Search results for ""author merchant"

The threat of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's surprise invasion of Russia in June 1941, succeeding prompted Churchill to decide to send vital military supplies to Britain's new ally. The early sailings to Northern Russia via the Arctic Ocean between August 1941 and February 1942 were largely unopposed. But this changed dramatically during the course of 1942 when German naval and air operations inflicted heavy losses on both merchantmen and their escorts. Problems were exacerbated by the need to divert Royal Navy warships to support the North African landing. Strained Anglo-Soviet relations coupled with mounting losses and atrocious weather and sea conditions led to the near termination of the programme in early 1943. Again, competing operational priorities, namely the invasion of Sicily and preparations for D-Day, affected the convoy schedules. In the event, despite often crippling losses of lives, ships and supplies, the convoys continued until shortly before VE-Day. This thoroughly researched and comprehensive account examines both the political, maritime and logistic aspects of the Arctic convoy campaign. Controversially it reveals that the losses of merchant vessels were significantly greater than hitherto understood. While Churchill may not have described the convoys as the worst journey in the world', for the brave men who undertook he mission often at the cost of their lives, it most definitely was.

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Many of the historic houses in and around the town of Victoria, Texas, were built between 1875 and 1910 by immigrant owners. From 1973 to 1975, with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rick Gardner traveled throughout the region, taking photographs of these historic homes. Gardner relied on his own instincts and guidance from knowledgeable locals as to where he should aim his lens. This book is an appreciative glimpse at what these vernacular houses looked like a century after their construction. Gardner has teamed up with Victoria historian and preservationist Gary Dunnam to present these rich images along with brief historical sketches of the houses and, where possible, the persons who occupied them when they were newly constructed. The result is an understated and elegant suggestion of what life may have been like for the merchants, bankers, agriculturalists, and others who built and lived in these homes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Designed to appeal to those with a love for old houses and especially for the preservation of historic structures, All the Houses Were Painted White offers its readers a stately appreciation of these homes and their place in the South Texas landscape. It is also a tribute to the architects, owners, and anonymous craftspeople who built the houses-to their vision, skill, ingenuity, imagination, creativity, and endurance.

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The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars.Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

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This book marks the centenary of Neil MacLeod's death in 1913 with the republication of some of his work. It also publishes for the first time all of the identifiable work of his brother, Iain Dubh (1847 - 1901), and of their father, Domhnall nan Oran (c.1787 - 1873). Their contrasting styles mark a fascinating period of transition in literary tastes between the 18th and early 20th centuries at a time of profound social upheaval. Neil Macleod left Glendale in Skye to become a tea-merchant in Edinburgh. His songs were prized by his fellow Gaels for their sweetness of sentiment and melody, which placed a balm on the recent wounds of emigration and clearance. They are still very widely known, and Neil's collection Clarsach an Doire was reprinted four times. Professor Derick Thomson rightly described him as 'the example par excellence of the popular poet in Gaelic'. However, many prefer the earthy quality of the work of his less famous brother, Iain Dubh. This book contains 58 poems in all (32 by Neil, 14 by Iain and 22 by Domhnall), with translations, background notes and the melodies where known. Biographies are given of the three poets, while the introduction reflects on the difference in style between them and places each in his literary context. An essay in Gaelic by Professor Norman MacDonald reflects on the social significance of the family in the general Gaelic diaspora.

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Presented here are nine tales from the celebrated Ming dynasty Sanyan collection of vernacular stories compiled and edited by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time in China. The stories he collected were pivotal to the development of Chinese vernacular fiction, and their importance in the Chinese literary canon and world literature has been compared to that of Boccaccio’s Decameron and the stories of One Thousand and One Nights. Peopled with scholars, emperors, ministers, generals, and a gallery of ordinary men and women in their everyday surroundings—merchants and artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, monks and nuns, servants and maids, thieves and imposters—the stories provide a vivid panorama of the bustling world of imperial China before the end of the Ming dynasty. The three volumes constituting the Sanyan set—Stories Old and New, Stories to Caution the World, and Stories to Awaken the World, each containing forty tales—have been translated in their entirety by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. The stories in this volume were selected for their popularity with American readers and their usefulness as texts in classes on Chinese and comparative literature. These unabridged translations include all the poetry that is scattered throughout the original stories, as well as Feng Menglong’s interlinear and marginal comments, which point out what seventeenth-century readers of the stories were being asked to appreciate.

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“...a marvelous book and a great contribution to Chinatown, the Chinese-American community, and to the world community. I am amazed at your photography, your appreciation of color, your mastery of framing, your adventurousness in perspectives...it all worked out beautifully.”—Ben Fong-Torres “Impressively pairing striking imagery with an informative historical narrative, the book transports readers right into the heart of Chinatown’s thriving streets, festivals, local flavor, and cultural intensity. A vividly realized tribute to one of Northern California’s most revered cultural neighborhoods.”—Kirkus Reviews “The unique imprints of different eras are presented as if readers travel through the corridor of time and read "of the many things from ancient to modern". Evans shoots in the context of the times. Leong introduces the history, tourism, daily life, and celebrations of the Chinatown community through clear text descriptions.”—World Journal, the nation’s #1 Chinese newspaper “As far as I am concerned, this is the best book on Chinatown. The book was so well written and all things Chinatown were told with such clarity! And the photographs were stunning! Our neighborhood can be so much prouder of its history and heritage, thanks to you two!! I can't thank you enough for creating such an important book for our community. It will be enjoyed for years to come!!”—Betty Louie, Advisor Chinatown Merchants Association “You have given us a synopsis of history, cultural, political, personal—it's pretty amazing. And while delivering so much content, the book yet evinces a great spirit of the place as well. I love photo books with text—it's a great combination, two modalities of perception that together make more than the sum of their styles.”—Mary Ellen Hannibal, author of Citizen Scientist America’s oldest Chinatown comes alive in stunning photos of its people and places Following his award-winning book on San Francisco’s Mission District, Dick Evans turns his attention to Chinatown, the fifth of a square mile that attracts more tourists than the Golden Gate Bridge but where the median household income is a quarter of the citywide average. From delicious dim sum to wok-filled shops, from iconic red lanterns to elaborate parade floats, from inside single-room occupancy apartments to outdoor games of Chinese chess in Portsmouth Square, Evans captures a place filled with diverse residents and a unique mélange of American and Chinese architecture, cuisine, and culture. Vibrant images are interspersed with sidebars highlighting particular people and institutions, deepening viewers’ immersion into this community. Kathy Chin Leong’s lucid text introduces readers to the history of the neighborhood, as well as to themes of tourism, daily life, and celebrations. At the heart of the book is a tight-knit community and a thriving neighborhood, which welcomes immigrants with supportive institutions and entices tourists to experience a wide array of Chinese traditions. Evans’s photos highlight a place undergoing visible progress but, unlike other San Francisco neighborhoods that are gentrifying, maintaining its unique character and authenticity.

