A brilliant short history of the relationship between Europeans and the rest of the world.

A unique history of Britain's most influential invention - from the East India Company to Enron

Simon Schama, the author of The Embarrassment of Riches and Citizens , sets out to tell the history of two certainties, of two deaths. In discussing the speculations surrounding them, he finds himself involved in a history he cannot classify - the unpredictable history of stories.

The decades of Western adulation for the Japanese economic miracle failed to notice a key point - that in pursuit of this miracle, the Japanese had turned their country into a concrete shambles. This book describes the dazzling nature of Japanese culture and its ruination.

Eighteenth-century Britain was the world's leading centre for the slave trade. Profits soared and fortunes were made, but in 1788 things began to change. This is a story of the men who sought to end slavery and brought the issue to the heart of British political life.

A history of North, South and Central America, from prehistory to the present, by one of the world's best-known historians.