The 100 Best English & British History Books



Winston Churchill on the HMS Prince of Wales, 1941, from The Library of Congress

1. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900-1300 By Susan Reynolds | Used Price: 80% Off This work explores the values and activities of ordinary people in Medieval Western Europe. Rather than focus on hierarchical structures the author instead looks at horizontal bonds of collective association. More »

2. Robin Hood By J. C. Holt | Used Price: 90% Off "Highly recommended to all armchair swashbucklers."â€”Fresno Bee The legend of Robin Hood began more than 600 years ago. The man, if he existed at all, lived even earlier. In this definitive work, Professor Sir James Holt, one of Britainâ€™s premier historians and author of the standard work on ... More »

3. The Feudal Kingdom of England, 1042-1216 By Frank Barlow | Used Price: 80% Off Now in its fifth edition, this hugely successful text remains as vivid and readable as ever. Frank Barlow illuminates every aspect of the Anglo-Norman world, but the central appeal of the book continues to be its firm narrative structure. Here is a fascinating story compellingly told.At the beginning ... More »

4. The Later Middle Ages, 1272-1485 By George Holmes | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 English life in the thirteenth century was characterized by: a single Christian Church owing allegiance to Rome and living on the revenues of its estates; kingship with difficulty kept intact in the face of scheming magnates jealous of their privileges; a countryside divided into thousands of small estates, ... More »

6. The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages By Shulamith Shahar Did women really constitute a `fourth estate' in medieval society and, if so, in what sense? In this wide-ranging study Shulamith Shahar considers this and the whole question of the varying attitudes to women and their status in western Europe between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. More »

7. The First European Revolution: c. 970-1215 By R. I. Moore | Used Price: 60% Off This book provides a radical reassessment of Europe from the late tenth to the early thirteenth centuries. Professor Moore argues that the period witnessed the first true revolution in European society, characterized by a transformation in the economy, in family structures, and in the sources of power and ... More »

8. The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England By Rosamond Faith How were manorial lords in the twelfth and thirteenth century able to appropriate peasant labour? And what does this reveal about the changing attitudes and values of medieval England? Considering these questions from the perspective of the 'moral economy', the web of shared values within a society, Rosamond ... More »

9. Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages By Walter Ullmann In many respects this book, first published in 1961, marked a somewhat radical departure from contemporary historical writings. It is neither a constitutional nor a political history, but a historical definition and explanation of the main features which characterised the three kinds of government which can be discerned ... More »

10. The Making of the Middle Ages By R. W. Southern | Used Price: 90% Off The subject of this book is the formation of Western Europe from the late 10th to the early 13th century. During these years the economic face of Europe and its position in the world were transformed. Civilization, as we understand it today, was born. Although the period witnessed ... More »

11. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State By Charles Tilly; Joseph R. Strayer The modern state, however we conceive of it today, is based on a pattern that emerged in Europe in the period from 1100 to 1600. Written from the experience of a lifetime of teaching and research in the field, this short, clear book is ... More »

12. The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750 By James D. Tracy The Political Economy of Merchant Empires 1350 - 1750 follows the growth of European trade and state power as Europe rose to a position of dominance. Without overemphasising the importance of long-distance trade to domestic economies, this history follows a trend in history from the Venetian merchant empires ... More »

14. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, 1470-1750 By Keith Wrightson This important new book, widely praised in hardcover (Yale UP) redefines the economic history of early modern Britain for a new generation of readers. Wrightson writes evocatively about the basic institutions and relationships of economic life, tracing the process of change, and examining how these changes affected men, ... More »

15. Reformation By Diarmaid MacCulloch | Used Price: 70% Off Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History is the best text on one of the key events of European history. It won the Wolfson History Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. More »

17. A People's History of England By A. L. Morton A complete social and political history of England. Originally published in 1938. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Obscure Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the ... More »

