General History

Lives of the painters, sculptors and architects of the Italian Renaissance.

A printer's rise in colonial America and his chart for practising thirteen virtues.

Crowd manias from the Mississippi scheme and South Sea Bubble to witch trials.

Why states rise and fall, explained through asabiyyah, the cohesion of a group.

How Standard Oil used railroad rebates to crush rival refiners, case by case.

Why Germany could not pay the 1919 reparations, and what they would do to Europe.

The late-1920s boom in margin loans and investment trusts, and the 1929 crash.

How DuPont, GM, Standard Oil and Sears built the multidivisional firm.

Interest rates from Babylonian lending through Rome and Europe to modern bonds.

What Germany's 1921 to 1923 hyperinflation did to ordinary people's lives.

The building of the Panama Canal, from France's failed attempt to US completion.

How salaried managers replaced markets in coordinating US business, 1840 to 1920.

How Japan's trade ministry steered industry from 1925 to 1975.

Electrification in the US, Britain and Germany, 1880 to 1930, as a technical system.

A century of US regulation through four figures, from Charles Francis Adams to Kahn.

How rival federal agencies dammed the American West's rivers for water projects.

How the bomb was built, from the discovery of atomic energy to Hiroshima.

Ford and Nissan side by side, showing why US carmakers lost to Japan.

How cost accounting served managers until financial reporting took it over.

Why big industrial firms in the US, Britain and Germany rose or lagged, 1880 to 1940.

The Morgan banks from 1830s London to J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley in the 1980s.

How Chicago and its western hinterland grew together as city and frontier.

The history of oil from the first Pennsylvania well to the Gulf War.

How the gold standard spread the Depression, and why leaving it early meant recovery.

Two centuries of a Jewish banking family from Hamburg to London and New York.

Latin America's economies from independence to today, period by period.

How the Chicago mob ran Las Vegas casinos, told through bookie Frank Rosenthal.

A century of the American cigarette industry, from mass marketing to 1990s lawsuits.

Why the Dutch Republic of 1500 to 1815 was the first modern economy.

How young directors and drugs remade Hollywood in the 1970s, from Easy Rider on.

Why some nations grew rich over 500 years, with culture as the deciding factor.

How Xerox PARC built the first personal computer and laser printer, and lost them.

Gold from ancient Egypt and Lydian coins to the end of Bretton Woods.

How IBM and its German subsidiary worked with Nazi Germany from 1933 through the war.

A Jewish boy survives the war and Soviet rule in Hungary and escapes to America.

How Lyndon Johnson mastered the Senate's rules and became its majority leader.

Hamilton's life from the West Indies to the Treasury and his duel with Aaron Burr.

How inventions of 1867 to 1914, from electricity to cars, made the modern world.

How the shipping container cut freight costs and remade global trade.

The economic history of Nazi Germany.

Henry Ford's failed attempt to build a small American town in the Amazon.

How four central bankers and the gold standard turned a slump into the Depression.

A biography of cancer, by a physician and oncologist.

Tests the popular comparison of America with ancient Rome and finds deep differences.

How the transcontinental railroads, the first corporate giants, reshaped America.

How American manufacturing rose to lead the world, and why its share then fell.

The rise of Bitcoin and the people trying to build a new money for the internet.

How 1930s lessons guided policy in 2008, averting a depression but adding errors.

How media from the penny press to social media capture attention and resell it.

The gene from Mendel and Darwin to genome editing, beside a family's mental illness.

Why the inventions of 1870 to 1970 raised living standards as nothing since has.

History told through energy, from muscle and fire to coal, oil and electricity.

How the East India Company became the first corporation to conquer a country.

Three generations of the Sackler family and how Purdue Pharma sold OxyContin.

Venture capital from Arthur Rock to SoftBank, and why a few big bets pay for all.

The Rochdale Pioneers by a contemporary; the founding cooperative account.

