): A historiographical review’, in Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher (eds), Approaches to the Byzantine Family (2013), pp. 109-30
• Rachel Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (2012), ch.6, 8-9

All of the following books are available as ebooks from the University Library.

An excellent overview is:

Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. 15th Anniversary Edition (2007)

For African American politics, see:

Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003)

For Civil War memory and the Lost Cause, I would recommend:

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001)

For an excellent work on race, see:

Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (1999)

For depictions of the South in popular culture, see:

Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (2011)

For religion, I would recommend:

Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (2005), especially chapter 1.

The course textbook is:

Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2010) - ebook

In addition you may wish to read a selection of the following:

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Chapter 13, ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government’, available online at: https://archive.org/details/HannahArendtTheOriginsOfTotalitarianismHarcourtBraceJovanovich1973

Primo Levi, If This Is A Man / The Truce (1987) [known as Survival in Auschwitz in some editions]

Albert Lindemann & Richard Levy, Antisemitism: A History (2010), Chapter 8, ‘Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, 1848-1914’, pp. 121–148 - ebook

Kershaw, Ian. ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2004); pp. 239–254.

A background knowledge of German history would be helpful, the best introductory works for the period are probably the trilogy by Richard Evans:

Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (2003); The Third Reich in Power (2005); The Third Reich at War (2008)

See also:

Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation (2016)

Hans Mommsen, The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality (2003)

After gaining a solid grounding, students may wish to dip into some of the more controversial recent works on the Holocaust – it might be helpful to read these alongside reviews of the works (in the NY Review of Books, TLS and the London Review of Books):

Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (2001)

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015)

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2007)

There is obviously a massive selection of Films and Documentaries on this topic, the following are recommended:

The Reader (Stephen Daldry: 2008)

The Son of Saul (Laszlo Nemes: 2015)

The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life (short documentary: 2013)

Numbered (Dana Doron and Uriel Sinai: 2012)

David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Oxford, 2000), available as an ebook via the EUL catalogue

J.H. Elliott, , ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past & Present, Vol. 137 (1992), pp. 48-71

Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘’Civilizinge of those rude partes’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s-1640s’, in: Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol I. The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 124-147 (and other essays) - ebook

Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500-c.1800 (London, 1995) - ebook

Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven & London, 2009) - ebook

or, a bit lighter:

John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (2007) & see Peer Vries, 'Roundtable: John Darwin's After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405', Britain and the World, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2008), pp. 111-117

Books & Book Chapters

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (2014). Chapters 12 and 13 discuss histories of industrialisation and labour.

Sonya O. Rose, What is Gender History? (2010). 

Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005). Read chapter 5. 

Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire 1700-1922 (2000). Read chapters 1 & 2.

Articles 

Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor, “Sex and Skill”, Feminist Review n.6 (1980) - classic text, still relevant.

Any article by Samita Sen (on women’s work, gender, and class in colonial India) and Donald Quataert (on Ottoman economic development, women’s work in domestic industries).

Movies and TV Shows

Made in Dagenham (2010)  

The Mill (2013-2014)

Podcast Episodes

Industrial Sexualities in Twentieth-century Egypt, episode from the Ottoman History Podcast, 5 March 2018 (the entire podcast is useful especially if you are new to the Ottoman history).

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, episode from the American Social History (ASHP) Podcast, 15 March 2018.

I'd recommend beginning with a relatively short primary source, David Hume’s A Natural History of Religion (1757). It’s the endpoint that the course works towards, and a helpful introduction to some of its main concerns and themes. Various editions are available, e.g.

• The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, eds A. Wayne Colver and John V. Price (Oxford, 1976)
• A Dissertation on the Passions. The Natural History of Religion, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford, 2007)
• Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and The Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford, 2008)

Dmitri Levitin, ‘From sacred history to the history of religion: paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European historiography from Reformation to ‘Enlightenment’’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 1117-1160, is a very useful but also rather dense review article. Focus on the headlines rather than the detail, or - if you're just finding it a bit heavy-going - read the early modern sections of this older article instead: Francis Schmidt, ‘Polytheism: degeneration or progress?’, History and Anthropology, 3 (1987), 9-60.

Robert Segal, Myth: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) provides a succinct, accessible introduction to modern theories of myth (since the 19th century), helpful as a counterpoint to early modern myth scholarship and for beginning to think about different ways of studying and interpreting myth.   

For students with little or no background in early modern European history, a useful textbook is Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe 1450-1789, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022), esp. the chapters on cultural and intellectual life. 

I'd also recommend Martin Scorsese's Silence (2016), based on the novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo, about Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century Japan. While more concerned with science than scholarship, Iain Pears’ novel An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997) is a great read and provides a well-researched picture of intellectual life in Restoration Oxford. 

The following provides a well-researched picture of intellectual life in Restoration Oxford, although mainly focused on scientific circles:

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997)

​​​

Probably the best short introduction is:

Julia Sweig, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (2009) – ebook available via the EUL catalogue

William M. LeoGrande & Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: the hidden history of negotiations between Washington and Havana (2014)

Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (2009) – ebook

Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The United States and Cuba: Intimate Enemies (2011)

You may also wish to look at the following (and other) essays:

Lars Schoultz ‘U.S. Policy toward Latin America since 1959: How Exceptional Is Cuba?’, in S M Castro Mariño & R W Pruessen (eds.), Fifty Years of Revolution: Perspectives on Cuba, the United States, and the World (2012) – ebook

Louis A. Pérez Jr, ‘Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US Policy Toward Cuba’, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 34, no. 2 (May 2002), pp. 227-254

Lars Schoultz ‘Blessings of Liberty: The United States and the Promotion of Democracy in Cuba’, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 34, no. 2 (May 2002), pp. 397-425

Some lighter reading:

Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (various)

Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment (various) for the life of a Cuban middle class man in the context of the 1962 Missile Crisis

There are also a couple of good films for the sleazy nature of Havana in the 1950s:

Godfather Part II obviously, and also

I am Cuba by Mikhail Kalatozov.

• John Baylis, James Wirtz, and Colin Gray (eds), Strategy in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Strategic Studies (any edition of the book is provocative).
• Hal Brands (ed.), The New Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, 2023).
• David Jordan (ed.), Understanding Modern Warfare (all editions of the book are helpful).
• Jeremy Black, Military Strategy: A Global History (2023).

A general history of Scotland in this period can be found in:

• Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (1992)
• Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470-1625 (1991)

You may wish to dip into the following: 

• Julian Goodare & Alasdair A. MacDonald (eds.), Sixteenth-Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch (2008) – ebook
• Michael Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (2001) - ebook
• Cynthia J. Neville (ed.), Land, Law and People in Medieval Scotland (2010) - ebook
• Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History (2008) - ebook