The Wealth of Nations
1776 · 537 pages
Wealth is not gold in a vault but what a country produces, and specialization multiplies it. Smith begins with ten men making pins and every economic argument since descends from him.
★ 8.2
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Making of the English Working Class
1963 · 848 pages
Thompson follows English weavers, artisans, and radicals from the 1780s to the 1830s and shows them making themselves into a class. He wrote to rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity.
★ 7.9
Germinal
1885 · 546 pages
Etienne Lantier takes work in a French coal pit and talks the starving miners into striking. Zola went down a real mine to write this, and you feel the rock overhead.
★ 7.3
The Age of Revolution
1789-1848
1962 · 368 pages
Two revolutions, one political in France and one industrial in Britain, fused into a single upheaval that remade work, politics, art, and belief. Historians still carve up the nineteenth century along Hobsbawm's lines.
★ 6.6