Empire Made Me

Empire Made Me PDF Author: Robert A. Bickers
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231131322
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare view of empire from the bottom up and a glimpse of the making of modern China. Robert Bickers mines the letters of Richard Tinkler along with archival files to create a fascinating and much-needed narrative of everyday life in the colonial world and an unvarnished portrait of the colonial experience that will permanently affect our view of it.

Empire Made Me

Empire Made Me PDF Author: Robert A. Bickers
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231131322
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book

Book Description
This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare view of empire from the bottom up and a glimpse of the making of modern China. Robert Bickers mines the letters of Richard Tinkler along with archival files to create a fascinating and much-needed narrative of everyday life in the colonial world and an unvarnished portrait of the colonial experience that will permanently affect our view of it.

Empire Made Me

Empire Made Me PDF Author: Robert Bickers
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141906391
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
'This is a biography of a nobody that offers a window into an otherwise closed world. It is a life which manages to touch us all...' Empire Made Me Shanghai in the wake of the First World War was one of the world's most dynamic, brutal and exciting cities - an incredible panorama of nightclubs, opium-dens, gambling and murder. Threatened from within by communist workers and from without by Chinese warlords and Japanese troops, and governed by an ever more desperate British-dominated administration, Shanghai was both mesmerising and terrible.Into this maelstrom stepped a tough and resourceful ex-veteran Englishman to join the police. It is his story, told in part through his rediscovered photo-albums and letters, that Robert Bickers has uncovered in this remarkable, moving book.

Empire Made Me

Empire Made Me PDF Author: Robert Bickers
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141011955
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Shanghai in the wake of World War I was one of the world's most dynamic, brutal and exciting cities. Into this maelstrom stepped a tough and resourceful ex-veteran Englishman to join the police. This is his story, told in part through his rediscovered photograph albums and letters.

Empire

Empire PDF Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241958512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Niall Ferguson's acclaimed bestseller on the highs and lows of Britain's empire Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries, showing how a gang of buccaneers and gold-diggers planted the seed of the biggest empire in all history - and set the world on the road to modernity. 'The most brilliant British historian of his generation ... Ferguson examines the roles of "pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts" in the creation of history's largest empire ... he writes with splendid panache ... and a seemingly effortless, debonair wit' Andrew Roberts 'Dazzling ... wonderfully readable' New York Review of Books 'A remarkably readable précis of the whole British imperial story - triumphs, deceits, decencies, kindnesses, cruelties and all' Jan Morris 'Empire is a pleasure to read and brims with insights and intelligence' Sunday Times

Outsourcing Empire

Outsourcing Empire PDF Author: Andrew Phillips
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691206198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world’s first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empire shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states—not sovereign states—drove European expansion, building the world’s first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North America, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this comparative exploration, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman explain the rise and fall of company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as vanguards of capitalism and imperialism. In dealing with alien civilizations to the East and West, Europeans relied primarily on company-states to mediate geographic and cultural distances in trade and diplomacy. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between European rulers’ expansive geopolitical ambitions and their scarce means, company-states succeeded best where they could balance the twin imperatives of power and profit. Yet as European states strengthened from the late eighteenth century onward, and a sense of separate public and private spheres grew, the company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy. Bringing a fresh understanding to the ways cross-cultural relations were handled across the oceans, Outsourcing Empire examines the significance of company-states as key progenitors of the globalized world.

The War That Made the Roman Empire

The War That Made the Roman Empire PDF Author: Barry Strauss
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982116684
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
"The story of one of history's most decisive and yet little known battles, the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, which brought together Antony and Cleopatra on one side and Octavian, soon to be emperor Augustus, on the other, and whose outcome determined the future of the Roman Empire"--

The Great Degeneration

The Great Degeneration PDF Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125524
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower, a searching and provocative examination of the widespread institutional rot that threatens our collective future What causes rich countries to lose their way? Symptoms of decline are all around us today: slowing growth, crushing debts, increasing inequality, aging populations, antisocial behavior. But what exactly has gone wrong? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues in The Great Degeneration, is that our institutions—the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail—are degenerating. With characteristic verve and historical insight, Ferguson analyzes the causes of this stagnation and its profound consequences for the future of the West. The Great Degeneration is an incisive indictment of an era of negligence and complacency—and to arrest the breakdown of our civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform.

Empire Made

Empire Made PDF Author: Kief Hillsbery
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544416899
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Lost in time for generations, the story of a 19th-century English gentleman in British India—a family mystery of love found and loyalties abandoned, finally brought to light In 1841, twenty-year-old Nigel Halleck set out for Calcutta as a clerk in the East India Company. He went on to serve in the colonial administration for eight years before abruptly leaving the company under a cloud and disappearing in the mountain kingdom of Nepal, never to be heard from again. While most traces of his life were destroyed in the bombing of his hometown during World War II, Nigel was never quite forgotten—the myth of the man who headed East would reverberate through generations of his family. Kief Hillsbery, Nigel’s nephew many times removed, embarked on his own expedition, spending decades researching and traveling through India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal in the footsteps of his long-lost relation. In uncovering the remarkable story of Nigel’s life, Hillsbery beautifully renders a moment in time when the arms of the British Empire extended around the world. Both a powerful history and a personal journey, Empire Made weaves together a clash of civilizations, the quest to discover one’s own identity, and the moving tale of one man against an empire.

Powering Empire

Powering Empire PDF Author: On Barak
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520973933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East—as an idea—was made by coal. Coal’s imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil that wreaks carnage today, as carbonization threatens our very climate. Powering Empire argues that we cannot promote worldwide decarbonization without first understanding the history of the globalization of carbon energy. How did this black rock come to have such long-lasting power over the world economy? Focusing on the flow of British carbon energy to the Middle East, On Barak excavates the historic nexus between coal and empire to reveal the political and military motives behind what is conventionally seen as a technological innovation. He provocatively recounts the carbon-intensive entanglements of Western and non-Western powers and reveals unfamiliar resources—such as Islamic risk-aversion and Gandhian vegetarianism—for a climate justice that relies on more diverse and ethical solutions worldwide.

How to Hide an Empire

How to Hide an Empire PDF Author: Daniel Immerwahr
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.