100 Books Like Empires of the Sea

Thucydides, along with Herodotus a generation earlier, created history as we know it. Herodotus added to narrative the analysis of cause: ‘why’ as well as ‘what’. Thucydides added different levels of causation: the immediate reasons for the war and the long-term causes. He studied how the dynamics of fear and power drive states into warfare. He took the gods out of history (it is hard to remember how radical that was). He studied the corruption of moral language and behaviour under the pressure of conflict. In Pericles’ Funeral Speech he set out the theory of Athenian democracy (Pericles would have denied that our own society was democratic—a challenging thought). Thucydides’ eye is not exactly cold, but it is unblinking: no historian seems so free of illusion.

After I visited Sicily at 22 (the same age as Mariella in the book) and stayed with relatives in Siracusa, I fell in love with Sicily (and all of Italy) and wanted to know everything I could about it, its history, its customs, architecture, food, and especially to understand the collective psyche of its people. 

My grandmother was born in Sicily and never spoke English even after moving to the United States, and my uncles and father spent a good part of their childhoods in Catania, where the Sicily part of Becoming Mariella takes place. I had never before felt the deep longing of a cultural belonging, and this book, written in 1958, is one of the finest works of twentieth-century fiction (according to Daunt Books), and opened my eyes to the pride and richness of the Sicilian people and its aristocracy, their stubbornness and an understanding of how,… show more.

There is no better scholar of modern Greece than Mark Mazower and his latest work on the Greek Revolution is a tour de force. As the title suggests, Mazower explores how the Greek Revolution, based on the “new politics” of national identity, overthrew Ottoman imperialism and established the world’s first true nation-state. The Greek Revolution gives us all the famous characters from 1821 in detail: Koloktronis, the brigand turned general who became a national hero. Ibrahim Pasha, the son of the Pasha of Egypt who dreamed of conquering Greece for himself. Ioannis Kapodistrias was a brilliant diplomat who became the first Greek head of state only to be murdered by his own people. And George Byron, the poet, turned adventurer, turned financer of the Greek Revolution who died of fever while campaigning for Greek freedom. At the same time, the book analyzes more universal characteristics of revolutions: their fundamental link… show more.

Kazantzakis is perhaps most famous for being excommunicated after he wrote The Last Temptation of Christ, but I think his best book is Freedom and Death. Freedom and Death was described as Kazantzakis’ “modern Iliad,” but it is more than a tale of heroes and war. It is about the struggle of the Cretan people for liberty and their desire to end the Ottoman occupation of their island at the end of the 19th century. In spite of the obvious morality of the cause of freedom, Kazantzakis paints a complex picture in which there are no obvious heroes and humanity’s faults are clearly visible. No character is more noble than the Turk, Nuri Bey. None more flawed than the novel’s Greek protagonist, Captain Michalis. Freedom and Death is also the powerful story of a man’s struggle against himself and the conflict between our personal interests and our… show more.

The Great Siege of Malta – a nearly four-month struggle in 1565, should be essential for any military historian to understand. Sadly, its treatment in fiction has been ludicrously underserved.

Enter Ironfire. Mr. Ball’s work builds slowly, showing the reader how various elements of the Ottoman Army (the Janissaries, in particular) were acquired, trained, and readied for war. Likewise, a failing legacy of crusade, as well as a decline in support for religious military orders, plague Christian leadership in Malta. Ball’s ‘slow burn’ narrative ignites into the island’s famous siege by a massive and well-equipped Ottoman army, facing a motley band of knights and Maltese locals reliant upon blades and fire to desperately hold their walls. Ironfire is a master class on premodern siege warfare in fiction.

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.

We are reminded on almost a daily basis of the plight of refugees in fragile boats that this sea can be cruel as well as kind. The present diaspora has its forerunners – in this book the great population exchange of 1923 that saw the displacement of two million people across the Mediterranean: Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire, Turks living in Greece. Bruce Clarke both explains the chain of events in the aftermath of the First World War and records the personal stories of those who were uprooted from the places they called home. They have a familiar resonance, the repeating patterns of memory and loss: ‘I remember the day they went away,’ recorded a Greek woman of her Muslim neighbours. ‘Some kissed the earth, some took bowls of soil with them. They were decent types; their menfolk used to attend our funerals, and we would exchange presents of… show more.

This book is so many things at once. It’s a history of management education. It’s a damning indictment of the consulting world. It’s an acerbic memoir of life as a consultant that had me laughing out loud.

But what resonated most with me is that it’s also a profound and rigorous argument for why business schools are not the right place to learn about management and that the traditional liberal arts give you more skills and mental models for assuming responsibility for leading an organization.  

Living in Istanbul over a long period since 1995 made me want to know its history better.

This book is one of best written and most influential books on the topic describing, as it does, not only the political and military history of the Ottoman Empire but also its economic and social fabric, its ability to innovate in a variety of fields and the reasons behind its rule over six centuries.

My interest in the topic eventually led to an influential publication with the economic historian Şevket Pamuk and our younger colleague Alpay Filiztekin in the European Review of Economic History in 2008 on the sources of economic growth for the region encompassing modern Türkiye between 1880-2005.      

This book was so much fun to read. I loved the author's dry, sardonic humor, coupled with his deep knowledge of Turkey and its history. The bumbling but persistent main character led me down fascinating and unexpected historical wormholes in the search for a missing Sherlock Holmes story linked to the Ottoman court.