To the Ends of the Earth

In 2012, Norman Davies set off on a global circumnavigation. Native Lands is his account of the places he visited and the history he found there, from Abu Dhabi to Singapore, the settlement of Tasmania to the short-lived Republic of Texas. As in Vanished Kingdoms, Davies's historical gaze penetrates behind the present to see how things became as they are, and how peoples came to tell themselves the stories which make up their identities. Everywhere, it seems, human beings have been travelling - pushing out others or arriving in terra nullius - since the beginning of recorded time. To whom is a land truly native? As always, Norman Davies has his eye on the historical horizon as well as on what is close at hand, and brilliantly complicates our view of the past.

Norman Davies was for many years Professor of History at the School of Slavonic Studies, University of London, and has also taught at Columbia, McGill, Stanford, Harvard, Hokkaido, CASS Beijing, ANU Canberra, CNRS Paris, Adelaide and Cambridge universities. He is the author of the acclaimed Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011) and the number one bestseller Europe: A History (1996). His previous books, which include Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (2003), The Isles: A History (1999) and God's Playground: A History of Poland (1981), have been translated worldwide into a score of languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Russian. From 1997-2004 he was Super numerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford; he is now Professor at the Jagiellonian University at Krakow, an Honorary Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford and a life member of Clare Hall and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and lives in Oxford and Krakow.