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"Her life was a bridge from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, from the time-hallowed beauty and rigidity of a samurai household to the disorienting, forward-looking freedoms of the West." —Janice P. Nimura, from the foreword.This is the story of one woman's remarkable life successfully navigating two very different cultures—the first memoir of an Asian-American woman.Beautifully told, this immigrant's account of an unforgettable journey is the story of a headstrong and empowered woman—a loyal wife, a widowed mother and a bilingual breadwinner—finding her way and finding her voice in a strange new world.Follow in her footsteps and trace the remarkable trajectory of her life as she: Witnesses her father prepare and perform the ritual seppuku and her mother burn down the family home Bids an emotional farewell and sails across the ocean to marry a wealthy merchant in a new land Returns to Tokyo with her two daughters and mother-in-law, only to find her homeland just as alien as America, forcing her to reinvent herself again in order to provide for her family Returns to America with her children following the death of her mother-in-law An international bestseller when it was first published a century ago, A Daughter of the Samurai emerges as a rare testament to a singular woman's resolve, strength and endurance. This edition features a new foreword by 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist Janice P. Nimura.

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Today, states’ ability to borrow private capital depends on stringent evaluations of their creditworthiness. While many presume that this has long been the case, Quentin Bruneau argues that it is a surprisingly recent phenomenon—the outcome of a pivotal shift in the social composition of financial markets.Investigating the financiers involved in lending capital to sovereigns over the past two centuries, Bruneau identifies profound changes in their identities, goals, and forms of knowledge. He shows how an old world made up of merchant banking families pursuing both profit and status gradually gave way to a new one dominated by large companies, such as joint stock banks and credit rating agencies, exclusively pursuing profit. Lacking the web of personal ties to sovereigns across the world that their established rivals possessed, these financial institutions began relying on a different form of knowledge created to describe and compare states through quantifiable data: statistics. Over the course of this epochal shift, which only came to an end a few decades ago, financial markets thus reconceptualized states. Instead of a set of individuals to be known in person, they became numbers on a page. Raising new questions about the history of sovereign lending, this book illuminates the nature of the relationship between states and financial markets today—and suggests that it may be on the cusp of another major transformation.

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The foundations for a world-class public art collection in Berlin were laid in 1821: This was the year the Kingdom of Prussia acquired on behalf of the museum to be established in Berlin the painting collection of English merchant Edward Solly (1776-1844). Between 1815 and 1820 this cosmopolitan lover of the arts living in Berlin amassed thousands of paintings above all from Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Many of the works were by artists little known at the time but who subsequently came to be greatly appreciated and are still renowned today. The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue showcase a representative selection of masterpieces, rediscoveries, and "historical peculiarities", and provide an insight into an age that on the one hand shaped our concepts of art and museums and on the other hand had an entirely different view of the works than we have today. Detailed insights into the history of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie Exhibition: Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 2022 Artists i.e.: Wilhelm Hensel, Meister der Dossali Veneziani, Puccio di Simone, Giotto, Meister des San Niccolò-Altares, Domenico und Davide Ghirlandaio, Raffael, Girolamo Figino, Johannes Hispanus, Girolamo Romanino, Giovanni Battista Benvenuti, Goossen van der Weyden, Hans Holbein der Jüngere, Hans Maler, Ambrosius Benson, Jan Gossart, Rembrandt, Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Gian Domenico Cerrini

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Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Žižek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Žižek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Žižek's practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism, thereby urging a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications for analyzing literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Žižekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Samuel Beckett's Not I, and William Burroughs's Nova Trilogy. The collection includes an essay by Žižek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek affirms Žižek's value to literary studies while offering a rigorous model of Žižekian criticism. Contributors. Shawn Alfrey, Daniel Beaumont, Geoff Boucher, Andrew Hageman, Jamil Khader, Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, Paul Megna, Russell Sbriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Slavoj Žižek

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From heart-stopping accounts of apparitions, poltergeists and related supernatural phenomena, to first-hand encounters with phantoms and spirits, this collection of stories contains both new and well-known spooky tales from around Stirling. A whole chapter is dedicated to the mysterious goings-on at Stirling Castle, where cleaners in the King's Old Building claimed to have heard footsteps coming from the third floor — which hasn't existed since a fire in the nineteenth-century; while a 1930s photograph purports to capture the shadow of a phantom guardsman — possibly the same 'Highland Soldier' often reportedly mistaken by tourists for a castle guide.The town itself has no shortage of fascinating tales, including the story of the Old Town's most famous phantom, seventeenth-century merchant John 'Auld Staney Breeks' Cowane, whose spirit is said to inhabit his statue each Hogmanay. A playful ghost supposedly throws pots and pans around the kitchens of the Darnley Coffee House, while frequent power failures and mishaps in the Tolbooth Theatre — originally the eighteenth-century Burgh jail — are blamed upon the malicious spirit of the last man hanged, Alan Mair. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources, Haunted Stirling is guaranteed to intrigue and chill both believers and sceptics alike.

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When a claimant to the title of Lord Darlymple comes to an unexpected sticky end, the cry goes up: 'Was it murder?'The Honourable Daisy Dalrymple is recruited by her cousin Edgar - the current Lord Dalrymple - to help him find the next heir to the viscountcy. With the involvement of the family lawyer, they come up with four claimants who, along with Daisy, are invited to Fairacres, the family estate, to celebrate Edgar's fiftieth birthday.And they're a mixed bunch. A hotelier from Scarborough, a diamond merchant from South Africa, a mixed-race boy from Trinidad and a sailor from Jamaica. But then the sailor goes missing... and so begins a series of inexplicable and troubling accidents, resulting in the death of one of the would-be heirs. Daisy and her husband, DCI Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, are left wondering who might be behind all of this and, more importantly... who's next?Praise for the Daisy Dalrymple series:Cunning... appropriate historical detail and witty dialogue are the finishing touches on this engaging 1920s period piece. Publisher's WeeklyAs always, Dunn evokes the life and times of 1920s England while providing a plot that is a cut above the average British cosy. This will delight readers who love country-house mysteries. BooklistFor fans of Dorothy L. Sayers' novels. Library Journal

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HMS Turbulent was a Royal Navy T-class submarine. From its launch in May 1941 to when it was lost at sea, along with its entire crew, in March 1943, it was responsible for the sinking of nearly 100,000 tons of enemy shipping. Besides the number of enemy vessels it sunk, HMS Turbulent has gone down in history for the attack on the Italian merchant vessel the Nino Bixio, which at the time was carrying more than 3,000 Allied POWS who had been captured during the fighting in North Africa. Having left the Libyan port of Benghazi on 16 August 1942, accompanied by the Italian cargo vessel the Sestriere, the Nino Bixio was attacked the following day. A total of 336 Allied POWs, most of whom were either Australian or New Zealanders, were killed or died of their wounds in the explosion. Although badly damaged, the Nino Bixio stayed afloat and was towed to Navarino, in southern Greece, where the surviving POWs disembarked. The wounded were treated in hospital, while the rest were shipped on to POW camps in Bari, Italy. Although there have been different theories put forward as to how HMS Turbulent met its end off the Italian coast in 1943, there is still no absolute certainty as to where, when and how the boat and its crew were lost.

