Here are 100 books that Alabama in Africa fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a historian based in England, raised in Texas. While undertaking a summertime spoken Latin course at the Vatican in 2001 I found myself in the midst of Italian protests against that year’s G8 summit in Genoa. The strength of the anti-globalization movement, and the violent response from the Carabinieri, sparked an early interest in the historical controversies surrounding globalization and US foreign policy. Ten years later, I had a PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin and the first draft of what would become my book,The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade.
Where to begin. Hoganson’s first book had already transformed our understanding about why the US acquired a colonial empire in 1898 through the politics of gender.
In Consumers’ Imperium she once again flips the script by investigating the domestic side of the Gilded Age capitalist empire. In doing so, wealthy white women are recast as power brokers of American globalization and imperialism through their purchasing habits, exhibitions, and armchair travel clubs.
Histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist nation bent on Americanizing the world without being transformed itself. In ""Consumers' Imperium"", Kristin Hoganson reveals the other half of the story, demonstrating that the years between the Civil War and World War I were marked by heightened consumption of imports and strenuous efforts to appear cosmopolitan. Hoganson finds evidence of international connections in quintessentially domestic places - American households. She shows that well-to-do white women in this era expressed intense interest in other cultures through imported household objects, fashion, cooking, entertaining, armchair…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a historian based in England, raised in Texas. While undertaking a summertime spoken Latin course at the Vatican in 2001 I found myself in the midst of Italian protests against that year’s G8 summit in Genoa. The strength of the anti-globalization movement, and the violent response from the Carabinieri, sparked an early interest in the historical controversies surrounding globalization and US foreign policy. Ten years later, I had a PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin and the first draft of what would become my book,The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade.
American Empire is a magisterial book from one of the founders of the field of global history—and the person most responsible for starting me on my career path as a historian.
This doorstopper of a book by one of the preeminent historians of our age will take you on a globe-trotting journey of the American Empire. The growth of Gilded Age capitalism plays an important part within it, as do the rival European powers.
A new history of the United States that turns American exceptionalism on its head American Empire is a panoramic work of scholarship that presents a bold new global perspective on the history of the United States. Drawing on his expertise in economic history and the imperial histories of Britain and Europe, A. G. Hopkins takes readers from the colonial era to today to show how, far from diverging, the United States and Western Europe followed similar trajectories throughout this long period, and how America's dependency on Britain and Europe extended much later into the nineteenth century than previously understood. In…
I am a historian based in England, raised in Texas. While undertaking a summertime spoken Latin course at the Vatican in 2001 I found myself in the midst of Italian protests against that year’s G8 summit in Genoa. The strength of the anti-globalization movement, and the violent response from the Carabinieri, sparked an early interest in the historical controversies surrounding globalization and US foreign policy. Ten years later, I had a PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin and the first draft of what would become my book,The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade.
Recovering histories nearly erased from the archival record is no easy task.
Hudson takes this daunting challenge on here as he traces the hidden ties binding the Gilded Age’s exploitative racial capitalist system with Wall Street’s subsequent imperial practices in the Caribbean. It’s a sordid tale that still resonates today; some of these same financial colonizers of the Caribbean still exist in the guise of Citigroup and Chase.
From the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression, Wall Street embarked on a stunning, unprecedented, and often bloody period of international expansion in the Caribbean. A host of financial entities sought to control banking, trade, and finance in the region. In the process, they not only trampled local sovereignty, grappled with domestic banking regulation, and backed US imperialism-but they also set the model for bad behavior by banks, visible still today. In Bankers and Empire, Peter James Hudson tells the provocative story of this period, taking a close look at both the institutions and…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a historian based in England, raised in Texas. While undertaking a summertime spoken Latin course at the Vatican in 2001 I found myself in the midst of Italian protests against that year’s G8 summit in Genoa. The strength of the anti-globalization movement, and the violent response from the Carabinieri, sparked an early interest in the historical controversies surrounding globalization and US foreign policy. Ten years later, I had a PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin and the first draft of what would become my book,The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade.
This easily digestible book is a must read for understanding the ways that the late-19th-century Sugar Trust and candy stores influenced early-20th-century imperial debates surrounding immigration and tariffs.
Merleaux’s enterprising study gets to the heart of how the American sweet tooth carved out many of the nation’s imperial cavities in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific.
In the weeks and months after the end of the Spanish-American War, Americans celebrated their nation's triumph by eating sugar. Each of the nation's new imperial possessions, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, had the potential for vastly expanding sugar production. As victory parties and commemorations prominently featured candy and other sweets, Americans saw sugar as the reward for their global ambitions.
April Merleaux demonstrates that trade policies and consumer cultures are as crucial to understanding U.S. empire as military or diplomatic interventions. As the nation's sweet tooth grew, people debated tariffs, immigration, and empire, all of which hastened the…
I am a historian of modern Germany at Vanderbilt University and have followed this field for more than thirty years. After a bit of respite, interest in Imperial Germany is suddenly chic again, as 2021 Germany looks back on the past 150 years of its unification in 1871. These five books, all published since 2000, are major recent contributions to the history of Imperial Germany’s prewar period; they also raise questions about the extent to which this conflict-ridden era represents a distant if imperfect mirror for our own contentious times.
A brand-new gripping, revealing history of German colonialism, focused on the brutal diamond trade in Southwest Africa on the eve of World War I. With pellucid prose, Press tells how the Germans cordoned off a so-called “forbidden zone,” behind which rapacious explorers, colonial authorities, miners, and businessmen carted off these precious, if largely useless rocks, for which there was a huge, artificially created demand, especially in the United States.
Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany's ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America-at the cost of African lives.
Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove "conflict diamonds" from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds-gems extracted from war zones-has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.
