Conquest

1. History of the Conquest of Mexico

By William Prescott
1843

History can be understood in many ways, but one of the most compelling is to track the movement of peoples and their later attempts to put their stamp on newly conquered lands. Spain's conquest of Mexico in the 16th century is a dramatic example. A rousing narrative of that conquest was written in the early 1840s by the partially blind American historian William Prescott, who combined admiration for the Spanish conqueror Cortés with a relatively sensitive portrayal of the vanquished Aztecs. "It is but justice to the Conquerors of Mexico," Prescott writes, "to say that the very brilliancy and importance of their exploits have given a melancholy celebrity to their misdeeds." This hugely influential book was based on research in Spanish archives and was published as Americans were completing a sweep across land that they had claimed as their own.

2. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640
By Patricia Seed
Cambridge, 1995

The assertion of control over newly conquered lands is usually marked by an act that has symbolic meaning, at least for the conquerors. In her landmark history, Patricia Seed describes the competing ways in which European powers asserted their right to territory in the Americas, with each country refusing to recognize the claims of the others. Her book is peppered with fascinating vignettes of Portuguese and Dutch who thought that mastering the navigation of distant seas entitled explorers to seize the lands that their ships chanced upon. In contrast, the British emphasized enclosing and farming as a means of establishing their dominion, while the French preferred to enact a ceremony that mimicked the forms of a coronation back home. As for the Spanish, "it was the words that counted," Seed writes. "A highly formalized and stylized speech known as the Requirement had to be made when encountering indigenous peoples for the first time. The text of the speech was not a request for consent, but a declaration of war."

3. Sacred Landscape
By Meron Benvenisti
University of California, 2000

Military superiority is not enough to ensure that an act of conquest will prevail. The newly acquired land must be made to seem the natural possession of the new rulers. In "Sacred Landscape," Meron Benvenisti -- who served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem from 1971 to 1978 -- recounts how, in the 1940s, he traveled across British Palestine with his father, a Jewish mapmaker, on a mission to "draw a Hebrew map of the land" that could act as "a renewed title deed." Partly based on this personal experience, "Sacred Landscape" is an anguished reflection on the terrible costs of two peoples' asserting an inalienable right to the same land.

4. The Isles
By Norman Davies
Macmillan, 1999

Although the British are usually regarded as having been conquerors across the world, the islands that they inhabit have themselves been the scene of conquests over the centuries, by Romans, Celts, Vikings, Saxons and others. In "The Isles," the British historian Norman Davies -- who has written extensively about Poland, another much-contested country -- applies his skills to describing his homeland. The result is a rewarding tour from prehistory to the present day. Davies explores the successive invasions of what we call the British Isles and the struggles between the peoples who had come to conquer and then remained to call different parts their own.

5. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
By Raphael Lemkin
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944

Any legitimacy that Hitler might have been able to claim for his European conquests unraveled as soon as he revealed that he was intent on doing more than redress the harsh peace of 1919. As readers of "Mein Kampf" had already learned, his ambitions were continental in scope and merciless in method. The monumental "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe," written as World War II entered its final phase, is Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin's description of how the Nazis executed with cold precision their brutal plans for conquered peoples. In the process of sounding the alarm, Lemkin coined what has become the vexed term "genocide." It is clear from Lemkin's other scholarly work, on the Turkish genocide of the Armenians during World War I, that he intended the term to have a wider application than just to the Nazis; it was meant to cover all those laws and actions that are used by conquerors to remove distinct populations from the landscape, whether through direct killing, expulsion, compulsory assimilation or other means. The book remains tragically relevant.

Mr. Day's latest book, "Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others," was published in June by Oxford University Press.