American life in the 1920s, from the Armistice to the crash.

How Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Morgan and others built 19th-century fortunes.

The standard mid-century Franklin biography; Munger's model of a working life

The 1933 Senate hearings exposing bankers' practices that led to securities laws.

A military historian's reflections on what history teaches and why we ignore it.

How American life changed between 1900 and 1950.

How the Copernican revolution unfolded, as a turning point in scientific thought.

Shackleton's men survive after the ice crushes their ship Endurance in Antarctica.

The standard account of 1720.

Classic fieldwork proving African farmers were rational capitalist investors.

The VOC and WIC as commercial and military enterprises.

The 1787 Federal Convention in Philadelphia that wrote the US Constitution.

Recurring patterns drawn from world history: biology, morals, religion, economics.

Wall Street from 1920 to 1938: the boom, the crash, the Depression and reform.

The history of molecular biology from the 1930s to the 1970s, told by its makers.

Wall Street in the 1960s: performance funds, conglomerates and the paperwork crisis.

Charles Schwab's rise from Carnegie's mill to head US Steel, then build Bethlehem.

The big international oil companies and how the 1973 embargo took away their control.

How plague, cholera, malaria and smallpox shaped history.

Peru's export economy from 1890 to 1977, and why growth did not bring development.

Edison's life drawn from his papers, unsparing about his finances.

Theodore Roosevelt's life from his birth in 1858 to the presidency in 1901.

A long history of Poland that explains where its institutions began.

The standard group history, repeatedly revised and expanded.

The classic account of the first oil boom and the Al Saud bargain.

A history of discovery: time and the clock, the earth and seas, nature and society.

Three generations of hackers, from MIT's AI Lab to the Homebrew club and game makers.

How Kilby and Noyce each invented the integrated circuit in 1958 and 1959.

The first volume of a history of the Hudson's Bay Company.

How Americans chose separate suburban houses and how that shaped the country.

Water control as the basis of power in the arid American West.

Germany's 1914 to 1923 inflation, with a more sympathetic view of its policy.

Argentina from Spanish conquest to the 1980s, and its reliance on foreign partners.

The culture of a society that got rich first and was uneasy about it.

Hong Kong at its commercial peak, before the handover to China.

Monthly data tested against explanations of Germany's 1919 to 1923 inflation.

A Pennsylvania steel town from Carnegie's purchase in 1883 to the 1986 closure.

Harry Truman's life and presidency, from the atomic bomb to the Korean War.

The full political, social and economic history of Germany's 1914 to 1924 inflation.

The standard one-volume history; the institutional backdrop to everything else.

The standard history; the state-business relationship runs through it.

How the Macintosh was made and launched in 1984.

Singapore's economy from a British trading post in 1819 through the postwar years.

Latin America's reforms from the 1980s debt crisis to the mid-1990s, assessed.

How Chicago-trained Chilean economists came to run economic policy under Pinochet.

Mexico in the NAFTA era: an uprising, assassinations, corruption and a $50bn bailout.

How Vietnam moved from central planning to a market economy, from field research.

After the Cold War, conflict will follow cultural and religious fault lines.

How Licklider and Pentagon-funded engineers built the network behind the internet.

How Britain, Germany, Japan and the US each built their own form of capitalism.

How the Bell Labs team of Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain invented the transistor.

Essays on why Brazil's and Mexico's economies lagged from 1800 to 1914.

Modern Mexico from the insurgent priests of the 1810s to Zedillo and the Zapatistas.

How Swiss bankers kept Jewish deposits and helped Nazis hide looted money.

How King Leopold II of Belgium seized the Congo as his own colony in the 1880s.

Britain's entry turned a continental war into a world war that was not inevitable.

A founding leader's account of his life and Singapore's politics and history.

India's economy from independence to 2000, told alongside a P&G executive's career.

The investors, politicians and workers who built the transcontinental railroad.

Russia's 1990s privatisation and the rise of the oligarchs, from Moscow.

