100 Books Like Aspects of Louisbourg

Using a wide range of original sources — diaries, letters, official correspondence, criminal cases, and maps and plans — Christopher Moore does a terrific job in this book of presenting the world of 18th-century Louisbourg. He restores to vivid life five people who actually walked the streets of the colony over two and a half centuries ago. Through the dramatically different stories of those five individuals, Moore offers innumerable insights into what society and culture was like in the French colonial town. First published in 1982, the book won Canada’s Governor General’s prize for best non-fiction book of the year.

Not many history books remain in print — and highly useful — more than a century after publication. Yet this book by John Stewart McLennan, first published in 1918, is one. His narrative of the rise and fall of Louisbourg remains a compelling and fact-based history that continues to satisfy many readers, especially those primarily interested in Louisbourg as a pawn in the game of imperial struggle between France and Great Britain. To be sure, McLennan’s book is light on the social, cultural, and religious history of Louisbourg, but there are lots of other authors who have explored those themes in more recent decades. 

This book is a true marriage of images and words. The photographer and the writer worked closely together to establish the central storylines they wanted to communicate — under the themes of seaport, fortress, and community. They then chose the best photos to illustrate and enliven the evocative text. Reardon’s photos are outstanding. They highlight the many moods, colors, and characteristics of the renowned Canadian national historic site. First published in 1990, the book remains a wonderful photographic portrayal of the Fortress of Louisbourg and its costumed animators.

As fascinating as Louisbourg’s history is all by itself, it is also important to place it in a wider context. René Chartrand provides just such a comparative look in this well-illustrated book about four major French colonial centers, including Louisbourg. Readers are able to grasp the imperial significance of the French colonial stronghold on Cape Breton Island (then known as Ile Royale) and compare it to the brief histories of three other North American towns: Québec, Montréal, and New Orleans.

This book positions Dolly as an icon for women’s struggles for equality and autonomy, through the lens of working-class women Sarah knew growing up. 

In songs like “Just Because I’m a Woman,” Dolly lays out issues of gender-based double standards just as clearly as any feminist analysis published in an academic journal, arguably, more clearly. Songs like “Eagle When She Flies” convey, in Sarah’s words, the “simultaneous vulnerability and deep power of women.” The first example was banned in its time on US radio, while many country radio DJs refused to play the latter during the early 1990s.

Sarah connects the dots and argues that Dolly’s feminism is embodied in her creative output and her actions, decade after decade. Dolly’s 2018 song “A Woman’s Right” makes a good follow-up.

This book is the most readable treatment I’ve encountered of a very complicated and theoretical set of ideas about how corporations have changed—not only in their legal structure but as social creatures—in the last century. Lemann makes the difficult theories of thinkers like Adolf Berle, John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, and Michael Jensen easy to understand and fun to read about. And in the process, he explains how corporations lost their “souls”—how we reached a point where companies are finance-obsessed, detached from their communities, and fixated on short-term profits and not long-term stability.

Most people think Europe grew rich through industrialization and free trade. What they don’t realize is that this industrialization was initially started because of protectionism. Prasannan Parthasarathi shows how Britain banned the import of Indian cotton cloth, known as Calico, and developed its own industry. The free trade happened only after Britain succeeded in industrializing.

Jeddah in the western Arabia has long been an entrance for Muslim pilgrims around the world as well as a terminus for global-international trade routes for centuries or even millennia due to its strategic location in the coastal Red Sea. Yet, surprisingly, the region has not been the subject of a serious academic inquiry. Scholars of Saudi Arabia generally focus on Mecca and Medina, two most important pilgrimage sites for Muslims. To my knowledge, this book is the first biography of Jeddah that traces the city's urban history, development, and cosmopolitanism from the late Ottoman period to its contemporary era. The author in particular examines how Jeddah’s different groups of travelers (migrants, pilgrims, etc.) interrelated in a changing urban space and how their economic behaviors and activities contributed to the shape of the city’s socio-political framework. 

This new book realizes much of my wish to see histories of the Caribbean take seriously its importance as a site of diverse groups and unexpected exchanges. The Creole Archipelago focuses on five little-studied islands—Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago. Tessa Murphy reveals an interconnected maritime world, shaped by the use of canoes that allowed mobility free of the prevailing winds. Alongside consideration of the space itself and movement within it, Murphy explores the region’s diversity, its indigenous peoples, African, and Europeans of various stripes. She gives special attention to the indigenous peoples whose traditions, presence, and legacy determined much about these islands. In this watery borderland—a region within the larger Caribbean—interisland, intercolonial, and interimperial interactions were everyday occurrences.

Sherene Seikaly’s Men of Capital is a great book that focuses on Elites and the spread of certain ideas like my project.

Men of Capital focuses more on the intellectual projects of local economic elites in British-ruled Palestine in the early twentieth century, who “understood their economic interests as part of a broader Arab horizon” and sought to promote a capitalist “pan-Arab utopia of free trade, private property, and self-responsibility.”

They did this through direct collaboration with and travel to local Chambers of Commerce based in cities in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, but also through extensive engagement in publishing and disseminating books and periodicals that promoted their vision in cities throughout the region.