Search results for ""author merchant"

A riveting investigation of the no-holds-barred battle between Amazon and Walmart to become the king of commerce.For years, Walmart and Amazon operated in separate spheres—one a massive brick-and-mortar retailer, the other an online giant. But in 2016, Walmart aggressively moved into the world of e-commerce, while Amazon made big bets in physical retail.The resulting rivalry is a bare-knuckle power struggle as each titan tries to outmaneuver the other to become the biggest omnichannel retailer in the world. As the two megacorporations have consolidated power, troubling consequences have also emerged—for consumers and small merchants faced with fewer buying and selling options, and for millions of workers paid meager wages for demanding and sometimes dangerous work.Winner Sells All is a tale of disruption and big money moves, with legendary executives and fearless entrepreneurs in a battle—between rival corporations and sometimes even within the same company—to invent the future and cement their own legacies. Veteran journalist Jason Del Rey chronicles the defining business clash of this generation—a war waged for our loyalty and our wallets, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and millions of jobs on the line. As both companies continue to expand their empires into new industries, Winner Sells All reveals how this battle will change the ways we shop, live, and work—for decades to come.

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A finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this prize-winning and critically acclaimed history uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America's dramatic rise from thirteen disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world's greatest superpower. George C. Herring tells a story of stunning successes and sometimes tragic failures, captured in a fast-paced narrative that illuminates the central importance of foreign relations to the existence and survival of the nation, and highlights its ongoing impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. He shows how policymakers defined American interests broadly to include territorial expansion, access to growing markets, and the spread of an "American way" of life. And Herring does all this in a story rich in human drama and filled with epic events. Statesmen such as Benjamin Franklin and Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman and Dean Acheson played key roles in America's rise to world power. But America's expansion as a nation also owes much to the adventurers and explorers, the sea captains, merchants and captains of industry, the missionaries and diplomats, who discovered or charted new lands, developed new avenues of commerce, and established and defended the nation's interests in foreign lands. From Colony to Superpower captures all this as it tells the dramatic story of America's emergence as superpower--its birth in revolution, its troubled present, and its uncertain future.

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An innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little attention to the role that cargoes have played in connecting the disparate parts of this vast oceanic world. Drawing from the work of anthropologists, geographers, and historians, Cargoes in Motion tells the story of how material objects have informed and continue to shape processes of exchange across the Indian Ocean. By following selected cargoes through both space and time, this book makes an important and innovative contribution to Indian Ocean studies. The multidisciplinary approach deepens our understanding of the nature and dynamics of the Indian Ocean world by showing how transoceanic connectivity has been driven not only by economic, social, cultural, and political factors but also by the materiality of the objects themselves. Essays by: Edward A. Alpers Fahad Ahmad Bishara Eva-Maria Knoll Karl-Heinz Kohl Lisa Jenny Krieg Pedro Machado Rupert Neuhöfer Mareike Pampus Hannah Pilgrim Burkhard Schnepel Hanne Schönig Tansen Sen Steven Serels Julia Verne Kunbing Xiao

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The Pitfalls of Piety for Married Women shows how problematic the practice of Buddhist piety could be in late imperial China. Two thematically related "precious scrolls" (baojuan) from the Ming dynasty, The Precious Scroll of the Red Gauze and The Precious Scroll of the Handkerchief, illustrate the difficulties faced by women whose religious devotion conflicted with the demands of marriage and motherhood. These two previously untranslated texts tell the stories of married women whose piety causes them to be separated from their husbands and children. While these women labor far away, their children are cruelly abused by murderous stepmothers. Following many adventures, the families are reunited by divine intervention and the evil stepmothers get their just deserts. While the texts in The Pitfalls of Piety for Married Women praise Buddhist piety, they also reveal many problems concerning married women and mothers. Wilt L. Idema's translations are preceded by an introduction that places these scrolls in the context of Ming dynasty performative literature, vernacular literature, and popular religion. Set in a milieu of rich merchants, the texts provide a unique window to family life of the time, enriching our understanding of gender during the Ming dynasty. These popular baojuan offer rare insights into lay religion and family dynamics of the Ming dynasty, and their original theme and form enrich our understanding of the various methods of storytelling that were practiced at the time.

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It is not surprising to anyone who knows the Bay country that the Chesapeake captured the imagination of Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries," writes Arthur Pierce Middleton in this classic maritime history of the earliest years of Maryland and Virginia. "It was called the 'Noblest Bay in the Universe' in which the whole navies of Great Britain, France and the Netherlands might simultaneously ride at anchor." "Tobacco Coast" is the history of how the Chesapeake Bay shaped the society and economy of an entire region. Its hundreds of miles of navigable tributaries made adoption of the tobacco staples possible and eliminated the necessity of cities and towns; its physical dominance created an "essential unity" of lands sharing its shores, despite the political decisions that created the separate colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Middleton recaptures the peril faced by the early colonists (Father Andrew White, who arrived in the Ark, wrote that "all the Sprights and witches of Maryland" seemed arrayed in battle against the ship when violent storms struck off the coast) and traces how the settlers persevered and the colonies thrived, due in great measure to the growth of tobacco as the mainstay of Chesapeake commerce (in 1775 it represented over 75 percent of the total value of exports from the Chesapeake colonies and was worth some $4 million). Colonial life and commerce, shipbuilding and the merchant marine, privateers and self-protection--are all treated with insight, drama, and thoroughness in a fascinating maritime history, long out of print and now widely made available for the first time.

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Brilliant and bedraggled, the picaresque Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon was one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century. Now the definitive English version of Maimon's remarkable Autobiography, the 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, is available for the first time in paperback, enhanced with a new introduction by Jewish studies scholar Michael Shapiro. Wry and spirited, shrewd and unrepentant, Maimon alternated between nomadic destitution and intellectual swordplay among the Jewish elite of Berlin. The son of a petty merchant in Polish Lithuania, Maimon was a child Talmud prodigy who became increasingly antagonistic toward the Jewish establishment and receptive toward the secular philosophies of Spinoza, Hume, Leibnitz, and Kant. A perpetual outsider, Maimon observed with an equally sharp eye the excesses of his time and the vicissitudes of his own life. Parallel to his own development as a thinker in the company of Moses Mendelssohn and others, Maimon conveys the physically wretched but spiritually vibrant Polish ghetto, the beginnings of Hasidism (which he denounces as antirationalist), and the world of the wealthy Berlin Jewry who enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment. Combining philosophical discourse with personal anecdotes that shift abruptly from the tragic to the hilarious and back, Maimon's Autobiography indelibly portrays one man's devotion to truth on his own terms regardless of the cost to himself or others.

