NEW IN 2026
Gondwanaland
Modern Histories of an Ancient Supercontinent
Bridging history, geography, and the geosciences, this volume analyzes the multidimensional interpretations of Gondwanaland in the modern world, tracing its diverse resonances and legacies in politics, science, culture, and the environment across five continents. By reassembling Gondwanaland into a hemispheric history of the southern Earth, this collection considers how deep geological pasts continue to inform geographical and political imaginaries into the present.
Edited by Alison Bashford, Pratik Chakrabarti and Jarrod Hore
“This landmark volume provides a new vision of the history of the earth sciences and moves it to the center of global history.”
Jim Secord, University of Cambridge
“This wonderful book changes the conversation.”
Lukas Rieppel, Brown University
“A model of how barriers between disciplines of knowledge may be spanned.”
Jan Zalasiewicz, University of Leicester
NEW IN 2026
How do we think about Population in the Anthropocene?
How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? brings together the world’s key thinkers in Anthropocene studies from a wide range of disciplines, including geology, geography, demography, history, political theory, and more. How do we think about population in the Anthropocene, or should we even think in terms of population at all? The twelve short essays in this pamphlet offer responses that reimagine how we think about economy, environment, consumption, reproduction and extinction.
Edited by Alison Bashford, Duncan Kelly and David Nally
“A fascinating pamphlet full of insight.”
George Tsakraklides, author of The Biology of Collapse
Forthcoming 2027
Populating the 1980s
Revisiting a Global Decade
Populating the 1980s delves into this transformative decade to offer fresh insights into the late-twentieth century world through the lens of population, and explores the economic, legal, political and religious implications for the relationship between individuals, kinship and the state.
Edited by Aprajita Sarcar, Aya Homei and Alison Bashford
Including: ‘Transnational Catholicism and Natural Family Planning’, Raúl Necochea López and Alison Bashford
“A brilliant and deeply researched contribution to the history of population and population thought, focusing on a decade that has long been overlooked.”
Emily Merchant, UC Davis
Decoding the Hand
A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic
The astonishing history of palmistry and biometrics—from occult physicians to the very foundations of modern science and medicine.
“Ingenious and fascinating, this is history at its best.”
Janet Browne, Harvard University
“Compelling… an indispensable guide for anyone interested in how the sciences and practices of self-knowledge emerged in modernity.”
Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
“A ground-breaking book, and one that deserves the widest possible audience. Five stars.”
Ross Macfarlane
An Intimate History of Evolution
The Story of the Huxley Family
Two hundred years of modern science and culture told through one family history.
A New Yorker and Economist Best Book of the Year.
“A daring and joyously intelligent book.”
The Wall Street Journal
“A masterpiece.”
The New Statesman
“What a family, what a story. And so cleverly told.”
Andrea Wulf
“I was captivated from beginning to end.”
Tim Smit
New Earth Histories
Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World
Edited by Alison Bashford, Emily M. Kern, and Adam Bobbette
With a Foreword by Dipesh Chakrabarty
A kaleidoscopic rethinking of how we come to know the Earth.
The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus
Rereading the Principle of Population
A sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be.
Co-authored with Joyce E. Chaplin
“Penetrating reappraisal.”
Nature
“The most important new reading of the life and work of Malthus in a generation. The book is beautifully written and powerfully conceived, and the scholarship is impeccable…a paradigm-changing interpretation of Malthus.”
Robert J. Mayhew, Pembroke College, Cambridge
“His Essay must now be read with new eyes.”
Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Global Population
History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth
With a close eye on twentieth-century war and peace, Bashford reveals how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land morphed into a biopolitical solution, about sovereignty over one’s person.
“A timely and brilliant piece of work.”
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
“A major contribution to global intellectual history.”
David Armitage, Harvard University
“This work commands respect for its sweep and its range, identifying authoritarian elements in ecology and even some libertarian tendencies in eugenics. Here is the best history we have of the emergence of demographic transition theory.”
American Historical Review
Quarantine
Local and Global Histories
A gripping account of the haunting lazarettos that dotted the world’s coasts in an era of maritime empire and globalization. A prehistory of COVID, this is the story that shaped the coronavirus world.
Oceanic Histories
Edited by: David Armitage, Alison Bashford, Sujit Sivasundaram
“The book oceanic scholars have been waiting for. Five oceans, six seas, eleven top scholars and a dozen magisterial essays.”
Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand and New York University
“A marvelous summation of the state of the field.”
Sugata Bose, Harvard University