Insider: the finance minister and IDA head on how the FDI model was built.

Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, and why things are going badly there.

The best single narrative of 1929 itself.

The reporting history of Linux and the businesses built around it.

Six men and the mechanics of how post-Soviet wealth was assembled.

Essays on why a rich, well-endowed Argentina stagnated for so long.

Franklin's life as printer, scientist, diplomat and founder.

How coal built empires and economies, and the death and pollution it caused.

How the British Empire shaped the modern world, from globalisation to democracy.

How Lincoln brought his three rivals for the 1860 nomination into his cabinet.

A short history of the joint stock company, from trading charters to multinationals.

The Ford Motor Company from 1903 to the end of the 20th century.

The citizens' movement of reformers and activists that ended Mexico's one-party rule.

Africa from independence to the present, country by country.

Why past societies from Easter Island to the Maya collapsed, and what that teaches.

The 1976 tasting of top French wines against new California ones, and its effects.

The Medici bank from its 1397 founding to its 1494 collapse.

Henry Ford as a shaper of American culture as much as of its industry.

What drives family business dynasties such as the Rothschilds, Fords and Toyodas.

How Spain is breaking its silence over the Civil War and Franco's rule.

The standard general history of gambling.

Why the 20th century's great progress came with unprecedented violence.

How diamonds and gold set Britain against the Boers before the 1910 union.

Latin America is neither doomed to fail nor saved by one reform; a balanced view.

How the cigarette rose in 20th-century America, and how its harm was proved.

The fight for Caspian Sea oil from the 19th century to the present.

The 1907 panic day by day, from a failed copper corner to J.P. Morgan's rescue.

The Dutch tulip episode of 1636 and 1637 from archives, and how its legend arose.

The 1914 closure of the exchange, and how the dollar took over.

Long-distance trade from Mesopotamia and the spice routes to modern globalisation.

The history of finance by instrument: credit, bonds, stocks, insurance and property.

The record-priced 1787 Lafite said to be Jefferson's, and doubts about its origin.

A scholarly history of Singapore as a trading port from 1819 to 2005.

How Dubai became the world's fastest-growing city until the credit crunch.

Ireland's crash was the product of its political culture, not global finance.

An Ohio lawyer's diary of the Depression years as he lived through them.

Congo from the slave trade and King Leopold to Mobutu and the resource wars.

Every US information industry moved from an open era to control by one firm.

A world history showing how control of water shaped political and economic power.

Six advantages, from competition to the work ethic, that let the West pull ahead.

Kinship networks, patronage and why the state is weaker and more durable than it looks.

Evidence that violence of nearly every kind has declined over history, and why.

How A&P became the world's largest retailer and the political fight it set off.

The authoritative volume on how the developmental state was built.

Kenya since 1963: a stable state held back by colonial legacies and poverty.

Why a small country without resources produces so many world-leading companies.

How deregulation from 1983 produced three decades without recession.

Joseph P. Kennedy's life in banking, film, the stock market and politics.

Political history that explains who controls which parts of the economy.

How Edison's electric light changed American life and marked a new age.

The 1944 Bretton Woods conference as a contest between Keynes and Harry Dexter White.

How the 37 days after Sarajevo led Europe into the First World War.

Japan after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima, and how it might recover.

Brazil's rise toward economic power and the many problems it still faces.

A global history of cotton used to trace how capitalism developed.

Why bankers kept lending to Philip II of Spain despite four payment suspensions.

Computing as a run of collaborations, from Ada Lovelace and Babbage to Google.

Why the security state crowded out the productive economy from the start.

How trading in Dutch East India Company shares grew into the first stock market.

Competing regional ideas of legitimate order and the balance of power.

The rise and fall of the American department store, with Sears throughout.

How the mp3, a CD-factory leaker and pirate websites broke the music business.

The history that explains the regional industrial geography and its ownership.