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'Read this wonderfully entertaining book: a unique story of a unique life in the world of world cinema' Wes Anderson'Jim is as eloquent and elegant with words as with the camera . . . Read it and drink it in!' Helena Bonham CarterIn Solid Ivory, a carefully crafted mosaic of memories, portraits, and reflections, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Ivory tells stories from his remarkable life and career as one of the most influential directors of his time. He often touches on his love affairs, looking back coolly and with unexpected frankness.From first meeting his collaborator and life partner, Ismail Merchant, at the Indian Consulate in New York to winning an Academy Award at age eighty-nine for Call Me by Your Name, Ivory writes with invariable fluency, wit, and perception about what made him who he is and how he made the movies for which he is known and loved.Solid Ivory, edited by Peter Cameron, is an utterly winning portrait of an extraordinary life told by an unmatched storyteller.'Consistently entertaining' Guardian'James Ivory write[s] with perfect elegance...there's nothing starchy or uptight about these scenes from his fascinating life' Sunday Times

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What do Bill Gates, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, Mary Kay Ash, and Walt Disney all have in common? Uncompromising vision, a willingness to take risks, and exceptional business acumen. Not only did these individuals amass great fortunes, they revolutionized the business world and helped shape society as we know it. Theirs are just a few of the stories collected in this anthology of commercial ingenuity. Drawing on a wealth of sources, this priceless collection brings to life extraordinary achievements, many of them forgotten or little known: how Robert Morris, the preeminent merchant of the eighteenth century, financed the American Revolution with his personal credit; how Ray Kroc used a shrewd real estate strategy to turn a faltering hamburger franchise operation into the McDonald's fast food empire; and how Mary Kay Ash built a billion-dollar direct sales cosmetics company by preaching a message of economic empowerment to women. Enlightening and fascinating, Forbes(r) Greatest Business Stories of All Time celebrates larger-than-life ambition, inspired leadership, wheeling and dealing, and hard work. Forbes is a registered trademark of Forbes Inc. Its use is pursuant to a license agreement with Forbes Inc.

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What do Bill Gates, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, Mary Kay Ash, and Walt Disney all have in common? Uncompromising vision, a willingness to take risks, and exceptional business acumen. Not only did these individuals amass great fortunes, they revolutionized the business world and helped shape society as we know it. Theirs are just a few of the stories collected in this anthology of commercial ingenuity. Drawing on a wealth of sources, this priceless collection brings to life extraordinary achievements, many of them forgotten or little known: how Robert Morris, the preeminent merchant of the eighteenth century, financed the American Revolution with his personal credit; how Ray Kroc used a shrewd real estate strategy to turn a faltering hamburger franchise operation into the McDonald's fast food empire; and how Mary Kay Ash built a billion-dollar direct sales cosmetics company by preaching a message of economic empowerment to women. Enlightening and fascinating, Forbes(r) Greatest Business Stories of All Time celebrates larger-than-life ambition, inspired leadership, wheeling and dealing, and hard work. Forbes is a registered trademark of Forbes Inc. Its use is pursuant to a license agreement with Forbes Inc.

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In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system? Far from a narrow, technical issue, Chinese monetary reform is a dramatic story full of political revolutions, economic depressions, chance, and contingency. As different governments in China attempted to create a unified monetary standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States, England, and Japan tried to shape the direction of Chinese monetary reform for their own benefit. Austin Dean argues convincingly that the Silver Era in world history ended owing to the interaction of imperial competition in East Asia and the state-building projects of different governments in China. When the Nationalist government of China went off the silver standard in 1935, it marked a key moment not just in Chinese history but in world history.

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Full of colorful details and engrossing stories, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles shows that the aspirations of individual Americans to be recognized as people worthy of others' respect was a driving force in the global extension of United States influence shortly after the nation's founding. Nancy Shoemaker contends that what she calls extraterritorial Americans constituted the vanguard of a vast, early US global expansion. Using as her site of historical investigation nineteenth-century Fiji, the "cannibal isles" of American popular culture, she uncovers stories of Americans looking for opportunities to rise in social status and enhance their sense of self. Prior to British colonization in 1874, extraterritorial Americans had, she argues, as much impact on Fiji as did the British. While the American economy invested in the extraction of sandalwood and sea slugs as resources to sell in China, individuals who went to Fiji had more complicated, personal objectives. Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles considers these motivations through the lives of the three Americans who left the deepest imprint on Fiji: a runaway whaleman who settled in the islands, a sea captain's wife, and a merchant. Shoemaker's book shows how ordinary Americans living or working overseas found unusual venues where they could show themselves worthy of others' respect—others' approval, admiration, or deference.

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The English East India Company was one of the most powerful and enduring organizations in history. Between Monopoly and Free Trade locates the source of that success in the innovative policy by which the Company's Court of Directors granted employees the right to pursue their own commercial interests while in the firm's employ. Exploring trade network dynamics, decision-making processes, and ports and organizational context, Emily Erikson demonstrates why the English East India Company was a dominant force in the expansion of trade between Europe and Asia, and she sheds light on the related problems of why England experienced rapid economic development and how the relationship between Europe and Asia shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though the Company held a monopoly on English overseas trade to Asia, the Court of Directors extended the right to trade in Asia to their employees, creating an unusual situation in which employees worked both for themselves and for the Company as overseas merchants. Building on the organizational infrastructure of the Company and the sophisticated commercial institutions of the markets of the East, employees constructed a cohesive internal network of peer communications that directed English trading ships during their voyages. This network integrated Company operations, encouraged innovation, and increased the Company's flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to local circumstance. Between Monopoly and Free Trade highlights the dynamic potential of social networks in the early modern era.

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They say that the Thorn of Camorr can beat anyone in a fight. They say he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They say he's part man, part myth, and mostly street-corner rumor. And they are wrong on every count. Only averagely tall, slender, and god-awful with a sword, Locke Lamora is the fabled Thorn, and the greatest weapons at his disposal are his wit and cunning. He steals from the rich - they're the only ones worth stealing from - but the poor can go steal for themselves. What Locke cons, wheedles and tricks into his possession is strictly for him and his band of fellow con-artists and thieves: the Gentleman Bastards. Together their domain is the city of Camorr. Built of Elderglass by a race no-one remembers, it's a city of shifting revels, filthy canals, baroque palaces and crowded cemeteries. Home to Dons, merchants, soldiers, beggars, cripples, and feral children. And to Capa Barsavi, the criminal mastermind who runs the city.But there are whispers of a challenge to the Capa's power. A challenge from a man no one has ever seen, a man no blade can touch. The Grey King is coming.A man would be well advised not to be caught between Capa Barsavi and The Grey King. Even such a master of the sword as the Thorn of Camorr. As for Locke Lamora ...

