Felipe Fernández-Armesto (born 1950) is a British professor of history and author of several popular works, notably on cultural and environmental history.
Life and career
He was born in
London; his father was the Spanish
journalist Felipe Fernández Armesto (who wrote using the pseudonym
Augusto Assía [
es]) and his mother was Betty Millan, a British-born journalist and co-founder (with Remy Hefter, in 1947) and editor of The Diplomatist (whose current title is Diplomat), the in-house journal of the diplomatic corps in London.[1]
In 1982 he published The Canary Islands after the Conquest: The Making of a Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century, an archival study of the Canary Islands during the period of their original settlement. In 1987 he published Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 1229–1492, a study of the earliest phase of European imperialism when Europeans left the Mediterranean and colonized the islands along the northwest coast of Africa.
Columbus and the Conquest of the Impossible (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974)
Ferdinand and Isabella (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975)
The Canary Islands after the Conquest: The Making of a Colonial Society in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1982)
Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (University of Pennsylvania Pr, 1987)
The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 (Oxford University Press, 1988)
Columbus (Oxford University Press, 1991)
Barcelona: A Thousand Years of the City's Past (Trafalgar Square, 1991)
The Times Illustrated History of Europe (Times Books, 1995)
Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years (Bantam Press, 1995)
Reformation: Christianity and the World 1500-2000 (Bantam Press, 1996) or Reformations: A Radical Interpretation of Christianity and the World, 1500-2000 (Scribner, 1997) (co-authored with Derek Wilson)
Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed (Bantam Press, 1997)
Civilizations (Macmillan, 2000) or Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature (Free Press, 2001)
Food: A History (Macmillan, 2001) or Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (Free Press, 2002)
The Americas: A Hemispheric History (Modern Library, 2003) or The Americas: A History of A Hemisphere (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003)
Ideas That Changed the World (Dorling Kindersley, 2003)
Humankind: A Brief History (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (W. W. Norton, 2006; Oxford University Press, 2007)
Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006; Random House, 2007)
The World: A Brief History (Pearson, 2007)
1492. The Year the World Began (HarperOne, 2009; Bloomsbury, 2010)
Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (W. W. Norton & Co., 2014)
A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change–and the Limits of Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2015)
The Oxford Illustrated History of the World (Oxford University Press, 2019)
Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It (Oneworld, 2019)
Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan (Bloomsbury, 2022)
An interview with TMCQ: "With my usual intellectual perversity, I thought it would be interesting to have a
Human history written from an imaginary perspective. I am interested in shifting perspective. I do believe in objective historical reality. I do believe that the truth is out there and I’m absolutely not a
relativist or a
postmodernist."
An interview with Spiked magazine: "I defend people's right to deny the
Holocaust and to utter lies — so long as the rest of us remain aware that what they're saying is a lie."