Books like Citizens by Simon Schama

Jared Diamond analyses why great civilizations collapse, linking environmental misuse, climate change, population pressures, and trade instability as common causes, and offering lessons from societies that survived.

Francis Fukuyama traces how diverse societies have arrived at their present political arrangements, exploring the historical and comparative routes that shape modern states.

Hannah Arendt’s seminal study charts the rise of totalitarianism from 19th‑century anti‑Semitism and European colonialism to the emergence of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, examining propaganda, terror, and mass mobilization.

This book begins by looking at the peoples of Africa at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and goes on to study the commercial and ideological penetration of Africa by the outside world. The partition and colonisation of Africa by the European powers are discussed, and there is comprehensive discussion of the colonial rule between 1885 and 1960. The last third of the book is concerned with the history of independent Africa during the last years of the twentieth century. The new edition covers events up to the middle of 2003, and takes account of the fresh perspectives brought about by the end of the Cold War and the new global situation following the events of September 11, 2001. It is also concerned with the demographic trends, with the ravages of diseases such as AIDS and malaria, and with the conflicts waged by warlords.

The French Revolution is one of the great turning-points in modern history. Never before had the people of a large and populous country sought to remake their society on the basis of the principles of popular sovereignty and civic equality. The drama, success, and tragedy of their endeavor, and of the attempts to arrest or reverse it, have attracted scholarly debate for more than two centuries. Why did the Revolution erupt in 1789? Why did it prove so difficult to stabilize the new regime? What factors caused the Revolution to take its particular course? And what were the consequences, domestic and international, of a decade of revolutionary change? Featuring contributions from an international cast of acclaimed historians, A Companion to the French Revolution addresses these and other critical questions as it points the way to future scholarship.

*L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution* (1856) is a work by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville translated in English as either *The Old Regime and the Revolution* or *The Old Regime and the French Revolution*. The book analyzes French society before the French Revolution, the so-called "Ancien Régime", and investigates the forces that caused the Revolution. It is one of the major early historical works on the French Revolution. In this book, de Tocqueville develops his main theory about the French revolution, the theory of continuity, in which he states that even though the French tried to dissociate themselves from the past and from the autocratic old regime, they eventually reverted to a powerful central government.