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As Spain colonized the Americas during the sixteenth century, Spanish soldiers, bureaucrats, merchants, adventurers, physicians, ship pilots, and friars explored the natural world, gathered data, drew maps, and sent home specimens of America's vast resources of animals, plants, and minerals. This amassing of empirical knowledge about Spain's American possessions had two far-reaching effects. It overturned the medieval understanding of nature derived from Classical texts and helped initiate the modern scientific revolution. And it allowed Spain to commodify and control the natural resources upon which it built its American empire. In this book, Antonio Barrera-Osorio investigates how Spain's need for accurate information about its American colonies gave rise to empirical scientific practices and their institutionalization, which, he asserts, was Spain's chief contribution to the early scientific revolution. He also conclusively links empiricism to empire-building as he focuses on five areas of Spanish activity in America: the search for commodities in, and the ecological transformation of, the New World; the institutionalization of navigational and information-gathering practices at the Spanish Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade); the development of instruments and technologies for exploiting the natural resources of the Americas; the use of reports and questionnaires for gathering information; and the writing of natural histories about the Americas.

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A ghost ship full of long-lost gold beckons, and Biggles gets an icy reception...Biggles, Algie, Bertie and Ginger are visited by Grimes, an old pal from the war, whose father, a Merchant Navy captain known as Jumbo, is in a spot of bother. He was recently tricked into skippering a crew of seal poachers to an islet off Antarctica. While there, they spotted an old ship – still rigged for sail – trapped in the pack ice. After an investigation of the ship, Jumbo overheard the words ‘starry’ and ‘crown’ from the jubilant crew.An avid fan of an unsolved mysteries, Biggles immediately recognises the importance of these words. Jumbo and his crew had stumbled upon the long-lost schooner Starry Crown, which went missing seventy years prior with a ton of Australian gold ingots aboard. There have been several sightings and ill-fated recovery expeditions since, but no one has ever retrieved the gold.Grimes reckons that they might be able to beat the poachers to the treasure if they were to go by air, and wonders if Biggles is interested in an adventure. After making a few enquiries, Biggles agrees to the expedition, but there is more than gold in the Starry Crown, and no help for miles across Antarctica’s vast silence…Wrap up warm for a classic Biggles adventure to the frozen continent of Antarctica.

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Over the past few decades, alliance and networks have been generally examined individually. This Handbook sheds new light on this research by combining the two topics and focuses on highlighting their similarities.The expert contributors discuss topics surrounding the state-of-the-art in alliance and network research such as organizing opportunities in international entrepreneurship; transaction costs in alliances and joint ventures; diaspora networks; and national culture and international alliances. They go on to look at conceptual developments relating to born globals; subsidiary performance; internationalisation; and knowledge transfer and organisational learning. Finally, they present empirical evidence of international alliances and networks. They combine diverse types of studies including literature reviews, conceptual papers and empirical studies in order to provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the topic.Researchers with an interest in joint ventures and alliance and networks, along with students and academics of international business will find this book to be a valuable resource.Contributors: S. Andersson, U. Andersson, A. Arslan, G.B. Awuah, P Ekman, M. Elo, C. Erixon, N. Evers, P.N. Ghauri, M. Hilmersson, M. Hsia-Wen Ho, M. Johanson, V. Kaartemo, J. Larimo, C. López-Duarte, H. Lundberg, T. Mainela, H. Makkonen, M. Marinov, S.T. Marinova, L.-G. Mattsson, H. Merchant, K.E. Meyer, N. Mirc, N. Nummela, R. Olkkonen, U.F. Ott, S. Papaioannou, E. Pernu, V. Puhakka, P.A. Ryan, S. Saarenketo, A. Salmi, P. Servais, A. Smith, A. Thyr, L. Torkkeli, P. Very, M.M. Vidal-Suárez, Y. Wang

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Barbara Furlotti presents a dynamic interpretation of the early modern market for antiquities, relying on the innovative notion of archaeological finds as mobile items. She reconstructs the journey of ancient objects from digging sites to venues where they were sold, such as Roman marketplaces and antiquarians' storage spaces; to sculptors' workshops, where they were restored; and to Italian and other European collections, where they arrived after complicated and costly travel over land and sea. She shifts the attention away from collectors to the elusive peasants with shovels, dealers and middlemen, and restorers who unearthed, cleaned up and repaired or remade objects, recuperating the role these actors played in Rome's socioeconomic structure. Furlotti also examines the changes in economic value, meaning, and appearance that antiquities underwent as they moved from person to person during their journey and as they reached the locations in which they were displayed. Drawing on vast unpublished archival material, she offers answers to novel questions: How were antiquities excavated? How and where did peasants, merchants, and agents trade them? How was a price agreed upon between sellers and buyers? How were laws about the ownership of ancient finds made, followed, and evaded?

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In the summer of 1812 Britain stood alone, fighting for her very survival against a vast European Empire. Only the Royal Navy stood between Napoleon's legions and ultimate victory. In that dark hour America saw its chance to challenge British dominance: her troops invaded Canada and American frigates attacked British merchant shipping, the lifeblood of British defence.War polarised America. The south and west wanted land, the north wanted peace and trade. But America had to choose between the oceans and the continent. Within weeks the land invasion had stalled, but American warships and privateers did rather better, and astonished the world by besting the Royal Navy in a series of battles.Then in three titanic single ship actions the challenge was decisively met. British frigates closed with the Chesapeake, the Essex and the President, flagship of American naval ambition. Both sides found new heroes but none could equal Captain Philip Broke, champion of history's greatest frigate battle, when HMS Shannon captured the USS Chesapeake in thirteen blood-soaked minutes. Broke's victory secured British control of the Atlantic, and within a year Washington, D.C. had been taken and burnt by British troops.

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To travel through Italy is as close as one gets to being in paradise. For centuries, writers, artists, architects, and merchants have been drawn here, inspired by the beauty of Venice, Florence, Naples, and Rome. Countless books, paintings, poems, and sculptures are evidence of its undying appeal, and over the past 60 years, the country has become one of the world’s top travel and holiday destinations. The loveliness of Italy is, if not eternal, certainly enduring, and the easygoing and relaxed Italian lifestyle is still unrivaled. Here, some of Italy’s most amazing landscapes and diverse regions are honored, like Tuscany, Umbria, the Amalfi Coast, and, no less magical, the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily. In these mythical surroundings are legendary hotels full of atmosphere, where novels are set, movies are made, weddings are celebrated, and famous love stories consummated: Villa d’Este on Lake Como, the Pellicano Hotel in Porto Ercole, the Il San Pietro on the Amalfi Coast, and the Palazzo Margherita in Basilicata—to name just a few. Angelika Taschen also reveals where to find more secret and hidden jewels—from the Locanda Cipriani, a destination for food lovers on the island of Torcello, to the romantic Castello di Vicarello in Tuscany and the atmospheric Masseria Moroseta in Puglia.