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“This stunning behind-the-curtain look into the last years of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the United States represents “a signal contribution to U.S. antebellum historiography.”—Library Journal, starred review “A remarkable piece of scholarship.”—Eric Herschthal, New Republic “Uncovers an important—and little known—aspect of both New York City history and the history of the illegal slave trade to Cuba.”—Erin Becker, Global Maritime History Long after the transatlantic slave trade was officially outlawed in the early nineteenth century by every major slave trading nation, merchants based in the United States were still sending hundreds of illegal slave ships from American ports to the African coast. The key instigators were slave traders who moved to New York City after the shuttering of the massive illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1850. These traffickers were determined to make Lower Manhattan a key hub in the illegal slave trade to Cuba. In conjunction with allies in Africa and Cuba, they ensnared around two hundred thousand African men, women, and children during the 1850s and 1860s. John Harris explores how the U.S. government went from ignoring, and even abetting, this illegal trade to helping to shut it down completely in 1867.

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Contributions by Grace Elizabeth Hale, Katie Knowles, Ted Ownby, Jonathan Prude, William Sturkey, Susannah Walker, Becca Walton, and Sarah Jones WeickselFashion studies have long centered on the art and preservation of finely rendered garments of the upper class, and archival resources used in the study of southern history have gaps and silences. Yet, little study has been given to the approach of clothing as something made, worn, and intimately experienced by enslaved people, incarcerated people, and the poor and working class, and by subcultures perceived as transgressive. The essays in the volume, using clothing as a point of departure, encourage readers to imagine the South's centuries-long engagement with a global economy through garments, with cotton harvested by enslaved or poorly paid workers, milled in distant factories, designed with influence from cosmopolitan tastemakers, and sold back in the South, often by immigrant merchants. Contributors explore such topics as how free and enslaved women with few or no legal rights claimed to own clothing in the mid-1800s, how white women in the Confederacy claimed the making of clothing as a form of patriotism, how imprisoned men and women made and imagined their clothing, and clothing cooperatives in civil rights-era Mississippi. An introduction by editors Ted Ownby and Becca Walton asks how best to begin studying clothing and fashion in southern history, and an afterword by Jonathan Prude asks how best to conclude.

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Antitrust is a sledgehammer to the creation of European-wide markets. How does it really work though? Take the case of power contracting. Look at the smart and fresh view from a promising scholar: Adrien de Hauteclocque. A must read.'- Jean-Michel Glachant, European University Institute, Italy'Long-term energy contracts pose one of the greatest challenges for EU competition law. Focusing on electricity markets and contracts, this book provides interesting new approaches and guidance in this area of EU law. The book also examines a wider and even more difficult issue: what role can competition law have in creating markets. The book delivers. It is a remarkably lucid account of difficult issues. A must-have book for practitioners and policy makers alike.'- Kim Talus, University of Eastern FinlandMarket Building through Antitrust investigates the role of antitrust policy in the building of competitive energy markets in Europe.By looking at the specific problem of long-term supply and access contracts in the electricity sector, the book questions the suitability of antitrust policy as a market building tool. It shows that the institutional infrastructure that pre-dated competitive reform and the politics of liberalization have largely shaped the current dynamics at work in European energy regulatory practice. In particular, antitrust law has increasingly been used as a quasi-ex ante regulatory tool, thereby raising problems in terms of economic efficiency, legal certainty and political legitimacy.By mixing legal, political and economic perspectives, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers from academia in law, economics and political science, regulatory and competition authorities, as well as legal and consulting practices and business economists.Contents: Foreword General Introduction 1. The Problem of Long-term Contracts in Decentralized Electricity Markets: An Economic Perspective 2. Vertical De-integration and Single Market Integration in the European Union: An Incomplete Transition 3. The Antitrust Strategy of the European Commission on Long-term Contracts: Is the New Methodology truly 'More Economic'? 4. Long-term Contracts Across Member States: The Problem of Priority Access Rights to Interconnectors 5. The Strategy of the European Union for the Development of Interconnectors: Assessing the Role of Merchant Transmission Investment with Vincent Rious Bibliography Index

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This new book tells the story of the Ocean class of standard cargo ships, their design, building and careers, and the author places them firmly in the context of the battle of the Atlantic which was raging at the time of the first launchings. They entered the vanguard of the Allied shipping effort at a time when the German U-boat threat was at its most dangerous, and British shipping resources were stretched to the limit. They were deployed in the North Atlantic, on the long supply routes around Africa to the Middle East, in the Russian convoys, in operations in support of the invasions of North Africa and Italy and the land campaigns which followed, in the D-Day landings and later amphibious operations on the south coast of France. Finally, some of the class joined an invasion force making its way towards Malaya when Japan surrendered in August 1945\. The Oceans paid a heavy price for these accomplishments, one third of the class being lost to torpedoes, bombs or mines in places as far apart as the Florida coast, the Norwegian Sea, the Bay of Algiers and the Gulf of Oman. While these achievements alone would merit an important place in histories of the war at sea, the impact of the Oceans stretched far beyond the direct contribution of the ships themselves. The yards where they were built also served as models for a series of new American shipyards, designed to mass produce cargo vessels with such speed and in such volume as to completely reverse the mathematics of attrition, which had run so badly against the Allies into 1942\. Even more important, the Oceans' blueprints were used as the basis for the American Liberty ship, the 2,700-strong fleet which finally tilted the balance of the war at sea decisively in the Allies' favour and went on to underpin the post-war renewal of the world merchant fleet. This comprehensive new history, based on extensive archival research and lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs, restores the Oceans to their rightful place in history. The ships' design antecedents are explained, and their ordering, financing and construction analysed in full. Wartime operations are covered in depth, by theatre and with full details of war losses and other casualties. The book concludes with an assessment of their subsequent peacetime careers and a comparison to other war-built designs. This is a model history of a highly significant class of ship.

