100 Books Like Biography of an Empire

I was impressed by how the American-style gumshoe was brought to Berlin before and during Nazi rule. I love noir, and this is a great example. I was taken with how Kerr’s irony speaks through his Bernie Gunther and gives a nuanced message about the choices we make when evil is around us.

Gunther has a moral compass in a regime that lacks one, and he struggles to do his duty as a cop under a regime that is not only corrupt but a low point in human morality. I watched as Nazi leaders appeared as flawed and little, cynical and also driven by a base ideology. It gave texture and believability.

I dove into this book because I wanted to know about the Napoleonic Wars and was surprised that a historian could write so well. The points are clear, and the anecdotes are appropriate, not just gimmicks. I liked how the small fact was connected to the big point about how mass mobilization changed the nature of war and made it more penetrating and inescapable.

I saw the French levée en masse and the massacres of the Vendée and Goya’s Spain in new light. It made me want to hear more about the colonial wars like Haiti.

I love historical fiction, and this one is just great. It brings to life a past and a place, and I was engrossed by the revolutionary personalities, shocked by the callousness of the colonial masters, and bewildered by the scale and intensity of the violence.

They were all messy, and only the largest stakes could let me make a judgment about good and evil. It was, in the end, a fight for freedom. Toussaint Louverture was always one of my heroes, and here he is humanized, with all justice done to his leadership and foresight.

I’m interested in empires, Crusades, and Greeks and I found it all in this book. I admire the research and the way this past comes alive with detail. I was drawn to the detective’s sense of duty to his autocrat and yet duty to himself to find the truth. I also find it a novel way to look at religiosity because all the characters are Christians, mostly Orthodox.

Most of the Catholics are crusaders, and I’m tired of the usual heroic depiction, and after reading, I’m more satisfied with this gang of fortune-seekers who were capable of great destruction. It was believable.

It may seem odd to recommend a book focused on a fifteen-year period, in the midst of a region that boasts many thousands of years of history. However, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire echoed across the Middle East in ways we are just beginning to understand. Having traveled to Turkey and many nations in this region, I’ve encountered historic sites, political quandaries, border conflicts, and ethnic troubles that can only be understood with the end of the Ottomans in mind. McMeekin does an exemplary job of viewing the Ottoman ending in the context of local challenges, global warfare, rising nationalism, and economic pressures in all directions. I had many “so that’s why that is the way it is” moments, and also enjoyed the gripping read.

Kafadar’s classic is a compelling prose unraveling the sources and fundamentals of the Ottoman state. It helps navigate the state’s existentialist search for order between Europe and the Orient. I like this book also because it comes from a culturally versed author well trained in multiple countries, disciplines, and traditions. Its focus on early conversations makes it one of my top picks in the Ottoman Empire and the Wider World.

This lavishly-illustrated volume takes a broad look at Ottoman culinary culture, holding up a mirror to the empire as reflected in the food and foodways of its people, from sultans to commoners. It offers a sweeping panorama of the evolution of culinary traditions that drew on the practices of the many societies inhabiting the Ottoman lands. The author lives in and travels widely in Turkey, encountering dishes that have ancient roots and finding food-related customs that survive until the present day. This is no book of recipes, but a compendium of richer food for thought.

Hot off the press, and building on the success of Aksan's earlier volume on the later Ottoman empire, this book charts the transformation of this once-formidable state into a colonial client of Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. It traces the lives of friends and foes of the Ottomans who witnessed the rise and fall of a constitutional experiment in an era of shrinking borders, global consciousness, ethno-religious nationalism, and revolutionary fervour. The narrative's primary focus is on those who negotiated with, fought for, defended, and finally challenged the sultan and the system in its final days just prior to WWI, resulting in a legacy of international relations and communal violence that continues into the present.   

Focusing on the period beginning with 1571’s epic battle of Lepanto and extending through the so-called “Northern Invasion” of the English and the Dutch into the Mediterranean, this book examines the central role piracy played in the emergence of an “Ottoman Mediterranean” as a legal space shaped by multiple, ever-shifting factors. In this wide-ranging and beautifully written study, archival sources spanning both religious and imperial spheres of law become windows onto the astonishing complexity of an early modern Mediterranean in which there were “no hard and fast lines separating Christian and Muslim spheres, but rather a culture of legal pluralism in which merchants, travelers, and seamen took advantage of multiple overlapping jurisdictions.” Evocatively written, blending narrative and analysis, White brings this exciting age to vivid life.

The workings of the state and the actions of state functionaries have long supplied the essential narrative informing our understanding of Ottoman history. This new volume by University of Chicago partner scholars is the first to give a platform to a wide spectrum of voices hailing from across the sultan's multilingual realm. Women and men, Muslims, Jews and Christians, prisoners and prostitutes, mystics and scholars, and a host of others, reach across the centuries to beguile us with their dreams and legends, anecdotes and jokes, biographies, and hagiographies. Although billed also as a textbook, as is customary these days in order to reach the widest readership, this book is for anyone who seeks affinity with the people of the early modern Ottoman world.