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We live in an age saturated with surveillance. Our personal and public lives are increasingly on display for governments, merchants, employers, hackers-and the merely curious-to see. In Windows into the Soul, Gary T. Marx, a central figure in the rapidly expanding field of surveillance studies, argues that surveillance itself is neither good nor bad, but that context and comportment make it so. In this landmark book, Marx sums up a lifetime of work on issues of surveillance and social control by disentangling and parsing the empirical richness of watching and being watched. Using fictional narratives as well as the findings of social science, Marx draws on decades of studies of covert policing, computer profiling, location and work monitoring, drug testing, caller identification, and much more, Marx gives us a conceptual language to understand the new realities and his work clearly emphasizes the paradoxes, trade-offs, and confusion enveloping the field. Windows into the Soul shows how surveillance can penetrate our social and personal lives in profound, and sometimes harrowing, ways. Ultimately, Marx argues, recognizing complexity and asking the right questions is essential to bringing light and accountability to the darker, more iniquitous corners of our emerging surveillance society.

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Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's north- and southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, C. Patterson Giersch provides a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how entrepreneurs centralized corporate power even as they expanded their businesses throughout the Southwest and into Tibet, Southeast Asia, and eastern China. Bringing wealth and cosmopolitan lifestyles to their hometowns, the merchant-owners also gained greater access to commodities at the expense of the Southwest's many indigenous minority communities. Meanwhile, new concepts of development shaped the creation of state-run corporations, which further concentrated resources in the hands of outsiders. The book reveals how important new ideas and structures of power, now central to the Communist Party's repertoire of rule and oppression, were forged, not along China's east coast, but along the nation's internal borderlands. It is a must-read for anyone wishing to learn about China's unique state capitalism and its contribution to inequality.

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Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's north- and southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, C. Patterson Giersch provides a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how entrepreneurs centralized corporate power even as they expanded their businesses throughout the Southwest and into Tibet, Southeast Asia, and eastern China. Bringing wealth and cosmopolitan lifestyles to their hometowns, the merchant-owners also gained greater access to commodities at the expense of the Southwest's many indigenous minority communities. Meanwhile, new concepts of development shaped the creation of state-run corporations, which further concentrated resources in the hands of outsiders. The book reveals how important new ideas and structures of power, now central to the Communist Party's repertoire of rule and oppression, were forged, not along China's east coast, but along the nation's internal borderlands. It is a must-read for anyone wishing to learn about China's unique state capitalism and its contribution to inequality.

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Gary Paul Nabhan takes the reader on a vivid and far-ranging journey across time and space in this fascinating look at the relationship between the spice trade and culinary imperialism. Drawing on his own family's history as spice traders, as well as travel narratives, historical accounts, and his expertise as an ethnobotanist, Nabhan describes the critical roles that Semitic peoples and desert floras had in setting the stage for globalized spice trade. Traveling along four prominent trade routes - the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real (for chiles and chocolate) - Nabhan follows the caravans of itinerant spice merchants from the frankincense-gathering grounds and ancient harbors of the Arabian Peninsula to the port of Zayton on the China Sea to Santa Fe in the southwest United States. His stories, recipes, and linguistic analyses of cultural diffusion routes reveal the extent to which aromatics such as cumin, cinnamon, saffron, and peppers became adopted worldwide as signature ingredients of diverse cuisines. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans demonstrates that two particular desert cultures often depicted in constant conflict - Arabs and Jews - have spent much of their history collaborating in the spice trade and suggests how a more virtuous multicultural globalized society may be achieved in the future.

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San Antonio native, military veteran, merchant, and mayor pro tem José Antonio Menchaca (1800–1879) was one of only a few Tejano leaders to leave behind an extensive manuscript of recollections. Portions of the document were published in 1907, followed by a “corrected” edition in 1937, but the complete work could not be published without painstaking reconstruction. At last available in its entirety, Menchaca’s book of reminiscences captures the social life, people, and events that shaped the history of Texas’s tumultuous transformation during his lifetime. Highlighting not only Menchaca’s acclaimed military service but also his vigorous defense of Tejanos’ rights, dignity, and heritage, Recollections of a Tejano Life charts a remarkable legacy while incorporating scholarly commentary to separate fact from fiction.Revealing how Tejanos perceived themselves and the revolutionary events that defined them, this wonderfully edited volume presents Menchaca’s remembrances of such diverse figures as Antonio López de Santa Anna, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, General Adrián Woll, Comanche chief “Casamiro,” and Texas Ranger Jack Hays. Menchaca and his fellow Tejanos were actively engaged in local struggles as Mexico won her independence from Spain; later many joined the fight to establish the Republic of Texas, only to see it annexed to the United States nine years after the Battle of San Jacinto. This first-person account corrects important misconceptions and brings previously unspoken truths vividly to life.

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In this volume of papers, deriving from two conferences held in Rome and Leicester in 2016, nineteen leading European archaeologists discuss and interpret the complex evolution of landscapes – both urban and rural – across Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (c. AD 300–700). The geographical coverage extends from Italy to the Mediterranean West through to the Rhine frontier and onto Hadrian’s Wall. Core are questions of impacts due to the socio-political, religious, military and economic transformations affecting provinces, territories and kingdoms across these often turbulent centuries: how did townscapes change and at what rate? What were the fates of villas? When do post-classical landscapes emerge and in what form? To what degree did Europe become an insecure, defended landscape? In what ways did people – cityfolk, farmers, nobility, churchmen, merchants – adapt? Do the elite remain visible and how prominent is the Church? Where and how do we see culture change through the arrival of new groups or new ideas? Do burials form a clear guide to the changing world? And how did the environment change in this period of stress – was the classical period landscape much altered through the attested depopulation and economic deterioration? And underlying much of the discussion is a consideration of the nature and quality of our source material: how good is the archaeology of these periods and how good is our current reading of the materials available? Combined, these expert studies offer valuable new analyses of people and places in a complex, challenging and crucial period in European history.