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A comprehensive survey and analysis of the Presbyterian community in its important formative period. The Presbyterian community in Ulster was created by waves of immigration, massively reinforced in the 1690s as Scots fled successive poor harvests and famine, and by 1700 Presbyterians formed the largest Protestant community in the north of Ireland. This book is a comprehensive survey and analysis of the Presbyterian community in this important formative period. It shows how the Presbyterians formed a highly organised, self-confident community which exercised a rigorous discipline over its members and had a well-developed intellectual life. It considers the various social groups within the community, demonstrating how the always small aristocratic and gentry component dwindled andwas virtually extinct by the 1730s, the Presbyterians deriving their strength from the middling sorts - clergy, doctors, lawyers, merchants, traders and, in particular, successful farmers and those active in the rapidly growing linen trades - and among the laborious poor. It discusses how Presbyterians were part of the economically dynamic element of Irish society; how they took the lead in the emigration movement to the American colonies; and how they maintained links with Scotland and related to other communities, in Ireland and elsewhere. Later in the eighteenth century, the Presbyterian community went on to form the backbone of the Republican, separatist movement. ROBERT WHAN obtained his Ph.D. in History from Queen's University, Belfast.

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The late sixteenth-century penal debt bond, which allowed an unsatisfied creditor to seize the body of his debtor, set in motion a series of precedents that would shape the legal, philosophical, and moral issue of property-in-person in England and America for centuries. Focusing on this historical juncture at which debt litigation was not merely an aspect of society but seemed to engulf it completely, Of Bondage examines a culture that understood money and the body of the borrower as comparable forms of property that impinged on one another at the moment of default. Amanda Bailey shows that the early modern theater, itself dependent on debt bonds, was well positioned to stage the complex ethical issues raised by a system of forfeiture that registered as a bodily event. While plays about debt like The Merchant of Venice and The Custom of the Country did not use the language of political philosophy, they were artistically and financially invested in exploring freedom as a function of possession. By revealing dramatic literature's heretofore unacknowledged contribution to the developing narrative of possessed persons, Amanda Bailey not only deepens our understanding of creditor-debtor relations in the period but also sheds new light on the conceptual conditions for the institutions of indentured servitude and African slavery. Of Bondage is vital not only for students and scholars of English literature but also for those interested in British and colonial legal history, the history of human rights, and the sociology of economics.

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'Outstanding, illuminating, compelling ... a riveting read' Peter Frankopan, Sunday Times Islamic civilization was once the envy of the world. From a succession of glittering, cosmopolitan capitals, Islamic empires lorded it over the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and swathes of the Indian subcontinent. For centuries the caliphate was both ascendant on the battlefield and triumphant in the battle of ideas, its cities unrivalled powerhouses of artistic grandeur, commercial power, spiritual sanctity and forward-looking thinking.Islamic Empires is a history of this rich and diverse civilization told through its greatest cities over fifteen centuries, from the beginnings of Islam in Mecca in the seventh century to the astonishing rise of Doha in the twenty-first.It dwells on the most remarkable dynasties ever to lead the Muslim world - the Abbasids of Baghdad, the Umayyads of Damascus and Cordoba, the Merinids of Fez, the Ottomans of Istanbul, the Mughals of India and the Safavids of Isfahan - and some of the most charismatic leaders in Muslim history, from Saladin in Cairo and mighty Tamerlane of Samarkand to the poet-prince Babur in his mountain kingdom of Kabul and the irrepressible Maktoum dynasty of Dubai. It focuses on these fifteen cities at some of the defining moments in Islamic history: from the Prophet Mohammed receiving his divine revelations in Mecca and the First Crusade of 1099 to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the phenomenal creation of the merchant republic of Beirut in the nineteenth century.

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The Hermitage Musuem in St Petersburg is possibly the greatest museum in the world. It began as a showcase for the art treasures of the Tsars and reflects their legendary extravagance. Imperial romances, marriages and murders all had an impact on the collection, as did the byzantine bartering of international politics. Nationalised by the Bolsheviks in 1917, the museum expanded to fill the imperial family's Winter Palace and the three riverside pavilions that were built onto the palace in the late eighteenth century. Vast, confiscated collections came the way of the museum as a result of the Revolution - the finest treasures of the Russian nobility, as well as two great merchant collections of Gauguin, Matisse and modern masters. The courage and devotion to scholarship of its curators have helped the museum survive the terrible trials of the twentieth century: the exile, imprisonment and execution of many staff during Stalin's purges, and extremities of hunger during the siege of Leningrad - when 2,000 people lived in a makeshift bomb shelter in the museum cellars. With the 1990s has come a new battle, as the Hermitage struggles to survive amidst the economic chaos of post- Communist Russia. The Hermitage is the first full history of this great museum in any language. It highlights the human adventures involved in the creation and preservation of one of the finest art collections in the world, and reveals the hitherto unchronicled dramas of the Communist years. It provides an unusual perspective on Russia's troubled history.

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Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape.

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The story of the inspiration for, establishment and evolution of the National Memorial Arboretum is a fascinating one. Sited at Alrewas, Staffordshire, the Arboretum has become the Nation's all year round focus for remembering and paying tribute to all who have served their country in both peace and war not only in the armed forces and merchant navy but in the emergency services as well.rnrnPlanting began in 1997 and was supported by hundreds of organisations both serving and retired. Among the early memorials was a life-size wooded polar bear, for 49th Division, a grove of Irish trees for the Royal Irish Regiment, an Avenue of Chestnuts for the Police and a Chapel of Peace and Forgiveness to mark the coming of the Millennium. Britain's war-widows had a rose-garden planted for them while the Far East Prisoners of War managed to fund a small museum to stand alongside a length of railway track brought back from the notorious Burma Railway. In October 2007 HM the Queen confirmed the importance of the site when she opened the Armed Forces Memorial to commemorate all service personnel lost on active service since the end of the Second World War; this is especially poignant given the on-going conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The importance of the National Memorial Arboretum is well demonstrated by the growing number of stands and the steady increase in visitor numbers.

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In 1868, Jacob Kaufmann, the nineteen-year-old son of a German farmer, stepped off a ship onto the shores of New York. His brother Isaac soon followed, and together they joined an immigrant community of German Jews selling sewing items to the coal miners and mill workers of western Pennsylvania. After opening merchant tailor shops in Pittsburgh’s North and South sides, the Kaufmann brothers caught the wave of a new type of merchandising - the department store - and launched what would become their retail dynasty with a downtown storefront at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street. In just two decades, Jacob and his brothers had ascended Pittsburgh’s economic and social ladder, rising from hardscrabble salesmen into Gilded Age multimillionaires.Generous and powerful philanthropists, the Kaufmanns left an indelible mark on the city and western Pennsylvania. From Edgar and Liliane’s famous residence, the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece called Fallingwater, to the Kaufmann clock, a historic landmark that inspired the expression “meet me under the clock,” to countless fond memories for residents and shoppers, the Kaufmann family made important contributions to art, architecture, and culture. Far less known are the personal tragedies and fateful ambitions that forever shaped this family, their business, and the place they called home. Kaufmann’s recounts the story of one of Pittsburgh’s most beloved department stores, pulling back the curtain to reveal the hardships, triumphs, and complicated legacy of the prominent family behind its success.

