Book Reviews

Writing a biography of Dante Alighieri is not an easy task even for the most talented historians. In narrating the life of the great Florentine poet, universally considered the initiator of Italian literature, scholars often excessively focus...

Strategos: Born in the Borderlands, by Gordon Doherty, is a novel following the incredible exploits of Apion, a Byzantine boy living among Seljuk farmers in the lawless area at the edge of Byzantium in the 1040’s CE. Set in Anatolia (modern-day...

Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 represents a paradigm shift in the study of Indian history. It debunks the stereotypical interpretation of the middle period of Indian history, first championed by the British and later...

Jonathan Barth argues that England expanded its empire overseas throughout the 1600s in order to collect precious metals and wealth. Barth’s thesis is that colonists tolerated economic subordination to England as long as they had political...

European rhetoric and language usage have experienced many changes and modifications ever since ancient Greece and Roman orator Cicero's famous diction. Language, in history, has been used not just for functional communication but also as...

As the title suggests, Caroline Elkins's book tells the history of what historians call the “second British Empire” - the imperial developments that took shape after the disastrous loss of the rebellious American colonies in 1783 - through...

The internet only changes how people process information instead of creating the idea of 'information.' As soon as humans developed writing around 3400 BCE, we found many ways to record information from tax records to poetry and from legal...

In the book's Introduction, Edward Watts sets out his premise clearly. Roman politicians grew their power by destabilizing the present conditions of their society. As Watts points out, when trying to restore Rome, politicians often violated...

When I first saw the title of this book, I was excited to read it. Many studies on the Silk Road focus on its eastern end in China or its southern sections in the Middle East, but few scholars have looked at the relationship between Central...

The story of the Mughal Empire is a fascinating one. It has most of the historical elements that one might expect out of an empire: powerful male rulers, wars of succession, magnificent buildings, conflicts between religious and non-religious...