Search results for ""author merchant"

Heirs of Ambition: The Making of the Boleyns uncovers the story and the family behind England’s most obsessed-over queen, Anne Boleyn.From the fields of Norfolk to the royal court, via city commerce, local government, liberal education and numerous wedding bells, the Boleyns emerge as just one of many newly prosperous and ambitious families seeking to make the best of a changing world. As they struggle upwards, England is visited by famine, plague, revolt and civil war – but also opportunity.Struggling peasants in dirt-floored cottages scratch a living on tiny scraps of land. More than half are swept away by plague while revolt soaks the south-east in blood, but hope lies in the teeming, timber-framed streets of London amongst ambitious merchants who speculate and scheme. Meagre rations become venison pasties and straw-filled mattresses, featherbeds, but some things remain the same. Disease has no respect for gold and silver; war takes sons whose lives have barely begun. While the Boleyns’ new-found wealth delivered power and status, they still lived in a violent world and life could be precarious, even for a queen.From steady climb to bone-breaking fall, the Boleyns’ story is medieval life at its messy, prejudiced and unstable best.

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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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Offering a richly nuanced portrayal placing Haiti in a global context as a place of ethnic and cultural complexity, this novel explores the role of spirituality in Caribbean life and culture. Told through multiple voices in a nonlinear fashion, the narrative unfolds through the perspectives of a Haitian-Syrian merchant, Ruth, who recounts her young adulthood and final days as she intuits her imminent death; Catherine, a professional pianist living in Paris who travels home to Haiti upon hearing of her Aunt Ruth's murder; Rose, Catherine's mother, an empath, who is believed to have committed suicide in Canadian exile in reaction to the worst years of the Duvalier regime; Romulus, a once famous Konpa singer and an addict, who, released by rebels from a Port-au-Prince jail searches for his redemption; and Elsie, an Irish, working-class seer who emigrates to Haiti in 1847 in search of a new mystic who will guide them all. Traversing the terrains of Port-au-Prince middle-class life, working-class French Canada, expatriate Paris, the peat bogs of famine stricken Ireland, and tracing lives that cross boundaries of time and place, this is a deeply absorbing portrayal of a fragmented community whose deepest connections lie in a shared sense of spirituality.

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For four centuries the British realm depended upon sea power to defend its interest and independence against a myriad of threats both military and economic. During this time the Royal Navy established itself as the sovereign of the Seas, helping transform England, and later Great Britain, from an unassuming island nation perched on the edge of the European continent to the centre of a global empire. Yet the advent of World War II presented Britain’s maritime services with their greatest challenge to date. At stake was the survival of the nation. The Longest Campaign tells the story of this epic struggle and the indispensable role that British sea power played in bringing about the victory that shaped the world we live in today.The Longest Campaign is a complete, balanced and detailed account of the activities, results and relevance of Britain's maritime effort in the Atlantic and off northwest Europe throughout World War II. It looks at the entire breadth of the maritime conflict, exploring the contributions of all participants including the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and British merchant marine and their Commonwealth equivalents. It puts the maritime conflict in the context of the overall war effort and shows how the various operations and campaigns were intertwined. Finally it provides unique analysis of the effectiveness of the British maritime effort and role it played in bringing about the final Allied victory.

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The first book-length study of hospitality in Shakespeare Offers innovative literary analysis of canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, providing a fresh interpretation of the stranger question Engages with different theoretical approaches to hospitality in order to read Shakespeare as a dramatist of ethical encounter Reconsiders the early modern interest in limits, thresholds, and boundaries, showing the significance to guest and host relationships in the drama Assembles a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary methodology by drawing on major thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Anne Dufourmantelle, Gaston Bachelard and Michel Serres In this critical analysis, Sophie E. Battell examines hospitality in Shakespeare's plays. By drawing on literary theory, modern philosophy, and anthropology as well as early modern scientific and religious texts, the book advances our understanding of Shakespeare as a dramatist concerned with the ethical questions at stake in encounters between guests and hosts of various kinds. The close readings and scholarly interventions presented here reconceive the plays in terms of a poetics of hospitality while arguing for an expansive, far-reaching vision of what it means to be open to the world and welcoming of others. Moving from the levels of subjectivity, the body, and the senses to architecture, economics, legal discourse, and the natural environment, On the Threshold not only makes important contributions to Shakespeare studies but forges new connections between Renaissance literary scholarship and contemporary debates on the politics of migrants and refugees.