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SFWA Grand Master Cherryh returns to the Hugo-award winning Alliance-Union Universe with a thrilling entry in her far-reaching sci-fi saga.For years, the stations of the Hinder Stars, those old stations closest to Sol, have lagged behind the great megastations of the Beyond, like Pell and Cyteen. But new opportunities and fears arise when Alpha station receives news of an incoming ship with no identification. The denizens of Alpha wait anxiously for news about the outsiders, each with their own suspicions about the ship and its origins. Ross and Fallon, crew members of the Galway, believe the unidentified ship belongs to Pell and has come to investigate another massive ship docked at Alpha, The Rights of Man. Though Rights is under the command of the Earth Company, it is not quite perfected—and its true purpose is shrouded in mystery. James Robert Neihart, captain of Finity's End—a huge faster-than-light ship flown by one of the Merchanter Families—has heard whispers of The Rights of Man and wonders at its design and purpose, especially as Sol struggles to rival the progress of the Farther Stars. Now docked at Alpha, he must convince the crews that there is more to The Rights of Man than meets the eye. Because the reasons behind the creation of The Rights of Man, and its true plans, could change everything—not just for Sol, but for the Hinder Stars and the Beyond itself.

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Published by Edition Synapse, Japan and distributed by Routledge outside of Japan.This is the very first collection of all the English works produced by an author renowned for her autobiographical novel A Daughter of the Samurai, which became a bestseller in pre-war America. Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto was born 1874 in the province of Niigata in Japan and after attending a Methodist school in Tokyo, she moved to the USA for a pre-arranged marriage to a Japanese merchant in Cincinnati. After her husband’s death, she started writing about Japan in local newspapers and then in a series of articles for the magazine Asia. A Daughter of Samurai, which was her first book and was based on the magazine series, was published by Doubleday, a leading US publisher. The book became one of the publisher’s biggest sellers and continued to be in print for many editions. A British edition was produced, as were translations into most other major Western languages. The book’s influence has been profound. For example, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, one the most widely read books on Japan in the West is deeply indebted to Sugimoto’s novel. Sugimoto later lived in New York and taught Japanese language and culture at Columbia University.In addition to her first novel, she published three other novels and a children’s book, all in English. Even in the anti-Japanese atmosphere of pre-war America and Britain, they were favourably reviewed on the both sides of the Atlantic. Reviews of her work appeared in the New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.This Collected English Works of Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto includes all of those books as facsimile reprints of first editions, together with colour plates and illustrations. The collection also gathers her newspaper and magazine articles. Selected reviews of her novels are also included.… Neither Americans nor Japanese, they felt alien in both countries, winning a sort of spiritual hybridism which is one of the tragedies of abi-racial background. The story takes root from this tragedy and serves as a commentary upon the life of both nations. In every sense A Daughter of the Samurai is an attempt to explain the life of the Samurai to the American people. "Unless the red barbarians and the children of the gods" she writes, "learn each other’s hearts the ships may sail and sail, but the two lands will never be nearer." At a time when a wholesome piece of American legislation was marred with ill manners toward the proud and sensitive nation of Japan and when American jin goes invoke a Yellow Peril analogous to Japan’s White Peril, such a book is useful and honorable. In unveiling the reticences of a Japanese heart, Mme. Sugimoto has deserved well not only of her caste and of her nation, but also of the many well-bred people in this land who desire a sympathetic understanding of the two peoples. --- from the review of A Daughter of the Samurai in The New York Times, January 10, 1926

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In this text, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J.S.G. Boggs, a young artist with a certain panache, a certain flair, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps, more precisely, value. What Boggs likes to do is to draw money - actual paper notes in the denominations of standard currencies from all over the world - and then to go out and try to spend those drawings. Instead of selling his money drawings outright to interested collectors, Boggs looks for merchants who will accept his drawings in lieu of cash payment for their wares or services as part of elaborately choreographed transactions, complete with receipts and even proper change - an artistic practice which regularly lands him in trouble with treasury around the world. This volume teases out these transactions and their sometimes dramatic legal consequences, following Boggs on a larkish, though at the same time disconcertingly profound, econo-philosophic chase. For in a madcap Socratic fashion, Boggs is raising all sorts of truly fundamental questions - what is it that we value in art, or, for that matter, in money? Indeed, how do we place a value on anything at all? And in particular, why do we, why should we, how can we place such trust in anything as confoundingly insubstantial as paper money? In passing, Weschler frames a concise, highly entertaining history of money itself - from cowrie shells through hedge funds.

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Following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Germany was not permitted to build or operate submarines. However, clandestine training took place on Finnish and Spanish submarines and U-boats were still built to German designs in Dutch yards. At the outset of the Second World War, Admiral Karl Doenitz argued for a 300-strong U-boat fleet, since his force of fifty-seven assorted U-boats could not materially affect British seaborne trade on their own. In August 1939, _U-48_ left Germany, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Herbert 'Vaddi' Schultze, to take up a waiting position around the British coast. It scored its first success on 5 September, when it torpedoed the British freighter _Royal Sceptre_, followed by _Winkleigh_ on 8 September. On both occasions, the first of many, Schultze showed himself to be a notable humanitarian: he addressed signals to Churchill giving positions of the sinkings so that crews could be saved. By 1 August 1941, _U-48_, the most successful U-boat of the Second World War, had sunk fifty-six merchant ships, of 322,478 gross tons, and one corvette. She was then transferred to the Baltic as a training boat. Schultze became commander of operations at 3 U-Flotilla, before being appointed commander of II/Naval College Schleswig. He died in 1987 at the age of 78\. _U-48_ was scuttled on 3 May 1945.

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From its rise in the 1830s to its pinnacle in the 1930s, the opium trade was a guiding force in the Chinese political economy. Opium money was inextricably bound up in local, national, and imperial finances, and the people who piloted the trade were integral to the fabric of Chinese society. In this book, Peter Thilly narrates the dangerous lives and shrewd business operations of opium traffickers in southeast China, situating them within a global history of capitalism. By tracing the evolution of the opium trade from clandestine offshore agreements in the 1830s, to multi-million dollar prohibition bureau contracts in the 1930s, Thilly demonstrates how the modernizing Chinese state was infiltrated, manipulated, and profoundly transformed by opium profiteers. Opium merchants carried the drug by sea, over mountains, and up rivers, with leading traders establishing monopolies over trade routes and territories and assembling "opium armies" to protect their businesses. Over time, and as their ranks grew, these organizations became more bureaucratized and militarized, mimicking—and then eventually influencing, infiltrating, or supplanting—the state. Through the chaos of revolution, warlordism, and foreign invasion, opium traders diligently expanded their power through corruption, bribery, and direct collaboration with the state. Drug traders mattered—not only in the seedy ways in which they have been caricatured but also crucially as shadowy architects of statecraft and China's evolution on the world stage.