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Leon Sciaky whose family were prosperous Jewish grain merchants, descendents of the Sephardic Jewish exodus from Spain in 1492, grew up in the vibrant city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in Macedonia in a remarkably polyglot world where Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian, French, Spanish and Hebrew were all spoken regularly in the city's busy streets and quays. In the early part of the book, Sciaky's recollections are achingly nostalgic and lyrical and describe an intimate and affectionate family existence where every day the young Sciaky would eat with his parents and his adored grandfather Nono on the oriental divan, exchanging stories and jokes. But in retrospect, the city was doomed to destruction and as early as 1902 when Leon Sciaky experienced an earthquake, he remarked: one's very conception of solidity, and one's feeling of security was suddenly destroyed'. Soon after, the young Sciaky witnessed the earliest examples of modern terrorism and a downward spiral of violent attacks. His account of the end of a world is powerful and intense; when, as a young boy, he saw the look of terror in the face of a refugee peasant, he likened it to the animal dread of cattle in the slaughterhouse'. "Farewell to Salonica" was first published in America in 1946. It is a beautiful and touching memoir, which also offers a unique political and historical insight into the complex history of the breakdown of the Turkish Empire. The Sciakys left for America in 1915 and like them many non-Greeks left Salonica following the Balkan Wars and World War I. All but 1,600 of the city's 50,000 Jewish inhabitants perished in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

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In the tradition of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an immensely powerful historical novel about the first encounters between Danish colonists and Greenlanders in the early eighteenth century, of brutal clashes between priests and pagans and the forces that drive each individual towards darkness or light.1728: The Danish King Fredrik IV sends a governor to Greenland to establish a colony, in the hopes of exploiting the country’s allegedly vast natural resources. A few merchants, a barber-surgeon, two trainee priests, a blacksmith, some carpenters and soldiers and a dozen hastily married couples go with him.The missionary priest Hans Egede has already been in Greenland for several years when the new colonists arrive. He has established a mission there, but the converts are few. Among those most hostile to Egede is the shaman Aappaluttoq, whose own son was taken by the priest and raised in the Christian faith as his own. Thus the great rift between two men, and two ways of life, is born.The newly arrived couples – men and women plucked from prison – quickly sink into a life of almost complete dissolution, and soon unsanitary conditions, illness and death bring the colony to its knees. Through the starvation and the epidemics that beset the colony, Egede remains steadfast in his determination – willing to sacrifice even those he loves for the sake of his mission.Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, Kim Leine's The Colony of Good Hope explores what happens when two cultures confront one another. In a distant colony, under the harshest conditions, the overwhelming forces of nature meet the vices of man.

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**NOW A MAJOR MOVIE STARRING ZAC EFRON, RUSSELL CROWE AND BILL MURRAY THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'An extraordinary story.' - Daily Mail'An unforgettable, wild ride from start to finish.' - John Bruning'The astounding true story - from the streets of Manhattan to the jungles of Vietnam.' - Thomas KellyIT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME.As a result of a rowdy night in his local New York bar, ex-Marine and merchant seaman "Chick" Donohue volunteers for a legendary mission. He will sneak into Vietnam to track down his buddies in combat to bring them a cold beer and supportive messages from home. It'll be the greatest beer run ever!Now, decades on from 1968, this is the remarkable true story of how he actually did it.Armed with Irish luck and a backpack full of alcohol, Chick works his passage to Vietnam, lands in Qui Nhon and begins to carry out his quest, tracking down the disbelieving soldiers one by one.But things quickly go awry, and as he talks his way through checkpoints and unwittingly into dangerous situations, Chick sees a lot more of the war than he ever planned - spending a terrifying time in the Demilitarized Zone, and getting caught up in Saigon during the Tet Offensive.With indomitable spirit, Chick survives on his wits, but what he finds in Vietnam comes as a shock. By the end of his epic adventure, battered and exhausted, Chick finds himself questioning why his friends were ever led into the war in the first place.

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The ink writing-tablets, first indentified at Roman Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian's Wall, in 1973, revealed a hitherto unknown papyrus-substitute, thin leaves of wood for day-to-day book-keeping and letters. Dating mostly from the years AD 90-125 (Hadrian's Wall was begun in 122), these unique tablets represent the largest collection of original Roman letters ever found. The book paints a detailed picture of two Roman auxilary regiments, the 9th Cohort of Batavians and the 1st Cohort of Tungrians. Among the 400 named officers and personnel, the Batavian prefect Flavius Cerialis features prominently, together with his wife Sulpicia Lepidina, who received the now famous birthday party invitation from her friend Claudia Severa, wife of Cerialis' colleague and fellow hunting enthusiast Aelius Brocchus. In addition to covering officers and familes, friends and colleagues, this book brings to life the ordinary soldiers and their names and duties; military routine, duty-reports, leave and deserters; the supply of food, drink and other goods; merchants and contractors; visitors and entertainment as well as day-to-day enthusiasms as varied as hunting and religion. This book, by the Chairman of the Vindolanda Trust, not only distils all the recovered material, including many unpublished writing-tablets, but makes full use of the other archaeological evidence. The result is an unparalleled insight into the spirit of the day-today life on the north-west edge of the Empire in the three decades before Hadrian's Wall was built.

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This collection of essays includes some of the most recent work of a master critic at the height of his powers. Of the fourteen essays, written from the late 1970's to the present, three have never before been published; the essays' appearance in a single volume makes available for the first time the full scope of Berger's unique approach to ethical discourses in Shakespeare's plays. The sequence of essays displays both the continuity and the revisionary development that mark his critical practice since the early work on The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, and the Elizabethan theater. When one compares Berger's earlier work from the 1960's with the writing from the 1980's and 1990's in the present collection, one sees that the difference stems primarily from the impact on the later work of his encounters with the whole range of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Much of the excitement and vitality of Berger's current work comes from his efforts to incorporate new methodological influences into his previous system. Because he comes to poststructuralism as a mature critic whose larger interpretive framework is already in place, his response is not simply to immerse himself in the new theoretical modes and adopt them wholesale, but rather to make them his own. Among the plays discussed are The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, Macbeth, 2 Henry IV, Richard II—and, in two of the new essays, 1 Henry IV and Measure for Measure. Also new is Berger's retrospective account of his critical development in the extensive opening "Acknowledgments."

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Working as merchants, skilled tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and journalists, Indians formed the economic and administrative middle class in colonial Kenya. In general, they were wealthier than Africans, but were denied the political and economic privileges that Europeans enjoyed. Moreover, despite their relative prosperity, Indians were precariously positioned in Kenya. Africans usually viewed them as outsiders, and Europeans largely considered them subservient. Indians demanded recognition on their own terms. Indians in Kenya chronicles the competing, often contradictory, strategies by which the South Asian diaspora sought a political voice in Kenya from the beginning of colonial rule in the late 1890s to independence in the 1960s.Indians’ intellectual, economic, and political connections with South Asia shaped their understanding of their lives in Kenya. Sana Aiyar investigates how the many strands of Indians’ diasporic identity influenced Kenya’s political leadership, from claiming partnership with Europeans in their mission to colonize and “civilize” East Africa to successful collaborations with Africans to battle for racial equality, including during the Mau Mau Rebellion. She also explores how the hierarchical structures of colonial governance, the material inequalities between Indians and Africans, and the racialized political discourses that flourished in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya limited the success of alliances across racial and class lines. Aiyar demonstrates that only by examining the ties that bound Indians to worlds on both sides of the Indian Ocean can we understand how Kenya came to terms with its South Asian minority.