18. The Population History of England 1541-1871 By E. A. Wrigley | Used Price: 70% Off This is the first paperback edition of a classic work of recent English historiography, first published by Edward Arnold in 1981. Numerous traditional assumptions are qualified, confirmed, or overturned, and the authors marshall a mass of statistical material into a series of clear, lucid arguments about ... More »

19. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 1, The Renaissance By Quentin Skinner | Used Price: 60% Off A two-volume study of political thought from the late thirteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, the decisive period of transition from medieval to modern political theory. The work is intended to be both an introduction to the period for students, and a presentation and justification of ... More »

20. Religion and the Decline of Magic By Keith Thomas | Used Price: 50% Off Keith Thomas's text looks at the 16th and 17th centuries where magic was being challenged in religion with the Reformation and in general with the rise of scietific, rational thinking. More »

21. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution By Christopher Hill | Used Price: 70% Off Within the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic - the ideology of the propertied class - there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success 'might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might ... More »

22. The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 By Conrad Russell A history of the dramatic events which led to the collapse of Charles I's authority in England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 1640s, this book links incidents in the king's three domains to construct a narrative account which makes sense of British history, as well as of the ... More »

24. The World We Have Lost By Peter Laslett The World We Have Lost is a seminal work in the study of family and class, kinship and community in England after the Middle Ages and before the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The book explores the size and structure of families in pre-industrial England, the ... More »

25. British Imperialism: 1688-2015 By P.J. Cain; A. G. Hopkins A milestone in the understanding of British history and imperialism, this ground-breaking book radically reinterprets the course of modern economic development and the causes of overseas expansion during the past three centuries. Employing their concept of 'gentlemanly capitalism', the authors draw imperial and domestic British history together to ... More »

26. Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 By Charles Tilly 'A rich and thoughtful book.' History 'A magnificent empirical resource accompanied by a subtle and powerful framework of interpretation...It is not often that historical scholarship is so effectively harnessed to the sociological imagination.' American Journal of Sociology 'This is a masterpiece of social movement analysis by an author ... More »

27. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy By Jonathan I. Israel Democracy, free thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality--these values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. But if these ideals no longer ... More »

28. The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1850 By Joel Mokyr Why did Western countries become so much wealthier than the rest of the world? And what explains the huge rise in incomes during the Industrial Revolution - and why did Britain lead the way? In the years between the Glorious Revolution and the Great Exhibition, the British economy ... More »

29. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution By Eric Hobsbawm | Used Price: 70% Off An updated edition of the classic study of the Industrial Revolution by "one of the few genuinely great historians of our century" (The New Republic). Premier historian Eric Hobsbawm's brilliant study of the Industrial Revolution, which sold more than a quarter of a million copies in its original ... More »

31. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England By Jeanette M. Neeson Did enclosure of the commons raise or lower living standards for the poor in England? This ground-breaking history enters that old debate, painting a rich picture of rural culture before enclosure and what was lost afterwards. Said to be the best book on the subject by EP Thompson. More »

32. Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America By Kenneth Morgan | Used Price: 70% Off Slavery and the British Empire provides a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, from the Cape Colony to the Caribbean. The book combines economic, social, political, cultural, and demographic history, with a particular focus on the Atlantic world and ... More »

33. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848 By Robin Blackburn | Used Price: 50% Off In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of products, both everyday and exotic. Some two and a half million black slaves, imprisoned in plantation colonies, toiled to produce the sugar, coffee, cotton, ginger and indigo craved by Europeans. By 1848 ... More »

34. Two Nations and the Educational Structure 1780-1870 By Brian Simon | Used Price: 80% Off The first of four studies in the "History of Education in England", this volume traces the emergence of modern education from the efforts of the scientific societies in the 1780s up to the securing of universal education with the Act of 1870. The ideas for model schools by ... More »

35. Clanship to Crofters War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands By Tom Devine Received to wide acclaim when first published in the 1990s, this absorbing book remains one of the most important, influential and widely-read histories of the Scottish Highlands from the end of the Jacobite Risings to the great crofters' rebellion of the 1880s. T. M. Devine argues that the ... More »

