If you haven’t yet read the History Today Books of the Year Part 1, you can find it here.
‘An exploration of issues relevant to anyone interested in the practice of history’
George Bodie Lecturer in History at Goldsmiths, University of London
I’d go for three books which, in very different ways, have made huge contributions to the discipline. The first is Ned Richardson-Little’s The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State (Bloomsbury). At a time of increasingly fractious debate around the legacy of the GDR, Richardson-Little provides a concise and authoritative account of its history, rising above the culture wars that have engulfed the topic.
If Richardson-Little’s book demonstrates the historian’s ability to intervene calmly in divisive debates, my next choice does quite the opposite. Following his provocative and radical history of the Cold War, Paul Thomas Chamberlin has produced a new interpretation of the conflict that preceded it. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books) he challenges ‘orthodox’ interpretations of the war as a battle between democracy and fascism, instead framing it as a ‘massive, colonial race war’.
Finally, I loved Lea Ypi’s Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Allen Lane). Ypi is not a historian, but her imaginative narration of her grandmother’s life serves as ballast for an exploration of issues relevant to anyone interested in the practice of history: archival silence, questions of belonging, and the relationship between history and narrative.
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The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State
Ned Richardson-Little
Bloomsbury, 296pp, £16.99
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Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II
Paul Thomas Chamberlin
Basic Books, 656pp, £30
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Indignity: A Life Reimagined
Lea Ypi
Allen Lane, 368pp, £22
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‘An accessible work that confronts the legacies of colonialism’
Sumita Mukherjee is Professor of Modern History at the University of Bristol
Imaobong Umoren’s Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean (Fern Press) offers an all-encompassing, immensely readable, centuries-spanning history of the Caribbean’s relationship with Britain. In a story covering slavery and indenture, pan-Africanism, flag independence, and the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Joy Gardner, Umoren presents a compelling argument about how the racial-caste hierarchy has been shaped by colonialism – and how it plays out in Britain today. Empire Without End is an accessible work that confronts the legacies of colonialism – it deserves to reach a wide, general audience.
Suraj Milind Yengde’s Caste: A Global Story (Hurst) is an ambitious book which grapples with the history of the entrenched Indian caste system. Foregrounding Dalit (or ‘untouchable’) subjectivity and agency, Yengde explores the effects of colonialism, the legacies of the indenture system, and the links between Dalit and Black activism. Using a range of historical sources and contemporary fieldwork, Yengde poses an important question: what is the place of caste within today’s global Indian diaspora?
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Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean
Imaobong Umoren
Fern Press, 528pp, £12.99
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Caste: A Global Story
Suraj Milind Yengde
Hurst, 360pp, £25
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‘A fascinating study of beliefs about the walking dead ’
Levi Roach is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter
For me, the standout book of 2025 is John Blair’s Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton), a fascinating study of beliefs about the walking dead from ancient times to the modern world. Blair combines archaeological evidence and historical expertise to produce an impressively comprehensive picture.
Similarly satisfying is David Woodman’s The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom (Princeton). Æthelstan has a good claim to be the first truly ‘English’ monarch, but is (sadly) scarcely known outside scholarly circles.
Finally, the most original book I read this year was Krisztina Ilko’s The Sons of St Augustine: Art and Memory in the Augustinian Churches of Central Italy, 1256-1370 (Oxford), a brilliant interdisciplinary study of the early history of the Augustinian Order, which should be out in time for Christmas. The Augustinians have been the ugly ducklings of the mendicant orders, but Ilko shows them to be just as important as their more famous Franciscan and Dominican brethren. At a time when an Augustinian has just ascended the throne of St Peter (Pope Leo XIV), there could hardly be a more topical subject.
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Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World
John Blair
Princeton, 536pp, £30
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The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom
David Woodman
Princeton, 344pp, £30
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The Sons of St Augustine: Art and Memory in the Augustinian Churches of Central Italy, 1256-1370
Krisztina Ilko
Oxford, 464pp, £113.85
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‘It reminds us that political agency and leadership in Africa has a long and varied history’
Jonathan M. Jackson is Research Associate in African History at the University of Oxford
Richard Reid’s spectacular The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century (Princeton) argues that the era before European colonial rule was anything but passive: it was a time of political experimentation, economic innovation, violence, and profound social change. Reid centres an East African trade road as a lens through which to view the forces – local, regional, global – that shaped the period. He rejects the prevailing notion that ‘the Scramble’ was the beginning of Africa’s modern history, showing instead that Africans forged many of the institutions that European colonialism later encountered and exploited.