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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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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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Dino Campagni's classic chronicle gives a detailed account of a crucial period in the history of Florence, beginning about 1280 and ending in the first decade of the fourteenth century. During that time Florence was one of the largest cities in Europe and a center of commerce and culture. Its gold florin was the standard international currency; Giotto was revolutionizing the art of painting; Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti were transforming the vernacular love lyric. The era was marked as well by political turmoil and factional strife. The inexorable escalation of violence, as insult and reprisal led to arson and murder, provides the bitter content of Compagni's story. Dino Compagni was perfectly placed to observe the political turmoil. A successful merchant, a prominent member of the silk guild, an active member of the government. Gompagni—like Dante—sided with the Whites and, after their defeat in 1301, was barred from public office. He lived the rest of his life as an exile in his own city, mulling over the events that had led to the defeat of his party. This chronicle, the fruit of his observation and reflection, studies the damage wrought by uncontrolled factional strife, the causes of conflict, the connections between events, and the motives of the participants. Compagni judges passionately and harshly. Daniel Bornstein supplements his lucid translation with and extensive historical introduction and explanatory notes.

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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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What were the lives of Africans in provincial England like during the early modern period? How, where, and when did they arrive in rural counties? How were they perceived by their contemporaries? This book examines the population of Africans in Norfolk and Suffolk from 1467, the date of the first documented reference to an African in the region, to 1833, when Parliament voted to abolish slavery in the British Empire. It uncovers the complexity of these Africans' historical experience, considering the interaction of local custom, class structure, tradition, memory, and the gradual impact of the Atlantic slaving economy. Richard C. Maguire proposes that the initial regional response to arriving Africans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not defined exclusively by ideas relating to skin colour, but rather by local understandings of religious status, class position, ideas about freedom and bondage, and immediate local circumstances. Arriving Africans were able to join the region's working population through baptism, marriage, parenthood, and work. This manner of response to Africans was challenged as local merchants and gentry begin doing business with the slaving economy from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Although the racialised ideas underpinning Atlantic slavery changed the social circumstances of Africans in the region, the book suggests that they did not completely displace older, more inclusive, ideas in working communities.

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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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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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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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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 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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A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens’ greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens based his historical detail on Carlyle’s great work – The French Revolution. ‘The best story I have written’ was Dickens’ own verdict on A Tale of Two Cities, and the reader is unlikely to disagree with this judgement of a story which combines historical fact with the author’s unsurpassed genius for poignant tales of human suffering, self-sacrifice, and redemption.

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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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“I’ve just read Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade twice over, with deep admiration and reverence. I am profoundly moved: what a work! And to think I’d never heard the name of Marcel Schwob. Who is he?”—Rainer Maria Rilke Marcel Schwob’s 1896 novella The Children’s Crusade retells the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land, who traveled to the shores of the sea, which—instead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem—instead delivered them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or delivered them to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric, a qalandar and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children, whose naive faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish. Though it is a tale drawn from the early 13th century, Schwob presents it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to such diverse works as Alfred Jarry’s The Other Alcestis, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove,” William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in which innocence must perish.

