Wars of Plunder

Wars of Plunder PDF Author: Philippe Le Billon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231702683
Category : Natural resources
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Angola and Iraq to Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, resource-rich countries with high incidences of poverty are prone to devastating outbreaks of war. The character of these conflicts is highly idiosyncratic, and the response of the international community is fascinatingly complex. Philippe Le Billon traces the specific burden of owning the world's most precious resources and the effect of resource politics on the development of war. He also takes a frank look at the international context surrounding such conflicts and its possible underlying motives. Le Billon focuses on three key resources----oil, diamonds, and timber----and the circumstances that link their abundance to war. He discusses the role of resource revenue in financing belligerent forces, a trend that has grown more conspicuous with the withdrawal of Cold War foreign sponsorship. While the War on Terror has altered the terms of military assistance and the nature of war's internationalization, many belligerent actors continue to rely on the profits of conflict resources to survive. Le Billon also examines the exploitation of resources and its creation of unrest.

Wars of Plunder

Wars of Plunder PDF Author: Philippe Le Billon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231702683
Category : Natural resources
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Angola and Iraq to Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, resource-rich countries with high incidences of poverty are prone to devastating outbreaks of war. The character of these conflicts is highly idiosyncratic, and the response of the international community is fascinatingly complex. Philippe Le Billon traces the specific burden of owning the world's most precious resources and the effect of resource politics on the development of war. He also takes a frank look at the international context surrounding such conflicts and its possible underlying motives. Le Billon focuses on three key resources----oil, diamonds, and timber----and the circumstances that link their abundance to war. He discusses the role of resource revenue in financing belligerent forces, a trend that has grown more conspicuous with the withdrawal of Cold War foreign sponsorship. While the War on Terror has altered the terms of military assistance and the nature of war's internationalization, many belligerent actors continue to rely on the profits of conflict resources to survive. Le Billon also examines the exploitation of resources and its creation of unrest.

Furies

Furies PDF Author: Lauro Martines
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608196186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
A forefront Italian Renaissance historian and author of Fire in the City evaluates darker aspects of the Renaissance including the military forces that ravaged Europe and shaped the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, exploring how massive, mobile armies consumed resources, spread disease and innovated violent new weapons.

The Oil Wars Myth

The Oil Wars Myth PDF Author: Emily Meierding
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501748955
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Do countries fight wars for oil? Given the resource's exceptional military and economic importance, most people assume that states will do anything to obtain it. Challenging this conventional wisdom, The Oil Wars Myth reveals that countries do not launch major conflicts to acquire petroleum resources. Emily Meierding argues that the costs of foreign invasion, territorial occupation, international retaliation, and damage to oil company relations deter even the most powerful countries from initiating "classic oil wars." Examining a century of interstate violence, she demonstrates that, at most, countries have engaged in mild sparring to advance their petroleum ambitions. The Oil Wars Myth elaborates on these findings by reassessing the presumed oil motives for many of the twentieth century's most prominent international conflicts: World War II, the two American Gulf wars, the Iran–Iraq War, the Falklands/Malvinas War, and the Chaco War. These case studies show that countries have consistently refrained from fighting for oil. Meierding also explains why oil war assumptions are so common, despite the lack of supporting evidence. Since classic oil wars exist at the intersection of need and greed—two popular explanations for resource grabs—they are unusually easy to believe in. The Oil Wars Myth will engage and inform anyone interested in oil, war, and the narratives that connect them.

Plunder

Plunder PDF Author: Cynthia Saltzman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374710392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May "A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal A captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from Venice Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness—to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization—and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

Wars of Plunder

Wars of Plunder PDF Author: Philippe le Billon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231702690
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Sacred Plunder

Sacred Plunder PDF Author: David M. Perry
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271066830
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Sacred Plunder, David Perry argues that plundered relics, and narratives about them, played a central role in shaping the memorial legacy of the Fourth Crusade and the development of Venice’s civic identity in the thirteenth century. After the Fourth Crusade ended in 1204, the disputes over the memory and meaning of the conquest began. Many crusaders faced accusations of impiety, sacrilege, violence, and theft. In their own defense, they produced hagiographical narratives about the movement of relics—a medieval genre called translatio—that restated their own versions of events and shaped the memory of the crusade. The recipients of relics commissioned these unique texts in order to exempt both the objects and the people involved with their theft from broader scrutiny or criticism. Perry further demonstrates how these narratives became a focal point for cultural transformation and an argument for the creation of the new Venetian empire as the city moved from an era of mercantile expansion to one of imperial conquest in the thirteenth century.

