The Hungry Empire • Lizzie Collingham • 2017
This book wears its learning lightly – you feel like you’re being talked through interesting meals and foodstuffs, but you’re actually being proffered fascinating economics and history.
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Bloody Foreigners • Robert Winder • 2004
Winder proffers a simple but powerful thesis: that Britain is a nation of immigrants. He reminds us that from our German royal family, to businesses created by Jews and Indians, we are, as a nation, in denial.
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Learning From the Germans • Susan Neiman • 2019
Neiman, who grew up in the American South, is a Jewish woman who has spent most of her adult life in Berlin. In this utterly original book, she compares how the USA and Germany have dealt with their histories of racism.
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The Anarchy • William Dalrymple • 2019
The East India Company was a strange organisation to say the least, beginning as a conventional international trading corporation but becoming an aggressive colonial power. Dalrymple does a peerless job of explaining it.
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The Trader, The Owner, The Slave • James Walvin • 2008
Coming in at just over 250 pages, this isn’t the longest book on slavery, but in efficiently telling the stories of three men – John Newton, Thomas Thistlewood and Black slave Olaudah Equiano – it’s the most accessible and powerful.
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Amritsar 1919 • Kim Wagner • 2019
The most authoritative account of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre and a powerful prism through which to get a real sense of the British Raj.
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The Pax Britannica Trilogy • Jan Morris • 1968
No other writer has written so elegantly about the complicated history of the British Empire. For me, it offers proof that you don’t always need to agree with a writer to admire them.
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Railways & The Raj • Christian Wolmar • 2017
Wolmar dismantles the lie at the heart of 1,000 documentaries – that the British bestowed railways on India in an act of benevolence.
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