Search results for ""Author Merchant"

Debt was an inescapable fact of life in early America. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, its sinfulness was preached by ministers and the right to imprison debtors was unquestioned. By 1800, imprisonment for debt was under attack and insolvency was no longer seen as a moral failure, merely an economic setback. In Republic of Debtors, Bruce H. Mann illuminates this crucial transformation in early American society.From the wealthy merchant to the backwoods farmer, Mann tells the personal stories of men and women struggling to repay their debts and stay ahead of their creditors. He opens a window onto a society undergoing such fundamental changes as the growth of a commercial economy, the emergence of a consumer marketplace, and a revolution for independence. In addressing debt Americans debated complicated questions of commerce and agriculture, nationalism and federalism, dependence and independence, slavery and freedom. And when numerous prominent men—including the richest man in America and a justice of the Supreme Court—found themselves imprisoned for debt or forced to become fugitives from creditors, their fate altered the political dimensions of debtor relief, leading to the highly controversial Bankruptcy Act of 1800.Whether a society forgives its debtors is not just a question of law or economics; it goes to the heart of what a society values. In chronicling attitudes toward debt and bankruptcy in early America, Mann explores the very character of American society.

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The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come. Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Katherine L. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague.

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A history of the small, mass-produced warships that defended the Atlantic convoys from U-boats and secured Britain's lifeline to the United States. As the Battle of the Atlantic grew fiercer, Britain and the Commonwealth needed large quantities of new warships to defend their shipping which could be produced cheaply. The two largest type of ship produced were the escort destroyer and the frigate. Escort destroyers were essentially small destroyers optimized for anti-submarine warfare, with speed and anti-surface weaponry sacrificed, while frigates were simpler, designed so they could be built quickly in civilian shipyards. Nearly 200 were built. These warships were key to protecting convoys in the Atlantic Ocean where their range and seagoing qualities made them well-suited for operations. They were also used to form hunting groups, and collectively accounted for the destruction of scores of German U-boats. Their arrival came at a critical time for the Royal Navy, when the Battle of the Atlantic was reaching its climax, and losses among both merchant ships and escorts were mounting. In this book, naval expert Angus Konstam outlines the history of the Hunt-, Loch-, Bay-, and River-class escort destroyers and frigates, revealing how crews fought, and what life was like on board. Using archive photos, detailed colour profiles, a Hunt-class cutaway, and battlescenes of the ships at war, he explores the key role played by these small but deadly escorts.

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Laden with works of art acquired by young British travelers on the Grand Tour in Italy, the British merchant ship Westmorland sailed from the Italian port of Livorno before being captured by French naval vessels and escorted to Malaga in southern Spain. The artistic treasures on board were purchased by King Carlos III of Spain, and the majority were deposited in the collections of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. There they resided, unknown, until recent research, using original inventories that survive in the Academia's archives, identified the Westmorland's rich cargo.The English Prize reveals the gripping story of the ship's capture and the disposition of its artistic contents, which included Raphael Mengs's Perseus and Andromeda, Pompeo Batoni's portraits of Frances Bassett and Lord Lewisham, and watercolors by John Robert Cozens. This volume illuminates the cultural phenomenon of the Grand Tour and the young travelers who acquired the trove of books and art works on board the Westmorland but were never able to enjoy their purchases.Published in association with the Yale Center for British Art, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Real Academia de Belles Artes de San Fernando, MadridExhibition Schedule:Ashmolean Museum, Oxford(05/09/12-08/29/12)Yale Center for British Art(10/03/12-01/20/13)

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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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In the early modern period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North Africa. Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco not only attacked sailors and merchants in the Mediterranean but also roved as far as Iceland. A substantial number of the European captives who later returned home from the Barbary Coast, as maritime North Africa was then called, wrote and published accounts of their experiences. These popular narratives greatly influenced the development of the modern novel and autobiography, and they also shaped European perceptions of slavery as well as of the Muslim world.Barbary Captives brings together a selection of early modern slave narratives in English translation for the first time. It features accounts written by men and women across three centuries and in nine different languages that recount the experience of capture and servitude in North Africa. These texts tell the stories of Christian pirates, Christian rowers on Muslim galleys, house slaves in the palaces of rulers, domestic servants, agricultural slaves, renegades, and social climbers in captivity. They also depict liberation through ransom, escape, or religious conversion. This book sheds new light on the social history of Mediterranean slavery and piracy, early modern concepts of unfree labor, and the evolution of the Barbary captivity narrative as a literary and historical genre.

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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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Published in 1557, Nikolaus Federmann’s Jndianische Historia is a fascinating narrative describing the German military commander’s incursion into what is now Venezuela. Designed not only for classroom use but also for the use of scholars, this English translation is accompanied by a critical introduction that contextualizes Federmann’s firsthand account within the broader Spanish colonial system.Having gained the rights to colonize Venezuela from the Spanish Crown in 1528, the Welser merchant house of Augsburg, Germany, sent mercenaries, settlers, and miners to set up colonial structures. The venture never turned a profit, and operations ceased in 1546 after two Welser officials were murdered. Federmann’s text gives an account of his foray into the interior of Venezuela in 1530–31. It describes violent first contact with Indigenous peoples as well as Federmann’s communication strategies, how he managed to prevail in hostile terrain, and how he related to other agents of the conquests. It also documents his unwavering belief in the intrinsic preeminence of European Christians and, ultimately, in the righteousness of his mission.The only detailed record of this incursion, Federmann’s text adds a unique and important perspective to our understanding of first colonial contact on the Caribbean coast of South America. It provides insight into the first-contact dynamic, the techniques of subjugation and dominance, and the web of diverging interests among stakeholders. This volume will be a valuable resource for courses and for scholarship on conquest and colonialism in Latin America.

