LITMIR.BIZ

Mutiny tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the age of revolution. While commoners across Europe laid siege to the nobility and enslaved workers put the torch to plantation islands, out on the oceans, naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. By the early 1800s, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all naval seamen serving in the North Atlantic had participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies. In <I>The Bloody Flag,</I> historian Niklas Frykman explores in vivid prose how a decade of violent conflict onboard gave birth to a distinct form of radical politics that brought together the egalitarian culture of North Atlantic maritime communities with the revolutionary era&rsquo;s constitutional republicanism. The attempt to build a radical maritime republic failed, but the red flag that flew from the masts of mutinous ships survived to become the most enduring global symbol of class struggle, economic justice, and republican liberty to this day.<BR /> &#160;

Подробнее

This book traces the journeys of a stone across the world. From its remote point of origin in the city of Nishapur in eastern Iran, turquoise was traded through India, Central Asia, and the Near East, becoming an object of imperial exchange between the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. Along this trail unfolds the story of turquoise–a phosphate of aluminum and copper formed in rocks below the surface of the earth–and its discovery and export as a global commodity.<BR /><BR /> In the material culture and imperial regalia of early modern Islamic tributary empires moving from the steppe to the sown, turquoise was a sacred stone and a potent symbol of power projected in vivid color displays. From the empires of Islamic Eurasia, the turquoise trade reached Europe, where the stone was collected as an exotic object from the East. The Eurasian trade lasted into the nineteenth century, when the oldest mines in Iran collapsed and lost Aztec mines in the Americas reopened, unearthing more accessible sources of the stone to rival the Persian blue.<BR /><BR /><I>Sky Blue Stone</I> recounts the origins, trade, and circulation of a natural object in the context of the history of Islamic Eurasia and global encounters between empire and nature.

Подробнее

Today labor migrants mostly move south to north across the Mediterranean. Yet in the nineteenth century thousands of Europeans and others moved south to North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant. This study of a dynamic borderland, the Tunis region, offers the fullest picture to date of the Mediterranean before, and during, French colonialism. In a vibrant examination of people in motion, Julia A. Clancy-Smith tells the story of countless migrants, travelers, and adventurers who traversed the Mediterranean, changing it forever. Who were they? Why did they leave home? What awaited them in North Africa? And most importantly, how did an Arab-Muslim state and society make room for the newcomers? Combining fleeting facts, tales of success and failure, and vivid cameos, the book gives a groundbreaking view of one of the principal ways that the Mediterranean became modern.

Подробнее

An innovative remapping of empire, <i>Imperial Connections </i>offers a broad-ranging view of the workings of the British Empire in the period when the India of the Raj stood at the center of a newly globalized system of trade, investment, and migration. Thomas R. Metcalf argues that India itself became a nexus of imperial power that made possible British conquest, control, and governance across a wide arc of territory stretching from Africa to eastern Asia. His book, offering a new perspective on how imperialism operates, emphasizes transcolonial interactions and webs of influence that advanced the interests of colonial India and Britain alike. Metcalf examines such topics as law codes and administrative forms as they were shaped by Indian precedents; the Indian Army's role in securing Malaya, Africa, and Mesopotamia for the empire; the employment of Indians, especially Sikhs, in colonial policing; and the transformation of East Africa into what was almost a province of India through the construction of the Uganda railway. He concludes with a look at the decline of this Indian Ocean system after 1920 and considers how far India's participation in it opened opportunities for Indians to be a colonizing as well as a colonized people.

Подробнее

During global capitalism&#39;s&#160;long ascent from 1600&ndash;1850, workers of all kinds&mdash;slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors&mdash;repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. <I>A&#160;</I><I>G</I><I>l</I><I>oba</I><I>l&#160;</I><I>H</I><I>ist</I><I>o</I><I>ry&#160;</I><I>o</I><I>f</I><I> Runaways</I>, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order&mdash;from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.<BR /> &#160;

Подробнее

&quot;For anyone who wants to learn about the rise and decline of Potos&iacute; as a city . . . Lane&rsquo;s book is the ideal place to begin.&quot;&mdash;The New York Review of Books In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world&#39;s greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or &quot;Rich Hill&quot; and the Imperial Villa of Potos&iacute; instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world&#39;s silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. &#160;Potos&iacute; is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city&rsquo;s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potos&iacute;&rsquo;s startling emergence in the 16th century to its collapse in the 19th. Throughout, Kris Lane&rsquo;s invigorating narrative offers rare details of this thriving city and its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potos&iacute; reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust.

Подробнее

Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies.&#160;<I>A Global History of Gold Rushes</I>&#160;brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world.

Подробнее

Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British, and American counterparts and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified &ldquo;Others&rdquo; became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field,&#160;<I>A Global&#160;History of Sexual Science&#160;</I>contends that actors outside of Europe&mdash;in Asia, Latin America, and Africa&mdash;became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Twenty scholars tackle specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.

Подробнее

The New World History is a comprehensive volume of essays selected to enrich world history teaching and scholarship in this rapidly expanding field. The forty-four articles in this book take stock of the history, evolving literature, and current trajectories of new world history. These essays, together with the editors&rsquo; introductions to thematic chapters, encourage educators and students to reflect critically on the development of the field and to explore concepts, approaches, and insights valuable to their own work. The selections are organized in ten chapters that survey the history of the movement, the seminal ideas of founding thinkers and today&rsquo;s practitioners, changing concepts of world historical space and time, comparative methods, environmental history, the &ldquo;big history&rdquo; movement, globalization, debates over the meaning of Western power, and ongoing questions about the intellectual premises and assumptions that have shaped the field.

Подробнее

What is the relationship between trafficking and free trade? Is trafficking the perfection or the perversion of free trade? Trafficking occurs thousands of times each day at borders throughout the world, yet we have come to perceive it as something quite extraordinary. How did this happen, and what role does trafficking play in capitalism? To answer these questions, Johan Mathew traces the hidden networks that operated across the Arabian Sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the entangled history of trafficking and capitalism, he explores how the Arabian Sea reveals the gaps that haunt political borders and undermine economic models. Ultimately, he shows how capitalism was forged at the margins of the free market, where governments intervened, and traffickers turned a profit.

Подробнее