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In the summer of 1914, Britain felt secure that the old order was firmly in place. Britain, through its navy, ruled the waves, and a fair part of the world through its Empire. Yet this security was an illusion; a war of unimaginable scale was just days away. The war would affect every level of British society; first through the urgent need for a massive expansion of the armed forces, drawing in ever-more men from civilian life. This in turn denuded the factories, shops and farms of labour, at a time when industry needed to expand to clothe and supply the armed services, and agriculture needed to fill the shortages of food created by the U-boat assault on our merchant fleet. The armed forces had first call on men, food, and material, so shortages hit the civilian population hardest; replacement labour was found in women, who began to take on work previously the reserve of men; in the factories, transport, commerce, and agriculture. Food remained a problem; shortages led to food queues, leading to increasing Government control and eventually rationing. Civilians were also hit by shortages of petrol and clothing, leading to petrol rationing, gas-cars, and ‘standard’ cloth. There were also more immediate dangers; raids by German ships on coastal towns, and air raids throughout the country by Zeppelins, and later, aeroplanes. In ‘Dear Old Blighty’, Mike Brown looks in depth at the experience of the civilians, men, women and children, of Britain throughout those four momentous years.

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Winner, Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical WritingWhat happened in Canadian Internment Camp B?From 1940 to 1945, Internment Camp B at Ripples, some 35 kilometres east of Fredericton, played a considerable role in the Second World War. Chosen for its remote rural New Brunswick location, Camp B interned hundreds who were deemed by the Canadian government to be enemy sympathizers.In the first year of its operation, the camp incarcerated German and Austrian Jewish refugees dispatched from Britain. In May 1940, fearful that the refugees were agents of the Nazis they'd fled, the British government sent thousands of men to Canada to be interned as "dangerous enemy sympathizers." After the refugees were finally released in 1941, Camp B held Canadian citizens who were suspected of opposing the war effort -- including the prominent opponent of conscription and Mayor of Montreal Camillien Houde, Canadians of German and Italian descent, and homegrown fascists such as Adrien Arcand -- as well as captured German and Italian merchant mariners.In this comprehensive illustrated account of Camp B, Andrew Theobald examines the daily lives and tribulations of those imprisoned behind the barbed wire. "Dangerous Enemy Sympathizers" also scrutinizes the troubling context that led to the internment of both refugees and Canadian citizens, the debates over the ethics of internment inside and outside the camp, and the role of the camps in shaping government policy towards immigration and the post-war powers of the Canadian state."Dangerous Enemy Sympathizers" is volume 26 of the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

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From Benjamin Franklin to Ragged Dick to Jack Kelly, hero of the Disney musical Newsies, newsboys have long intrigued Americans as symbols of struggle and achievement. But what do we really know about the children who hawked and delivered newspapers in American cities and towns? Who were they? What was their life like? And how important was their work to the development of a free press, the survival of poor families, and the shaping of their own attitudes, values and beliefs? Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys offers an epic retelling of the American experience from the perspective of its most unshushable creation. It is the first book to place newsboys at the center of American history, analyzing their inseparable role as economic actors and cultural symbols in the creation of print capitalism, popular democracy, and national character. DiGirolamo's sweeping narrative traces the shifting fortunes of these "little merchants" over a century of war and peace, prosperity and depression, exploitation and reform, chronicling their exploits in every region of the country, as well as on the railroads that linked them. While the book focuses mainly on boys in the trade, it also examines the experience of girls and grown-ups, the elderly and disabled, blacks and whites, immigrants and natives. Based on a wealth of primary sources, Crying the News uncovers the existence of scores of newsboy strikes and protests. The book reveals the central role of newsboys in the development of corporate welfare schemes, scientific management practices, and employee liability laws. It argues that the newspaper industry exerted a formative yet overlooked influence on working-class youth that is essential to our understanding of American childhood, labor, journalism, and capitalism.

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Before the twentieth century, personal debt resided on the fringes of the American economy, the province of small-time criminals and struggling merchants. By the end of the century, however, the most profitable corporations and banks in the country lent money to millions of American debtors. How did this happen? The first book to follow the history of personal debt in modern America, Debtor Nation traces the evolution of debt over the course of the twentieth century, following its transformation from fringe to mainstream--thanks to federal policy, financial innovation, and retail competition. How did banks begin making personal loans to consumers during the Great Depression? Why did the government invent mortgage-backed securities? Why was all consumer credit, not just mortgages, tax deductible until 1986? Who invented the credit card? Examining the intersection of government and business in everyday life, Louis Hyman takes the reader behind the scenes of the institutions that made modern lending possible: the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of multinationals, and the back rooms of loan sharks. America's newfound indebtedness resulted not from a culture in decline, but from changes in the larger structure of American capitalism that were created, in part, by the choices of the powerful--choices that made lending money to facilitate consumption more profitable than lending to invest in expanded production. From the origins of car financing to the creation of subprime lending, Debtor Nation presents a nuanced history of consumer credit practices in the United States and shows how little loans became big business.

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Discusses the complexities of a trading network in this period, outling commodity chains, links between colonies and colonial centres, and tensions between local polities and competing empires. This book explores European mercantile activity in Southeast Asia at a time when trade in this part of the world was being transformed and extended much more widely. Based on extensive original research including in newly discovered archives, the book reveals, through the study of one particular merchant and his extensive network, how trade in the region worked. It outlines the activities of Gillian Maclaine, a young Scottish "adventurer" (his word) who came to the region in about 1816 and established an enduring business in Batavia (present day Jakarta), trading in cotton goods and coffee, and later in opium. It examines the multi-faceted nature of such a trading network, including the wide scope of commodity chains, the associated link between colony and colonial metropole, and the many tensions between colonial powers, in this case the Dutch and the British, and with local polities. The book demonstratesthat Southeast Asian maritime trade was every bit as important to European worldwide commercial networks as the trade with India and China, which have been much more extensively studied, and it contributes to current scholarly debates about western imperialism, colonialism and the nature of empire. G. Roger Knight is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Politics in the University of Adelaide. He has published three previous books and numerous journal articles on the economic and social history of Southeast Asia.

