Wars of Plunder

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

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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.

Plunder

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

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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.

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

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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.

Nazi Looting

Nazi Looting PDF Author: Gerard Aalders
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The Nazi looting machine was notoriously efficient during the Second World War. In the Netherlands, 8.5 million citizens suffered losses estimated at 3.6 billion guilders. Approximately one-third of these losses were borne by Jews, who comprised only 1.6% of the total population. In todays terms, the German occupiers stripped the Jewish population of assets worth $7 billion.Nazi Looting offers a comprehensive history of the Dutch experience and demonstrates how reputable indigenous institutions acted as willing collaborators. Beginning with a survey of international law and various definitions of 'looting', the author shows how the Germans systematically robbed Dutch Jewry through a variety of means that gave the outward appearance of honest trading. Forced to sell under duress and at unreasonably low prices, few dared refuse the German on the doorstep when threatened with prison or incarceration in a camp.The plundering was total and systematic. In May 1940, a team of highly trained art historians, linguists, musicologists and literary experts arrived immediately behind the victorious German troops to catalogue the vast collections for Hitler. From 1941, Jews were compelled to deposit all their money into a bank called Lippmann, Rosenthal Co. The name of the bank itself was a cynical ploy since it was taken from a respected, Jewish-owned Amsterdam bank and presented as a new branch. This bank, however, simply channelled money into the Third Reich with the help of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, insurance brokers and other well-established Dutch banks. Once the Jews were deported, their houses were emptied and the contents used to re-furnish bombed out areas of the Reich. In common with many other formerly Nazi-occupied countries in Europe, the Netherlands has been unable to retrieve many of its pre-war assets. More than fifty years after the wars end, 20% of its most important pre-war museum exhibits and approximately 80% of the less important works remain untrace

Wine and War

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

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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.

Warhogs

Warhogs PDF Author: Stuart D. Brandes
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813157609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
The Puritans condemned war profiteering as a "Provoking Evil," George Washington feared that it would ruin the Revolution, and Franklin D. Roosevelt promised many times that he would never permit the rise of another crop of "war millionaires." Yet on every occasion that American soldiers and sailors served and sacrificed in the field and on the sea, other Americans cheerfully enhanced their personal wealth by exploiting every opportunity that wartime circumstances presented. In Warhogs, Stuart D. Brandes masterfully blends intellectual, economic, and military history into a fascinating discussion of a great moral question for generations of Americans: Can some individuals rightly profit during wartime while others sacrifice their lives to protect the nation? Drawing upon a wealth of manuscript sources, newspapers, contemporary periodicals, government reports, and other relevant literature, Brandes traces how each generation in financing its wars has endeavored to assemble resources equitably, to define the ethical questions of economic mobilization, and to manage economic sacrifice responsibly. He defines profiteering to include such topics as price gouging, quality degradation, trading with the enemy, plunder, and fraud, in order to examine the different guises of war profits and the degree to which they have existed from one era to the next. This far-reaching discussion moves beyond a linear narrative of the financial schemes that have shaped this nation's capacity to make war to an in-depth analysis of American thought and culture. Those scholars, students, and general readers interested in the interaction of legislative, economic, social, and technological events with the military establishment will find no other study that so thoroughly surveys the story of war profits in America.

Plunder

Plunder PDF Author: Ugo Mattei
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405178949
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Plunder examines the dark side of the Rule of Law and explores how it has been used as a powerful political weapon by Western countries in order to legitimize plunder – the practice of violent extraction by stronger political actors victimizing weaker ones. Challenges traditionally held beliefs in the sanctity of the Rule of Law by exposing its dark side Examines the Rule of Law's relationship with 'plunder' – the practice of violent extraction by stronger political actors victimizing weaker ones – in the service of Western cultural and economic domination Provides global examples of plunder: of oil in Iraq; of ideas in the form of Western patents and intellectual property rights imposed on weaker peoples; and of liberty in the United States Dares to ask the paradoxical question – is the Rule of Law itself illegal?

Sacred Plunder

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

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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

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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.

Nazi Plunder

Nazi Plunder PDF Author: Kenneth D. Alford
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0306820900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
World War II was the most devastating conflict in human history, but the tragedy did not end on the battlefields. During the war, Germany -- and, later, the Allies -- plundered Europe's historic treasures. Between 1939 and 1945, German armed forces roamed from Dunkirk to Stalingrad, looting gold, silver, currency, paintings and other works of art, coins, religious artifacts, and millions of books and other documents. The value of these items, many of which were irreplaceable, is estimated in the billions of dollars. The artwork alone, looted under Hitler's direction, exceeded the combined collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, and the Louvre. As the war wound to its conclusion in 1945, occupying forces continued the looting. The story of these celebrated works of art and other vanished treasures -- and the mystery of where they went -- is a remarkable tale of greed, fraud, deceit, and treachery. Kenneth Alford's Nazi Plunder is the latest word on this fascinating subject.