From a Dayton bicycle shop to the first powered flights and the 1908 demonstrations.

Portugal's economy over nine centuries, from imperial trade to EU convergence.

Insider: the reporters who received and worked the Mossack Fonseca leak.

Zimbabwe's history from Rhodesia's 1965 break to Mugabe, by a lawyer and MP.

New York's 1975 fiscal crisis and the austerity politics it taught the nation.

How federal housing policy engineered segregation.

American economic growth from colonial times to now, driven by creative destruction.

How Poland achieved Europe's fastest sustained growth after 1989.

Revises the declinist story of British industry and its ownership.

How ancient DNA has rewritten the story of human prehistory and migration.

A political history of American monopoly and of the tradition that fought it.

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and the secrecy and myth that hid what happened.

How McDonald's and fast-food franchising became bound up with Black America.

Innovation is gradual, collective and bottom-up, not the work of lone inventors.

New Zealand's economic history from the Maori gift economy to climate policy.

The US drug industry from patent medicines to the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers.

The KGB network's recapture of the commanding heights.

How land ownership shaped history: how people fight over, keep and share land.

The first independent scholarly history using company archives.

How chips became the key to economic and military power, made in a few chokepoints.

Six materials the world runs on, sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium, traced.

Chile's market reforms under Pinochet and their results up to the 2019 protests.

Current account of the cross-strait risk that prices every Taiwanese asset.

Six friends, including Acheson, Harriman and Kennan, who shaped US foreign policy.

The book that made the Swedish model an international reference point.

The major revisionist defence written against Tarbell.

The classic scholarly history of the mail-order and store model.

The authorised scholarly history of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Trans-Saharan gold and salt trade; the medieval West African economy

How the stirrup and the plough reorganised medieval society and economy

The Austrian account of 1929 and the policy response that followed

Pre-industrial English society before wage labour and cities

The Melbourne property mania and bank collapses of the 1890s.

Clifford Irving's fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, reported as it unravelled.

The family and trusts that outlived the operating company.

How Unilever's overseas subsidiaries worked, 1895 to 1965.

The founding of AI research, from interviews with McCarthy, Minsky and others.

The Jewish families behind America's great department stores.

How Rockefeller philanthropy reshaped American medicine.

Economic history of the crop, the growers' federation and the export institutions built around it.

Contemporary anatomy of the same fiscal crisis, written from the numbers.

Jardine Matheson and the model of the diversified Hong Kong trading house.

Why the first merger wave happened and why most of it disappointed.

The idea of personal computing and the people who pursued it, up to PARC.

How Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos built crony monopolies and hid their wealth abroad.

Three generations of Rockefellers and how the fortune passed down.

How the Vanderbilt heirs spent and scattered the family fortune.

Portraits of the scientists, engineers and founders behind new technology.

How electricity spread through everyday American life and commerce.

The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and Exxon's response, reported from Alaska.

Survey of what humans have known, era by era

The definitive study of the bank failure that broke Central European finance.

The rival national ideas behind Argentina's recurring policy reversals.

Human behaviour read from evolutionary biology; a Munger latticework staple

Documentary history of the strike, assembled from contemporary sources.

AI research from Dartmouth in 1956 to the funding cuts, told by the field's leaders.

The family dynasties that have run the Philippines' politics and conglomerates.

The four-volume history of the world's oldest continuous financial centre.

Comparative coffee political economy; sets Colombia's growers' federation in context.

The Overseas Chinese business families and their fortunes around the Pacific.

The pre-crisis baseline: how the boom economy was actually structured.

Spain's institutions and business culture after Franco.

Commercial aviation from biplanes after the First World War to deregulation.

Economic history that explains the industrial base the Czechs privatised.

How the productive structure and business class were remade after 1973.

The post-war economy through the liberalisation, by its best chronicler.

The state-chaebol bargain and how it shifted over forty years.

Companion investigation into Swiss banks and looted wartime assets.