36. The Making of the English Working Class By E. P. Thompson | Used Price: 60% Off This book transformed our understanding of English social history. Thompson revealed how working class people were not merely victims of history, moved by powerful forces outside of themselves, but were also active in creating their own culture and future, during the degradation of the industrial revolution. More »

37. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes By Jonathan Rose | Used Price: 60% Off Now in its second edition, this landmark book provides an intellectual history of the British working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century. Drawing on workers’ memoirs, social surveys, library registers, and more, Jonathan Rose discovers which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what ... More »

38. Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 By Peter Thorsheim | Used Price: 50% Off Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain's cities and towns became ... More »

39. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture By Bruce Haley The quest for health guided Victorian living habits, shaped educational goals, and sanctioned a mania for athletic sports. As both metaphor and ideal, it influenced psychology, religion, moral philosophy; it affected the writing of history as well as the criticism of literature. Here is a wide-ranging and ably ... More »

41. 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement By John Saville | Used Price: 70% Off This is a detailed study of the workings of the various parts of the British state in their confrontation with the radical movements of Chartism and Irish nationalism. The year 1848 was notable, first, for the immense influence of the French revolution of February upon the whole of ... More »

42. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 By Catherine Hall How did the English get to be English? In Civilising Subjects, Catherine Hall argues that the idea of empire was at the heart of mid-nineteenth-century British self-imagining, with peoples such as the "Aborigines" in Australia and the "negroes" in Jamaica serving as markers of difference separating "civilised" English ... More »

43. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire By David Cannadine | Used Price: 90% Off With the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the empire that had lasted three hundred years and "upon which the sun never set" finally lost its hold on the world and slipped into history. But the question of how we understand the British Empire--its ... More »

44. Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England By Patrick Joyce | Used Price: 80% Off This pioneering and highly original study explores critically the nature of class identity by looking at the formation and influence of two men (Edwin Waugh and John Bright) who are taken as representative of what "working class" and "middle class" meant in England in the nineteenth century. ... More »

45. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940 By Daniel Headrick | Used Price: 70% Off Daniel Headrick examines why the massive transfer of Western technology to European colonies did not spark an industrial revolution in those countries. Rather than spurring economic progress, he argues, the transfer of stock technology between 1850 and 1940 caused the traditional self-sufficient economies of the colonial regions to ... More »

46. After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1874 By Margot C. Finn This book charts the course of working- and middle-class radical politics in England from the continental revolutions of 1848 to the fall of Gladstone's Liberal government in 1874. The author traces the genealogy of English radicalism from its roots in Protestant Dissent and the seventeenth-century revolutions, but also ... More »

47. Victorian Feminists By Barbara Caine | Used Price: 90% Off A study of Victorian feminism, this book focuses on four leading feminists: Emily Davies, Frances Power Cobbe, Josephine Butler, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Caine uncovers the range, diversity, and complexity of Victorian feminism, and examines the relationship between personal experience and feminist commitment. Caine sets her carefully researched ... More »

48. Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850-1960 By Michael A. Havinden; David Meredith British colonial rule of the tropics is the critical background to contemporary development issues. This study of Britain's economic and political relationship with its tropical colonies provides detailed analyses of trade and policy. The considerations of past successes and failures elucidate current opportunities and developments. No other book ... More »

49. Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire By Lance E. Davis; Robert A. Huttenback Historians have so far made few attempts to assess directly the costs and benefits of Britain's investment in empire. This book presents answers to some of the key questions about the economics of imperialism: how large was the flow of finance to the empire? How great were the ... More »

50. Imperialism and Popular Culture By John M. MacKenzie | Used Price: 90% Off Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this more true than in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. This text examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were ... More »

51. Gender and Empire By Philippa Levine Focusing the perspectives of gender scholarship on the study of empire produces an original volume full of fascinating new insights about the conduct of men as well as women. Bringing together disparate fields - politics, medicine, sexuality, childhood, religion, migration, and many more topics - this new collection ... More »

