Latest book
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.
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
