For such a seemingly small island, Great Britain has permanently painted history red, white and blue. She’s a nation which has bloodied battlefields, surrendered hopelessly and suffered a mourner’s fate over the centuries.
The legacy of the British Empire is vast, sprawling, and extremely complex. There’s a reason we’ve provided a round-up of books written by experts in the field, instead of attempting to explain a brief history in the space of a few short introductory sentences.
While many of us know that Great Britain was once part of the Roman Empire, it can be difficult to understand just how the landscape changed from that of ancient roads and ingenious irrigation to that of waste-ridden Victorian England and all the tales of royal succession in between.
Though school lessons tend to focus on tracing the history of monarchs and British-led conflicts and conquering, there are many fascinating ways through which we can explore the depths of British history.
Whether it be by tracing the history of fashion and sumptuary laws, gastronomical tradition and dining accoutrements, tools of trade, burial rites or lost and found objects, the methods and minutiae of historical discovery are wonderfully wide-ranging.
From archaeological deep dives into the ancient history of British soil to journeys through forgotten villages, we’ve curated a selection of the best books about British history to read in 2024. Keep scrolling if you’re interested in what lies beneath the surface of the streets you walk daily.
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Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera
The bloody legacy of British Imperialism continues to surround us in the modern day. In this fantastic non-fiction book, Sanghera writes of how centuries of society-building simply cannot be erased by the tearing down of a few statues, no matter how much we’d like it to be. The essence of the imperial attitude continues to influence our politics on a private and collective level.
Despite hiding in plain sight, Britain is scarily good at sweeping its dark history under the rug. In tracing how the legacy of British colonialism and empire has shaped modern society, Sanghera reveals how confronting our history head-on and examining its lasting influence is an essential tool.
Buy now £9.32, Amazon
Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire by Priya Satia
In this brilliant revisionist history, Priya Satia writes of how British historians’ accounts of war and conquest have had untold repercussions on our modern understanding of the British Empire.
The author traces how this decidedly biased history which consolidated Imperial rule over the centuries was used by major figures to halt the decolonisation process. In doing so, Satia also draws attention to early anticolonial writers and artists such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi and E. P. Thompson to reveal how other historians were collating history to influence society in a different way.
Buy now £7.69, Amazon
Shadowlands by Matthew Green
If you’ve ever taken a road trip across the British Isles, you’ll have likely experienced a moment or two of wonderment and confusion somewhere beyond the M1. From spotting seemingly random crumbling castles atop pastoral hillsides to spying the remnants of forgotten villages taken by plague, we find ourselves thinking of what has been left out of history books. Matthew Green resurrects the hidden history of England through vanished places and spaces with astonishing clarity in this highly original piece of non-fiction.
Buy now £8.99, Waterstones
Unruly by David Mitchell
Widely considered to be a version of Horrible Histories for adults, comedian, actor and unlikely historian David Mitchell (he graduated from Peterhouse College, Cambridge with a degree in the subject, in case you didn’t know) reveals the oddities and habits of English monarchs throughout the centuries.
From King Arthur to Elizabeth I, Mitchell delves into a hilariously insightful exploration of the inherently narcissistic and bloodthirsty individuals who had the supposed God-given right to rule bestowed upon them by pure chance.
Buy now £20.99, Waterstones
Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials by Alice Roberts
Taking seven burial sites of ancient Britons as her focus, Professor Alice Roberts reaches an outstretched arm into the shadowy world of prehistory to reveal the traditions and habits of a time before the arrival of the Romans. Professor Roberts details how landmark archaeological studies have shaped and reshaped our understanding of British history.
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World Wars by Helen Fry
A subject that has been touched on in the cinematic world, Helen Fry plunges into the secret history of female intelligence professionals during both World Wars. From running sophisticated espionage networks and the administrative excellence of the women at Bletchley and Whitehall to landing parachutes behind enemy lines, Fry puts the oft-forgotten female heroes at the forefront of her revisionist history.
Buy now £21.99, Waterstones
Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year by Eleanor Parker
Every 365 days, Earth completes an orbit around the sun. Within the year, countries and continents across the globe experience four distinct seasons. Though it hasn’t always been this way, we can relate to our distant ancestors through their experience of the changing seasons, and their inherently intimate relationship with the rhythms of nature before the industrial world.