52. The Origins of Modern English Society By Harold Perkin | Used Price: 50% Off Bringing together subjects such as culture, religion, morals, politics, economics, and mentality, Perkin presents and applies a holistic concept of social history in the tradition of great historians of the past. In this classic text of social history, Harold Perkin explores the emergence of a new form ... More »

53. The Nineteenth Century: The British Isles 1815-1901 By Colin Matthew This new eleven-volume series will span the history of the British Isles from the Roman Era to the present. Each volume consists of essays by leading historians who focus on key issues for the period-including society, economy, religion, politics, and culture. The chapters are at once wide-ranging surveys ... More »

54. Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory By Cormac O Grada | Used Price: 80% Off Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish ... More »

55. Crime and Society in England: 1750 - 1900 By Clive Emsley Acknowledged as one of the best introductions to the history of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 examines thedevelopments in policing, the courts, and the penal system as England became increasingly industrialised and urbanised. The book challenges the old but still influential ... More »

56. Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism By Ronald Robinson; John Gallagher Imperialism in the eyes of the world is still Europe’s original sin, even though the empires themselves have long since disappeared. Among the most egregious of imperial acts was Victorian Britain’s seemingly random partition of Africa. In this classic work of history, a standard text for generations of ... More »

57. Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870-1914 By Jose Harris The late nineteenth century and Edwardian era, suggests Jose Harris in this book, represent a sharp break with the early years of Queen Victoria's reign. Indeed, despite the intense upheavals of two world wars, it was the beliefs, social structures and oppositional forces established between 1870 and 1914 ... More »

59. The Wilde Century By Alan Sinfield | Used Price: 80% Off For 15 years in Victorian England, Oscar Wilde was able to carry on like the famous camp queen of our imaginings - effete, leisured, aesthetic, amoral, decadent, dandified. This work explores how Wilde was seen before the trials that ended his career and made him the most famous ... More »

62. Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-2000 By Peter Clarke | Used Price: 80% Off Peter Clarke brilliantly challenges the commonly held view of Britain in the twentieth century as a nation in decline. Adopting a wide perspective, he examines the political, social and economic changes that transformed Britain. He looks at how jobs and prices, food and shelter, and education and welfare, ... More »

63. Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present By Pat Thane How has the UK evolved into the country it is today? This clear, comprehensive survey of its history since 1900 explores the political, economic, social and cultural changes which have divided the nation and held it together, and how these changes were experienced by individuals and communities. Pat ... More »

64. An Environmental History of Twentieth-Century Britain By John Sheail Environmental history - the history of the relationship between people and the natural world - is a dynamic and increasingly important field. In An Environmental History of Twentieth-Century Britain, John Sheail breaks new ground in illustrating how some of the most pressing concerns came to be recognised, and ... More »

65. Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century By Ritchie Ovendale A critique of Anglo-American relations in the 20th century in the light of recent research. It challenges existing interpretations and argues that the basis of the Anglo-American special relationship was laid by Roosevelt and Chamberlain, preferred Stalin to Churchill, and that the origins of the Cold War should ... More »

66. Women in Twentieth-Century Britain By Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska Women's lives have changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century: reduced fertility and the removal of formal barriers to their participation in education, work and public life are just some examples. At the same time, women are under-represented in many areas, are paid significantly less than ... More »

67. Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 By Anthony Seldon; Stuart Ball | 90% Off The dominant force in twentieth-century British politics, the Conservative Party has nevertheless been seriously neglected and misunderstood. Conservative Century systematically surveys the history of the Party from the "Khaki" election of 1900 to John Major's victory of 1992 and beyond. Ignoring traditional boundaries between history and political science, ... More »

68. The Strange Death of Liberal England: 1910-1914 By George Dangerfield The Strange Death of Liberal England, written by George Dangerfield, examines the causes of the fall of the British Liberal Party, from 1910 to 1914. The book was listed in the Modern Library's top 100 best nonfiction books. More »