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Merchants' shouts, jostling strangers, aromas of fresh fish and flowers, plodding horses, and friendly chatter long filled the narrow, crowded streets of the European city. As they developed over many centuries, these spaces of commerce, communion, and commuting framed daily life. At its heyday in the 1800s, the European street was the place where social worlds connected and collided. Brian Ladd recounts a rich social and cultural history of the European city street, tracing its transformation from a lively scene of trade and crowds into a thoroughfare for high-speed transportation. Looking closely at four major cities--London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna--Ladd uncovers both the joys and the struggles of a past world. The story takes us up to the twentieth century, when the life of the street was transformed as wealthier citizens withdrew from the crowds to seek refuge in suburbs and automobiles. As demographics and technologies changed, so did the structure of cities and the design of streets, significantly shifting our relationships to them. In today's world of high-speed transportation and impersonal marketplaces, Ladd leads us to consider how we might draw on our history to once again build streets that encourage us to linger. By unearthing the vivid descriptions recorded by amused and outraged contemporaries, Ladd reveals the changing nature of city life, showing why streets matter and how they can contribute to public life.

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How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalismThe Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets.By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. Francesca Trivellato recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. She locates the legend’s earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart.Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Trivellato vividly describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.

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How slave emancipation transformed capitalism in the United States and BrazilIn the nineteenth century, the United States and Brazil were the largest slave societies in the Western world. The former enslaved approximately four million people, the latter nearly two million. Slavery was integral to the production of agricultural commodities for the global market, and governing elites feared the system’s demise would ruin their countries. Yet, when slavery ended in the United States and Brazil, in 1865 and 1888 respectively, what resulted was immediate and continuous economic progress. In American Mirror, Roberto Saba investigates how American and Brazilian reformers worked together to ensure that slave emancipation would advance the interests of capital.Saba explores the methods through which antislavery reformers fostered capitalist development in a transnational context. From the 1850s to the 1880s, this coalition of Americans and Brazilians—which included diplomats, engineers, entrepreneurs, journalists, merchants, missionaries, planters, politicians, scientists, and students, among others—consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in their countries. These reformers were not romantic humanitarians, but cosmopolitan modernizers who worked together to promote labor-saving machinery, new transportation technology, scientific management, and technical education. They successfully used such innovations to improve production and increase trade.Challenging commonly held ideas about slavery and its demise in the Western Hemisphere, American Mirror illustrates the crucial role of slave emancipation in the making of capitalism.

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How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalismThe Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets.By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. Francesca Trivellato recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. She locates the legend’s earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart.Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Trivellato vividly describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.

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The first in the Oathsworn series, charting the adventures of a band of Vikings on the chase for the secret hoard of Attila the Hun. Life is savage aboard a Viking raider. When young Orm Rurikson is plucked from the snows of Norway to join his estranged father on the Fjord Elk, he becomes an unlikely member of a notorious crew. They are the Oathsworn – so named after the spoken bond that ties them in brotherhood – and they ply a casual trade on the ocean wave, selling their swords to the highest bidder. But times are changing. Loyalty to the old Norse Gods is fading, and the followers of the mysterious 'White Christ' are gaining power across Europe. Hired as relic-hunters by the merchant rulers of a bustling city, the Oathsworn are sent in search of a legendary sword of untold value to the new religion. With only a young girl as guide, their quest will lead them onto the deep and treacherous waters of the 'whale road', toward the cursed treasure of Attila the Hun. And to a challenge that will test the very bond that holds them together. Robert Low, a significant up and coming voice in historical fiction, has created a startlingly modern tale in the style of the great Viking sagas. A heady mix of powerful suspense, blockbuster battles and religious intrigue, THE WHALE ROAD is a must for fans of Bernard Cornwell and Tim Severin. The Oathsworn series is sure to hook old and new readers alike.

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Eason Favourite Book of the Year 2022 ‘she is no small town, and this is no small story . . .’ BASED ON THE POPULAR DUBLIN HISTORY PODCAST A companion to the hugely successful podcast of the same name by Donal Fallon, THREE CASTLES BURNING is an enjoyable wander through some of Dublin's less obvious but more interesting streets and roads such as Henrietta Street, Watling Street, Fownes Street and Kildare Road. On the Dublin streets we walk every day, there are hidden reminders of the lesser-known heroes and events that have contributed to the evolving story of our capital. The city’s motto, ‘the obedience of the citizens produces a happy city’, may feel outdated and loaded today but the three burning castles of its ancient coat of arms have come to represent the indomitable spirit, creativity and vision that define this big town. Inspired by the No. 1 podcast, Three Castles Burning: A History of Dublin in Twelve Streets champions the activists, workers, architects, poets, migrants, artists and merchants who have made and remade the city we know and love by going beneath the many layers of twelve key streets where they lived and worked. Because, in the city Joyce called the ‘Hibernian Metropolis’, the disobedience of its citizens is the cornerstone of its past, present and future. This combination of social, cultural, industrial and commercial, and political history, through the prism of the places where revolutions great and small were sparked, offers the reader a fresh and unexpected take on Ireland's capital city.

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Born Betsy Bowen into grinding poverty, the woman who reinvented herself as Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Seizing opportunities and readjusting facts to achieve the security and status she so desperately craved, she obtained a fortune from her first husband, a French merchant, and nearly lost it to her second, the notorious vice president Aaron Burr. Divorcing Burr promptly amid lurid charges of adultery, she lived on triumphantly to the age of ninety, astutely managing her property and public persona.By the end of her life, “Madame Jumel” was one of New York’s richest women, with servants of her own, an art collection, an elegant mansion, a summer home in Saratoga Springs, and several hundred acres of land. After her death, a titanic battle over her estate went all the way to the United States Supreme Court . . . twice.As the feud over her fortune riveted the nation, family members told of a woman who earned the gratitude of Napoleon I and shone at the courts of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Their opponents painted a different picture, of a prostitute who bore George Washington’s illegitimate son, a wife who defrauded her husband and perhaps even plotted his death. Now Eliza Jumel’s real story—so unique that it surpasses any invention—has finally been told.