I grew up in Zambia, a small, landlocked country where travel was prohibitively expensive, but through books, I could travel to any place and across time without ever leaving my bedroom. Now, I’m fortunate that I get to travel for work and leisure and have been to over thirty countries and counting. Before I go to a new country, I try to read historical fiction as a fun way to educate myself and better understand that country’s history, culture, food, and family life. I hope you also enjoy traveling worldwide and across time through this selection.
I didn’t find it an easy book to read, but it’s a powerful telling of a brutal time in Tanzanian history—the beginning of the 20th Century, and a tender love story.
As unflinching as Gurnah is about what war and violence do to the human body and mind, I really admired how he focused on the impact on the lives of ordinary people caught up in war and how the opposing realities of violence and love can coexist simultaneously.
BY THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2021
'One of Africa's greatest living writers' Giles Foden
'Exquisite' Telegraph
'A remarkable novel, by a wondrous writer' Philippe Sands
'To read Afterlives is to be returned to the joy of storytelling' Aminatta Forna
'Effortlessly compelling storytelling ... You forget that you are reading fiction, it feels so real' Leila Aboulela
Restless, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari, the German colonial troops; after years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away.
Hamza was not stolen, but…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I became fascinated with geography as a teenager and spent my life studying it. I always wanted to understand how we transform our planet, for better or worse. Part of this is understanding what happens in particular localities, which I have been able to look at closely by visiting places across all continents (except Antarctica). Part of it is understanding how the complex relations between human society and everything else shape global futures. My long-standing passion, however, has been understanding how what happens in one locality is shaped by its evolving connections with the rest of the world. These books pushed me to see the world differently through these connections.
Having long wondered about how our world has been shaped by such commodities as tea, coffee, and sugar, I was fascinated by this carefully researched study of how cotton has shaped our world since the first cotton clothing 5,000 years ago in (what is now called) Pakistan.
The great thing about this book is its global reach, following cotton around the world as folks learned how to use it. While this is serious academic research, the author’s ability to relate local lives and key individuals to the broader forces shaping the globalizing cotton market keeps the story humming along.
I learned how British military power was key to Britain’s ability to relocate the global heart of cotton textile production from India to Manchester, boosting European wealth by deindustrializing India—a reminder that who wins and loses crucially depends on political power, not just market forces.
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.
“Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times
The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today.
I’ve always wanted to know why people acquire the things they choose, how they get them, and what they do with them. For years, too, I’ve been fascinated by the period when modernity was being born, a time full of worldwide exploration, the founding of new nations and societies, and the invention of new ways of making, transporting, and distributing all sorts of goods and services. I discovered that studying consumers, consumer goods, and trade from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century was the perfect way to satisfy my curiosity. The Material Atlantic is my report about what I’ve learned.
I’ll bet that you, like me, wear cotton clothes all the time. Before the eighteenth century, we could not have done so, or only on special occasions. You or I might have owned a bright calico skirt or fancy vest, but maybe not. Garments like those were expensive and hard to get, because they had to be imported from India, where they were woven and dyed by hand.
In this beautifully illustrated, prize-winning book, the Italian-British historian Giorgio Riello explains with remarkable clarity the multiple innovations from consumer choices to new technology that transformed cotton textiles from yesterday’s luxury into today’s necessity.
Of all the recent books on cotton and consumption, this is by far the best.
Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalised economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialisation of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire…
I am a Professor Emeritus of Classical and Byzantine History, and I was fascinated by Attila and the Hun and Genghis Khan from early childhood when I decided that I would become a historian. I set out to write the history of the Eurasian nomads from their perspective, and so convey their neglected history to a wider readership.
I recommend as a very readable account based on original research about the role played by Oghuz Turkish tribes in extending the range and importance of the international trade along the Silk Road between the tenth and eleventh centuries by breeding hybrid camels.
Bulliet has established his reputation as a scholar of vehicles and beasts of burden with his first groundbreaking book The Camel and the Wheel. While Bulliet’s arguments for an advent of colder climate as the stimulus for the breeding of the hybrid camels can be debated, his overall thesis is sound and explains why the Seljuk Turks emerged as the new military power in Eastern Islam in the eleventh century.
A boom in the production and export of cotton made Iran the richest region of the Islamic caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries. Yet in the eleventh century, Iran's impressive agricultural economy entered a steep decline, bringing the country's primacy to an end. Richard W. Bulliet advances several provocative theses to explain these hitherto unrecognized historical events. According to Bulliet, the boom in cotton production directly paralleled the spread of Islam, and Iran's agricultural decline stemmed from a significant cooling of the climate that lasted for over a century. The latter phenomenon also prompted Turkish nomadic tribes to enter…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I am a veterinarian who has worked extensively with African Wildlife in the heart of the African bush. I have also met African Sangoma’s, witch doctors. I have made a study of African mysticism and Ancestral communications and have participated in African mystic rituals, including the cleansing ritual called smudging or burning of herbs and utilizing the smoke for spiritual cleansing. In my books, I fuse my knowledge of African wildlife, African customs and rituals, and my innate ability to tell a good story and have brought forth the Jamie James series. They are quintessential African Adventures taking place in the heart of the African bush.
The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the African Continent from 1876 to 1912 is a comprehensive history of the colonization of African territory by European powers between 1876 to 1912 known as the Scramble for Africa.
I am an African. I was born and raised in Africa. When I read about the horrors of the colonization of the continent I live on, I simply could not believe what I was reading. It took a lot more reading and research before I fully understood the implications and impact of this colonization. This led me to understand the place of wildlife in the early history of colonization and the evolution of a wildlife ethic.
Colonial powers viewed Africa as their sole domain for domination of its people and exploitation of its resources for the benefit of the colonial power and no benefit at all to the colony. Humans and…