69. The Guns of August By Barbara Tuchman | Used Price: 70% Off The Pulitzer Prize winning, The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, is focussed on the first month of World War I. Tuchman explains in detail the events that led to the war. The book was featured in the Modern Library's Top 100 nonfiction books of the 20th Century. More »

70. The First World War By Hew Strachan "This serious, compact survey of the war's history stands out as the most well-informed, accessible work available." (Los Angeles Times) Nearly a century has passed since the outbreak of World War I, yet as military historian Hew Strachan (winner of the 2016 Pritzker Literature Award) argues in ... More »

71. The Great War and Modern Memory By Paul Fussell | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 The Great War and Modern Memory is a book that describes the literary works by English participants in World War I to their experiences in trench warfare. Fussell describes how the futility and insanity of war defined the thinking of a generation and led England away from Romantacism. The book won the ... More »

72. English History 1914-1945 By A.J.P. Taylor | Used Price: 90% Off During ten of the 31 years between 1914 and 1945 the English people were involved in world wars; for 19 of the years they lived in the shadow of mass unemployment. These themes and the politics which sprang from them shape the narrative of this book. More »

73. A Nation and not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-23 By Diarmaid Ferriter Packed with violence, political drama and social and cultural upheaval, the years 1913-23 saw the emergence in Ireland of the Ulster Volunteer Force to resist Irish home rule and in response, the Irish Volunteers, who would later evolve into the IRA. World War One, the rise of Sinn ... More »

74. Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914-1964 By Partha Sarathi Gupta | 70% Off This book examines the attitudes and politics of the British labour movement towards the British Empire and the Commonwealth in the twentieth century. Its focus is not the British working class as such but rather the decision-making and policy-framing institutions of the labour movement, such as the Labour ... More »

75. British Unemployment 1919-1939 By W. R. Garside | Used Price: 50% Off Despite the dominance of unemployment in the historiography of interwar Britain, there is as yet no comprehensive single volume study of government reactions to the problem over the entire period down to 1939. British Unemployment 1919-1939 aims to fill that gap. W.R. Garside draws upon ... More »

76. Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 By David Edgerton This impressively researched and controversial book presents an alternative account of the development of one of the greatest states of the twentieth-century. It represents the culmination of David Edgerton's long-standing research on the relationship between science, technology, the military and the British state. Edgerton seeks to put the ... More »

78. The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 By Angus Calder The People's War The 1939-45 conflict was, for Britain, a "total war"; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. This book not only states the great events and the leading figures, but also the oddities and the ... More »

79. Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II By Madhusree Mukerjee | Used Price: 70% Off A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century. But while he has been widely extolled for his achievements, parts of Churchill’s record have gone ... More »

81. British Counterinsurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland By John Newsinger British Counterinsurgency challenges the British Army's claim to counterinsurgency expertise. It provides well-written, accessible and up-to-date accounts of the post-1945 campaigns in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, South Yemen, Dhofar, Northern Ireland and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. More »

82. The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy Since 1945 By Mark Curtis Using formerly secret government documents and independent sources, this historical study argues for a radically revised understanding of Post-war British foreign policy. Dr Curtis shows that, contrary to the impression usually conveyed by both academic writing and press coverage, British policy, in both intention and effect, had been ... More »

83. The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence By Richard J. Aldrich | Used Price: 60% Off Paranoia with respect to Russia raged in the wake of World War II, just as Churchill had foreseen: fear of a "nuclear Pearl Harbor" and the growing challenge of political stability in Europe gripped the Western world. The advent of new and terrifying weapons of war and annihilation-atomic ... More »

84. Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention By A. W. Brian Simpson The European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 established the most effective international system of human rights protection ever created. This is the first book that gives a comprehensive account of how it came into existence, of the part played in its genesis by the British government, and ... More »

