Browse the index

The Art of War is still on military and business curricula worldwide.

The biographer who invented the idea that character makes history.

Founded al-Qarawiyyin in 859, the oldest continuously operating university.

Measured Earth's radius to within 1% and wrote the first comparative anthropology of India.

Preserved and completed Ibn Sina's corpus.

Described the magnetic compass and deduced geological deep time.

Travelled some 120,000 km across the medieval world and wrote the Rihla.

Founded sociology and economic history with the Muqaddimah.

Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.

The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.

Won the world's first national women's vote in 1893.

Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.

The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.

The Great Transformation showed markets are made by states, not found in nature.

Wrote Vietnam's declaration of independence quoting Jefferson.

Principal architect of India's constitution and Dalit emancipation.

The Gulag Archipelago broke the Soviet system's moral standing.

Agronomist whose theory of culture and liberation shaped decolonisation.

Theorised 'nation language' and Caribbean creolisation.

Defined the 'triple heritage' framework for African identity.

Novelist and filmmaker of Algerian women's silenced history.

Open Veins of Latin America reframed a hemisphere's economic history.

Built a new documentary genre from thousands of interviews.