In Kaput, Wolfgang Münchau argues that the weaknesses of Germany's economy have, in fact, been brewing for decades. The neo-mercantilist policies of the German state, driven by close connections between the country's industrial and political elite, have left Germany technologically behind over-reliant on authoritarian Russia and China—and with little sign of being able to adapt to the digital realities of the 21st century. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Europe's biggest economy.

Hal Brands argues that a better understanding of Eurasia's strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today's world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics—with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.

Over the course of the last half dozen years, China's supreme leader Xi Jinping has made extraordinary changes which have profound implications not only for the Chinese people but nations throughout the world. Given how swiftly and fundamentally China's relations with the rest of the world are changing under Xi's rule, it is imperative that we know what Xi Jinping Thought is, how it evolved, and why it is so important.

Acclaimed presidential historian Tevi Troy takes listeners on a riveting journey through the biggest battles between CEOs and the nation’s commander in chief. He unearths the untold stories—both political and personal—that have shaped America. The Power and the Money shows how some of the nation’s most important CEOs forged (and fumbled) relationships with the president, revealing an intricate web of power, where CEOs need presidents, and presidents need CEOs. Troy shows how each must step carefully—or risk unpredictable costs and collateral damage.

Bull chronicles the story of Iraq from the exploits of Gilgamesh to the fall of the Iraqi monarchy that ushered in its modern era. The land between the rivers has been the melting pot and battleground of countless outsiders. Here, Judaism was born and the Sunni-Shia schism took its bloody shape.

Writing in response to the growing anti-Chinese sentiment and alarmed by the threat of war, Dr. David Daokui Li pulls from his wealth of firsthand experience to demystify contemporary Chinese society and advocate for understanding between China and the West. In this urgently needed and fascinating book, he explains the inner workings of a rising superpower to help the world understand how it works-and how to work with it.

In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations.

Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was "a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war." Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud's conclusion that the "death drive" made any deliverance impossible.

Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immersion in Mongol culture and tradition, Emperor of the Seas brings this little-known story vibrantly to life.

In this new history of the conflict that defined the postwar era, Sergey Radchenko provides a deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinksmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world, and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow.

The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.

They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through 100 years of wars, revolutions, and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. All three sisters enjoyed tremendous privilege and glory, but also endured constant mortal danger. They showed great courage and experienced passionate love, as well as despair and heartbreak.

At the end of the Nuremberg trials in 1946, some of the greatest war criminals in history were sentenced to death, but hundreds of thousands of Nazi murderers and collaborators remained at large. The Allies were ready to overlook their pasts as the Cold War began, and the legacy of the Holocaust was in danger of being forgotten. In The Prosecutor, Jack Fairweather brings to life the heroic story of Fritz Bauer who survived the Nazis as a gay Jewish man to force his countrymen to confront their complicity in the genocide.

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. Acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer sets aside the usual Cold War caricatures of the GDR to offer a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country.

Award-winning historian Frank Dikötter explores how the People’s Republic of China was transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today. His account is the first to be based on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, from the secret minutes of top party meetings to confidential bank reports. Unfolding with great narrative sweep, this riveting, richly detailed chronicle recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers celebrate as an economic miracle.

In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the great transformation of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi's seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade.

Xi Jinping rules over 1.4 billion people and the second biggest economy on earth. He commands huge armed forces and runs a technology programme meant to dominate the globe. His ambition is to take the place of the United States and to change the world order. Xi's life story is full of drama: plots, purges, murders, a power struggle and a pandemic. The book, based on new sources, leads the listener from the poor, isolated China of the 1950s to the modern economic and military juggernaut of today.

In On Xi Jinping, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd provides an authoritative account of the ideological worldview driving Chinese behaviour both domestically and on the world stage—that of President Xi Jinping, who now holds near-total control over the Chinese Communist Party and is now, in effect, president-for-life. Rudd argues that Xi’s worldview differs significantly from those of the leaders who preceded him, and that this ideological shift is reflected in the real world of Chinese policy and behaviour.

In The Cold War, Odd Arne Westad offers a new perspective on a century when a superpower rivalry and an ideological war transformed every corner of our globe. We traditionally think of the Cold War as a post-World War II diplomatic and military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Westad argues that the conflict must be understood as a global ideological confrontation with roots in the industrial revolution and with continuing implications for the world today.

Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world's oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years.

Writing in response to the growing anti-Chinese sentiment and alarmed by the threat of war, Dr. David Daokui Li pulls from his wealth of firsthand experience to demystify contemporary Chinese society and advocate for understanding between China and the West. In this urgently needed and fascinating book, he explains the inner workings of a rising superpower to help the world understand how it works-and how to work with it.

Once described by Mao Zedong as a "needle inside a ball of cotton", Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China's radical transformation in the late 20th century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao's cult of personality, and loosened the policies that had stunted China's growth. Obsessed with modernization, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yet he also answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

Eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi himself; the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life; and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world.

From one of the most admired reporters covering China today comes a vital new account of the life and political vision of Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader of the People’s Republic whose hard-edged tactics have set the rising superpower on a collision with Western liberal democracies. Party of One shatters the many myths that shroud one of the world’s most secretive political organizations and its leader. Many observers misread Xi during his early years in power, projecting their own hopes that he would steer China toward more political openness, rule of law, and pro-market economics.

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.

How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth." Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate.

From kung-fu to tofu, tea to trade routes, sages to silk, China has influenced cuisine, commerce, military strategy, aesthetics, and philosophy across the world for thousands of years. Chinese history is nothing if not messy. Heroes are also villains; prosperity mingles with violence; cultural vibrancy coexists with censorship and repression. Modern China is seen variously as an economic powerhouse, an icon of urbanization, a propaganda state, and an aggressive superpower seeking world domination.

The Party is Financial Times reporter Richard McGregor's eye-opening investigation into China's Communist Party, and the integral role it has played in the country's rise as a global superpower and rival to the United States. Many books have examined China's economic rise, human rights record, turbulent history, and relations with the US; none until now, however, have tackled the issue central to understanding all of these issues: how the ruling communist government works. The Party delves deeply into China's secretive political machine.

Many nations define themselves in terms of territory or people; China defines itself in terms of history. Taking into account the country's unrivaled, voluminous tradition of history writing, John Keay has composed a vital and illuminating overview of the nation's complex and vivid past. Keay's authoritative history examines 5,000 years in China, from the time of the Three Dynasties through Chairman Mao and the current economic transformation of the country.

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China's path.