Rana Dasgupta shares his favourite books

Rana Dasgupta is a recipient of one of this year's Windham Campbell Prizes for non-fiction.

Against the Grain

James C. Scott, 2017

Scott is one of those rare academics whose writing is a thing of beauty. This book shows how the first states – such as Sumer in Mesopotamia – could not have emerged without grain. As a durable and transportable form of value, grain could be taxed – and everything else flowed from that.

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The City of Blue and White

Anne Gerritsen, 2020

This fascinating book tells the extraordinary story of China's porcelain industry, which from the 14th century began to export everywhere. Six centuries ago, China was already the "factory to the world".

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Sven Beckert, 2014

Silver, cotton and sugar fuelled the shift to Western power. In rich detail, this describes the hair-raising manoeuvres that allowed Britain, in particular, to build an "empire of cotton" and so dominate the modern world.

Late Victorian Holocausts

Mike Davis, 2000

Davis’s account of the destruction of Asia is not for the faint-hearted: his descriptions of mass famines in 1870s India and China – which had been, until recently, the richest places on the planet – are excruciating. But they teach us a lot about the enormous hunger for success that both countries have displayed in the past few decades.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

Katharina Pistor, 2019

The mechanics of law might seem an obscure subject. Pistor gives you the sense it is the only subject. She shows how the legal artifice creates capital; and so reveals why the global distribution of wealth changes so little over time, and why our political system can never fulfil the utopian promises on which its legitimacy rests. Dark and fascinating.