Century of War (Large Print 16pt)

Century of War (Large Print 16pt) PDF Author: Gabriel Kolko
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459603125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

Get Book Here

Book Description
Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political results of these traumatizing experiences in the twentieth century.

Wine and War

Wine and War PDF Author: Donald Kladstrup
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767913256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
The remarkable untold story of France’s courageous, clever vinters who protected and rescued the country’s most treasured commodity from German plunder during World War II. "To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine." –Claude Terrail, owner, Restaurant La Tour d’Argent In 1940, France fell to the Nazis and almost immediately the German army began a campaign of pillaging one of the assets the French hold most dear: their wine. Like others in the French Resistance, winemakers mobilized to oppose their occupiers, but the tale of their extraordinary efforts has remained largely unknown–until now. This is the thrilling and harrowing story of the French wine producers who undertook ingenious, daring measures to save their cherished crops and bottles as the Germans closed in on them. Wine and War illuminates a compelling, little-known chapter of history, and stands as a tribute to extraordinary individuals who waged a battle that, in a very real way, saved the spirit of France.

Writing and Reading War

Writing and Reading War PDF Author: Brad E. Kelle
Publisher: Society of Biblical Lit
ISBN: 1589833546
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book Here

Book Description
The meaning of war: definitions for the study of war in ancient Israelite literature / Frank Ritchel Ames -- Concepts of war in the Hebrew Bible: a plaidoyer for book-oriented study / Jacob L. Wright -- Fighting in writing: warfare in histories of ancient Israel / Megan Bishop Moore -- Assyrian military practices and Deuteronomy's laws of warfare / Michael G. Hasel -- Siege warfare imagery and the background of a biblical curse / Jeremy D. Smoak -- Wartime rhetoric: prophetic metaphorization of cities as female / Brad E. Kelle -- Family metaphors and social conflict in Hosea / Alice A. Keefe -- "We have seen the enemy, and he is only a 'she'": the portrayal of warriors as women / Claudia D. Bergmann -- Conquest reconfigured: recasting warfare in the redaction of Joshua / Daniel Hawk -- "Go back by the way you came": an internal textual critique of Elijah's violence in 1 Kings 18-19 / Frances Flannery -- Shifts in Israelite war ethics and early Jewish historiography of plundering / Brian Kvasnica -- Gideon at Thermopylae?: on the militarization of miracle in biblical narrative and "battle maps" / Daniel l. Smith-Christopher.

Prohibiting Plunder

Prohibiting Plunder PDF Author: Wayne Sandholtz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199725470
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
For much of history, the rules of war decreed that "to the victor go the spoils." The winners in warfare routinely seized for themselves the artistic and cultural treasures of the defeated; plunder constituted a marker of triumph. By the twentieth century, international norms declared the opposite, that cultural monuments should be shielded from destruction or seizure. Prohibiting Plunder traces and explains the emergence of international rules against wartime looting of cultural treasures, and explores how anti-plunder norms have developed over the past 200 years. The book covers highly topical events including the looting of thousands of antiquities from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, and the return of "Holocaust Art" by prominent museums, including the highly publicized return of five Klimt paintings from the Austrian Gallery to a Holocaust survivor. The historical narrative includes first-hand reports, official documents, and archival records. Equally important, the book uncovers the debates and negotiations that produced increasingly clear and well-defined anti-plunder norms. The historical accounts in Prohibiting Plunder serve as confirming examples of an important dynamic of international norm change. Rules evolve in cycles; in each cycle, specific actions trigger arguments about the meaning and application of rules, and those arguments in turn modify the rules. International norms evolve through a succession of such cycles, each one drawing on previous developments and each one reshaping the normative context for subsequent actions and disputes. Prohibiting Plunder shows how historical episodes interlinked to produce modern, treaty-based rules against wartime plunder of cultural treasures.