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This study provides a striking new explanation of how China's Nationalist Party (GMD) defeated its rivals in the revolution of 1922–1929 and helped bring some degree of unification to a country torn by class, regional, and ideological interests. Disarming the Allies of Imperialism argues that inconsistency—more than culture, ideology, or any other factor—gave nationalism its unique edge. Revolutionary leaders manipulated revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries alike to advantage their own positions and seize national power, sometimes seeking to protect foreign lives and property and shield Chinese merchants from agitative disruptions, sometimes voting to do the opposite. Exploiting the symbiotic yet contradictory relationship between state-building, which sought foreign ties and international recognition; and low-level agitators committed to confrontational anti-imperialist objectives, top Guomindang leaders were able to manipulate political circumstances to their own benefit. For example, party leaders stirred up anti-Christian sentiment, pitting popular forces against mission schools, while simultaneously intervening to rescue these same schools from agitative destruction, thus "helping" missionaries to soften their attitudes toward the revolution and eventually embrace the new order. Scholars of modern Chinese history and anyone familiar with the growing literature on nationalism will appreciate this work for its elucidation of a complex historical snarl, while undergraduates and scholars outside the China field will find this a useful and accessible study as well.

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This is the well-written account of Jonathan Carridia's final years at sea as a senior second and chief officer. He chronicles the events that led him to leave the sea before being confirmed in a period of temporary command and relates the gruelling interview processes before being accepted as a mature student. Jonathan describes in atmospheric terms incidents in the Far East and the initial awe he experienced when joining a very large supertanker - the class of ship for which he had yearned since his early days as a cadet. Following a spate of serious accidents leading to loss of life and vessel, Jonathan's decisive role in questioning and challenging the casual approach to maritime practices current at that time is excellently portrayed...Once arrangements were confirmed I relaxed completely and savoured my final couple of voyages navigating this magnificent ship as extra chief officer...I remained convinced that 'swallowing the anchor' and venturing into a new career was the correct course for me to follow. The challenges of navigation and collision avoidance, plus the comradeship I had experienced at sea would truly be missed, but other than that I would leave the Merchant Navy without regrets. It was time to move on in life and doubtless carry a raft-load of diverse experiences and countless happy memories along with me. Thus concludes the third in the maritime trilogy by Ray Solly which will be of special appeal to those who have already enjoyed Mariner's Launch and Mariner's Voyage.

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To sail the oceans needed skill as well as courage and experience, and the sea chart with, where appropriate, the coastal view, was the tool by which ships of trade, transport or conquest navigated their course. This book looks at the history and development of the chart and the related nautical map, in both scientific and aesthetic terms, as a means of safe and accurate seaborne navigation. The Italian merchant-venturers of the early thirteenth century developed the earliest ‘portulan’ pilot charts of the Mediterranean. The subsequent speed of exploration by European seafarers, encompassing the New World, the extraordinary voyages around the Cape of Good Hope and the opening up of the trade to the East, India and the Spice Islands were both a result of the development of the sea chart and additionally as an aid to that development. By the eighteenth century the discovery and charting of the coasts and oceans of the globe had become a strategic naval and commercial requirement. Such involvements led to Cook’s voyages in the Pacific, the search for the Northwest Passage and races to the Arctic and Antarctic. The volume is arranged along chronological and then geographical lines. Each of the ten chapters is split into two distinct halves examining the history of the charting of a particular region and the context under which such charting took place following which specific navigational charts and views together with other relevant illustrations are presented. Key figures or milestones in the history of charting are then presented in stand-alone story box features. This new edition features around 40 new charts and accompanying text.

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In this fresh study Brian Schoen views the Deep South and its cotton industry from a global perspective, revisiting old assumptions and providing new insights into the region, the political history of the United States, and the causes of the Civil War. Schoen takes a unique and broad approach. Rather than seeing the Deep South and its planters as isolated from larger intellectual, economic, and political developments, he places the region firmly within them. In doing so, he demonstrates that the region's prominence within the modern world-and not its opposition to it-indelibly shaped Southern history. The place of "King Cotton" in the sectional thinking and budding nationalism of the Lower South seems obvious enough, but Schoen reexamines the ever-shifting landscape of international trade from the 1780s through the eve of the Civil War. He argues that the Southern cotton trade was essential to the European economy, seemingly worth any price for Europeans to protect and maintain, and something to defend aggressively in the halls of Congress. This powerful association gave the Deep South the confidence to ultimately secede from the Union. By integrating the history of the region with global events, Schoen reveals how white farmers, planters, and merchants created a "Cotton South," preserved its profitability for many years, and ensured its dominance in the international raw cotton markets. The story he tells reveals the opportunities and costs of cotton production for the Lower South and the United States.

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Between Crown and Commerce examines the relationship between French royal statecraft, mercantilism, and civic republicanism in the context of the globalizing economy of the early modern Mediterranean world. This is the story of how the French Crown and local institutions accommodated one another as they sought to forge acceptable political and commercial relationships with one another for the common goal of economic prosperity. Junko Therese Takeda tells this tale through the particular experience of Marseille, a port the monarchy saw as key to commercial expansion in the Mediterranean. At first, Marseille's commercial and political elites were strongly opposed to the Crown's encroaching influence. Rather than dismiss their concerns, the monarchy cleverly co-opted their civic traditions, practices, and institutions to convince the city's elite of their important role in Levantine commerce. Chief among such traditions were local ideas of citizenship and civic virtue. As the city's stature throughout the Mediterranean grew, however, so too did the dangers of commercial expansion as exemplified by the arrival of the bubonic plague. Marseille's citizens reevaluated citizenship and merchant virtue during the epidemic, while the French monarchy's use of the crisis as an opportunity to further extend its power reanimated republican vocabulary. Between Crown and Commerce deftly combines a political and intellectual history of state-building, mercantilism, and republicanism with a cultural history of medical crisis. In doing so, the book highlights the conjoined history of broad transnational processes and local political change.