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While doing fieldwork in the modernizing Javanese city of Solo during the late 1980s, Suzanne Brenner came upon a neighborhood that seemed like a museum of a bygone era: Laweyan, a once-thriving production center of batik textiles, had embraced modernity under Dutch colonial rule, only to fend off the modernizing forces of the Indonesian state during the late twentieth century. Focusing on this community, Brenner examines what she calls the making of the "unmodern." She portrays a merchant enclave clinging to its distinctive forms of social life and highlights the unique power of women in the marketplace and the home--two domains closely linked to each other through local economies of production and exchange. Against the social, political, and economic developments of late-colonial and postcolonial Java, Brenner describes how an innovative, commercially successful lifestyle became an anachronism in Indonesian society, thereby challenging the idea that tradition invariably gives way to modernity in an evolutionary progression. Brenner's analysis centers on the importance of gender to processes of social transformation. In Laweyan, the base of economic and social power has shifted from families, in which women were the main producers of wealth and cultural value, to the Indonesian state, which has worked to reorient families toward national political agendas. How such attempts affect women's lives and the meaning of the family itself are key considerations as Brenner questions long-held assumptions about the division between "domestic" and "public" spheres in modern society.

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"Fascinating and vivid." New Statesman "Thoroughly researched." The Spectator "Intriguing." BBC History Magazine "Vividly told." BBC History Revealed "A timely warning against persecution." Morning Star "Astute and thoughtful." History Today "An important work." All About History "Well-researched." The Tablet On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came rasping, rapping and tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Frightened by its appearance, his servants and members of his family had, within a matter of hours, convinced themselves that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy the fabric of their lives. As the result of these allegations, three women of Bideford came to be forever defined as witches. A Secretary of State brushed aside their case and condemned them to the gallows; to hang as the last group of women to be executed in England for the crime. Yet, the hatred of their neighbours endured. For Bideford, it was said, was a place of witches. Though ‘pretty much worn away’ the belief in witchcraft still lingered on for more than a century after their deaths. In turn, ignored, reviled, and extinguished but never more than half-forgotten, it seems that the memory of these three women - and of their deeds and sufferings, both real and imagined – was transformed from canker to regret, and from regret into celebration in our own age. Indeed, their example was cited during the final Parliamentary debates, in 1951, that saw the last of the witchcraft acts repealed, and their names were chanted, as both inspiration and incantation, by the women beyond the wire at Greenham Common. In this book, John Callow explores this remarkable reversal of fate, and the remarkable tale of the Bideford Witches.

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How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes--in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies--the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women--through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa--transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate--but never entirely control--the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.

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A Nation is Born Lexington, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Washington, Hamilton, Benedict Arnold. All familiar names, but how did they all fit together? How did merchants, lawyers, farmers, and cobblers come together to defeat the British Empire, its powerful navy, and its Hessian auxiliaries? For that matter, who were the Hessians, and what is an auxiliary? Bringing together ten eminent Revolutionary War experts, editor Ed Lengel presents their stirring narratives of the military campaigns that changed history and gave birth to a new nation. These historians guide you through the fateful decade of the 1770s in British America. In 1776, you battle in Brooklyn Heights, then cross the Delaware with Washington. In the late summer and fall of ’77, you bushwhack down the Champlain Valley with Johnny Burgoyne. You struggle through winter with Washington and his beleaguered troops in Valley Forge. When the spring of ’78 turns to summer, you endure the oppressive heat and the massive battle on New Jersey farmland at Monmouth Courthouse. In 1780 your journey takes you south into a bloody civil war—Tory versus patriot, neighbor versus neighbor in Georgia and the Carolinas. Finally, in ’81, you join the patriots as they maneuver north into Virginia, whereWashington and the French navy can trap the British on the Yorktown Peninsula. Complete with maps and suggested further reading, The 10 Key Campaigns of the American Revolution is a short course in one of history’s most consequential wars, explaining how citizens became soldiers and how their dedication, determination, and force of will defeated the world’s greatest power and launched a nation like no other.

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“Are you an American, or are you not?” This was the question Harry Wheeler, sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, used to choose his targets in one of the most remarkable vigilante actions ever carried out on U.S. soil. And this is the question at the heart of Katherine Benton-Cohen’s provocative history, which ties that seemingly remote corner of the country to one of America’s central concerns: the historical creation of racial boundaries.It was in Cochise County that the Earps and Clantons fought, Geronimo surrendered, and Wheeler led the infamous Bisbee Deportation, and it is where private militias patrol for undocumented migrants today. These dramatic events animate the rich story of the Arizona borderlands, where people of nearly every nationality—drawn by “free” land or by jobs in the copper mines—grappled with questions of race and national identity. Benton-Cohen explores the daily lives and shifting racial boundaries between groups as disparate as Apache resistance fighters, Chinese merchants, Mexican-American homesteaders, Midwestern dry farmers, Mormon polygamists, Serbian miners, New York mine managers, and Anglo women reformers.Racial categories once blurry grew sharper as industrial mining dominated the region. Ideas about home, family, work and wages, manhood and womanhood all shaped how people thought about race. Mexicans were legally white, but were they suitable marriage partners for “Americans”? Why were Italian miners described as living “as no white man can”? By showing the multiple possibilities for racial meanings in America, Benton-Cohen’s insightful and informative work challenges our assumptions about race and national identity.

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Simon Dubnow (18601941) is one of the most important historians in Jewish history. His famous world history of the Jewish people has long been available in German translation, but not his memoirs, of which only a greatly abridged version appeared in 1937. This first complete German-language publication of his memoirs brings the personality and work of the great Russian-Jewish historian back to the German-speaking world. Here, in Berlin, Dubnow lived between 1922 and 1933; It was here that he completed his memories. In the first volume, Dubnow describes his persistently pursued educational path from the cheder to the schools of the Enlightenment. Coming from a respected family of timber merchants, he worked as a young journalist in the milieu of the Russian-Jewish Petersburg intelligentsia around the magazine "Voschod". The anti-Jewish policy of Alexander III. destroyed any hope of cultural integration. Dubnow finally went to Odessa, where he developed the foundations of his ideas on Jewish history and, as a "missionary of history," became the initiator and mentor of the Russian-Jewish history movement. The following volumes describe the 20th century from the perspective of a contemporary witness, its historical View from Eastern Europe reflects the intellectual and social upheavals in the centers of world affairs St. Petersburg (19061922) and Berlin (19221933). In 1941 in Riga, Simon Dubnow was the victim of the National Socialist annihilation of European Jewry, which was his life's work would have.

