Improvising Empire

Improvising Empire PDF Author: Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
While the general outline of the history of Portuguese expansion in Asia is rather well-known, many areas that were hubs of trade and settlement have been only briefly studied. One of the most conspicuous of those is the Bay of Bengal, where the Portuguese had an important official and unofficial presence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The product of extensive research in Indian, Portuguese, and Netherland archives, this collection of essays is the first substantial treatment of the Portuguese presence in the Bay of Bengal. The work of an economic historian, the volume offers important insight into the nature of early modern European expansion and imperialism, urban history, and colonial social history.

Improvising Empire

Improvising Empire PDF Author: Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
While the general outline of the history of Portuguese expansion in Asia is rather well-known, many areas that were hubs of trade and settlement have been only briefly studied. One of the most conspicuous of those is the Bay of Bengal, where the Portuguese had an important official and unofficial presence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The product of extensive research in Indian, Portuguese, and Netherland archives, this collection of essays is the first substantial treatment of the Portuguese presence in the Bay of Bengal. The work of an economic historian, the volume offers important insight into the nature of early modern European expansion and imperialism, urban history, and colonial social history.

Improvising Empire

Improvising Empire PDF Author: Anne Elizabeth Dwyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description


Empires

Empires PDF Author: Susan E. Alcock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521770200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
Empires, the largest political systems of the ancient and early modern world, powerfully transformed the lives of people within and even beyond their frontiers in ways quite different from other, non-imperial societies. Appearing in all parts of the globe, and in many different epochs, empires invite comparative analysis - yet few attempts have been made to place imperial systems within such a framework. This book brings together studies by distinguished scholars from diverse academic traditions, including anthropology, archaeology, history and classics. The empires discussed include case studies from Central and South America, the Mediterranean, Europe, the Near East, South East Asia and China, and range in time from the first millennium BC to the early modern era. The book organises these detailed studies into five thematic sections: sources, approaches and definitions; empires in a wider world; imperial integration and imperial subjects; imperial ideologies; and the afterlife of empires.

Borderless Empire

Borderless Empire PDF Author: Bram Hoonhout
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Borderless Empire explores the volatile history of Dutch Guiana, in particular the forgotten colonies of Essequibo and Demerara, to provide new perspectives on European empire building in the Atlantic world. Bram Hoonhout argues that imperial expansion was a process of improvisation at the colonial level rather than a project that was centrally orchestrated from the metropolis. Furthermore, he emphasizes that colonial expansion was far more transnational than the oft-used divisions into "national Atlantics" suggest. In so doing, he transcends the framework of the "Dutch Atlantic" by looking at the connections across cultural and imperial boundaries. The openness of Essequibo and Demerara affected all levels of the colonial society. Instead of counting on metropolitan soldiers, the colonists relied on Amerindian allies, who captured runaway slaves and put down revolts. Instead of waiting for Dutch slavers, the planters bought enslaved Africans from foreign smugglers. Instead of trying to populate the colonies with Dutchmen, the local authorities welcomed adventurers from many different origins. The result was a borderless world in which slavery was contingent on Amerindian support and colonial trade was rooted in illegality. These transactions created a colonial society that was far more Atlantic than Dutch.

Civilizations

Civilizations PDF Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743216504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
In Civilizations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto once again proves himself a brilliantly original historian, capable of large-minded and comprehensive works; here he redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization. To Fernández-Armesto, a civilization is "civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified natural environment"...by its taming and warping of climate, geography, and ecology. The same impersonal forces that put an ocean between Africa and India, a river delta in Mesopotamia, or a 2,000-mile-long mountain range in South America have created the mold from which humanity has fashioned its own wildly differing cultures. In a grand tradition that is certain to evoke comparisons to the great historical taxonomies, each chapter of Civilizations connects the world of the ecologist and geographer to a panorama of cultural history. In Civilizations, the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not merely a Christian allegory, but a testament to the thousand-year-long deforestation of the trees that once covered 90 percent of the European mainland. The Indian Ocean has served as the world's greatest trading highway for millennia not merely because of cultural imperatives, but because the regular monsoon winds blow one way in the summer and the other in the winter. In the words of the author, "Unlike previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations, it is arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period, or society by society." Thus, seventeen distinct habitats serve as jumping-off points for a series of brilliant set-piece comparisons; thus, tundra civilizations from Ice Age Europe are linked with the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest; and the Mississippi mound-builders and the deforesters of eleventh-century Europe are both understood as civilizations built on woodlands. Here, of course, are the familiar riverine civilizations of Mesopotamia and China, of the Indus and the Nile; but also highland civilizations from the Inca to New Guinea; island cultures from Minoan Crete to Polynesia to Renaissance Venice; maritime civilizations of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea...even the Bushmen of Southern Africa are seen through a lens provided by the desert civilizations of Chaco Canyon. More, here are fascinating stories, brilliantly told -- of the voyages of Chinese admiral Chen Ho and Portuguese commodore Vasco da Gama, of the Great Khan and the Great Zimbabwe. Here are Hesiod's tract on maritime trade in the early Aegean and the most up-to-date genetics of seed crops. Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations is a remarkable achievement...a tour de force by a brilliant scholar.

(Dis)connected Empires

(Dis)connected Empires PDF Author: Zoltán Biedermann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192556371
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire-building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, cartography, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It examines a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest.

Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico

Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico PDF Author: Tatiana Seijas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107063124
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This book is a history of Asian slaves in colonial Mexico and their journey from bondage to freedom.

Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500-1800

Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500-1800 PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004304150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Beyond Empires explores the complexity of empire building from the point of view of self-organized networks, rather than from the point of view of the central state. This focus takes readers into a world of cooperative strategies worldwide that emphasises the role played by individuals, rather than institutions, in the overseas expansion and consequent development of European empires. While unveiling the practices and mechanisms of cooperation between individuals, this volume show cases the role played by individuals for the creation, development and maintenance of self-organized networks in the Early Modern period. Applying new conceptual and theoretical inputs, this book values the contributions of different ‘worlds’, bringing to the fore the interactions of Europeans and non-Europeans, Christians and non-Christians, people living within-, on- or just outside the border of empire.

Historiography of Europeans in Africa and Asia, 1450–1800

Historiography of Europeans in Africa and Asia, 1450–1800 PDF Author: Anthony Disney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351930672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
The first part of this volume deals with the changes and continuities in historical approaches over the last fifty years, with three further sections focusing on initial contacts, formal presences, and informal presences. Emphasis has been placed on the major European players in Asia and Africa before 1800 - the Portuguese, Dutch and English, without neglecting the role played by the French, Spanish, Scandinavians and others.

The Roman History ... The Seventh Edition, Carefully Revis'd, and Much Improv'd

The Roman History ... The Seventh Edition, Carefully Revis'd, and Much Improv'd PDF Author: Laurence EACHARD
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description