An Explosive History - from the Alchemists of China to the Battlefields of Europe

Gunpowder

The explosive short history of gunpowder and how it changed the world.

A fascinating story, told well and simply... This is an insightful book seen from a refreshing, and non-Eurocentric point of view

A highly readable account of gunpowder, from its origins in China about 1,200 years ago up to its most famous moment in English history

An eminently readable little history of gunpowder itself, written with customary attention to detail

Gunpowder... performs an admirable job in synthesizing all the available research on the subject

A good story and it covers a huge sweep of ground.... Ponting traces its military development and influence as it spread from the Far East into the Islamic world, Europe, the Americas and finally back to China on the receiving end of the naval guns of a brutal and greedy Britain during the 19th-century Opium Wars

Ponting has managed to write a history of the entire world

[Ponting's account] fills a school boy's heart with joy

Clive Ponting was until recently Reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea. His Green History of the World was an international bestseller, and his revisionist biography of Churchill raised a storm of controversy. Available in Pimlico are his most recent books: The Pimlico History of the Twentieth Century; World History: A New Perspective; Thirteen Days: The Road to the First World War; and The Crimean War. He recently took early retirement and now lives on a small Greek island where he is creating a Mediterranean garden and cultivating olives.

For many, gunpowder is associated with Guy Fawkes and the attempt to blow up parliament on 5 November 1605. Fewer people know that the formula for gunpowder was in fact discovered more than 1,000 years ago - in China - and by accident - and was initially a medicine. 
 
This fascinating book tells the story of the huge impact of gunpowder on every state and empire in the world. For 400 years the Chinese kept it to themselves, until a Mongol soldier leaked the secret to the Islamic world, where gunpowder played a crucial role in the rise of the great empires of the Ottomans and the Mughals: the spectacular capture of Constantinople in 1453 was accomplished through new siege tactics, while India was conquered with muskets and artillery mounted on 700 carts held together with ox harnesses. 
 
Even more important was the impact of gunpowder on Europe, where new weapons created new states and helped Europeans go on to dominate the rest of the world. Packed with unexpected and interesting facts, Gunpowder is an exciting, devastating and important story.

The World in the Twentieth Century

Progress and Barbarism

Arranged thematically, this ambitous and masterly book defines the twentieth century in a single volume. A work of easy reference, it contains a massive amount of fascinating data and will be of value for decades to come.

How has the world changed in the last century? As we look back across a hundred years of turbulence, Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of what the twentieth century has meant to people throughout the world. Progress and Barbarism analyses the fundamental forces of population, industry and their consequences for the environment. It traces the rise and fall of empires, the impact of nationalism, examines domestic politics from all political perspectives, and considers the darker side of history in the growing repressive power of states across the world and the most terrible of twentieth-century crimes - genocide. Progress and Barbarism is a provocative and challenging interpretation of twentieth-century history, combining a global sweep and an eye for detail and individual experiences.

The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations

A New Green History Of The World

Clive Ponting's bestselling study of man's despoliation of the planet - now completely revised and updated.

If there is a single book on the subject to engage the enthusiast, silence the cynic and enlighten the ignoramus, this is it

Ponting's re-evaluation of history is an important antidote to mental troglodytism. It also makes a welcome change from the scatter-gun apocalypse-mongering which has become standard fare in green literature. With luck and foresight, and more books like this, we may yet learn our lesson

Pioneering...a book good enough to rival the best American products in the field... Clive Ponting has embraced a daunting task with commendable success

An ambitious and thought-provoking attempt to rewrite history from an ecological standpoint

Large, ambitious and often enthralling, it is a successful attempt to look at the unfolding of world history from an entirely new perspective

Clive Ponting was until recently Reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea. Available in Pimlico are his most recent books: A New Green History Of The World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations; Gunpowder: From the Alchemists of China to the Battlefields of Europe; The Pimlico History of the Twentieth Century; World History: A New Perspective; Thirteen Days: The Road to the First World War; and The Crimean War. He recently took early retirement and now lives on a small Greek island where he is creating a Mediterranean garden and cultivating olives.

Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Clive Ponting's book studies the relationship between the environment and human history. It examines world civilisations from Sumeria to ancient Egypt, from Easter Island to the Roman Empire and it argues that human beings have repeatedly built societies that have grown and prospered by exploiting the Earth's resources, only to expand to the point where those resources could no longer sustain the societies' populations and cause subsequent collapse. 
 
This new edition of Clive Ponting's international bestseller has been revised, expanded and updated. It provides not only a compelling story of how we have damaged the environment for thousands of years but also an up-to-the-minute assessment of the crisis facing the world today - and the problems that have to be addressed in the search for solutions.

The Truth Behind the Myth

The Crimean War

With maps and contemporary photographs, this vivid and important account sheds new light on this human story.

Lucid and comprehensive-a vivid essay on wartime blunders and the post-war bluster that tried to hide them

Exhaustively researched and scholarly-an exciting story and one that benefits from accounts written at the time by various soldiers and observers

Between these covers you will find a wholly unpretentious, terrifyingly honest breakdown of a war-exceptionally harrowing and impossible to put down

Ponting is both incisive and original in his account of what contemporaries called the "Russian War"

Clive Ponting is a Reader in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Wales, Swansea. His Green History of the World was an international bestseller, and his revisionist biography of Churchill raised a storm of controversy. He is the author of Armageddon, an analysis of the Second World War, The Pimlico History of the Twentieth Century, World History: A New Perspective and Thirteen Days: The Road to the First World War.