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A model of Jewish community history that will enlighten anyone interested in Baltimore and its past.Winner of the Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Prize by the Southern Jewish Historical Society; Finalist of the American Jewish Studies Book Award by the Jewish Book Council National Jewish Book AwardsIn 1938, Gustav Brunn and his family fled Nazi Germany and settled in Baltimore. Brunn found a job at McCormick’s Spice Company but was fired after three days when, according to family legend, the manager discovered he was Jewish. He started his own successful business using a spice mill he brought over from Germany and developed a blend especially for the seafood purveyors across the street. Before long, his Old Bay spice blend would grace kitchen cabinets in virtually every home in Maryland. The Brunns sold the business in 1986. Four years later, Old Bay was again sold—to McCormick. In On Middle Ground, the first truly comprehensive history of Baltimore’s Jewish community, Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R. Weiner describe not only the formal institutions of Jewish life but also the everyday experiences of families like the Brunns and of a diverse Jewish population that included immigrants and natives, factory workers and department store owners, traditionalists and reformers. The story of Baltimore Jews—full of absorbing characters and marked by dramas of immigration, acculturation, and assimilation—is the story of American Jews in microcosm. But its contours also reflect the city’s unique culture.Goldstein and Weiner argue that Baltimore’s distinctive setting as both a border city and an immigrant port offered opportunities for advancement that made it a magnet for successive waves of Jewish settlers. The authors detail how the city began to attract enterprising merchants during the American Revolution, when it thrived as one of the few ports remaining free of British blockade. They trace Baltimore’s meteoric rise as a commercial center, which drew Jewish newcomers who helped the upstart town surpass Philadelphia as the second-largest American city. They explore the important role of Jewish entrepreneurs as Baltimore became a commercial gateway to the South and later developed a thriving industrial scene.Readers learn how, in the twentieth century, the growth of suburbia and the redevelopment of downtown offered scope to civic leaders, business owners, and real estate developers. From symphony benefactor Joseph Meyerhoff to Governor Marvin Mandel and trailblazing state senator Rosalie Abrams, Jews joined the ranks of Baltimore’s most influential cultural, philanthropic, and political leaders while working on the grassroots level to reshape a metro area confronted with the challenges of modern urban life. Accessibly written and enriched by more than 130 illustrations, On Middle Ground reveals that local Jewish life was profoundly shaped by Baltimore’s “middleness”—its hybrid identity as a meeting point between North and South, a major industrial center with a legacy of slavery, and a large city with a small-town feel.

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A riveting history and maritime adventure about priceless masterpieces originally destined for Catherine the Great.On October 1771, a merchant ship out of Amsterdam, Vrouw Maria, crashed off the stormy Finnish coast, taking her historic cargo to the depths of the Baltic Sea. The vessel was delivering a dozen Dutch masterpiece paintings to Europe’s most voracious collector: Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Among the lost treasures was The Nursery, an oak-paneled triptych by Leiden fine painter Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt’s most brilliant student and Holland’s first international superstar artist. Dou’s triptych was long the most beloved and most coveted painting of the Dutch Golden Age, and its loss in the shipwreck was mourned throughout the art world. Vrouw Maria, meanwhile, became a maritime legend, confounding would-be salvagers for more than two hundred years. In July 1999, a daring Finnish wreck hunter found Vrouw Maria, upright on the sea floor and perfectly preserved. The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure masterfully recounts the fascinating tale of Vrouw Maria—her loss and discovery—weaving together the rise and fall of the artist whose priceless masterpiece was the jewel of the wreckage. Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees bring to vivid life the personalities that drove (and are still driving) this compelling tale, evoking Robert Massie’s depiction of Russian high politics and culture, Simon Schama’s insights into Dutch Golden Age art and art history, Gary Kinder’s spirit of, danger and adventure on the beguiling Archipelago Sea.

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

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The persecution of the church in Iraq is one of the great tragedies of the twenty-first century. In this short, yet sweeping account, Cardinal Filoni, the former Papal Nuncio to Iraq, shows us the people and the faith in the land of Abraham and Babylon, a region that has been home to Persians, Parthians, Byzantines, Mongols, Ottomans, and more. This is the compelling and rich history of the Christian communities in a land that was once the frontier between Rome and Persia, for centuries the crossroads of East and West for armies of invaders and merchants, and the cradle of all human civilization. Its unique cultural legacy has, in the past few years, been all but obliterated. The Church in Iraq is both a diligent record and loving testimonial to a community that is struggling desperately to exist. Filoni guides the reader through almost two thousand years of history, telling the story of a people who trace their faith back to the Apostle Thomas. The diversity of peoples and churches is brought deftly into focus through the lens of their interactions with the papacy, but The Church in Iraq does not shy away from discussing the local political, ethnic, and theological tensions that have resulted in centuries of communion and schism. Never losing his focus on the people to whom this book is so clearly dedicated, Cardinal Filoni has produced a personal and engaging history of the relationship between Rome and the Eastern Churches. This book has much to teach its reader about the church in the near East. Perhaps its most brutal lesson is the ease with which such a depth of history and culture can be wiped away in a few short decades.

