Books by James Belich
“With history books, sometimes you say they’re ambitious when they cover fifty or a hundred years. This is a book that starts in 1346 and makes an argument about the impact on the globe that stretches right into and up to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. This really is grand history, in the good old-fashioned sense of the term…To put it starkly, the argument of the book is that wherever the plague hit, these are the parts of the world that eventually benefited and prospered, and those places where the plague didn’t strike—India and China—ended up falling behind. He’s saying this is not about culture, this is not about institutions, this is not about religion—it’s the plague.” Read more...
The Best History Books of 2023: The Wolfson History Prize
Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Scientist
Interviews where books by James Belich were recommended
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1
The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe
by James Belich -
2
Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-1945
by Halik Kochanski -
3
Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers
by Emma Smith -
4
The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire
by Henrietta Harrison -
5
African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History
by Hakim Adi -
6
Vagabonds
by Oskar Jensen
The Best History Books of 2023: The Wolfson History Prize, recommended by Sudhir Hazareesingh
The Best History Books of 2023: The Wolfson History Prize, recommended by Sudhir Hazareesingh
The Wolfson History Prize is the UK’s most prestigious history book prize. The judges, all professional historians, pick out books that combine excellence in research with readability. Oxford University historian Sudhir Hazareesingh, one of the Wolfson judges and author of Black Spartacus, talks us through the six terrific books that made the 2023 shortlist, from the Black Death and its critical impact on economic development to the magic of our relationship with books.
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1
Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by Brad DeLong -
2
How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth
by Jared Rubin & Mark Koyama -
3
The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe
by James Belich -
4
Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800
by Jan Luiten van Zanden & Maarten Prak -
5
The Cambridge Economic History of China
by by Debin Ma and Richard von Glahn (editors)
The Best Economic History Books of 2022, recommended by Davis Kedrosky
The Best Economic History Books of 2022, recommended by Davis Kedrosky
From a sweeping history of China covering three millennia to what econometrics papers can tell us about what made the world rich, it’s been a fantastic year for economic history books. Davis Kedrosky, a student at Berkeley and publisher of Great Transformations, an economic history newsletter, picks some of his favourite economic history books of 2022.
