Finding broad history books that aren't super eurocentric
October 8, 2018 12:19 PM   Subscribe

seeking broad topic overviews (eg: "super important battles") where the overview is not totally eurocentric.

this question prompted by the following: I just stumbled across a book on goodreads, 1001 battles that changed history, and it sounds like pretty much all 1001 involve at least one european side. Which, come on, really? 1001 battles, and nothing important ever happened without a european (or americans) present? I may be unfairly misrepresenting the book, since I haven't read it. But this is a problem I've encountered more generally-- it is way, way easier for me to find eurocentric history books than anything else.

where am I not looking? which authors can I read my way through? are there websites that curate this?

If I drew a greyscale map of my history knowledge, the more knowledge the darker grey, almost everywhere outside of europe and (post-european) USA would be embarrassingly white or super pale grey. I've already started slowly fixing this with some book recs I've already received from you helpful folks. I appreciate any and all help/suggestions/recommendations/reading lists that will accelerate the process.

(sort of related: when i search goodreads for "authors like ruth goodman", what I want is authors that describe in reasonably exhaustive detail a day in the life of someone in any period of history, not "500 books about tudor or victorian england", but I guess there's no reasonable way for me to hope goodreads would do that. are there any other websites that do do that kind of thing?)
posted by Cozybee to Media & Arts (15 answers total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Myth of Continents
posted by PMdixon at 12:54 PM on October 8, 2018


Best answer: 1491 was pretty interesting.

For "day in the life" histories, the search term you're looking for is "social history". The Annales school popularized this sort of historiography. I currently have Life in a Medieval City by Frances and Joseph Gies in my bag, but haven't started it yet.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:13 PM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: It's not just you, books about non-Western social history and culture can be really hard to find in English. For overviews, you may look at books published by DK and National Geographic. Sometimes they do an okay job covering world history, sometime not so much.

You might enjoy these titles:

Looking East From Indian Country

The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa

Life Along the Silk Road
posted by toastedcheese at 1:54 PM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Might be a little more academic then you are looking for, but I enjoyed Before European Hegemony, an overview of the world outside Europe around the year 1300.
posted by LeeLanded at 1:59 PM on October 8, 2018


Are you interested in a world history general survey, or do you prefer more specific topics?
posted by praemunire at 4:15 PM on October 8, 2018


Best answer: For what you specifically seem to be asking for - history of a single subject that's not focused only on Europe - I can recommend:

The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History has up-to-date scholarship, including a lot about China that I hadn't read elsewhere.

Debt: The First 5000 Years does its best to explore the history of money, debt, and slavery without being completely Eurocentric.

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy is a comparative economic history which has provoked much scholarly debate and spurred on research in both Europe and China since its publication in 2000 or thereabouts.

If you're also open to narrower histories of non-European areas, I'd recommend the following about China:

Chen Village is a detailed anthropology/history of a single Chinese village from just before the Cultural Revolution until now. Fanshen and Shenfan cover a different village in even greater detail from Liberation until the death of Mao or thereabouts. All three books are excellent.

Sources of Chinese Tradition has many original political and philosophical Chinese documents in translation, with commentary, from ancient Shang oracle bone transcriptions up to 1600 or so.

God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan is a ripping tale of the largest civil war in history.

The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth takes a second look at what happened during the Long March, and is very useful in understanding Mao and everything that he did subsequently.
posted by clawsoon at 4:46 PM on October 8, 2018


Response by poster: >Are you interested in a world history general survey, or do you prefer more specific topics?

both. both is good. Although I guess I'm mostly hoping the former will lead me to the latter- I've read one or two textbook-type general surveys and they did not provide the level of depth I prefer (and just ended up being 95% euro anyway).

(I realize that if so the question was deceptively phrased, I guess I'm like, going on fishing expeditions for in-depth non-euro history, and can't find the right lakes to fish in, but it's the fish, not the lake, that are the end-goal.

but I think possibly "broad overview of africa" would be fine even though that's quite broad, since just an entire book focusing on that would already be more than five throwaway paragraphs in "broad overview of world". i'm worried broad overview of world will definitely be too diffuse.)
posted by Cozybee at 9:41 PM on October 8, 2018


Best answer: The first Prime Minister of India, Nehru, wrote a book called Glimpses of World History, which was essentially a compilation of letters he wrote to his daughter Indira while he was in prison during the Indian Independence Movement. They aim to cover human history from about 6000 BC. In parts the book may seem dated, and certainly Nehru was human and subject to his own biases like everyone else, but I found it refreshingly non-Eurocentric.
posted by peacheater at 3:53 AM on October 9, 2018




The biggest name in the Annales school is Fernand Braudel, and he has exactly the kind of deep-dive history that you're talking about. Unfortunately, while he's excellent for Europe, most of the stuff that he says about the rest of the world hasn't stood up to subsequent scholarship.
posted by clawsoon at 5:05 AM on October 9, 2018


Seconding 1491!
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 3:50 PM on October 9, 2018


Best answer: General histories don't usually do a very good job of covering the whole world. One exception is comparative religion, so that might be a good place to start. I like Huston Smith's The World's Religions, though it's popular more than scholarly. You might like Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, which is informative though a bit dry. John Keegan's A History of Warfare covers Eurasia at least.

I recommend just jumping into region-specific histories. I've written two myself! Some of the best books I read for research:

Ray Huang, China: A Macro History
John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985
Mark Elvin: The Retreat of the Elephants
Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History
A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India
Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History.

All of these books will have recommendations for further reading.
posted by zompist at 6:31 PM on October 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: If you read 1491, be sure to get the sequel: 1493. (Seriously, it's great and goes into more details about North and South American indigenous history.)
posted by BenevolentActor at 6:55 PM on October 9, 2018


Oh, one that I forgot about: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. It's old, and some of its scholarship is out-of-date, but it has information on Japanese rebellions during the Meiji era that I haven't read elsewhere. I'm sure there's a better, more up-to-date source for that if you go looking, though.
posted by clawsoon at 5:58 AM on October 14, 2018


This one looks like it might be interesting: The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan 900-1200
posted by clawsoon at 6:10 AM on October 24, 2018


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