📚 World History

How civilisations met, traded, fought and copied each other — the long view that makes the news legible.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject world history in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Historical Mysteries	Andrew Lang	1864	89
	Western Civilizations	Joshua Cole	2011	84
	The Outline of History	H. G. Wells	1919	81
	A Short History of Scotland	Andrew Lang	1911	80
	Story of the Moors in Spain	Stanley Lane-Poole	1886	71
	A Short History of the World	H. G. Wells	1922	45
	Traditions & encounters	Jerry H. Bentley	1999	44
	Murat	Alexandre Dumas	1838	42
	The Great events by famous historians	John Rudd	1904	42
	The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history	Madison Grant	1916	37
	Countess de Saint-Geran	Alexandre Dumas	2014	37
	The story of mankind	Hendrik Willem Van Loon	1921	32
	The proud tower	Barbara Tuchman	1959	32
	Oral History Archive of the Global Women's Movement	Women's Learning Partnership	2016	31
	Webs of Humankind	J. R. McNeill	2020	31
	World History Readers	Rob Waring	2017	28
	Peace handbooks	Great Britain. Foreign Office. Historical Section	1920	26
	The national system of political economy	Friedrich List	1966	25
	The Lessons of History	Will Durant	1968	25
	A Time of Gifts	Patrick Leigh Fermor	1977	25
	Connections	Edward H. Judge	2009	25
	The Earth and Its Peoples	Richard W. Bulliet	2000	24
	A history of the modern world	R. R. Palmer	1950	23
	The Heritage of World Civilizations	William A. Graham	1994	23
	Worlds Together, Worlds Apart	Robert Tignor	2010	21
	Historical tales	Charles Morris	1893	20
	Glimpses of world history	Jawaharlal Nehru	1934	20
	History of the World	Marvin B. Perry	1900	18
	The Silk Roads	Peter Frankopan	2015	18
	World History in Brief	Peter N. Stearns	1998	17

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 28 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

Ancient HistoryAnthropologyArchitectureArt HistoryAstronomyBiology

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.