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In 1867, an American merchant ship, the Rover, sank off the coast of southern Taiwan. Fourteen sailors reached the shore, where almost all were killed by indigenous people. In retaliation, the United States launched two disastrous military operations against local tribes. Eventually, the U.S. consul to Amoy, Charles Le Gendre, negotiated a treaty with Tauketok, the chief of the eighteen tribes of the area, that secured safe passage for shipwrecked sailors.Yao-Chang Chen’s historical novel Puppet Flower retells the story of the Rover incident, bringing to light its pivotal role in Taiwanese history. Merging documented events and literary imagination, the novel vividly depicts Tauketok, Le Gendre, and other historical figures alongside the story of Butterfly, a young woman of mixed ethnic heritage who serves as an interpreter and mediator during the crisis. Chen deftly reconstructs the multiethnic and multilingual society of southern Taiwan in the second half of the nineteenth century from multiple perspectives, portraying local people’s daily struggles for survival and their interactions with Han Chinese settlers, Qing dynasty bureaucrats, and Western officials, tradesmen, and adventurers. The novel explores nineteenth-century Sino-American and Sino-indigenous relations and emphasizes the centrality of Taiwanese indigenous cultures to the island’s history.A gripping work of historical fiction, Puppet Flower is a powerful revisionist narrative of a formative moment in Taiwan’s past. It was recently adapted into a popular Taiwanese TV miniseries, Seqalu: Formosa 1867.

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REVISED 2018 Streetwise Jerusalem Map is a laminated city center map of Jerusalem, Israel in an accordion-fold pocket size travel map format. Coverage includes: Main Jerusalem Map 1:17,000 Old City Map 1:7,000 Dimensions: 4" x 8.5" folded, 8.5" x 27" unfolded Traveling to Jerusalem Israel can be the experience of a lifetime. It s hard not to feel the depth of history and atmosphere of the Holy Land in this concentrated labyrinth of tiny alleyways and small streets crowded with residents, merchants, tourists and pilgrims from around the world, same as it has been for thousands of years. To help the traveler experience the richness of this ancient capital, the STREETWISE® Jerusalem Map includes the intricately laid out street grid of the Old City and features an abundance of tourist sites such as hotels, museums, religious holy sites, parks, and government locations. Jerusalem is a walking city, particularly The Old City. A special inset map of the Old City enables you to discover that all the religious sites you visit are not just displays of antiquity, but rather still serve the same higher purpose they have for centuries. The city surrounding the Old City is clearly depicted including Mount Scopus, Yad Vashem, and areas South and North of the city. Our pocket size map of Jerusalem is laminated for durability and accordion folding for effortless use.

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Can Shakespeare help us with the question of how to live? Re Humanising Shakespeare argues that although Shakespeare strikingly dramatizes various kinds of uncertainty and scepticism, including scepticism about what it is to be human, his work can still serve as as rich source of existential wisdom and guidance. Revised throughout, this edition includes: a new introduction which focuses more attention on what is specific to literature's treatment of the human (as epitomised by Shakespeare); a section drawing on new work on literary and dramatic genres as different ways of attending to human life; a revised chapter on the history plays; and a reading of King Lear. Blending theory and critical resources with close analysis of the plays, this book makes provocative reading for all those interested in Shakespeare, ethics, human being and questions of literary value. It is revised throughout and includes a new section on genre, as well as discussion of King Lear. It offers new ways of understanding literature's distinctive treatment of the human. It shows through detailed readings of the plays how Shakespeare both unsettles and reclaims ideas about being human. It provides a clear account of modernity which illuminates the relationship between critical theory, scepticism and literary humanism. It includes close readings of a number of plays including Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, Coriolanus and Macbeth.

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Emirates Diaries tells the story of how Peter Clark came to love the Emirates and its people. He got to know Abu Dhabi sheikhs and Dubai merchants and people at every level of society. The country was on the cusp of enormous economic expansion and this book is an affectionate picture of the Emirates when it was still like a chain of large informal villages. The people of the UAE were aware of their good fortune and were, he found, open, generous and innovative. Clark arranged for the explorer Wilfred Thesiger to return to the country he had celebrated before it became oil-rich. Thanks to Peter, Thesiger met up with his old companions who had accompanied him in crossing the Empty Quarter 40 years earlier. Peter embedded himself in the local cultural scene and translated stories by Dubai's best known writer, Muhammad al-Murr. Emirates Diaries tells of opera in Ras Al Khaimah, how Shakespeare was brought to large audiences of young people, how to organize a royal visit, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease among the oryx in the Al Ain zoo, the culture of camel racing and an unpaid bill left by Margaret Thatcher. The diaries sparkle with mischievous humor and acute observation. This book is a prequel to Peter Clark's Damascus Diaries: Life under the Assads, described by The Economist as 'quirky, digressive and indiscreet'.

