100 Books Like German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence

This is one of the first ‘proper’ history books I read, having borrowed it from my local public library, and gave me a lasting interest in the wars and warriors of Central Europe.

First published in 1964, it recounts the life of an Irish exile who became a field marshal in the Austrian Habsburg army and died leading a bayonet charge against the Prussians. Browne’s career exemplifies how ‘German’ military history is far more diverse than it might first appear.

Christopher Duffy vividly brings the eighteenth century to life, and I warmly recommend his many other books on early modern warfare. 

More than one in four Germans served during the Second World War, but only one in ten of these volunteered.

In the eight decades since that conflict, the history of this staggering mobilization has been rewritten several times but remains controversial, particularly as more recent research is revealing the scale and complexity of the German military’s involvement in the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime.

Ben Shepherd offers a balanced and finely nuanced account of the German armed forces, their organization, culture, and conduct of total war, noting the importance of context, whilst indicating that the postwar distinction between ‘good German soldiers’ and ‘bad Nazis’ is a myth. 

After 1918, many German and Austrian Habsburg officers blamed their defeat on being ‘stabbed in the back’ by civilian ‘shirkers’, leftists, and (in the Habsburg case) fractious nationalists.

Both states indeed failed to manage their home fronts but, as Alexander Watson shows in his compelling account of this titanic conflict, there were far more complex reasons for the war’s outcome, not least the willingness of the high command in both states to embark on a conflict they had no realistic chance of winning.

The Thirty Years War remains seared into the popular consciousness across Germany and Austria as a momentous catastrophe against which other conflicts are still measured.

The conflict was indeed terrible, yet its impact was uneven across time, place, social status, and gender.

Sigrun Haude writes sympathetically about how ordinary people coped with calamity whilst skillfully weaving individual stories with the wider dynamic of military and political events. 

A beautifully told story about a Namibian family who created a real-life Noah’s Ark in the desert. Marieta van der Merwe and her late husband Nick turned their cattle ranch into a refuge for thousands of wounded or orphaned animals who can’t make it on their own in the wild. This book, full of wonder and gentle souls, has special meaning for me. I met Barbara Bennett, a North Carolina University literature professor, when I was sent to Namibia to write a story about Harnas Wildlife Sanctuary for the Guardian and we were both volunteering. Afterward, I introduced her to my New York literary agent who sold the book. It’s so vividly written that it allowed me to relive my experiences of daily mischief of the baboons, walking full-grown lions in the desert, sleeping with cheetahs under the stars, and watching the giant thunderstorms on the porch with a menagerie… show more.

I love this one because of the premise: Theroux wants to go up the west coast of Africa, with the caveat that he will go via overland methods only – no planes.

The thinking is that having to traverse the land (or water) itself, however circuitous, tedious, or even dangerous the journey may be, gives us a much greater appreciation for the places we visit. It gives our experiences texture and forces us to be in the present.

I think this is a critical message for us in the modern world. We have this idea that convenience and comfort and speed are necessarily aspirational. But if everything’s streamlined, we end up taking things for granted and essentially just ghosting through life.

This book is all about the dark, foreboding atmosphere of its setting, a township in an isolated part of Walvis Bay, in Namibia. Dr. Clare Hart is a police profiler sent in to try to pin down the perpetrator of a gruesome crime against a teenage boy. For all Hart’s professional competence, her emotional and relationship skills are in doubt as her wavering romantic interest, Captain Reidwaan Faizal, arrives to lead the investigation. Fantastically well-observed, very dark, and beautifully written, you lose yourself in its fog-filled pages, but the journey is far from comfortable.

Environmental Infrastructure in African History offers a new approach for analyzing and narrating environmental change. Environmental change conventionally is understood as, moving from a state of more nature to a state of less nature and more culture. In this model, non-Western and pre-modern societies live off natural resources, whereas more modern societies rely on artifacts, or nature that is transformed and domesticated through science and technology into culture. Emmanuel Kreike argues that both non-Western and pre-modern societies inhabit a dynamic middle ground between nature and culture. He asserts that humans - in collaboration with plants, animals, and other animate and inanimate forces - create environmental infrastructure that constantly is remade and re-imagined in the face of ongoing processes of change.

In this recent book from South Africa, a group of mostly African academics and lawyers, including some young researchers, examine the financial stresses that COVID put on the sovereign debt burden of countries in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), including studies of Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The authors view the debt constraints on SADC governments from an economic, financial, and human rights perspective, domestically and in interacting with international institutions, including limits on available debt relief.

The book also contains proposals to evade such crises in the future, including in a chapter by your correspondent.

The book is available in French and Portuguese as well as English, and you can download a copy for free. What could be better? 

So much about this true story was evocative to me at a time when I didn’t yet understand anything much about the real Africa.

Kuki’s perfect prose through adversity and new beginnings had me right there with her in an entirely different world where ordinary people were experiencing extraordinary things.

I read this book over and over again, with joy and tears, before finally making my own move to live in the wilds of Africa.