The next generation of Canada's business owners after the old Establishment.

The building of America's first transcontinental railroad, from plan to completion.

Taiwan's history, including its land reform and base of small firms.

How Kodak's advertising taught Americans what to photograph.

John Law, the Mississippi bubble and the invention of paper money in France.

History read as an expanding series of non-zero-sum games

How Las Vegas grew from the Rat Pack era into a family holiday city.

History of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance

Turkey caught between two worlds, its politics up to the 2001 bank crisis.

How Henry Ford published The International Jew, a book the Nazis spread.

Scottish Enlightenment as the source of modern commercial and economic thinking

Italy from 1980 to 2001: family capitalism, patronage and the state.

Malaysia's 1997-98 crisis and its unorthodox answer of capital controls.

How evidence and probability were reasoned about before formal statistics

Video games from their pre-electronic origins to the industry of 2001.

Colombia's history read through its regional divisions, the fact behind its markets.

How experts, capital and land were arranged in modern Egypt.

The two Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the story.

The current war: Edison against Westinghouse and Tesla.

How great powers and local people fought over Taiwan, through the party-state era.

The book on voucher privatisation, bank ownership and the tunnelling that followed.

How returning land in Transylvania after communism created property rights.

Chester Carlson and xerography, the invention that funded PARC.

Franklin's reinvention from imperial gentleman into American businessman

The political history behind the current institutional settlement.

The standard modern history, strong on business families and state capital.

Indonesia's 1997-98 collapse and the fall of Suharto, reported on the ground.

How the Homestead strike turned Carnegie and Frick's partnership into a feud.

Why the Philippine state stays weak while strong families hold power.

How Poland's Solidarity union won the transition and lost the workers after it.

A structural account of the social market model and its rigidities.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan and the economy they built

Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution, the oligarchs and why they kept their assets.

Stabilisation, privatisation and the authoritarian bargain that delivered them.

Conrail, deregulation and how US railroads returned to profit.

Comparative transition account; Czech vouchers judged against other sequencing choices.

How Hong Kong's banks and bank crises shaped the miracle economy.

Two centuries of graft quantified; the cost of doing business, measured.

The history of Pakistan's army and its hand in how the country is governed.

The forced labour on Lord Leverhulme's Congo palm-oil concessions behind his soap.

Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, and the collision between the two.

What the Nordic model is, where it came from and where the countries differ.

Illustrated studio history tied to the documentary of the same name.

Covers EU accession as the main driver of Romanian institutional change.

Saudi Arabia's oil wealth, religious establishment and attempts at reform.

Contemporaneous reporting on the collapse and the Icesave dispute.

The rise and fall of the Texas oil fortunes, the Hunts among them.

The foreign oil companies' camps in Venezuela and the society they shaped.

Asia's growth stories told through the people who drove them.

Uranium: its mining, its boom towns and the geopolitics of its supply.

Harvard business historian; sets her brand-building against the whole industry.

Egypt from Nasser to Mubarak: its politics, economy and crony privatisations.

Why growth kept disappointing despite reform; good on institutions and productivity.

Video games from Atari and cartridge consoles to Nintendo and the global industry.

The wider economy: labour markets, defence spending, inflation and stabilisation.

How BCG, Bain and McKinsey created the market for strategy itself.

Institutional history of the stabilisation that made the commodity boom possible.

One product's history, including the Wertheimer deal that made the money.

Ten years of field data on what actually happened to seized farmland.

The critique of the transition's distributional cost.

How tobacco chemists engineered cigarettes, drawn from the industry's own documents.

Ethnic coalition politics as the mechanism that allocates economic rents.

How the Al-Thani family shaped modern Qatar and took hold of its gas wealth.

Declassified files on her Abwehr connection; contested by the house.

Egypt from Nasser to Tahrir Square, and its state-run economy and opening.

The commodity-boom decade and the institutions underneath it.