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In Imperial Gateway, Seiji Shirane explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Challenging understandings of empire that focus on bilateral relations between metropole and colonial periphery, Shirane uncovers a half century of dynamic relations between Japan, Taiwan, China, and Western regional powers. Japanese officials in Taiwan did not simply take orders from Tokyo; rather, they often pursued their own expansionist ambitions in South China and Southeast Asia. When outright conquest was not possible, they promoted alternative strategies, including naturalizing resident Chinese as overseas Taiwanese subjects, extending colonial police networks, and deploying tens of thousands of Taiwanese to war. The Taiwanese—merchants, gangsters, policemen, interpreters, nurses, and soldiers—seized new opportunities for socioeconomic advancement that did not always align with Japan's imperial interests. Drawing on multilingual archives in six countries, Imperial Gateway shows how Japanese officials and Taiwanese subjects transformed Taiwan into a regional gateway for expansion in an ever-shifting international order. Thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

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The romantic Beauty and the Beast retelling of your dreams - perfect for fans of reimagined fairy tales and dark, brooding love interests ... A heartless beastA sister's sacrificeAnd a love so strong it will drown the raging sea ...THIS FAIRY TALE IS CURSEDIn a kingdom that fears the sea, Ria Lucroy longs to be brave. Bodies are washing ashore and everyone knows who's to blame. Legends of the Heartless King shroud the continent in fear; they call him a pirate, a monster, a god. When his mercenaries raid her father's merchant ship, Ria's family is faced with a horrifying demand. They will spare his life, in exchange for one of his daughters.Determined to save her sisters, Ria launches herself into the world of pirates. Face-to-face with the Heartless King, she finds he is far more than the stories told. He is a man, with a human name and blood-stained hands, bound to the seas by a centuries-old curse. As their chemistry blooms into something more, Ria finds herself caught in an ancient web of secrets. Battling creatures of the deep alongside those that reign its surface, Ria discovers how to love a heartless man and that some curses aren't so easy to break.Prepare for stormy seas and swoony romance in this addictive enemies-to-lovers fairytale romance set on a cursed pirate ship. Perfect for fans of Brigid Kemmerer's Cursebreakers series and Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses.

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The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels’ intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide. With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value, development, and the relationship between capital and history. Capitalism, he argues, is not a frame of economic organization based on the smooth, consistent operation of a series of laws, but rather an assemblage of contingent and interrupted logics stitched together into the appearance of a deus ex machina. Following this line of thinking, Gidwani points to ways in which political economy might be freed of its lingering Eurocentrism, raises questions about the adequacy of postcolonial studies’ critique of Marx and capitalism, and opens the possibility of situating capitalism as a geographically uneven social formation in which different normative or value-creating practices are imperfectly sutured together in ways that can equally impair and enable profit and accumulation. Both theoretically astute and empirically informed, Capital, Interrupted unsettles encrusted understandings of staple concepts within the human sciences such as hegemony, governmentality, caste, and agency and, ultimately, does nothing less than rethink the very constitution of capitalism. Vinay Gidwani is associate professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota.

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In Shakespeare and Abraham, Ken Jackson illuminates William Shakespeare’s dramatic fascination with the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Themes of child killing fill Shakespeare’s early plays: Genesis 22 informed Clifford’s attack on young Rutland in 3 Henry 6, Hubert’s providentially thwarted murder of Arthur in King John, and Aaron the Moor’s surprising decision to spare his son amidst the filial slaughters of Titus Andronicus, among others. However, the playwright’s full engagement with the biblical narrative does not manifest itself exclusively in scenes involving the sacrifice of children or in verbal borrowings from the famously sparse story of Abraham. Jackson argues that the most important influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is to be found in the conceptual framework that Shakespeare develops to explore relationships among ideas of religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. Jackson probes the Shakespearean texts from the vantage of modern theology and critical theory, while also orienting them toward the traditions concerning Abraham in Jewish, Pauline, patristic, medieval, and Reformation sources and early English drama. Consequently, the playwright’s “Abrahamic explorations” become strikingly apparent in unexpected places such as the “trial” of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the bifurcated structure of Timon of Athens. By situating Shakespeare in a complex genealogy that extends from ancient religion to postmodern philosophy, Jackson inserts Shakespeare into the larger contemporary conversation about religion in the modern world.

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BOOK 1 IN THE BALLANTYNE SERIES BY INTERNATIONAL SENSATION WILBUR SMITH'Best historical novelist' - Stephen King'A master storyteller' - Sunday Times'Wilbur Smith is one of those benchmarks against whom others are compared' - The Times'No one does adventure quite like Smith' - Daily MirrorA DISHONOURABLE MAN. AN HONOURABLE MISSION.Dr Robyn Ballantyne has always worked hard for what she wants. Following in the footsteps of their father she and her brother, the celebrated soldier Zouga Ballantyne, depart England on an expedition to Africa, the land of their birth. Robyn is determined to bring an end to slave trading, while Zouga is certain that Africa will be the land that makes him, and determines to make his fortune there, whatever the cost.Manning the expedition is the notorious American merchant, Mungo St John. Robyn is deeply attracted to St John but is horrified to discover that he is a slave-trader, and that she is unwittingly travelling on a slave ship.Also vying for her love is the fanatical anti-slavery naval captain, Clinton Codrington. Kind and respectable, Codrington is deeply in love with Robyn, but despite herself she cannot return his feelings.As Robyn finds herself torn between the two men, she is forced to make a decision that will change her life forever, and which will shape the future for them all.The first book in the first sequence of the epic Ballantyne seriesBook 2 in the Ballantyne series, Men of Men, is available now.

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Within hours of the outbreak of the Second World War, Winston Churchill took up office as First Lord of the Admiralty. The same day the liner Athenia was torpedoed in the Atlantic in the first U-boat attack of the war. Churchill quickly recognised Britain's survival depended on countering the U-boat threat and the strategic importance of protecting Allied merchant shipping with measures such as the convoy system. As this superbly researched book reveals, the Nazi U-boat fleet was relatively small and unprepared for war in 1939\. But by early 1941 its numbers and effectiveness had increasing to the point that Hitler was able to declare our warfare at sea is just beginning'. Prime Minister Churchill's response was to issue his famous Battle of the Atlantic' Directive. Churchill's Atlantic Convoys describes the political, strategic and tactical ebb and flow of events, particularly between 1942 and 1943\. Thanks to increased numbers and scientific innovations the Allies slowly gained the upper hand despite a determined German fight back in late 1943 and early 1944\. While the U-boat threat was never wholly defeated, the tenacity and sacrifices of the Allied naval forces won the day. Churchill later recognised the persistence of Germany's effort and the fortitude of the U-boat service. It would not be until 7 June 1945 that Churchill and President Truman felt able to assert the Allies have finished the job'.