The Crimean War is full of resonance - not least, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Sevastopol and Florence Nightingale at Scutari with her lamp. In this fascinating book, Clive Ponting separates the myths from the reality, and tells the true story of the heroism of the ordinary soldiers, often through eye-witness accounts of the men who fought and those who survived the terrible winter of 1854-55. 
 
To contemporaries, it was 'The Great War with Russia' - fought not only in the Black Sea and the Crimea but in the Baltic, the Arctic, the Pacific and the Caucasus. Ironically, Britain's allies were France, her traditional enemy, ably commanded (from home) by Napoleon III himself, and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, widely seen as an infidel corrupt power. It was the first of the 'modern' wars, using rifles, artillery, trench systems, steam battleships, telegraph and railways; yet the British soldiers wore their old highly coloured uniforms and took part in their last cavalry charge in Europe. There were over 650,000 casualties. 
 
Britain was unable fully to deploy her greatest strength, her Navy, while her Army was led by incompetent aristocrats. The views of ordinary soldiers about Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan make painful reading.

The Road to the First World War

Thirteen Days

Enormously gripping popular history of the 13-day crisis that led to world war.

It is a hugely difficult feat of juggling, but Ponting somehow manages to keep all the balls in the air. His methodical approach and lively style result in a very clear account of an otherwise confusing period of frenetic diplomacy

[A] fascinating picture of double-dealing, misread signals of intent and naked self-interest which afflicted every major capital over a crucial period

Clive Ponting was a Reader in Politics at the University of Wales, Swansea and is a specialist in environmental politics, political and military history. He has written numerous books including the world-wide bestseller A Green History of the World; a highly controversial revisionist biography of Winston Churchill; Armageddon: The Second World War; The Pimlico History of the Twentieth Century; World History: A New Perspective and The Crimean War: The Truth behind the Myth.

At the end of WWI, Germany was demonised. The Treaty of Versailles contained a 'war guilt' clause pinning the blame on the aggression of Germany and accusing her of 'supreme offence against international morality'. Thirteen Days rejects this verdict. Clive Ponting has made a thorough study of the incredibly complex diplomatic documents. His interpretation also rejects the thesis that Europe in 1914 had reached such a boiling point that war was bound to erupt and the theory that the origins of the War lay in a mighty arms race. He argues that the War occurred primarily because of the situation in the Balkans, while he gives full weight to Austria-Hungary's desire to cripple Serbia instead of negotiating, and to Russia's militaristic programme of expansion. 
 
Clive Ponting begins with a dramatic recreation of the assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June. He then examines how things spiralled out of control during the weeks that led to war. The tension builds as his story criss-crosses the capital cities of Europe and describes developments day by day, and, latterly, hour by hour. 
 
The First World War destroyed the old Europe. During four years of fighting nearly nine million soldiers were killed and twenty-one million wounded; over ten million civilians died. By the end of the War, three great European empires - Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia - had disintegrated. Why did the War happen? In 1914, the states of Europe had been at peace for forty years, and every diplomatic dispute had been resolved peacefully. 
 
Thirteen Days describes failures of communication, fateful decisions and escalating military moves; it is an extraordinary narrative of personalities and diplomacy in the dying weeks of an era in which telephone networks were in their infancy and governments relied on telegrams in code and face-to-face meetings of ambassadors.

A New Perspective

World History

'Large, ambitious and often enthralling, it is a successful attempt to look at the unfolding of world history from an entirely new perspective.' Literary Review

Pioneering...an impressive feat of scholarship. Clive Ponting has embraced a daunting task with commendable success.

Large, ambitious and often enthralling, it is a successful attempt to look at the unfolding of worlds history from an entirely new perspective...The joy and originality of this book is that Ponting offers us very little that is unfamiliar.

Few single-volume efforts have covered so much ground in terms of sheer time-scale and territory, and the general reader will find plenty of useful reference material...Ponting is at his best on technology and the economy, and his description of Europe's waning influence since the 1940s makes perfect sense.

This is a history book with a difference. It is imaginative in its approach, courageous in its execution and expansive in its sweep of interest...His approach is radical and interesting...It is a fine example of how a radically new point of departure can cast light on a range of areas over which the specialists will continue to do battle long into the future.

Clive Ponting is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Wales, Swansea. His Green History of the World was a bestseller in many countries.

Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation and concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire and the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India and Japan, and therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters and gatherers and their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica and Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them and how technologies, ideas and the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China and of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations and social and economic change.

Clive Ponting

Fifty years after the end of World War II Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of the most destructive conflict in human history - one in which 85 million people died. 
 
Armageddon avoids conventional chronological accounts in order to concentrate on the deeper forces shaping the origins, course and outcome of the war across the globe. It analyses how and why the war spread from being a limited European conflict to the only global war, why countries were dragged into the fighting and how only a small number of neutral states escaped. It compares the two alliances, how they mobilized their resources and their strategies for victory. It avoids a detailed description of how commanders maneuvered on the battlefield and concentrates instead on the impact the war had on individual soldiers, sailors and airmen. Equally important is the fate of hundreds of millions of civilians. How did they survive occupation and what did resistance, collaboration and liberation really involve, and what happened at the end of the war? 
 
Armageddon has a truly global sweep, combined with an eye for detail, and provides fascinating comparisons from a multi-faceted war. It contains new facts, asks provocative questions and challenges many of the common assumptions about the war. It is a compelling new inquiry.

Clive Ponting

Books by Clive Ponting

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