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The Black Song is the action-packed conclusion to the Raven's Blade series by Anthony Ryan, which began with The Wolf's Call. The Steel Horde has laid waste to the Venerable Kingdom, unleashing a storm of fire and blood. Now the leader of this mighty host - Kehlbrand, the warlord who thinks himself a god - turns his eyes to the other merchant kingdoms. No one can stop his divine conquest. No one, perhaps, except Vaelin Al Sorna. Yet Vaelin is on the run, his own army in disarray. Worse, the new blood song he has acquired is as much a curse as a blessing, and seeks to guide him down a path far darker than he could have imagined . . .Praise for the series'Robin Hobb meets Joe Abercrombie . . . This is fantasy with a totally legendary feel' Fantasy Book Review'The Wolf's Call is everything a fantasy fan could ever wish for' Booknest'Anthony Ryan's best work since the release of his incredible debut . . . fantastic storytelling' Novel NotionsBooks by Anthony RyanRaven's ShadowBlood SongTower LordQueen of FireRaven's BladeThe Wolf's CallThe Black SongDraconis MemoriaThe Waking FireThe Legion of FlameThe Empire of AshesThe Covenant of SteelThe PariahThe MartyrThe TraitorWriting as A. J. RyanRed River Seven

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Africa has been coveted for its riches ever since the era of the Pharaohs. In past centuries, it was the lure of gold, ivory, and slaves that drew fortune-seekers, merchant-adventurers, and conquerors from afar. In modern times, the focus of attention is on oil, diamonds, and other valuable minerals. Land was another prize. The Romans relied on their colonies in northern Africa for vital grain shipments to feed the population of Rome. Arab invaders followed in their wake, eventually colonizing the entire region. More recently, foreign corporations have acquired huge tracts of land to secure food supplies needed abroad, just as the Romans did. In this vast and vivid panorama of history, Martin Meredith follows the fortunes of Africa over a period of 5,000 years. With compelling narrative, he traces the rise and fall of ancient kingdoms and empires; the spread of Christianity and Islam; the enduring quest for gold and other riches; the exploits of explorers and missionaries; and the impact of European colonization. He examines, too, the fate of modern African states and concludes with a glimpse of their future. His cast of characters includes religious leaders, mining magnates, warlords, dictators, and many other legendary figures--among them Mansa Musa, ruler of the medieval Mali empire, said to be the richest man the world has ever known. "I speak of Africa," Shakespeare wrote, "and of golden joys." This is history on an epic scale.

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After Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, he was sent into exile on St Helena, arriving in October 1815. For the six years until his death, he was an 'eagle in a cage', reduced from the most powerful figure in Europe to a prisoner on a rock in the South Atlantic. But the fallen emperor was charmed and entertained by Betsy Balcombe, the pretty teenage daughter of a local merchant.Anne Whitehead brings to life Napoleon's time on St Helena and the web of connections around the globe which framed his last years. Betsy's father, William Balcombe, was well-connected in London, and he smuggled letters and undertook a clandestine mission to Paris for Napoleon.Betsy's friendship with Napoleon cast a shadow over the rest of her colourful life. She married a Regency cad, who soon left her and their daughter, and she travelled to Australia in 1823 with her father, who was appointed the first Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales. After her father was exposed for fraud and the family lost their fortune, she returned to London and published a memoir which turned her into a celebrity.With her extraordinary connections to royalty in London and to the Bonaparte family and their courtiers, Betsy Balcombe led a life worthy of a Regency romance. This new account reveals Napoleon at his most vulnerable, human and reflective, and a woman caught in some of the most dramatic events of her time.

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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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The Kriegsmarine‘s Scharnhorst was a German capital ship, described either as a battleship or battlecruiser, and the lead ship of her class, which included one other ship, Gneisenau. She was launched on 3 October 1936 and completed in January 1939, armed with nine 28cm C/34 guns in three triple turrets. She operated with Gneisenau for much of the early portion of World War II, including sorties into the Atlantic to raid British merchant shipping. They took part in Operation Weserübung (April–June 1940), the German invasion of Norway, during which they sank the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her escort destroyers Acasta and Ardent. Scharnhorst also sank HMS Rawalpindi in November 1939. In early 1943, Scharnhorst joined the Tirpitz in Norway to intercept Allied convoys to the Soviet Union. On a sortie from Norway to attack a convoy, the German force was intercepted by British ships and during the Battle of the North Cape (26 December 1943), HMS Duke of York and her escorts sank Scharnhorst. Most of her crew was lost. This is the most comprehensive examination of Scharnhorst ever published, drawing on new research and technology to tell the full story of the ship. It includes a complete set of detailed line drawings with fully descriptive keys and full-colour 3D artwork, supported by technical details, photographs, and text on the building of the ship, as well as a record of her service history.

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A major international debut novel from a storyteller who couples a timelessly beguiling style with an energetically modern worldscape. Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell each other stories. Robert De Niro's lovechild explores the magical properties of a packet of Oreos; a Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; a man who edits other people's memories has to confront his own past; a Chinese youth with amazing luck cuts men's hair and cleans their ears; an entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left all alone in the house of a German cartographer. Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit. Stories from the great cities – New York, Istanbul, Delhi, Lagos, Paris, Buenos Aires – that grow into a novel about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere. Dasgupta's writing is utterly distinctive and fresh, so striking that it seems to come from the future and the past all at once, but in marrying a timeless mystery to an alert modernity, his cautionary tales manage to be reminiscent of both Ballard and Borges, depicting ordinary extraordinary individuals (some lost, some confused, some happy) in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, wonderful.