85. Britain since 1945: The People's Peace By Kenneth O. Morgan | Used Price: 90% Off This penetrating analysis is the first comprehensive study by a professional historian of British history from 1945 to the present day. It examines the transformation of post-war Britain from the planning enthusiasm of 1945 to the rise of New Labour. Using a wide variety of sources, including the ... More »

86. No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain By Paul Addison | Used Price: 60% Off In No Turning Back, Paul Addison charts the vastly changing character of British society since the end of the Second World War, tracing a series of peaceful revolutions that have completely transformed the country. He shows, for instance, that much of the sexual morality preached if not practiced ... More »

87. Britain and the Cold War By Sean Greenwood During the Cold War, the process of East West tension, though dominated by the Superpowers, was often conditioned, and in its early stages accelerated, by Britain's continuing world wide interests and influence. Since the 1980s, British scholars have been using newly released material to demonstrate the central role ... More »

88. The Five Giants; A Biography of the Welfare State By Nicholas Timmins Giant Want. Giant Disease. Giant Ignorance. Giant Squalor. Giant Idleness. These were the Five Giants that loomed over the post-war reconstruction of Britain. The battle against them was fought by five gargantuan programmes that made up the core of the Welfare State: social security, health, education, housing ... More »

89. Black and British: A Forgotten History By David Olusoga In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean. Drawing on new genealogical research, original records, and expert testimony, Black and ... More »

90. Muslims in Britain By Sophie Gilliat-Ray Archaeological evidence shows there was contact between Muslims and the British Isles from the 8th century. Beginning with these historical roots, Sophie Gilliat-Ray traces the major points of encounter between Muslims and the British in subsequent centuries, and explores Muslim migration to Britain in recent times. Drawing upon ... More »

91. Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century By David Reynolds | Used Price: 90% Off This book brings together the often separated histories of diplomacy, defence, economics and empire in a provocative reinterpretation of British 'decline'. It also offers a broader reflection on the nature of international power and the mechanisms of policymaking. For this Second Edition, David Reynolds has added a new chapters and ... More »

92. Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya By Caroline Elkins | Used Price: 90% Off Britain's Gulag examines the British response to the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya post-World War Two. Elkins examines the brutal tactics adopted by the British to maintain their empire – including putting 1.5 million people into concentration camps. More »

95. A Short History of the Labour Party By Henry Pelling; Alastair J. Reid This is the classic account of the rise of the Labour Party from its foundation through to Tony Blair's second term as Prime Minister. Thoroughly revised and updated, it describes the events that led to the inception of the party, the role of the trade unions within the ... More »

96. A History of British Trade Unionism, 1700-1998 By W. Hamish Fraser This new history of British trade unionism offers the most concise and up-to-date account of 300 years of trade union development, from the earliest documented attempts at collective action by working people in the eighteenth century through to the very different world of `New Unionism' and `New Labour'. More »

97. An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community By Stephen George Britain joined the EU in 1973, over twenty years after the first of the European Communities was formed. Within a year, Britain had established a reputation for being at odds with major Community initiatives and for taking an independent point of view. An Awkward Partner surveys the policies ... More »

98. The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class By Selina Todd THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'There was nothing extraordinary about my childhood or background. And yet I looked in vain for any aspect of my family's story when I went to university to read history, and continued to search fruitlessly for it throughout the next decade. Eventually I realised ... More »

99. London: A Social History By Roy Porter | Under $1.00 This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern colossus. Roy ... More »

100. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities By Jeffrey Weeks | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Few topics evoke so much anxiety and pleasure, pain and hope, discussion and silence as sexuality. Throughout the Christian era it has been a major moral preoccupation. Since the eighteenth century it has also been the focus of 'scientific' exploration and political activity. But, despite this obsessive concern, ... More »

The 100 Best English and British History Books provides a reading list for those serious about history. Made up of modern works, it covers English and British history from the medieval period to the early modern and modern period. The list offers suggestions of the best books to read, but - being limited to one hundred books - is not entirely comprehensive. Related pages