Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2017
Read alongside Sowell’s Basic Economics: a bit more simplistic, but a much more ideologically neutral perspective than Sowell, who makes economists seem like a monolithic group. Highly recommend this one for newcomers to the discipline.
Sternhell’s fascism is revolutionary revisionism, integral nationalism, and futurism: a movement born when western Marxists turned social democratic. Dense, and I can’t say I agree with him on everything, but he makes some excellent arguments; there’s too much to distill in one review.
Pomeranz, Kenneth, ed. The Pacific in the Age of Early Industrialization. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
Despite the title, the collection focuses almost entirely on the Pacific Rim, and even more specifically East Asia; the chapters on the US and Latin America are secondary, and the Pacific islands don’t fit into the collection at all.
Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
An absolutely brutal read whose neo-Marxist jargon is so difficult and vague the whole feels weak. There are no people here except the “multitude” (whatever that means), no places, only structures: abstraction, unverifiable. This one goes into the “dustbin of history.”
Not a mere narrative of early Maori-European exchanges but a study of two forms of knowledge: each side had to reconcile very different ways of seeing the world to make contact meaningful. Read with that in mind, the book essentially becomes a work of art.
I expected a deep analysis of the Pacific “labor trade” (or slavery); it’s better read as a study of colonial violence through that lens, alongside King Leopold’s Ghost and Heart of Darkness. A must-read for anyone interested in colonial history or indigenous studies.
Hands down the best modern French history textbook on the market: I’ve read Sowerwine, Popkin, and Conklin/Fishman/Zaretsky too, and Stovall masterfully weaves French history into global trends while staying both detailed and concise. A must-read for anyone introducing or refreshing themselves to French history.
Donovan, Jack. Becoming a Barbarian. Milwaukie, OR: Dissonant Hum, 2016.
Donovan’s understanding of history is tenuous at best; his idea of culture requires an isolation no culture has ever had, and his sense of struggle is based more in high fantasy and observations of wolves than anything remotely human. An absolute pile of nonsense, better suited to an obsessive blog than print.
The first part is a commentary on Victorian society through two-dimensional life; the second deals with dimensional geometry. Much of it is common knowledge today, but it still forces you to think about how different dimensions actually function.
Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
Absolutely breathtaking. The historical probability is shaky, but there are so many narrative lines that fit together incredibly well; I was most drawn in by Juliana Frink and Nobusuke Tagomi, and the end was simply fascinating.
Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Excellent introduction to modern Ottoman history, sparse with details at times but with a decent list of recommended works after each chapter. The one major downside: the author appears to downplay the Armenian genocide. Still worth reading.
Overall an excellent book, but its goal of placing the Ottoman Empire in European history founders on a missing definition: claiming the empire was “European” in 1600 doesn’t offer much when we haven’t established what “Europe” is.
Hussey usefully links contemporary France to its colonial experience, but the negatives far outweigh the positives: (not even low key) racism throughout, sparse notes, and no real engagement with the historical literature. Take him with a grain of salt; far better to read something else.
The crux is convincing: railroads, public schools, and universal conscription made the French nation, a kind of internal colonialism that produced citizens rather than subjects. But the book is outdated, bombards you with provincial customs without coherence, and lacks the tools to look into peasant minds.
Pitts assembles Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria and slavery: a powerful, early example of liberalism, nationalism, and imperialism intertwined, abolitionist in the colonies yet with little issue putting native Algerians to the sword. Necessary for anyone who wishes to see Algeria as liberal political figures saw it.
Another textbook for every French historian’s shelf, this one emphasizing France’s connections with its colonies, immigration, and race, though the colonial inclusion occasionally seems forced. More detailed and interesting than Popkin, less so than Sowerwine, with a different orientation: gender and race over political and cultural history.
Kirkland restores Napoleon III to the Haussmann story and sees the transformation of Paris as heavy-handed, achieved at tremendous human and cultural cost. But the writing is not very good, the sources are slim, and much of the book is Kirkland saying how much he loves Paris: a light read, not serious scholarship.
Gould disavows the Commune’s Marxist heritage: the insurgents of 1871 rose as urban citizens, not a class, a shift he traces to Haussmann’s reforms. Convincing and provocative; his sociologist’s statistical models left me wishing for more cooperation between historians and sociologists.
A political history of French conservatism during the Second Republic: Guyver centers the notables displaced in February 1848, held together by suspicion of the new republic and hatred of socialism, where most work emphasizes the Left or Napoleon III’s usurpation.
An “anatomy” rather than a narrative history: thematic snapshots of Napoleon III’s regime, focused squarely on the government with little on the politicization of the masses or the social changes sweeping France. Well-researched and a useful introduction, though dense at times.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Taylor & Francis, 2015.
Exhausting, albeit necessary: a good, up-to-date summary of the field, with the downside that Loomba hurls so much information at her readers that it’s hard to make sense of it all. Solid read nonetheless.
Scott’s argument: feminist agency is paradoxical, since claims made on behalf of “women” reinscribe the very sexual difference feminism set out to eliminate. She wears dense theory lightly and stays readable; the chapters only occasionally return to the argument, but this belongs on the must-read list.
Revolutionary republicanism from the July Monarchy’s birth to its crashing demise, held together by montagnardism: violence against the state, working-class honor, romantic consciousness. A vivid, heavily sourced narrative that never explains the deeper meaning; without conclusions, the reader must draw their own.
Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History?. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
An introduction to a methodology rather than a work of history: Conrad defines global history as the study of integration into the world-system and urges historians into the field. A fairly easy read, though the field stands in the long shadow of European colonialism, and the lack of bibliographies makes it hard to proceed from here.
Price, Munro. The Perilous Crown: France Between Revolutions 1814-1848. London: Pan Books, 2007.
A close look at the French monarchy between revolutions through Louis-Philippe, with Adélaïde’s influence the real contribution, though Price treats her more as good-luck charm than agent and downplays Louis-Philippe’s flaws into one-sided great-man history. Convincing, sympathetic, and accessible despite that.
Jardin and Tudesq cast the Restoration and July Monarchy as a transitional period, and the regional second half usefully de-centers Paris; but the book is dry and outdated, without footnotes and with sources stale even in 1988. Worth passing by.
A slog but well worth it: Dubois argues that slaves gained their rights by accepting a Republican identity in the 1790s, and that the universalism of French citizenship came partly from accepting black slaves as citizens. French citizenship can’t be understood by looking at the hexagon alone; necessary scholarship on the Revolution.
An extraordinary textbook on France from 1870 to 2007, at its best in the final hundred pages, where Sowerwine tests the French state against three icebergs: coming to terms with Vichy and Algeria, race and racism, and the global economy.
Cole, Juan R.I. Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
The lesson holds even now: learn at least a little about a region before implementing policies that make the native populations hate you (Napoleon failed, the British failed, Bush failed). Cole is at his best on the cultural history of Franco-Egyptian interactions and gets bogged down in military explanations.