India

India: A History by John Keay, relates thousands of years of events which took place in the land known as current day India. The country has a history longer than many other existing cultures on earth, but most historical work on India concentrates on the period after the arrival of Europeans, with predictable biases, distortions and misapprehensions. Taking the longest possible view, Keay surveys what is both provable and invented in the historical record. His narrative begins in 3000 B.C. with the complex, and little understood, Harappan period, a time of state formation and the development of agriculture and trade networks. This period coincides with the arrival of Indo-European invaders, the so-called Aryans, whose name, of course, has been put to bad use at many points since. Keay traces the growth of subsequent states and kingdoms throughout antiquity and the medieval period, suggesting that the lack of unified government made the job of the European conquerors somewhat easier--but by no means inevitable. He continues to the modern day, his narrative ending with Indian-Pakistani conflicts in 1998.