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Deep in southern latitudes, in a desolate corner of Cumberland Bay on the east coast of the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, hard by the rotting quays of the abandoned whaling station of Grytviken and almost within a stone's throw of the grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton, lie three forsaken steam ships: rusting remnants of our industrial past, unique survivals from a vanished age of steam at sea. One of these ships is 'Viola', the sole surviving Hull steam trawler from the huge fleet which put 'fish & chips' on Britain's plates more than a hundred years ago. In this absorbing account, maritime historians Robb Robinson and Ian Hart describe her ancestry and origins in the Victorian and Edwardian North Sea fishery - vividly depicting life for her crew in the most dangerous industry of its time; they record her Great War service as a U-boat hunter - one of the many merchant vessels largely unsung for their contribution, and often sacrifice, in wartime; and they recount her subsequent career hunting whales off West Africa, then later sealing and exploration work in the South Atlantic, before her final abandonment in South Georgia. Here she became quarry for the infamous Argentine scrap metal expedition of 1982, in the initiating action of the Falklands War. This improbable yet true story of a humble working vessel and those involved with her is a highly readable work of social, as well as maritime, history.

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This book is based on the unpublished journals of William Schaw Lindsay (1815-1877) housed in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. From rags to riches. Born in Scotland and orphaned by the age of 10, Lindsay ran away to sea at the age of 16. The book highlights his life at sea from cabin boy to captain, a sometimes shocking insight into what life was like sailing across oceans in the 1830s. He then became an agent selling coal for steam ships. He would eventually own one of the largest shipping companies in the world, with 22 ships, some of which were employed as troop transporters in the Crimean War. He entered Parliament in 1854 where he focussed on shipping matters. He was vocal in his criticism of the Admiralty during the Crimean War. He visited the Northern states just prior to the American Civil War to discuss shipping laws and met Abraham Lincoln. In fact, his story includes meetings with an astonishing array of luminaries: Livingstone, Buchanan, Garibaldi, Gladstone, Disraeli, Brunel, Nightingale, Dickens, Paxton, Emperor Napoleon III and Queen Victoria. Lindsay strove to improve the shipping laws, not only in England but abroad, and he persistently advocated the removal of restrictions on free trade. His magnum opus, entitled History of Merchant Shipping and Ancient Commerce, became a standard reference on the subject.

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Published in memory of Ivy L. McClelland, a pioneer-scholar of Spain’s eighteenth century, this volume of original essays contains, besides an Introduction to her career and internationally influential writings, three previously unpublished essays by McClelland and nine studies by other scholars, all of which are focused on elucidating the Enlightenment and its characteristic manifestations in the Hispanic world.Among the Enlightenment writers and artists, works and genres, themes and issues discussed, are: Nicolás Moratín and epic poetry, Lillo’s The London Merchant and English and French influences on eighteenth-century Spanish drama, José Marchena and literary historiography, oppositions and misunderstandings within Spanish society as reflected in El sí de las niñas, Goya and the visual arts, Quintana’s Pelayo and historical tragedy, Enlightenment discourse, the Periodical Press, theatre as propaganda, the ideology and politics of Empire, the roots of revolt in late viceregal Quito, women’s experience of Enlightenment in Spain, social and cultural difference in colonial Peru, ideological debate and uncertainty during the Age of Reason, eighteenth-century Spain on the nineteenth-century stage, and public opinion in Spain on the eve of the French, and European, Revolution.First published as a Special Issue of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies (LXXXVI [November–December 2009], Nos 7–8), this book will be of value and stimulus to all scholars concerned to investigate and interpret the culture, theatre, ideology, society and politics of the Enlightenment in Spain, Europe and Spanish America.

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This seventh volume of final reports of the Lahav Research Project’s efforts at Tell Halif in Southern Israel focuses on the team’s excavations and related regional ethnographic research at adjacent Khirbet Khuweilifeh, an early twentieth-century settlement of Bedouin and Arab fellahin clients. These efforts illustrate the symbiosis between the itinerant Bedouin and their seasonal sharecropper neighbors along the northern flanks of the Negev desert during and following the First World War in southern Palestine.The stratigraphic excavation and recovery of material culture from Cave Complex A revealed a pattern of occupation dating from the late nineteenth century C.E. up to the mid-1940s and produced hundreds of artifacts and samples, giving testimony to the lifeways of the fellahin who had inhabited the complex. The associated ethnographic research with Bedouin sheikhs and Hebron-area merchant informants established that the Complex’s most recent occupants were the family of a plow maker named Khalil al-Kaayke. The studies elucidated in this volume articulate in more detail the family’s patterns of subsistence, showing the interdependence of the Bedouin and fellahin partners. Examination of the pottery remains provides a profile of the site’s Stratum I, early twentieth-century ceramic forms and also reveals earlier Islamic-period and pre-Islamic traces.Over the past century the lifeways of these early twentieth-century Bedouin and their fellahin village neighbors in southern Palestine have been rapidly disappearing. This volume serves to chronicle and preserve data on their waning history and culture.

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A fascinating story of a key turning point in the War in the Mediterranean, as the island of Malta was thrown a vital lifeline. Since 1940, the island of Malta had been a thorn in the Axis' side. It sat astride the direct sea route between Italy and its North African colonies, and from 1941 the Royal Navy had used the island as a base for its attacks on Axis convoys. The island, though, relied on convoys to survive, and from early 1941 these came under increasingly heavy air and submarine attack. As the situation became critical in 1942, the decision was made to send through a heavily protected convoy, carrying fuel and supplies, in an effort to save the island. This mission was codenamed Operation Pedestal. This fascinating work describes how, after leaving Britain on 2 August 1942, the convoy was repeatedly pummeled by Axis air and submarine attacks as it ground its way towards Malta, with most of the merchant ships sunk during the passage, along with an aircraft carrier and two cruisers. It also explores how despite this grim toll, the sacrifice was worth it. The specially commissioned illustrations in this work cover the progress of the convoy step by step, the submarine and surface naval actions during Pedestal’s voyage, the Stuka attack on the carrier Indomitable and the air attacks against the convoy, and the broader strategic situation in the Western Mediterranean. The result is a unique visual exploration of one of the most famous episodes of the war in this theatre.

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Narra Jal is cursed. Birthmarks declare her damned, and her penance for the sins from a past life is a touch that spreads bad luck like poison. As the humble daughter of a cloth merchant, she spent her life traversing Tigang, a harsh country carved out of stone, moving from place to place before people discover her secret and chase her out. When her mother is arrested, Narra blames her bad luck. She has no money for bribes and no connections to beg favours to save her family. What she needs is power. Every ten years, Tigang selects a new ruler through a vicious competition. Anyone may compete, but only the desperate and the foolish ever join. No one knows what happens in the glass fortress during the trials, only that those who survive never leave unbroken. Within the magic suffused walls of the fortress, Narra quickly realizes there is more at risk than her life and her family. She comes face to face with a disarming immortal enemy and learns how close the peace in Tigang is to shattering. Narra must unravel the mystery of who she is, and confront the ugly truth of who she was, before the competition undoes her, or her growing feelings for the enemy destroy her people – again.

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