In When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors (Trapeze), Paula Akpan brings to life African rulers whose stories have been marginalised. From Ancient Egypt through pre-colonial societies to apartheid-era resistance, Akpan traces how these leaders exercised power, negotiated complex gender expectations, and were simultaneously celebrated and contested. Blending archival research, fieldwork, and personal reflection, it reminds us that political agency and leadership in Africa has a long and varied history that deserves to be better known.
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The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century
Richard Reid
Princeton, 432pp, £25
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When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors
Paula Akpan
Trapeze, 416pp, £30
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‘Tells a thoroughly human story of this most cataclysmic event’
Alice Hunt is Professor of Early Modern Literature and History at the University of Southampton
2025 saw the 400th anniversary of the death of James I and the publication of excellent books on Britain’s most interesting – but much maligned – monarch. Clare Jackson’s The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I (Allen Lane) eschews the tired ‘cradle to grave’ format and presents James through a series of perfectly formed thematic chapters. It’s like seeing James through several mirrors at once, and the effect is dazzling.
Anna Whitelock’s The Sun Rising: James I and the Dawn of a Global Britain (Bloomsbury) also does away with conventional royal biography. This rich and evocative book takes us far from Whitehall in pursuit of James’ ambitious vision for a united, global Britain. Moving from the plantations of Ireland and trading posts in Indonesia to the courts of Japan and Russia, the book shows us the strange birth of an empire and pushes beyond anglocentric history.
Jonathan Healey’s The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642 (Bloomsbury) is a forensically detailed, unputdownable account of the bleak winter of 1642, as England tumbled into war. It was dark, messy, and complicated but Healey, always with an eye for the everyday and the quirky, tells a thoroughly human story of this most cataclysmic event.
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The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I
Clare Jackson
Allen Lane, 560pp, £27
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The Sun Rising: James I and the Dawn of a Global Britain
Anna Whitelock’
Bloomsbury, 448pp, £30
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The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642
Jonathan Healey
Bloomsbury, 432pp, £12.99
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‘A deeply absorbing account of major economic thinkers’
Dinyar Patel is Associate Professor of History at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai
Srinath Raghavan’s Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India (Yale) masterfully covers the political life of a prime minister both hailed as a strong leader and condemned as a dictator. Raghavan pulls no punches: he details Gandhi’s paranoia, hunger for power, and corruption while offering some revisionist takes, such as on her surprisingly pragmatic economic policy.
Sam Dalrymple’s debut Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins) is an innovative take on mid 20th-century South Asia and its hinterlands. Dalrymple goes beyond 1947 to trace the violent splintering of the larger British Indian Empire, from the Red Sea to Rangoon. ‘Partition is not over’, he concludes, pointing to how these divisions continue to animate geopolitics.
John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World (Allen Lane) is a deeply absorbing account of major economic thinkers and their times. Cassidy finds ‘remarkably consistent’ critiques of capitalism across the centuries: a system exploitative and inequitable ‘yet also all-conquering and overwhelming’.
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Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India
Srinath Raghavan
Yale, 384pp, £25
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Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
Sam Dalrymple
William Collins, 4528pp, £25
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Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World
Allen Lane
John Cassidy, 624pp, £10.99
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‘A nuanced, accessible, and rigorous study’
Elizabeth Boyle is Lecturer in Early Irish at Maynooth University
In The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton) Ian Stewart tackles the question of what is, and isn’t, ‘Celtic’ in a nuanced, accessible, and rigorous study which covers the development of Celtic Studies, the ‘Celtomania’ which gripped 18th- and 19th-century Britain, France, and Germany, and the various nationalisms of the 20th-century Celtic-speaking nations – Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.
