Legacy of Empire
£10.99Highly readable and compelling account of British colonial policy in Palestine and its role in the creation of Israel.
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A War of Empires
£25.00In 1941 and 1942 the British and Indian Armies were brutally defeated and Japan reigned supreme in its newly conquered territories throughout Asia. But change was coming. New commanders were appointed, significant training together with restructuring took place, and new tactics were developed. This book expertly retells these coordinated efforts and describes how a new volunteer Indian Army, rising from the ashes of defeat, would ferociously fight to turn the tide of war. But victory did not come immediately. It wasn’t until March 1944, when the Japanese staged their famed ‘March on Delhi’, that the years of rebuilding reaped their reward and after bitter fighting, the Japanese were finally defeated at Kohima and Imphal. This was followed by a series of extraordinary victories culminating in Mandalay in May 1945 and the collapse of all Japanese forces in Burma.
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The Nutmeg’s Curse
£20.00Before the 18th century, every single nutmeg in the world originated around a group of small volcanic islands east of Java, known as the Banda Islands. As the nutmeg made its way across the known world, they became immensely valuable – in 16th century Europe, just a handful could buy a house. It was not long before European traders became conquerors, and the indigenous Bandanese communities – and the islands themselves – would pay a high price for access to this precious commodity. Yet the bloody fate of the Banda Islands forewarns of a threat to our present day. Amitav Ghosh argues that the nutmeg’s violent trajectory from its native islands is revealing of a wider colonial mindset which justifies the exploitation of human life and the natural environment, and which dominates geopolitics to this day.
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The Story of Afro Hair
£9.99This book sensitively tells the powerful history of Black hair for younger readers.
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Conquistadors
£12.99The ‘conquistadors’, the early explorers and settlers of Spanish America, have become the stuff of legends and nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and building roads, cathedrals, palaces and cities which have endured to the present. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation, as men who carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory. In ‘Conquistadors’, Fernando Cervantes cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to immerse the reader in the world of the late-medieval imperialist: a world as unfamiliar to us as the native peoples of the New World were to the conquistadors themselves. He paints a revelatory portrait of a diverse group of men, set against the political and ideational landscape from which they emerged.
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Empireland
£10.99In his brilliantly illuminating book, Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past. In prose that is, at once, both clear-eyed and full of acerbic wit, Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere: from how we live to how we think, from the foundation of the NHS to the nature of our racism, from our distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that imbued the campaign for Brexit and the government’s early response to the Covid crisis. And yet empire is a subject, weirdly hidden from view.
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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
£9.99Kidnapped and sold into slavery at the age of ten, Olaudah Equiano’s memoir caused a sensation when it was first published in 1789. ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’ is the true story of his life, from his ten years of service as a slave in the British Navy to his experiences – after having purchased his freedom twice – as a freed black man living in eighteenth-century England. Equiano would go on to be a leading figure in the anti-slavery movement, boosted by the success of his memoir, which became a bestseller and went through nine editions in his lifetime.
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Against White Feminism
£14.99Here is an essential, comprehensive account of what white feminism is – and an empowering manifesto for revolution. Feminism is supposed to be the fight for the freedom and equality of women. And in the past 200 years it has made incredible gains: paving the way for women to advance economically, handing them back control of their own bodies, and advocating for their needs and their experiences. Eye-opening, timely and impossible to ignore, ‘Against White Feminism’ traces the connections between feminism and white supremacy from the earliest stirrings of the women’s suffrage movement to the ‘fourth wave’ we see today, demonstrating how an idea based on equality has been corrupted by prejudice and exploitation from the start.
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Blood and Ruins
£40.00Richard Overy sets out to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. He argues that this was the ‘great imperial war’, a violent end to almost a century of global imperial expansion which reached its peak in the ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires. How war on a huge scale was fought, supplied, paid for, supported by mass mobilization and morally justified forms the heart of this account. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked these imperial projects, the war and its aftermath. This war was as deadly for civilians as it was for the military, a war to the death over the future of the global order.
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Waves Across the South
£10.99WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE FOR GLOBAL CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN-HESSEL TILTMAN PRIZE 2021
LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2021
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Past Mistakes
£9.99From the fall of Rome to the rise of the Wild West, David Mountain brings colour and perspective to historical mythmaking.