The 2023 Nonfiction Challenge: Empires in March!

Well, the Ides of March are almost upon us, and Caesar's assassination on that date really was one of those events that marked an end to the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire -- so it seemed like a great month to read a non-fiction book set in some empire in some period of time!

You can read about Rome, about the Pax Britannica, about the Mongols, about some of the African empires, or about China or Japan. The rise of an empire, the fall of an empire, the legacy of an empire, or a specific emperor/empress -- Romanov, Habsburg, Ming dynasty, Napoleon -- whatever intrigues you most. Or read something about empires themselves -- historiography.

For the purposes of this month's reading -- while Tsarist Russia was an empire, the Soviet Union really wasn't (even though its rulers behaved as if it was). Neither is the Pax Americana a literal American empire. You can certainly read books about empires as a category that differ with this, but American/Soviet foreign policy or political books wouldn't count. On the other hand, I will consider Egyptian pharaohs as de facto emperors -- they had peoples who paid tribute to them and who they formally colonized.

Don't forget to star this page, and to come back and bring us all up to date with your discoveries!!

Here's a list of what you have to look forward to for the rest of the year!

April: The Sea/Ocean. What happens on and in the sea, from trade and travel to oceanography and the study of fishes (think, Mark Kurlansky's book about the humble cod...)

May: Literary Biography. Books about literary creators, and some of the books they created.

June: Indigenous/Aboriginal Peoples/ First Nations. Explore their history, the first contacts with interlopers, land rights and treaty issues, human rights, social justice issues, etc.

July: Explorations and Expeditions. Define this any way you choose. Someone could walk the length of the Silk Road, or explore the structure of the human genome.

August: The World of the Land, Trees and Plants. So, think the natural world, here. This could be scientific; it could also be a travel book that is tied to geography, ecology, etc.

September: Family Ties. A family-based memoir (so, not just any memoir, but one revolving around family members), a book about family history or exploring a family's past/roots.

October: Crimes, Mysteries, Puzzles, Enigmas. What did happen to the Princes in the Tower? Does the Bermuda Triangle exist, really? Where did DB Cooper go? Or anything puzzling that intrigues you.

November: Matters of Faith and Philosophy. Basically: books about any ideas that shape the way we live and how we interact in society.

December As You Like It. Yes, it's the other perennial bookend! A go-anywhere/read-anything challenge.

I plan to read The Baburnama, the memoirs of a 16th century Mughal emperor.

Unfortunately I don't have anything obvious on my TBR shelves so am going to sit out this month, but I've still starred the thread as I'm sure I'll get hit with a BB or three!

>4 Jackie_K: That's the name of the game!
>3 cbl_tn: Yes, I think that was THE book of the Mughals, if I remember correctly... I'm impressed!

Not sure yet what I'll read. I've got a lot on my TBR mountain about Rome, but my top three candidates focus on other areas:

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen Platt (this is about the Taiping Rebellion in 19th C China; I really liked his more recent book about the Opium Wars, which was a Baillie Gifford shortlist candidate)

Legacy of Violence by Caroline Elkins -- about the aftermath of a specific empire, the British one

Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley. Title is self-explanatory; I just finished a novel about the aftermath of Portuguese colonization in Angola, from the POV of a teenage boy who has to return to live in the "homeland" where he has never been. The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso does an excellent job of delving into the confusion and dislocation on the part of this kind of group -- people with privilege who lose those privileges that were never earned, but also from the perspective of someone young enough not to be willfully complicit in exploitation and young enough to make simplistic and sweeping judgments on the groups he finds himself caught between. This book renewed my curiosity about one of the earliest (and remarkably large) European empires.

I'm also tempted to include The French Intifada, which is about the impact of the French empire in North Africa on the creation of a diaspora within France itself post-decolonization.

Hmmm, I'm going to have to think about this one for a bit. I have Justinian's Flea: plague, empire, and the birth of Europe, which fits the category perfectly, but I just finished reading it in December. I don't have a lot else on my TBR shelves that fits. I'm planning to read Cleopatra: a Life this month for the Reading Through Time - Notorious Women challenge; maybe I could count it for both challenges? Otherwise, I may need to pick up something at the library or bookstore.

I think a book I found on my shelves will have an interesting take on an empire. It's Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain's Empire.

>5 Chatterbox: One of my long-term reading projects is working my way through 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. Its author used to operate the mail-order book business A Common Reader. I always looked forward to browsing their new catalog. I created a 1,000 books collection in my library and I'm slowly adding books to it. When I searched "empires" in my catalog for something to read this month, it was either The Baburnama or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I didn't think I had time for Gibbon this month, so that left The Baburnama!

>8 cbl_tn: Gulp, yes, Gibbon is a year-long project, at the very least! I have a couple of volumes from my grandfather's library (he died in 1987...) but have not tackled him. Though it's definitely on my list...

