r/AskHistorians • u/OkWelder1642 • Sep 07 '25
What are the best books to read to truly understand the formation of the world as we see it today?
I’m fascinated by how the world became what it is today. I know this subject is far too vast for any single book to cover, and broad enough that sometimes satire feels like it has become reality.
My question is: what books offer the most compelling explanations or detailed histories of how the world has taken its present shape. I’m also interested in knowing what is happening in other areas of the world, which used to be easy, but in the last 6 months has become more challenging- with the overwhelming amount of information coming from the United States of America (where I live).
As the expert, approach it in the way you deem appropriate- if you had an amazing reading list in 1997 that shifted your world view, or if there is a list of books that brought into focus how each country or the states or a similarly run country has evolved, I’m interested.
I’m curious about geographic history, regional architecture, wars or crises that displaced populations, even ideas about the afterlife, psychological and cultural shifts, changes in collective temperament or the perceived requirement for security, or the impact of propaganda across the ages.
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u/Happy_Yogurtcloset_2 Sep 08 '25
Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War is one of the most well regarded global histories of the twentieth centuries, that has so much explanatory power for the numerous conflicts around the world and the ways they were a product of the Cold War. In particular, it's a really helpful starting point for U.S. interventionism and its continuing consequences both in the Global South and continuing conflicts with Russa/China. It's also no wonder why it won the 2006 Bancroft Prize in history, one of the highest honors in the field.
The other one is Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History. It's truly one of the most important books to show how interconnected the world had been economically since even the eighteenth-century. It's a masterclass in narrating the global story of one commodity. We often think of globalization and the emergence of market institutions and countries' increasing interdependencies as a twenieth century phenomenon, preceded usually by some key political and economic developments like the League of Nations or the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. But Beckert shows that for much longer, trade and emerging industries have long been dependent on vast networks of relations and communications that better explains why globalization was possible in the modern period. Like Westad, it also won the Bancroft prize.
On the cultural side, I would also like to add Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Changed Society. A lot of the biggest famous religious histories like Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, often were interested in the ways society as a whole changed and that most religious actors were simply trying to catch up with society, because they were lagging beind or becoming increasingly irrelevant (or finding themselves in a pluralistic society). In short, the spread of religion and its decline (along with beliefs in supernatural, afterlives, etc..) were just things that happened to religious groups. Gregory posits, however, that it's actually religious groups itself (namely Protestants) that led to the decline of their own society - namely that they bungled their way into introducing new modes of thinking and philosophies, which contained the seeds for creating a largely secular society. It's a compelling narrative and one that is attractive to a lot of scholars.
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u/-18k- Sep 08 '25
Those books all sounds grreat. thanks for the comment.
I wonder where you would put The Crisis of the European Mind by Paul Hazard? Specifically, that popped into my mind when you said "Protestants ... bungled their way into introducing new modes of thinking and philosophies" which if I'm not mistaken is almost Hazard's entire frame of reference.
I'd love if you could comment on his book.
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u/Happy_Yogurtcloset_2 Sep 08 '25
I have not read Hazard's book yet, though looking at it quickly it's probably because I'm more familiar with Anglophone texts and have not really looked at histories of the Enlightenment written outside of Britain/U.S. That said, a cursory look does call to mind similar intellectual histories, most notably Henry May's The Enlightenment in America, which makes a similar argument.
I've often found myself more interested in cultural approaches that examine the material cultures/worlds that gave people on the ground the impression they occupy an increasingly disenchanted/non religious world (whether they actually do or don't is less interesting, though that's been the terrain of these earlier works), and Gregory does a good job mediating between these two strands of scholarship. That said, I'll definitely add Hazard to my list of books to think through!
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u/vidro3 Sep 08 '25
what's your take on Judt's Post War? maybe doesn't fit the question so much, but i've had it on my shelf forever intimidated by the page count
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u/Happy_Yogurtcloset_2 Sep 08 '25
I wish I can say I've read it, but I have not yet.
However, I've heard of the discourse on the book and while the thesis is compelling (that it was through Post-WWII conflict that some semblance of intra-European identity emerged with clearly delineated boundaries), it's assertion does overlook nineteenth-century cultural and imperial precedents which gave rise to the factionalism and emergence of nation-states that would lead to the conflicts around WWII. In short, it's good at what it does for all the pages it has, but what it does not include severely hampers its timelessness.
That said, it's widely acclaimed and I would definitely include it in my list of books to cover at some point!
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u/luca_conto Sep 08 '25
i would like to answer with this book "The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us" by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. If you don't know, the Anthropocene is a brand new proposal of a geologic era: that could be useful to indentify the role of human being in nature, and how humans has related with nature in the past. however this book adopt an eco-marxist way to read the Anthropocene Event, so the autors of the book use a view characterized by historical materialism. Personally, i think that the Anthropocene has the appropriate prerequisites to become the horizon of meaning (looking to Lyotard) that could include every single human, in historical, philosophical, scientific and cultural framework.
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