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In September 1298, the rival Italian republics of Genoa and Venice fought a fierce sea battle at Curzola off the rocky coast of southern Dalmatia. Against the odds the Venetians, led by Admiral Andrea Dandolo, son of the Doge, were defeated. Among the thousands of Venetians captives was one Marco Polo, gentleman, merchant of Venice, and sometime traveller to East Asia. Incarcerated in a Ligurian fastness, he told his story to a fellow-prisoner, a writer of romances named Rustichello of Pisa. The account of his travels that Marco Polo dictated to Rustichello in captivity - Il Milione - would be exceptionally widely read and would stimulate European interest in the East and its riches. Marco Polo: from Venice to Xanadu is Laurence Bergreen's thrilling and masterly reconstruction of the life and wanderings of one the great adventurers of world history. Between 1271 and 1275 Marco Polo accompanied his father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo on a journey east from Acre into central Asia along the Silk Route, eventually reaching China and the court of the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan. Entering the service of the Khan, he travelled extensively in the Mongol Empire. The three Venetians returned home by sea in 1292-5, calling at Sumatra and southern India before reaching Persia, and making the last part of their journey to Venice overland. Three years later came that fateful encounter with the Genoese fleet in the Adriatic...

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While the experiences of the men and ships who sailed in the Allied convoys to North Russia between August 1941 and May 1945 have been fully documented, the wider political, diplomatic and military factors which determined the campaign are less well known. The principal actors Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin each had their own agendas and expectations, influenced by advisers and competing national priorities. These inevitably gave rise to differences putting pressure in turn on the convoy programme while the varying effectiveness of German counter-action was a significant and unpredictable factor. 1942 was dominated by pressure on Churchill from Roosevelt and Stalin to increase the size of convoys at a time when the Royal Navy lacked the necessary escorts. This deficiency was exacerbated by heavy merchant shipping losses and the demands of Operation TORCH. The temporary convoy suspension in 1943 followed the deployment of German heavy warships to Norway and the diversion of escorts to Operation HUSKY. A serious Anglo-Soviet rift, which led to Allied threats to discontinue the programme, was only resolved by lengthy negotiations. It resumed until temporarily suspended due to the D-Day landings after which the increasing escort availability allowed operations to run uninterrupted until May 1945. This carefully researched work providing an overview of the strategic factors dominating the costly yet war-winning Arctic convoy programme will be welcomed by experts and laymen alike.

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The Maritime Transport of Sculptures in the Ancient Mediterranean examines where, when, why and how sculptures were transported on the Mediterranean Sea during Classical Antiquity through the lenses of both maritime and classical archaeology. From the 16th century onwards numerous ancient sculptures have been discovered in the Mediterranean from the context of surveyed shipwrecks, unrecorded potential shipwrecks or as isolated finds. Scholars so far have analysed those sculptural artefacts from an art historical perspective, with interpretation of their maritime transportation remaining conjectural due to the problematic recording and the remoteness of their underwater context. With a focus on the underwater context of already retrieved sculptures, this book aims at comprehending in detail the various circumstances under which ancient sculptural artefacts were carried on board ancient merchant ships and were consequently deposited underwater. Through the creation of an extensive Mediterranean-wide database, with more than 100 known incidents of ancient sculptures found underwater, and the in-depth analysis of three case studies, the Porticello, Mahdia and Favaritx shipwrecks, a new interpretation is presented for this maritime activity. Thereby, new details for the maritime transport and distribution of sculptures during the period of Classical Antiquity are revealed. Finally, the volume demonstrates the importance of the thorough recording of underwater archaeological evidence in the hope of raising awareness and eliminating the salvage of ancient sculptures out of their underwater context, a practice that has been encouraging the illicit trade of such antiquities.

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Devizes began as the satellite town of a great Norman castle built in the twelfth century by Bishop Roger of Salisbury to defend the boundaries of his church's domain. Roger was Chancellor to Henry I and a powerful man in the land while the king was fighting in France. The castle in Devizes, by all accounts an impressive structure, played an important role in military and political events as Stephen and Matilda vied for the English throne following Henry's death. At the end of the Middle Ages the importance of the castle declined and Devizes became primarily a market town, trading in leather, corn and wool. Surviving merchants' houses from the fifteenth century are evidence of the town's flourishing trade at that time.Just as the existence of many Georgian houses reflect a 'Golden Age' of Devizes in the eighteenth century when wool was the major source of the town's wealth. Today the town preserves many fine buildings including two Norman churches, a medieval street plan and one of the largest and most attractive market places in the country. The medieval castle has gone but a Victorian replacement built by a Devizes businessman picturesquely occupies the castle site. A feature of the book is a guided tour of the town that can be used independently of the main text of the book, enabling the reader to embark straight away on a journey into Devizes' past through its existing streets and buildings. Lorna Haycock lives in Devizes and is currently the Sandell Librarian at Devizes Museum in Long Street.

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How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity.Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.

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In 1900 few people could have imagined that their world would change so drastically in such a short time. The shell-shocked society that emerged from the Great War was at once less unequal and more demanding, more hopeful and yet less certain, than the old. The Voice from the Garden opens a window onto these two worlds through Pamela and her families. The daughter of a doomed union between trade and title, Pamela was born into the Cobbold brewing family of Suffolk and married into the famous merchant banking dynasty, the Hambros. Wealthy the families may have been, but money is no protection against the loss caused by war or the frailties of human nature. From an extraordinary period of social and economic change, here are fascinating characters, mystery, adultery, despair and hope. It is a unique tale, at the heart of which lies the love story of Pamela and Charles. Long-listed for the 2013 New Angle Prize for Literature (www.ipswichinstitute.org.uk/NAP.html). The New Angle Prize for Literature is awarded biennially for a recently published work of literary merit associated with or inspired by East Anglia. The judges described the book as "A meticulous and captivating reconstruction of the life of Pamela Hambro - of the East Anglian Cobbold family - and the impact of the First World War on her life. At the story's heart lies her enduring love for her husband Charles, of the Hambro banking dynasty."