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Fans of Patrick O'Brian and C. S. Forester will love this captivating, vivid and exciting page-turner from multi-million copy seller Alexander Kent - guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat! 'Shipwreck, survival... a spirited battle... a splendid yarn' -- Times'One of our foremost writers of naval fiction' -- Sunday Times'Alexander Keen is a master of his craft' -- ***** Reader review'Seamless fiction at its best' -- ***** Reader review'Another great story, gripping to the end' -- ***** Reader review'Difficult to put down' -- ***** Reader review'Superb' -- ***** Reader review************************************************************************************************1811: After two and a half months of precious peace in Cornwall with his beloved mistress Catherine, Admiral Richard Bolitho is once again summoned to London.In defence of an Empire, the Admiralty must quell the unrest in America - or face the war with those who were once friends. For when diplomacy fails, the cannon will speak.For his daring mission, Bolitho must call on the loyalty of his most trusted officers - and the trust of those he loves the most. Distance too is their enemy, as the Indomitable leads the fleet from Plymouth towards the rich merchant grounds of the Americas.In the troubled seas from Antigua north to Halifax, Admiral Bolitho's revolutionary 'flying squadron' will face their first and harshest test. For a country's freedom. For a hero's right to turn his back on the sea ...

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For much of its extraordinary life, Baghdad, known for centuries as the "City of Peace," enjoyed both cultural and commercial preeminence. For five centuries it was the seat of the Abbasid Empire, a marvel of glittering palaces, exquisite parks, magnificent mosques, and Islamic colleges. It was a city boasting the most accomplished astronomers, mathematicians, doctors, musicians, and poets-it was here, in the time of the caliphs, that the great Arabic classic One Thousand and One Nights was set. With its teeming markets watered by the Tigris, Baghdad was a thriving trading emporium, attracting merchants from Central Asia to the Atlantic; its economy was the envy of West and East alike. Yet Baghdad's inhabitants have also seen many terrible hardships, from epidemics and famines to invasions and devastating floods. And it has also been one of the most violent cities on earth. When U.S. troops entered in 2003, they became the latest participants in a turbulent history stretching back to the city's founding in 762. Over most of its thirteen-century history, Baghdad has endured the rule of brutal strongmen, from capricious caliphs to Saddam Hussein; and it has suffered violent occupations at the hands of its conquerors, from the Mongol Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, to Tamerlane, known as the "Sword Arm of Israel." Here, in this vivid new history-the first published in English in nearly a century-Justin Marozzi brings to life the whole splendorous and tumultuous story of what was once the greatest capital on earth.

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Discusses how Britain replicated the "Singapore model" - the use of imported "industrious" Chinese labour - to other parts of its empire, with varying degrees of success. The transformation of Singapore, founded by Stamford Raffles in 1819, from a trading post to a major centre for international trade was a huge commercial and colonial success for Britain. One key factor in all of this was the recruitment of Chinese migrant labour, which by the 1850s made up over half of the population. The transformation, however, was not limited to Singapore. As this book demonstrates, colonial administrators saw that the "model" of whathad been done in Singapore, especially the use of Chinese migrant labour, could be replicated elsewhere. This book examines the establishment of the "Singapore model" and its transference - to Assam in India, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Mauritius, Australia and the West Indies. It examines the role of the key people who developed the model, including the Hong Kong merchant houses and their financial expertise, discusses central ideas which lay behind the model, notably free trade and the use of "industrious" Chinese rather than "lazy" natives, and assesses the varying outcomes of the different colonial experiments. The themes discussed - economic opportunities and globalisation; theneed to find labour without recourse to slavery, indentured labour or convict labour; migration, ethnicity and racism - all continue to have great significance at present, as does the idea that Singapore, still, is a model to be replicated more widely. STAN NEAL is Lecturer in Modern British Imperial History at Ulster University.

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A compelling saga from Margaret Dickinson, Fairfield Hall charts the changing fortunes of Annabel Constantine, in the devastating lead up to the First World War.Ruthlessly ambitious Ambrose Constantine is determined that his daughter, Annabel, shall marry into the nobility. A fish merchant and self-made man, he has only his wealth to buy his way into society.When Annabel's secret meetings with Gilbert, a young man employed at her father's offices, stop suddenly, she learns that he has mysteriously disappeared. Heartbroken, she finds solace with her grandparents on their Lincolnshire farm, but her father will not allow her to hide herself in the countryside and enlists the help of a business connection to launch his daughter into society.During the London Season, Annabel is courted by James Lyndon, the Earl of Fairfield, whose country estate is only a few miles from her grandfather's farm. Believing herself truly loved at last, Annabel accepts his offer of marriage. It is only when she arrives at Fairfield Hall that she realizes the true reason behind James's proposal and the part her scheming father has played.Throughout the years that follow, Annabel experiences both heartache and joy, and the birth of her son should finally secure the future of the Fairfield Estate. But there are others who lay claim to the inheritance igniting a feud that will only reach its resolution in the trenches of the First World War.

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How the West Was Drawn explores the geographic and historical experiences of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas during the European and American contest for imperial control of the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. David Bernstein argues that the American West was a collaborative construction between Native peoples and Euro-American empires that developed cartographic processes and culturally specific maps, which in turn reflected encounter and conflict between settler states and indigenous peoples. Bernstein explores the cartographic creation of the Trans-Mississippi West through an interdisciplinary methodology in geography and history. He shows how the Pawnees and the Iowas—wedged between powerful Osages, Sioux, the horse- and captive-rich Comanche Empire, French fur traders, Spanish merchants, and American Indian agents and explorers—devised strategies of survivance and diplomacy to retain autonomy during this era. The Pawnees and the Iowas developed a strategy of cartographic resistance to predations by both Euro-American imperial powers and strong indigenous empires, navigating the volatile and rapidly changing world of the Great Plains by brokering their spatial and territorial knowledge either to stronger indigenous nations or to much weaker and conquerable American and European powers.How the West Was Drawn is a revisionist and interdisciplinary understanding of the global imperial contest for North America’s Great Plains that illuminates in fine detail the strategies of survival of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas amid accommodation to predatory Euro-American and Native empires.

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What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Richly illustrated, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers in China and beyond have irrevocably shaped this great artistic tradition. Arguing that audiences within China were crucially important to the evolution of Chinese painting, Clunas considers how Chinese artists have imagined the reception of their own work. By examining paintings that depict people looking at paintings, he introduces readers to ideal types of viewers: the scholar, the gentleman, the merchant, the nation, and the people. In discussing the changing audiences for Chinese art, Clunas emphasizes that the diversity and quantity of images in Chinese culture make it impossible to generalize definitively about what constitutes Chinese painting. Exploring the complex relationships between works of art and those who look at them, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences sheds new light on how the concept of Chinese painting has been formed and reformed over hundreds of years.

