I’ve been watching some documentaries on Netflix about Romans, Ottomans and Samurai and I now have an unscratchable itch to learn more about world history. What I’d like to do is get a brief history of what was going on across the continents throughout human history to help me decide what areas I’d like to dive into in more detail.
I’m looking for some suggestions of how best to do that. Be it books, documentaries or blogs/podcasts I’m really keen to get a top level view of it all. Any ideas?
For "world histories", there are a lot of books out there that are flashy, but get some major facts wrong.
There has, however, been a burgeoning movement of global history in the past few decades, which has produced some good works that don't fall into the usual "modernisation" narrative.
One is John Darwin's "After Tamerlane", tracing how the steppe-nomad model, which had been dominant for centuries, declined and gave way to organised settled states, and how this led into the modern world.
Another is Christopher Alan Bayly's "Birth of the Modern World", trying to deal with thr major changes in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries while eschewing the classic "West is Best" narrative, while still maintaining a cohesive global historical narrative. Very useful for bringing things together.
These tilt a little later in history but tie things together nicely!
First of course is the askhistorians booklist, available on this very subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/)! The tough thing about that is that the books range from 200 dollar tomes to quick breezy intros, and it's not always kept very up to date (which isn't a criticism of the volunteers that make it possible in the first place!)
My go-to recommendations are the "Very Short Introduction" series. They are, surprise, very short (even the page count is deceptive, the books are physically small which incidentally is why I recommend ebook versions if you don't mind - you can also get a free sample on kindle). But they're also very cheap, and written by experts so they don't fall into some of the mistakes a more amateur or pop-history book does.
Because they're cheap and short it's a quick and easy way to get a high-level overview of the subject. You can decide if you want to dig into more detail and where. A lot of books on the book list are around 50 bucks or more and this is a good way to decide if you really feel like going into more detail or if that quick introduction was all you really wanted to know.
A good example (and one on the subreddit booklist is The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction (https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Near-East-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B00IDA40VY)
This quickly blasts through thousands of years of ancient near east history and when it's done you might be interested in digging more into the Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylon, the Hittites, etc. Or none at all, but then you're only out less than 10 bucks and you still learned an overview!
They're not all created equal of course, and they're not all straightforward historical summaries. The Ancient Greece one, for example, is organized by city. I thought that wasn't the best way for such a quick intro, but it still gets the job done. I imagine these books are hard for experts to write, and it's probably worth reading the sample and reviews to make sure it's what you really want (still, they're cheap at least). You're not going to learn everything from them, obviously, but it lets you decide if you do want to learn more, and gives you a little exposure to the subject's unique vocabulary and details that makes reading the denser books easier.