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Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) is the major ongoing editorial project devoted to the history of private book ownership in early modern Britain. With the publication of Volume 7 (2009), PLRE completed editions of the 162 Renaissance book-lists contained in Oxford University inventories. Volume 8 (2014) marked a new beginning for PLRE, marked by a broad expansion in the range of early modern book owners the project represented. Volume 9 (2017) and now Volume 10 (2020) continue that expansion. Twenty book owners are represented in this volume, and they include statesmen, lawyers, landowners, merchants (a Manchester clothier, a London member of the Levant Company), and clerics ranging from rural vicars to a cathedral prebendary, and from a pre-Reformation country priest to a seventeenth-century puritan who left his books to his minister son in New England. PLRE has also continued to document book ownership by early modern women, offering here the substantial and remarkable libraries associated with Lady Elizabeth (Talbot) Grey, Lady Margaret (Miller) Heath, and Lady Anne (Stanhope) Holles. The book-lists in this volume represent libraries situated widely across England, and they derive from a variety of sources, from wills, inventories, bequests, donations, and reconstructions to such less common forms as purchase records and lists inscribed in books. Each booklist has been transcribed, identified, annotated, and provided with an introductory essay.

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This is the story of a city that shouldn’t exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America’s most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world.Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city’s history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent City evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of peoples, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric—and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel.Powell’s tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.

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A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

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The city of Liverpool is famous throughout the world. This once small fishing village was transformed into a mighty commercial powerhouse, seen by many as the second city of the British Empire. Over the centuries her influence grew and her population soared. Town planners were forced to draw up designs to accommodate the town’s increasingly diverse demographic. Humble terraced properties were laid out for the thousands of labourers in the region’s core shipping industry, while luxurious town houses were constructed for the region’s wealthier elite. Vast brick-built warehouses were raised for the storage of goods and imports, while merchants from far and wide took up shop on many of the city’s bustling high streets. Hotels, taverns and theatres appeared on nearly every corner to impress the weary traveller, and an array of parks, monuments and public buildings adorned the urban landscape for as far as the eye could see. Sadly the twentieth century cast a grave shadow over Liverpool’s good fortunes and the city lost its old allure and prestige. The Second World War cost the city dear, and many of the most awe-inspiring buildings were lost in the carnage or demolished in the name of progress. This book steps back in time and rediscovers Liverpool’s lost buildings and remembers the forgotten architectural heritage that once embellished this impressive maritime metropolis.

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When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. Historical debate about the origin of racial slavery has focused on the status of the Negro in seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland. However, as Theodore W. Allen argues in this magisterial work, what needs to be studied is the transformation of English, Scottish, Irish and other European colonists from their various statuses as servants, tenants, planters or merchants into a single new all-inclusive status: that of whites. This is the key to the paradox of American history, of a democracy resting on race assumptions.Volume One of this two-volume work attempts to escape the 'white blind spot' which has distorted consecutive studies of the issue. It does so by looking in the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of that phenomenon in terms of social control, free from the absurdities of classification by skin color. Compelling analogies are presented between the history of Anglo-Irish and British rule in Ireland and American White Supremacist oppression of Indians and African-Americans. But the relativity of race is shown in the sea change it entailed, whereby emigrating Irish haters of racial oppression were transformed into White Americans who defended it. The reasons for the differing outcomes of Catholic Emancipation and Negro Emancipation are considered and occasion is made to demonstrate Allen's distinction between racial and national oppression.

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The Nigerian and West African practice of aso ebi fashion invokes notions of wealth and group dynamics in social gatherings. Okechukwu Nwafor’s volume Aso ebi investigates the practice in the cosmopolitan urban setting of Lagos, and argues that the visual and consumerist hype typical of the late capitalist system feeds this unique fashion practice. The book suggests that dress, fashion, aso ebi, and photography engender a new visual culture that largely reflects the economics of mundane living. Nwafor examines the practice’s societal dilemma, whereby the solidarity of aso ebi is dismissed by many as an ephemeral transaction. A circuitous transaction among photographers, fashion magazine producers, textile merchants, tailors, and individual fashionistas reinvents aso ebi as a product of cosmopolitan urban modernity. The results are a fetishization of various forms of commodity culture, personality cults through mass followership, the negotiation of symbolic power through mass-produced images, exchange value in human relationships through gifts, and a form of exclusion achieved through digital photo editing. Aso ebi has become an essential part of Lagos cosmopolitanism: as a rising form of a unique visual culture it is central to the unprecedented spread of a unique West African fashion style that revels in excessive textile overflow. This extreme dress style is what an individual requires to transcend the lack imposed by the chaos of the postcolonial city.

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The world of wealth and patronage that we associate with sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy can make the Renaissance seem the exclusive domain of artists and aristocrats. Revealing a Renaissance beyond Michelangelo and the Medici, Sarah Gwyneth Ross recovers the experiences of everyday men and women who were inspired to pursue literature and learning.Ross draws on a trove of original unpublished sources—wills, diaries, household inventories, account books, and other miscellany—to reconstruct the lives of over one hundred artisans, merchants, and others on the middle rung of Venetian society who embraced the ennobling virtues of a humanistic education. These men and women sought out the latest knowledge, amassed personal libraries, and passed both their books and their hard-earned wisdom on to their families and heirs.Physicians were often the most avid—and the most anxious—of professionals seeking cultural legitimacy. Ross examines the lives of three doctors: Nicolò Massa (1485–1569), Francesco Longo (1506–1576), and Alberto Rini (d. 1599). Though they had received university training, these self-made men of letters were not patricians but members of a social group that still yearned for credibility. Unlike priests or lawyers, physicians had not yet rid themselves of the taint of artisanal labor, and they were thus indicative of a middle class that sought to earn the respect of their peers and betters, protect and advance their families, and secure honorable remembrance after death.

