How the Dutch Shaped the World

Utterly exceptional -- William Dalrymple
The past is full of wonders but very far away; we don't need textbooks and timelines to go there, we need the very best kind of travel writing, a human viewpoint on unfamiliar worlds. Michiel Baas is the ideal guide, informed and inquisitive, satisfying the senses as much as the mind. He starts on Easter Island and finishes on Manhattan, taking us on his detective trail of all the times the Dutch put the world in motion from the age of discoveries onwards. He discovers the half-buried history of the Dutch empire, the lost connection between Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Polynesia, Suriname, and the vegetable markets of New Jersey. With that empire story, we have the missing panel in the picture of how our world came to be -- Michael Pye