How Vietnam's Communist Party talked itself into opening the economy and joining WTO.

Modern Colombia through its reform years and the security-led recovery.

The society and politics a foreign investor in Samsung is buying into.

The 2010-12 euro-zone rescues and the national politics behind each one.

Edison's laboratory as a business, with pictures from his archive.

Gold's history from early kingdoms to the mining boom after the 2008 crisis.

Modern retelling with more on the stabilisation and the Rentenmark.

How physicists and mathematicians came to run money; useful context for Simons.

Thailand's royal succession and the political violence and censorship around it.

Why US railroads declined under regulation and recovered after the Staggers Act.

Nuclear accidents, what went wrong in each, and what each taught about the atom.

African American co-operative economics, a history largely written out.

How Star Wars merchandise came to outgrow the films that created it.

Includes the Czech voucher scheme written up by people who designed and criticised it.

Dhaka's garment industry from Rana Plaza back through its supply chain.

Academic but decisive: the decline began decades before Chávez, and shows why.

Migration and openness as the source of Australia's long-run growth.

Brazil's long history and the roots of its inequality and patronage politics.

How modern Greece's state developed, up to the debt crisis that began in 2010.

Retrospective essays on the limits of the model and what comes next.

Detroit's Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the largest by a US city, from inside the case.

The Ansari X Prize and the start of commercial human spaceflight.

Israel's political history and the choices behind its economy.

How oil rebuilt Kuwait City and how land deals made its merchant fortunes.

Argues price stability always required a swing producer or cartel.

The long-run reconstruction of Spanish output and productivity.

Short critical history of the brothers and the studio style.

The accounting oligopoly's economics and conflicts.

Oral history; Thiel and the PayPal cohort speak in their own words.

Spain's financial crisis, its bank rescue and the shape of the country's recovery.

How Walt Disney bet his company on building Disneyland.

Why Muslim-majority countries lag: an old alliance of clerics and military states.

History of the Vienna school as a network, including its financing and its export to the US.

How population change and migration made and unmade nations over two centuries.

The 2017 coup reported from inside, including its business backers.

Gas transit, trade dependence and the economics under the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

The 1920s Florida land boom and its collapse.

Hong Kong's 2019 protests, from the extradition bill to months of street battles.

Colonial economism and the debt-and-cotton origins of the modern Egyptian economy.

Modern Saudi Arabia's history, and whether its system can change as Vision 2030 asks.

Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura and Cargill; the definitive book on the trading houses.

Insider: two federal police delegates on the Lava Jato investigation.

Reporting on the endgame: PDVSA's decay, default, sanctions and dollarisation.

The social traits that the authors argue sustain Israel's success.

A contemporary's account of the long war between Athens and Sparta.

The original population-versus-resources argument that still frames the debate

An abolitionist's life in slavery and his fight for the full freedom of Black people.

A general's own account of his career, from West Point cadet to head of Union armies.

The broad lines of European military history from 378 to 1515.

How the Industrial Revolution's self-regulating market upended society.

Interviews with German generals of the Second World War and their military lessons.

How the concept of number evolved from prehistoric times to the twentieth century.

Narrative of the American West's mining and railroad fortunes

How cities developed, from Egypt and Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome to today.

Fifteenth-century Italian painting, and reading social history from its style.

How science developed, and the discoveries that set humans apart from other species.

Cicero's speeches defending accused murderers, from Sextus Roscius to King Deiotarus.

Dated but the only serious English work on Colombian manufacturing.

A reference history of US securities markets from the 1929 crash to 1933.

Military spending measured against the economy that has to carry it.

How economics copied the maths of 19th-century physics, and what that cost it.

An interpretation of the New Deal and of the historians who have written on it.

Illustrated family survey.

Memoir of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen; his only English-language book.

An enquiry into nationalism since 1780: its programme, its myths and its reality.

Why Britain's empire after the Seven Years War struggled with the costs of power.