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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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Erik Smalhout was born a child of privilege in the Netherlands East Indies. Smalhout’s father sent his unruly son to a boarding school in Australia, just months before the Japanese seized the Netherlands East Indies in early 1942. While young Smalhout adapted to life in rural Australia, his sister and father back home were placed in Japanese prison camps, an experience that proved fateful for his father and changed his sister’s life forever. Serendipity followed him through induction in the WWII Dutch military, his postwar service on merchant ships circling the globe, and eventually to the most southern place on earth: the Mississippi Delta. Smalhout spent the rest of his life adapting to challenging circumstances time after time: first as a progressive Dutchman in the American South, then as an IRS agent in the nation’s second-largest financial center, and finally as a man who, due to a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, often could not identify himself. Motherland, Fatherland, Whateverland: Searching for Home is Smalhout’s memoir; edited by his granddaughter, Erika Berry; and supported with pictures and documents that he saved throughout his lifetime. Smalhout’s story reminds readers that place is secondary to experience and that no matter where we are or what fortunate or unfortunate circumstances placed us there, an eternal curiosity for humanity will help us find a place in the world.

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At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. Analyzing trajectories among average Southerners, this is perhaps the most extensive sociological treatment of the transition from slavery since W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America. In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today.

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Southern Region Steam 1948-1967 contains over 250 stunning colour and black and white photographs of steam locomotives working across much of the South of England. Many areas of interest are featured, including: Eastleigh; Dover; Southampton; Brighton; Guildford; Exeter; Plymouth; Guildford; Reading; Salisbury; Winchester; Yeovil. A section is provided for all the important SR locations in London, such as Waterloo station, Stewarts Lane shed, Bricklayers Arms shed, Clapham Junction, Victoria station, etc. There is also a selection of images taken on the Isle of Wight which came under the jurisdiction of the SR. A large number of the area's most recognisable classes are presented: Bulleid's 'Merchant Navy' and 'Battle of Britain'/'West Country' Pacifics; Maunsell 'King Arthur' and 'Schools', amongst others; Urie 4-6-0s; Drummond M7; Wainwright C Class. The old Adams 415 Class engines have been captured on their native soil, whilst equally ancient Stroudley E1s have been encountered. Also making appearances are BR Standard Class engines, ranging from the 'Britannias' to the 4-6-0s, 2-6-0s and 2-6-4Ts. The locomotives have been captured in many evocative scenes of the era, comprising those at stations, both main line and smaller local facilities, engine sheds and from the lineside. The photographs are accompanied by well-researched and informative captions. The preservation movement was born in the Southern Region and hopefully this collection of images helps remind everyone that the steam locomotives left are worthy of continued interest as representatives of a bygone age.

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Following _Britain and the Ocean Road_, Ian Friel expertly navigates the history of Britain and the sea from the Middle Ages to modern times. With _Breaking Seas, Broken Ships_, we follow the story of Britain's maritime history through some of it's most dramatic shipwrecks. From the country's imperial zenith to the very different world of the early twenty-first century we encounter an extraordinary range of people, ships and events, including... the crew and passengers of a state-of-the-art Victorian steamship who vanished in the Atlantic; the sailors of a doomed collier brig in the dying days of sail - and the wives and children they left behind; a lowly ex-naval stoker who went into showbiz with his version of a disaster caused by an admiral; a First World War merchant ship captain who fought a running battle with German U-Boats; the courage and compassion shown by British sailors who escaped their dive-bombed ships; the people who confronted the 'black tide' left by the oil tanker Torrey Canyon; how the container ship has helped to make a new world for us all - for better or worse. With people at the heart of every chapter, it explores major environmental themes alongside the traditional concerns of maritime history, such as trade, social issues and naval warfare. Their experiences tell us the story of Britain's maritime past, one that is remarkable, moving and at times horrifying. Based on brand new scholarship, it is perfect for history enthusiasts, professional historians and archaeologists alike.

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'As hypnotic as an opium dream and pretty unputdownable' Daily MailIn September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Canton? And what fate befell those aboard the Redruth, a sturdy two-masted brig heading East out of Cornwall? Was it the storm that altered their course or were the destinies of these passengers at the mercy of even more powerful forces?On the grand scale of an historical epic, River of Smoke follows its storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbors of China. There, despite efforts of the emperor to stop them, ships from Europe and India exchange their cargoes of opium for boxes of tea, silk, porcelain and silver. Among them are Bahram Modi, a wealthy Parsi opium merchant out of Bombay, his estranged half-Chinese son Ah Fatt, the orphaned Paulette and a motley collection of others whose pursuit of romance, riches and a legendary rare flower have thrown together. All struggle to cope with their losses - and for some, unimaginable freedoms - in the alleys and crowded waterways of 19th century Canton. As transporting and mesmerizing as an opiate induced dream, River of Smoke will soon be heralded as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literature.

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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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