Readers wishing to find out more about any of the subjects covered in A Political History of the World may find the following selection of recommended works more useful than a conventional and lengthy list of the sources consulted in the course of writing this book. Works have been listed under the period for which they are most relevant.
Avari, Burjor, 2016. India: The Ancient Past. A History of the Indian Subcontinent from c. 7000 BCE to CE 1200. Abingdon: Routledge.
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Cohen, Raymond, and Raymond Westbrook, eds., 2000. Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Di Cosmo, Nicola, 2002. Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diehl, Richard A. 2004. The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization. London: Thames & Hudson.
George, Andrew, trans., 2003. The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. London: Penguin.
Kriwaczek, Paul, 2014. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. London: Atlantic Books.
Morkot, Robert G., 2005. The Egyptians: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Romer, John, 2013–15. A History of Ancient Egypt, 2 vols. London: Penguin.
Singh, Sarva Daman, 1997. Ancient Indian Warfare, with Special Reference to the Vedic Period. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Singh, Upinder, 2008. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century. Delhi: Pearson Longman.
Smith, John D., trans., 2009. The Mahabharata. London: Penguin.
Thorp, Robert L., 2006. China in the Early Bronze Age: Shang Civilization. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Aubet, Maria Eugenia, 1993. The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Confucius, 1861. The Analects. In James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 1, Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean. London: Trübner & Co.
Coogan, Michael D., et al., eds., 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frahm, Eckart, ed. 2017. A Companion to Assyria. Chichester: John Wiley.
Grousset, René, 1970. The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Kuhrt, Amélie, 2007. The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. Abingdon: Routledge.
Lao, Tzu, Arthur Waley, trans., 1997. Tao Te Ching. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.
Loewe, Michael, and Edward L. Shaughnessy, eds., 1999. The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rolle, Renate, 1989. The World of the Scythians. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Simpson, St John, and Svetlana Pankova, eds., 2017. Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia. London: Thames & Hudson.
Sun, Tzu, Lionel Giles, trans., 1910. Sun Tzu on the Art of War: The Oldest Military Treatise in the World. London: Luzac & Co.
Adcock, Frank, and D. J. Mosley, 1975. Diplomacy in Ancient Greece. London: Thames & Hudson.
Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes, ed., 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Briant, Pierre, 2002. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Herodotus, Aubrey de Sélincourt, trans., 2003. The Histories. London: Penguin.
Kagan, Donald, 2005. The Peloponnesian War: Athens and Sparta in Savage Conflict, 431–404 BC. London: Harper Perennial.
Kautilya, R. Shamasastry, trans., 1915. Kautilya’s Arthasastra. Bangalore: The Government Press.
Lewis, Mark Edward, 2007. The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Plato, Desmond Lee, trans., 2003. The Republic. London: Penguin.
Thapar, Romila, 1997. Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Thucydides, Steven Lattimore, trans., 1998. The Peloponnesian War. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Wiesehöfer, Josef, 2001. Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD. London: I.B. Tauris.
Allen, Charles, 2012. Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor. London: Little, Brown.
Eilers, Claude, ed., 2009. Diplomats and Diplomacy in the Roman World. Leiden: Brill.
Freeman, Philip, 2011. Alexander the Great. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Goldsworthy, Adrian, 2016. Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Grainger, John D., 2017. Great Power Diplomacy in the Hellenistic World. Abingdon: Routledge.
Liu, Xinru, 2001. Migration and Settlement of the Yuezhi-Kushan: Interaction and Interdependence of Nomadic and Sedentary Societies. Journal of World History, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 261–92.
Man, John, 2009. The Terra Cotta Army: China’s First Emperor and the Birth of a Nation. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
Miles, Richard, 2010. Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. London: Allen Lane.
Polybius, Ian Scott-Kilvert, trans., 1979. The Rise of the Roman Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Powell, Anton, 2016. Athens and Sparta: Constructing Greek Political and Social History from 478 BC. Abingdon: Routledge.
Qian, Sima, Raymond Dawson, trans., 2007. The First Emperor: Selections from the Historical Records. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawlinson, H. G., 1912. Bactria: The History of a Forgotten Empire. London: Probsthain & Co.
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Dio, Cassius, Earnest Cary, trans., 1917–27. Roman History, vols. 6–9. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goldsworthy, Adrian, 2014. Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
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Kim, Hyun Jin, 2016. The Huns. London: Routledge.
