17th Century

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" - spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s - when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond....

As he explodes many accepted pirate myths (i.e. "walking the plank" is pure fiction), Cordingly replaces them with a truth that is more complex and often bloodier....

January, 1649. After seven years of fighting in the bloodiest war in Britain’s history, Parliament faced a problem: what to do with a defeated king, a king who refused to surrender....

Winner of the 2015 CWA Endeavour Dagger for Historical Fiction London, 1654. Oliver Cromwell is at the height of his power and has declared himself Lord Protector. Yet he has many enemies, at home and abroad. London is a complex web of spies and merchants, priests and soldiers, exiles and...

Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal....

Rebellion in the city, and a Royalist spy in his own ranks - Damian Seeker, Captain of Oliver Cromwell's guard, must eradicate both in this action-packed historical thriller for fans of CJ Sansom, Rory Clements and The Three Musketeers. 'MacLean skilfully weaves together the disparate threads of...

Drawing on rich, original sources, Lubaaba Al-Azami traces the origins of a relationship between two nations - one outsider and one superpower.

London, 1991: Alex Johns, trainee art intern at the Courtauld, believes a hidden secret lies within Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas—one of the most written about paintings of all time....

Clare Jackson's dazzling original account of English history's most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis....

Discover the “fascinating and outrageously readable” account of the roguish acts of the first pirates to raid the Pacific in a crusade that ended in a sensational trial back in England—perfect for readers of Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough (Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times...

A remarkable portrait of one of the most talented, thoughtful, loyal, moral, artistically alert and yet, somehow, disastrous of all this country's rulers....

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world....

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast....

Events moved fast in the 1650s. Something cataclysmic happened every year, something that would thrust the newly formed republic, its people, and its eventual 'Lord Protector' Oliver Cromwell, in an entirely new direction.

This biography brings Sarah Churchill's own voice, passionate and intelligent, back to life and casts a critical eye over images of the Duchess handed down through art, history and literature....

A seemingly inconsequential fire ignited in a baker’s shop on Pudding Lane. Unchecked and underestimated, it would grow to become one of the most devastating disasters London had ever faced....

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer....

This audiobook examines the meteoric rise of Sweden as the pre-eminent military power in Europe during the Thirty Years War during the 1600s....

From poverty to pets, from medicine to magic, from slang to sex, from wallpaper to women's rights....

Once valued at close to seven trillion dollars by today’s standards, the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, became the world’s first multinational corporation....

The history of China as a single nation began more than 2,000 years ago, when Qin Shi Huangdi first united a group of warring kingdoms into a single empire....

In this engaging, anecdotal history of food, world conquest, and desire, a chef-turned-journalist tells the story of three legendary cities that transformed the globe in the quest for spice....

The story of the Mayflower is one of adventure, courage, and destiny. Leaving England in September of 1620, the ship carried 102 English Separatists to a new life, one that came with the freedom to practice their religious beliefs as they saw fit....

Viceroys is the story of the British aristocracy sent to govern India during the reigns of five British monarchs. It is also the story of how the modern British identity was established....