I have been thinking a lot about biographical writing over the past year, and it is a joy to dip into the lives of the Irish scientists brought together in Turlough O’Riordan and Jane Grimson’s Irish STEM Lives (Royal Irish Academy). Taking due care to correct the historic under-representation of women, this fascinating collection, drawn from the Dictionary of Irish Biography, is bookended by the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle and the particle physicist Anne Kernan, who died in 2020.
My other preoccupation has been urbanisation, and I found Richard Hodges’ The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Towns: A Viking Gift? (Bloomsbury) to be a most interesting and thought-provoking essay. Succinct and stimulating, it is a must-read for anyone thinking about the development of towns in medieval Europe.
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The Celts: A Modern History
Ian Stewart
Princeton, 576pp, £35
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Irish STEM Lives
Turlough O’Riordan and Jane Grimson
Royal Irish Academy, 296pp, £15
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The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Towns: A Viking Gift?
Richard Hodges
Bloomsbury, 232pp, £24.99
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‘Shows how Vietnamese emperors took a close interest in the weather and climate’
Patrick Jory is Associate Professor of History at the University of Queensland
Southeast Asian history sometimes seems at the periphery of mainstream historical interest, but two books this year are exceptions. We think of climate change as a contemporary Western preoccupation, but Kathryn Dyt’s brilliantly researched The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (University of Hawaiʻi Press) shows how Vietnamese emperors took a close interest in the weather and climate. Their understanding of the natural world’s influence on human life was a mixture of classical Chinese learning, Jesuit scholarly works, and their own empirical observation of Vietnam’s distinct environment.
Charles Higham’s revised and reissued Early Southeast Asia: From First Humans to First Civilizations (NUS Press) highlights the region’s importance to theories of human evolution due to vital discoveries such as ‘Java Man’, Homo floresiensis (aka ‘the Hobbit’), and the recently discovered Homo luzonensis on the island of Luzon. The use of the new technology of light detection and ranging (‘lidar’) in the past decade has revealed that the Cambodian royal city of Angkor was one of the world’s largest pre-industrial urban centres.
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The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam
Kathryn Dyt
University of Hawaiʻi Press, 284pp, £60 -
Early Southeast Asia: From First Humans to First Civilizations
Charles Higham
NUS Press, 376pp, £35
‘An immensely well-researched and reflective history’
Harshan Kumarasingham is Reader in Politics and History at the University of Edinburgh
Just shy of his 90th year the great historian of the British Empire and its demise Wm. Roger Louis has, in The End of the British Empire in the Middle East, 1952-1971 (Oxford), once more produced an immensely well-researched and reflective history to help us understand a critical period and region in postwar history. It complements his book published over four decades ago covering the same subject for the years 1945-51.
Keeping with the theme of empire and its consequences, and impressively with his first book, in Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia Sam Dalrymple excitingly reminds us of the continent-spanning division of the British Raj; especially interesting are those stories beyond modern India.
Finally, Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam have expertly edited the diaries of A.C. Benson, Cambridge scholar and lyricist for Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. The Benson Diary (Pallas Athene) provides candid and catty insights into the establishment, covering 1885-1925, when Britain was arguably at the height of its power.
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The End of the British Empire in the Middle East, 1952-1971
Wm. Roger Louis
Oxford, 528pp, £30
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Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
Sam Dalrymple
William Collins, 4528pp, £25
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The Benson Diary
Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam
Pallas Athene, 1050pp, £60
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‘A vast, unsparing world history from the 1750s on’
Bathsheba Demuth is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University
There are two books that will stay with me long past 2025. Surekha Davies’ Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press) is creative and deeply serious, winding a path from primordial gods to zombies and large language models. Davies shows how the concept of monstrousness helped create the categories of who is human and who is not that undergird contemporary inequality. It is a history of why we make monsters – and what might happen if we cease to.
If Davies’ book is about the creation of monsters, Clifton Crais’ The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador) chronicles the wages of monsters unleashed. A vast, unsparing world history from the 1750s on, Crais chronicles the rise of industrial technologies of death able to kill at horrific scale from the battlefield to the slaughterhouse. It is a book about how monstrous actions became normalised parts of the global economy, and are the root of our current environmental crises.
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Humans: A Monstrous History
Surekha Davies
University of California Press, 336pp, £21
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The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World
Clifton Crais
Picador, 736pp, £30
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