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Since imperialism has been a key theme of recent historical writing, it is no surprise that the year's finest books have been immersed in the culture of empire.
John Darwin's After Tamerlane (Allen Lane, £25, T £23), an amazingly erudite history of the world since the Mongol conquests, didn't quite get the attention it deserved. But it is a sensational accomplishment, covering everything from Manchu China to Victorian Britain, and makes a powerful case that empire has been the "default position" for most of human history.
One of Darwin's more arresting arguments is that Britain's empire, compared with the realms of the Persians or the Chinese, was a blip in world history. But how did we get it in the first place?
Not by sea power, argues Brendan Simms, whose Three Victories and a Defeat (Allen Lane, £30, T £26) claims that Georgian Britain acquired its empire through diplomatic prowess on the Continent, not - as we often think - courtesy of the Royal Navy.
Some will disagree with his thesis, but there is no arguing with his scholarship, and there is no better history of British foreign policy in this crucial period.
Still, Britain's empire pales by comparison with the glories of Constantinople, where the Romans' Byzantine successors created an empire that lasted 1,000 years and bequeathed a magnificent legacy of churches. Judith Herrin's Byzantium (Allen Lane, £20, T £18) is the perfect introduction: briskly written, beautifully illustrated and a wonderfully exotic read.
Otherwise, lovers of medieval history have had slim pickings this year.
Ian Mortimer's The Fears of Henry IV (Jonathan Cape, £18.99, T £16.99) is your best bet: forensically detailed, it argues that England's Lancastrian usurper was a "model medieval magnate", and perhaps the greatest political pragmatist in our history.
For a fine example of collective biography, skip forward a couple of centuries to Adrian Tinniswood's The Verneys (Jonathan Cape, £25, T £23), which uses one aristocratic family's stash of letters to paint an evocative picture of life and attitudes during the turbulent years of Civil War, Cromwell, Restoration and revolution.
Once we cross the threshold of the 18th century, however, famine turns into glut. Vast, learned and gorgeously illustrated, Tim Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory (Allen Lane, £30, T £26), a survey of European history from 1648 to 1815, strikes a nice balance between the Enlightenment's optimistic rationalism and the mud-soaked reality of everyday life. 'I loathe popular history," one university professor said to me recently during a radio discussion about the latest deranged scheme to focus on "concepts" not "periods" in A-level history.
Red Mutiny is a cracking account of the uprising on Battleship Potemkin What an odd thing for the man - a self-styled cultural historian - to say: after all, some of our greatest stylists - Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle - wrote beautifully composed histories that reached a wide audience.
And despite the advent of specialisation and postmodernism, their successors are in good nick. Will any of them last as long as Gibbon? Perhaps not; but they'll certainly keep you entertained well after the last of the turkey has gone into the freezer.
The mention of Gibbon is not coincidental. In his epic The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Jonathan Cape, £25, T £23), one of the most colourful and blood-soaked narratives of the year, Piers Brendon makes no secret of his ambition to emulate his great predecessor.
Indeed, one of his achievements is to show how, throughout all the sieges and massacres and daring raids, British imperialists often looked with deep foreboding to Gibbon's great work on the fall of Rome.
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