>6 atozgrl: Cleopatra would definitely work, both because I'm including pharaohs and because Cleopatra's life was dominated by Egypt's tangles with Rome and the emerging Roman empire. (Arguably, the demise of Egypt's quasi-empire dovetailed/was linked to the creation of Rome's empire...)

>9 Chatterbox: How ironic! I looked at my inherited set of the Great Books of the Western World this afternoon and saw that it included Gibbon. But two volumes of extremely small type--no way can I read that in March!

I'll go ahead and count Cleopatra for both challenges this month. And I'll keep looking to see if I can find another book that will work.

Thanks!

I am torn between Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt of Sailing from Byzantium by Colin Wells, or Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley. I am very much leaning toward the Cicero book because I have recently started reading the Marcus Didius Flaco series by Lindsey Davis and the background on the Roman Empire would be helpful knowledge.

I decided on Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World byRoger Crowley as the book for this category. It is a blow by blow account of the 16th century told from the point of view of two empires - the Hapsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. It concentrates on the struggle for the Mediterranean Sea and why this happened at that point in time and place. Up until the 1550's the Ottoman Empire had done nothing but expand in every direction, but the middle years of the 16th Century marked a turning point and the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire solidified at their present day borders. The author makes a point of noting that in the western Mediterranean this happened because the Spanish throne, which had become the Hapsburg Throne suddenly found itself with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of wealth coming from the new world's of the Western Hemisphere and were then able to pour that money into stopping the infidel and returning Europe to orthodox Catholicism.

The author spends a great deal of time setting the scene of the titanic clashes between Spain and Turkey and does so with telling the story of the Siege of Rhodes and the loss of western North Africa to Turkish naval superiority in the early part of the century. The next big clash was that of the Turks against the island of Malta in 1565, and this blow by blow account sets the stage for the next big battle - Lepanto in 1571.

The author makes a point of telling the modern reader how important all of this was in the development of the modern nation states of Europe and how effectively the Ottoman Empire controlled the commerce of the Mediterranean. It is easy for the modern reader to not understand how big of a player on the world stage the Ottoman's were in this era because of the tendency to think of that empire as it was in 1915 rather than what it was in 1515. Of course, we don't have the same problem with Spain or the Hapsburg's because they had long ago passed from the scene. It was a very different world in 1500.

At the end of the book the author tells the reader that another reason we don't know about these titanic battles was that in the end, they were fought too late and history had bypassed them and moved on while they were being fought. The world around these two mighty powers changed and they were so caught up in what they were doing that they failed to see the importance of these changes. One was that the center of the world shifted from the Mediterranean to the Western Hemisphere because of the shift from ore to sail, and with that the opening of the sea routes to Asia caused the world center to shift farther to the east and the Indian Ocean. The author addresses this failure on the parts of Spain and Turkey equally and explains why this happened to them.

This was an interesting work of military and political history that should be read and studied by many more western scholars than do so. It helps to explain so many things going on in the present world.

Empires are made up of people and the British Empire needed lots of them to colonize the places they wanted to take over. They also had a problem with overcrowded prisons which was what happened when people were put there for stealing petty items as well as other crimes. The solution was transportation. Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire delved into the various types of transportation over the centuries that it was used as a solution. The amount of people and places affected as well as the time span it which it was practiced in its various forms were astounding.

I finished Cleopatra: a Life by Stacy Schiff a couple of days ago. This is quite a good retelling of Cleopatra's story. The big problem that historians have when trying to learn about Cleopatra is that all the writings about her that have survived are from the Romans, who were not favorably predisposed to her. Schiff does her best to tease out the truth about Cleopatra from the information that is still available to us, and I learned quite a bit about Cleopatra that I did not already know. One of the things I had not known was that Mark Antony had assigned vast lands in the eastern Roman empire (and beyond) to their children, giving Cleopatra nominal reign over more territory than the Ptolemy's had controlled since Alexander. So at least temporarily, the Egyptian "empire" was quite expansive, "on paper" if not in actual fact. This was obviously an affront to Octavian and Rome, and led inevitably to the final falling out between Octavian and Antony. With Octavian's final victory and the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt finally became a province of Rome, completing the Roman empire that we today are familiar with.

I would recommend Cleopatra: a Life to anyone who wants to know more about Cleopatra and this period in Roman history.

Is the April thread out yet? I can't find it.

>15 fuzzi: I was looking for it this weekend, and I couldn't find it either.

chatterbox said she would be offline for a bit due to a family matter (post on her thread from mid-March)

Mayhap one of us could set up the new thread (as we know the topic)? Or message her to offer to do so?

Apologies for this -- no excuse, as I've been home for (almost) a week, and it's been (almost) two weeks since my father died. I literally simply forgot about this until today. Am off to set it up now.

And... it's live.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/350004

>18 Chatterbox: I'm so sorry for your loss, Suzanne.

Sorry to hear of your loss.

>18 Chatterbox: My condolences on your loss, and it's perfectly OK to forget about routine matters (like LibraryThing) or not have the emotional energy for them, especially after something like that.

Thank you Suzanne for all that you do to organize these threads. Much appreciated!