📚 Imperialism & Empire

How a handful of states came to rule most of the world, what it cost the ruled, and why the map after 1945 still looks the way it does.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject imperialism 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
	Imperializm, kak vysshai͡a︡ stadii͡a︡ kapitalizma	Vladimir Il’ich Lenin	1900	88
	The Origins of Totalitarianism	Hannah Arendt	1951	64
	Peau Noire, Masques Blancs	Frantz Fanon	1952	52
	Empire and Its Critics, 1899-1939	Peter Cain	1998	33
	Imperialism and world economy	Nikolaĭ Ivanovich Bukharin	1917	27
	Empire	Niall Ferguson	2003	20
	Imperialism and world politics	Parker Thomas Moon	1926	19
	The expansion of Europe	Ramsay Muir	1917	18
	The Silk Roads	Peter Frankopan	2015	18
	Culture and imperialism	Edward W. Said	1993	17
	Imperial gazetteer of India	William Wilson Hunter	1881	16
	Imperialism	John Atkinson Hobson	1902	14
	An introduction to neo-colonialism	Jack Woddis	1967	13
	How to Hide an Empire	Daniel Immerwahr	2019	13
	Marksizm i nat︠s︡ionalʹno-kolonialʹnyĭ vopros	Joseph Stalin	1930	12
	The precarious balance	Ludwig Dehio	1962	11
	Studies in mid-Victorian imperialism	C. A. Bodelsen	1924	10
	Imperialism and the revolution	Enver Hoxha	1979	10
	Towards colonial freedom	Kwame Nkrumah	1962	9
	The diplomacy of imperialism, 1890-1902	William L. Langer	1935	8
	L' expansion européenne	Frédéric Mauro	1964	8
	The Colonial Empires	D. K. Fieldhouse	1965	8
	European imperialism in Africa	Hoskins, Halford Lancaster	1930	7
	The Origins of Totalitarianism	Hannah Arendt	1958	7
	Imperialismustheorien	Wolfgang J. Mommsen	1977	7
	Pensamiento Basura	Claudio Canaparo	2017	7
	Imperial federation	John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, 9th Duke of Argyll	1885	6
	Imperialism	C. De Thierry	1898	6
	Social Science as Imperialism. The Theory of Political Development	Claude Ake	1979	6
	The Real Terror Network	Edward S. Herman	1982	6

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 06 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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