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Over the past few centuries, as Western civilization has enjoyed an expansive and flexible geographic domain, Westerners have observed other cultures with little interest in a return gaze. In turn, these other civilizations have been similarly disinclined when they have held sway. Clearly, though, an external frame of reference outstrips introspection we cannot see ourselves as others see us. Unprecedented in its scope, What the Rest Think of the West provides a rich historical look through the eyes of outsiders as they survey and scrutinize the politics, science, technology, religion, family practices, and gender roles of civilizations not their own. The book emphasizes the broader figurative meaning of looking west in the scope of history. Focusing on four civilizations Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian Nader has collected observations made over centuries by scholars, diplomats, missionaries, travelers, merchants, and students reflecting upon their own Wests." These writings derive from a range of purposes and perspectives, such as the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist who goes west to India, the missionary from Baghdad who travels up the Volga in the tenth century and meets the Vikings, and the Egyptian imam who in 1826 is sent to Paris to study the French. The accounts variously express critique, adoration, admiration, and fear, and are sometimes humorous, occasionally disturbing, at times controversial, and always enlightening. With informative introductions to each of the selections, Laura Nader initiates conversations about the power of representational practices.

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For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires. Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

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For most of the twentieth century Britain possessed both the worlds largest merchant fleet and its most extensive overseas territories. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Royal Navy always showed a particular interest in the cruiser a multi-purpose warship needed in large numbers to defend trade routes and police the empire. Above all other types, the cruisers competing demands of quality and quantity placed a heavy burden on designers, and for most of the inter-war years Britain sought to square this circle through international treaties restricting both size and numbers. In the process she virtually invented the heavy cruiser and inspired the large 6in-armed cruiser, neither of which, ironically, served her best interests. For the first time this book seeks to comprehend the full policy background, from which a different and entirely original picture emerges of British cruiser development. After the war the cruisers role was reconsidered and the final chapters of the book cover modernisations, the plans for missile-armed ships and the convoluted process that turned the through-deck cruiser into the Invincible class light carriers. With detailed appendices of ship data, and illustrated in depth with photos and A D Bakers specially commissioned plans, British Cruisers truly matches the lofty standards set by Friedmans previous books on British destroyers. **'This is a sumptuous volume, providing a most authoritative and comprehensive review of British cruisers in the twentieth century. The book is beautifully laid out to Seaforth's traditional high standard.'** _Scuttlebutt_

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The year 1942 began badly for the Allies. German U-boats were indiscriminately sinking merchant shipping off America's east coast and in the Caribbean. Allied fortunes were no better in the Far East under the relentless Japanese advance. America was struggling to hold the Philippines, while the Soviet Union was fighting a series of bitter winter battles against Hitler's Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow. General Erwin Rommel's surprise offensive in North Africa brought a renewed threat to the Middle East in mid-1942, which hastened the transfer of U.S. aircraft to Egypt to assist the beleaguered British. The vast, sprawling deserts of North Africa were a new and strange terrain to American aircrew. Confronted by sand storms, flooding rains, extremes of temperature and primitive living conditions, the United States Army Air Forces were pitted against an experienced and determined enemy. U.S. air power nevertheless played a decisive role in the Allied invasion of Northwest Africa and the subsequent surrender of Axis forces in Tunisia in May 1943\. Later bombing missions flown from North Africa struck Axis targets across Europe and supported the Allied invasions of Sicily and mainland Italy. This book is a pictorial account of U.S. fighter aircraft and bombers including the iconic B-17 Flying Fortress, P-38 Lightning and B-24 Liberator and the aircrews that fought to establish ascendancy over North African skies and beyond.

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In Tea, James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773, two large shipments of tea from the East India Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North America. Their survival shaped the politics of the years ahead, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for the tea lost in Boston Harbor, and hinted at the enduring potency of consumerism in revolutionary politics. Tea protests were widespread in 1774, but so were tea advertisements and tea sales, Fichter argues. The protests were noisy and sometimes misleading performances, not clear signs that tea consumption was unpopular. Revolutionaries vilified tea in their propaganda and prohibited the importation and consumption of tea and British goods. Yet merchant ledgers reveal these goods were still widely sold and consumed in 1775. Colonists supported Patriots more than they abided by non-consumption. When Congress ended its prohibition against tea in 1776, it reasoned that the ban was too widely violated to enforce. War was a more effective means than boycott for resisting Parliament, after all, and as rebel arms advanced, Patriots seized tea and other goods Britons left behind. By 1776, protesters sought tea and, objecting to its high price, redistributed rather than destroyed it. Yet as Fichter demonstrates in Tea, by then the commodity was not a symbol of the British state, but of American consumerism.

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Sir Robin Knox-Johnston burst to fame when he became the first man ever to complete a single-handed, non-stop circumnavigation of the world. Now, 50 years on from that famous voyage, he reveals the true, extraordinary story of his life. After leaving school, he immediately joined the Royal Naval Reserve before serving in the merchant navy and travelling the world. During that time, he spied for the British government in the Gulf, worked in the South African dockyards, and built his boat Suhaili in Bombay, before sailing home to England. In June 1968, he set sail in Suhaili in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, and Running Free vividly brings to life that remarkable voyage, where he was the only person to finish the race, completing his journey on 22 April 1969 and thus entering the record books. Once back home, he set up a hugely successful business and continued his naval adventures, completing a second solo circumnavigation of the globe in 2007 - at 68, he became the oldest to complete this feat. Knox-Johnston's insatiable appetite for life and adventure shines through these pages, making this book a must for all sailing enthusiasts, readers of books by Ranulph Fiennes and Chris Bonington, or for anyone who has felt that the time for putting up your feet can always be put back to another day.

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Between the late twelfth century and the mid fourteenth, Castile saw a reordering of mental, spiritual, and physical space. Fresh ideas about sin and intercession coincided with new ways of representing the self and emerging perceptions of property as tangible. This radical shift in values or mentalites was most evident among certain social groups, including mercantile elites, affluent farmers, lower nobility, clerics, and literary figures--"middling sorts" whose outlooks and values were fast becoming normative. Drawing on such primary documents as wills, legal codes, land transactions, litigation records, chronicles, and literary works, Teofilo Ruiz documents the transformation in how medieval Castilians thought about property and family at a time when economic innovations and an emerging mercantile sensibility were eroding the traditional relation between the two. He also identifies changes in how Castilians conceived of and acted on salvation and in the ways they related to their local communities and an emerging nation-state. Ruiz interprets this reordering of mental and physical landscapes as part of what Le Goff has described as a transition "from heaven to earth," from spiritual and religious beliefs to the quasi-secular pursuits of merchants and scholars. Examining how specific groups of Castilians began to itemize the physical world, Ruiz sketches their new ideas about salvation, property, and themselves--and places this transformation within the broader history of cultural and social change in the West.

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