Parker’s highly unique way of tracing Anglo-Saxon history focuses on the traditions and customs of society before the Norman Conquest of 1066 as governed by cyclical, reliable Mother Nature.
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
The Restless Republic by Anna Keay
Within weeks of the execution of Charles I, British society had been overturned beyond recognition. It was void of a monarchy, the House of Lords had been abolished and the people had sovereign power over the nation. But how exactly was this Puritan ideal to look in practice? Keay focuses on the immediate aftermath and the middling period before the restoration of the English monarchy in this brilliant deep-dive into the short-lived Puritan England.
Buy now £9.99, Amazon
Civilising Subjects by Catherine Hall
Hall delves into the history of English ‘civility’ and how societal habits and traditions were used to control colonies across the globe in this renowned book. The separation between the ‘civil’ and the ‘savage’ during the Victorian period of high Imperialism came down to the identity afforded by empire – the idea that Englishness represented a great power with the civilised English people at the centre. Yet transforming distant nations into English microcosms naturally proved more difficult than imagined. Student, teacher or casual enthusiast, Halls’ book is a must-read.
Buy now £24.99, Amazon
Queer London by Matt Houlbrook
Through the lens of personal letters written by an individual named Cyril in 1934, Houlbrook explores how the advent of urban London shaped the culture and politics of queer life in the early 20th century. The author explores forgotten sources ranging from police reports to personal diaries and the first queer guidebook ever written to reveal the vibrant veins of queer culture that continue to run through London.
Buy now £24.99, Amazon
Roman Britain: A New History by Guy de la Bédoyère
A revised edition featuring almost 300 illustrations and aerial images of historic Roman sites, Romano-British archaeologist Guy de la Bédoyère showcases the latest and greatest findings which shed light on our country’s ancient history.
Buy now £17.24, Amazon
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century by C.S Lewis
The beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia was also a veritable academic, and his history of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century is renowned for its panoramic scope of zeitgeist-shifting literature throughout the 1500s. From Shakespeare and Marlow to Donne and Cranmer, Lewis meticulously crafts a series of essays which illustrate the influence of poetry and prose from this specific corner of history on the British intellectual tradition.
Buy now £20.33, Amazon
Tudor: Passion. Manipulation. Murder. by Leanda de Lisle
A one-stop shop for fans of Tudor history, Leanda de Lisle’s sprawling history begins in 1437 and covers the rise and rule of the endlessly fascinating and inherently bloody dynasty. From the Welsh commoner Owen Tudor who found himself in the bosom of the English Monarchy to the struggle that his grandson Henry VII had in securing a line of succession, de Lisle’s thrilling read has it all.
Buy now £10.99, Amazon
English Food: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss
We discovered this fantastic book thanks to The Full English podcast, hosted by chef and researcher Lewis Bassett. Purkiss, in her discussion with Bassett, mentions how she decided to stick to a solely English history of food, simply because expanding outward into the remainder of the UK would make for a book so large it’d become unpublishable.
Nevertheless, in English Food, Purkiss illustrates how the way we eat is inherently intertwined with notions of class and gender throughout history. Taking us on a journey from the development of the coffee trade to the first breeders of British beef, Purkiss teaches us what it means to eat food in England, and England’s historically complicated relationship with the global food market.
Buy now £30.00, Waterstones
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Written by Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners offers an incredibly moving, yet wonderfully humorous depiction of immigrant life in London in the 1950s. The story begins when an increasingly homesick Moses Aloetta meets Henry ‘Sir Galahad’ Oliver and teaches him how to survive in the city.
Buy now £8.29, Amazon
The Wager by David Grann
From the very first page of David Grann’s The Wager, it feels impossible to believe that you’re reading a non-fiction novel. The author holds up a magnifying glass to the enthralling tale of a shipwreck and mutiny aboard the doomed HMS Wager in 1741.
Buy now £8.99, Amazon
Crypt by Alice Roberts
Looking at human remains helps us to uncover the mysterious lives of those who came before us. While memento mori is far from comforting, Roberts guides us along the fascinating archaeological finds deriving from tombs, graves and crypts which have unlocked infamous tales of life, death and disease during the Middle Ages.
Buy now £15.00, Amazon