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In 1867, an American merchant ship, the Rover, sank off the coast of southern Taiwan. Fourteen sailors reached the shore, where almost all were killed by indigenous people. In retaliation, the United States launched two disastrous military operations against local tribes. Eventually, the U.S. consul to Amoy, Charles Le Gendre, negotiated a treaty with Tauketok, the chief of the eighteen tribes of the area, that secured safe passage for shipwrecked sailors.Yao-Chang Chen’s historical novel Puppet Flower retells the story of the Rover incident, bringing to light its pivotal role in Taiwanese history. Merging documented events and literary imagination, the novel vividly depicts Tauketok, Le Gendre, and other historical figures alongside the story of Butterfly, a young woman of mixed ethnic heritage who serves as an interpreter and mediator during the crisis. Chen deftly reconstructs the multiethnic and multilingual society of southern Taiwan in the second half of the nineteenth century from multiple perspectives, portraying local people’s daily struggles for survival and their interactions with Han Chinese settlers, Qing dynasty bureaucrats, and Western officials, tradesmen, and adventurers. The novel explores nineteenth-century Sino-American and Sino-indigenous relations and emphasizes the centrality of Taiwanese indigenous cultures to the island’s history.A gripping work of historical fiction, Puppet Flower is a powerful revisionist narrative of a formative moment in Taiwan’s past. It was recently adapted into a popular Taiwanese TV miniseries, Seqalu: Formosa 1867.

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This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market.Smallwood's story is animated by deep research and gives us a startlingly graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. Ultimately, Saltwater Slavery details how African people were transformed into Atlantic commodities in the process. She begins her narrative on the shores of seventeenth-century Africa, tracing how the trade in human bodies came to define the life of the Gold Coast. Smallwood takes us into the ports and stone fortresses where African captives were held and prepared, and then through the Middle Passage itself. In extraordinary detail, we witness these men and women cramped in the holds of ships, gasping for air, and trying to make sense of an unfamiliar sea and an unimaginable destination. Arriving in America, we see how these new migrants enter the market for laboring bodies, and struggle to reconstruct their social identities in the New World.Throughout, Smallwood examines how the people at the center of her story-merchant capitalists, sailors, and slaves-made sense of the bloody process in which they were joined. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.

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Reveals the little known history of one of history’s most famous maps – and its maker Tucked away in a near-forgotten collection, Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited is one of the most extraordinary maps of colonial British America. Created by a colonial merchant, planter, and diplomat named Augustine Herrman, the map pictures the Mid-Atlantic in breathtaking detail, capturing its waterways, coastlines, and communities. Herrman spent three decades travelling between Dutch New Amsterdam and the English Chesapeake before eventually settling in Maryland and making this map. Although the map has been reproduced widely, the history of how it became one of the most famous images of the Chesapeake has never been told. A Biography of a Map in Motion uncovers the intertwined stories of the map and its maker, offering new insights into the creation of empire in North America. The book follows the map from the waterways of the Chesapeake to the workshops of London, where it was turned into a print and sold. Transported into coffee houses, private rooms, and government offices, Virginia and Maryland became an apparatus of empire that allowed English elites to imaginatively possess and accurately manage their Atlantic colonies. Investigating this map offers the rare opportunity to recapture the complementary and occasionally conflicting forces that created the British Empire. From the colonial and the metropolitan to the economic and the political to the local and the Atlantic, this is a fascinating exploration of the many meanings of a map, and how what some saw as establishing a sense of local place could translate to forging an empire.

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BY CROM! Robert E. Howard's famous Cimmerian UNCENSORED! For the first time, Robert E. Howard's Conan is brought to life uncensored! Discover the true Conan, unrestrained, violent, and sexual. Read the story as he intended! The Cimmerian Vol 1 includes two complete stories, Queen of the Black Coast, and Red Nails, plus bonus material, in one hardcover collection! In Queen of the Black Coast, Conan seeks refuge on a merchant ship, after being pursued for killing a judge. But soon after setting sail, the Cimmerian and his new companions face a threat: the legendary Belit, self-proclaimed Queen of the Black Coast! Soon finding himself smitten by the lovely Belit, Conan agrees to joins up with her and her crew to brutally pillage and sail the poisonous river Zarkheba, encountering ancient ruins, lost treasure, and winged, vicious monstrosities! In Red Nails, Conan finds himself in the Darfar region, whose territory is almost entirely covered by a huge forest. Here Conan pledges himself a mercenary, promising his sword to the highest bidder, fighting alongside fellow mercenary and fierce female warrior Valeria. After a clash against a terrible dragon, the two go to a strange fortified city, apparently deserted...but the duo will quickly discover that a civilization lives hidden inside, and that the citadel hides a heavy secret.

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Surveillance Capitalism in America offers a crucial historical perspective on the intimate relationship between surveillance and capitalism. While surveillance is often associated with governments, today the role of the private sector in the spread of everyday surveillance is the subject of growing public debate. Tech giants like Google and Facebook are fueled by a continuous supply of user data and digital exhaust. Surveillance is not just a side effect of digital capitalism; it is the business model itself, suggesting the emergence of a new and more rapacious mode of capitalism: surveillance capitalism. But how much has capitalism really changed? Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that surveillance has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding. Managers surveilled labor, merchants surveilled consumers, and businesses surveilled each other. Focusing on events in the United States, the chapters in this volume examine the deep logic of modern surveillance as a mode of rationalization, bureaucratization, and social control from the early nineteenth century forward. Even more, business surveillance has often involved collaborations with the state, through favorable laws, policing, and information sharing. The history of surveillance capitalism is thus the history of technological, legal, and knowledge infrastructures built over decades. Together, the chapters in this volume reveal the long arc of surveillance capitalism, from the violent coercion of slave labor to the seductions of target marketing.

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