Souza, Philip de, and John France, eds., 2008. War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tacitus, Michael Grant, trans., 1996. The Annals of Imperial Rome. London: Penguin.
Veyne, Paul, ed., 1992. A History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
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Daryaee, Touraj, 2009. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: I.B. Tauris.
Gibbon, Edward, David Womersley, ed., 2000. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Penguin.
Gregory, Timothy E., 2010. A History of Byzantium. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Halsall, Guy, 2007. Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, Mark Edward, 2009. China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
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Merrills, Andy, and Richard Miles, 2009. The Vandals. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Mookerji, Radhakumud, 1989. The Gupta Empire. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Norwich, John Julius, 1988. Byzantium: The Early Centuries. London: Viking
Qian, Sima, Burton Watson, trans., 1993. Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty, 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Gregory of Tours, Lewis Thorpe, trans., 1974. The History of the Franks. London: Penguin.
Le Goff, Jacques, 1988. Medieval Civilization, 400–1500. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Maas, Michael, ed., 2005. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maurice, George T. Dennis, trans., 1984. Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Theophilus of Edessa, Robert G. Hoyland, trans., 2011. Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
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Barbero, Allesandro, 2004. Charlemagne: Father of a Continent. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bennison, Amira K., 2009. The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire. London: I.B. Tauris.
Clot, André, 2005. Harun al-Rashid and the World of the Thousand and One Nights. London: Saqi Books.
Hawting, G. R., 2000. The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate, AD 661–750. London: Routledge.
Hulbert, Homer B., Clarence Norwood Weems, 1999. The History of Korea, vol. 1. Richmond: Curzon.
Kaldellis, Anthony, 2017. Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, Mark Edward, 2009. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Wilson, Peter H., 2016. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Asbridge, Thomas, 2010. The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land. London: Simon & Schuster.
Crowley, Roger, 2011. City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire. London: Faber and Faber.
Farooqui, Salma Ahmed, 2011. A Comprehensive History of Medieval India: Twelfth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century. Delhi: Longman.
Hall, Kenneth R., 2011. A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100–1500. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Huffman, Joseph P., 2000. The Social Politics of Medieval Diplomacy: Anglo-German Relations (1066–1307). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Jackson, Peter, 2005. The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410. Harlow: Longman.
Joinville and Villehardouin, Caroline Smith, trans., 2008. Chronicles of the Crusades. London: Penguin.
Kaldellis, Anthony, 2017. Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Runciman, Steven, 2016. A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. London: Penguin.
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McKissack, Patricia and Frederick, 1994. The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa. New York: Henry Holt.
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Polo, Marco, Ronald Latham, trans., 1958. The Travels of Marco Polo. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Braudel, Fernand, 1995. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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Diamond, Jared, 2017. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton.
Frankopan, Peter, 2017. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. London: Bloomsbury.
Kennedy, Paul, 1987. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House.
Landes, David S., 1999. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: W. W. Norton.
Parker, Geoffrey, ed., 2005. The Cambridge History of Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pomeranz, Kenneth, 2001. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ralph, Philip Lee, et al., 1997. World Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture. New York: W. W. Norton.
Satow, Ernest, Ivor Roberts, ed., 2017. Satow’s Diplomatic Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Twitchett, Denis, and John K. Fairbank, eds., 1978–2016. The Cambridge History of China, 15 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Throughout this book, I have tried to give readers a rough idea of the size of populations, the magnitude of economies, and so forth, in order to contextualize political events. Any such figures should be treated as estimations, as rough indicators, not as exact data. For anyone interested in historical demographic and economic data, I can recommend the following:
Broadberry, Stephen, et al., 2017. China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850. University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, no. 155. Retrieved from: https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/working_papers/…/155aprilbroadberry.pdf.
De Long, J. Bradford, 1998. Estimating World GDP: One Million B.C.–Present. Berkeley University. Retrieved from: https://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf.
Maddison, Angus, 2010. Historical Statistics of the World Economy, 1–2008 AD, table 1. Retrieved from: www.ggdc.net/maddison/historical_statistics/horizontal-file_02-2010.xls.
McEvedy, Colin and Richard Jones, 1978. Atlas of World Population History. New York: Facts on File.