Download or read book The Age of Gunpowder Empires 1450 1800 written by William Hardy McNeill and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Islamic Gunpowder Empires written by Douglas E. Streusand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islamic Gunpowder Empires provides readers with a history of Islamic civilization in the early modern world through a comparative examination of Islam's three greatest empires: the Ottomans (centered in what is now Turkey), the Safavids (in modern Iran), and the Mughals (ruling the Indian subcontinent). Author Douglas Streusand explains the origins of the three empires; compares the ideological, institutional, military, and economic contributors to their success; and analyzes the causes of their rise, expansion, and ultimate transformation and decline. Streusand depicts the three empires as a part of an integrated international system extending from the Atlantic to the Straits of Malacca, emphasizing both the connections and the conflicts within that system. He presents the empires as complex polities in which Islam is one political and cultural component among many. The treatment of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires incorporates contemporary scholarship, dispels common misconceptions, and provides an excellent platform for further study.
Download or read book The Gunpowder Age written by Tonio Andrade and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global history The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind? Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons helped Europeans establish global hegemony. Yet the inhabitants of what is today China not only invented guns and bombs but also, as Andrade shows, continued to innovate in gunpowder technology through the early 1700s—much longer than previously thought. Why, then, did China become so vulnerable? Andrade argues that one significant reason is that it was out of practice fighting wars, having enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace, since 1760. Indeed, he demonstrates that China—like Europe—was a powerful military innovator, particularly during times of great warfare, such as the violent century starting after the Opium War, when the Chinese once again quickly modernized their forces. Today, China is simply returning to its old position as one of the world's great military powers. By showing that China’s military dynamism was deeper, longer lasting, and more quickly recovered than previously understood, The Gunpowder Age challenges long-standing explanations of the so-called Great Divergence between the West and Asia.
Download or read book Islamic European Expansion written by Michael Adas and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays makes available the essential background information and methods for effective teaching and writing on cross-cultural history. The contributors--some of the most distinguished writers of global and comparative history--chart the advances in understanding in their fields of concentration, revealing both specific findings and broad patterns that have emerged. The cover image, "The Arrival of the Dutch at Patane," from Theodore de Bry, India Orientals, Part VIII (Frankfurt: W. Richteri, 1607) depicts the two key phases of global history that are covered by the essays. Muslim inhabitants of the town of Patane on the Malayan peninsula warily confront a Dutch landing party whose bearing suggests that it is engaged in yet another episode in the saga of European overseas exploration and discovery. The presence of the Muslims in Malaya reflects an earlier process of expansion that saw Islamic civilization spread from Spain and Morocco in the west to the Philippines in the east in the millennium between the 7th and 17th centuries. The Dutch came by sea to an area on the coastal and island fringes of Asia, the one zone where their warships gave them a decisive edge in this era. The citizens of Patane had good reason to distrust the European intruders, since the Portuguese who had preceded the Dutch had used force whenever possible to control the formerly peaceful trade in the region and often to persecute Muslim Peoples. Author note: Michael Adas is Abraham Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is currently editor of the American Historical Association's series on Global and Comparative History and co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series on "Studies in Comparative World History." He has published numerous articles and books, including most recently (with Peter Stearns and Stuart Schwartz) World Civilization: The Global Experience (1992) and Turbulent Passage: A Global History of the Twentieth Century (1993).
Download or read book Turkish Letters written by Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The observations of a 16th-century Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople.
Download or read book Rivers of the Sultan written by Faisal H. Husain and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rivers of the Sultan offers a history of the Ottoman Empire's management of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the early modern period. During the early sixteenth century, a radical political realignment in West Asia placed the reins of the Tigris and Euphrates in the hands of Istanbul. The political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia allowed the Ottoman state to rebalance the natural resource disparity along its eastern frontier. It regularly organized the shipment of grain, metal, and timber from upstream areas of surplus in Anatolia and the Jazira to downstream areas of need in Iraq. This imperial system of waterborne communication, the book argues, created heavily militarized fortresses that anchored the Ottoman presence in Iraq, enabling Istanbul to hold in check foreign and domestic challenges to its authority and to exploit the organic wealth of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium. From the end of the seventeenth century, the convergence of natural and human disasters transformed the Ottoman Empire's relationship with its twin rivers. A trend toward provincial autonomy ensued that would localize the Ottoman management of the Tigris and Euphrates and shift its command post from Istanbul to the provinces. By placing a river system at the center of analysis, this book reveals intimate bonds between valley and mountain, water and power in the early modern world"--
Download or read book Waging War written by Wayne E. Lee and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History provides a wide-ranging examination of war in human history, from the beginning of the species until the current rise of the so-called Islamic State. Although it covers many societies throughout time, the book does not attempt to tell all stories from all places, nor does it try to narrate "important" conflicts. Instead, author Wayne E. Lee describes the emergence of military innovations and systems, examining how they were created and then how they moved or affected other societies. These innovations are central to most historical narratives, including the development of social complexity, the rise of the state, the role of the steppe horseman, the spread of gunpowder, the rise of the west, the bureaucratization of military institutions, the industrial revolution and the rise of firepower, strategic bombing and nuclear weapons, and the creation of "people's war."
Download or read book Empires and Colonies written by Jonathan Hart and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-06 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empires and Colonies provides a thoroughgoing and lively exploration of the expansion of the seaborne empires of western Europe from the fifteenth century and how that process of expansion affected the world, including its successor, the United States. Whilst providing special attention to Europe, the book is careful to highlight the ambivalence and contradiction of that expansion. The book also illuminates connections between empires and colonies as a theme in history, concentrating on culture while also discussing the rich social, economic and political dimensions of the story. Furthermore, Empires and Colonies recognizes that whilst a study of the expansion of Europe is an important part of world history, it is not a history of the world per se. The focus on culture is used to assert that areas and peoples that lack great economic power at any given time also deserve attention. These alternative voices of slaves, indigenous peoples and critics of empire and colonization are an important and compelling element of the book. Empires and Colonies will be essential reading not only for students of imperial history, but also for anyone interested in the makings of our modern world.
Download or read book Understanding Business Markets written by Vivek Suneja and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-25 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do markets work? This reader introduces the student to the workings of the market, explaining both the reasons for its success and its shortcomings. Throughout, the text encourages a critical approach demonstrating the diversity of market economies. In particular it explores: the social nature of market economies the range of approaches to the study of the market: Marxist, Austrian, Keynesian and institutional economics are discussed as alternatives to the neo-classical mainstream the differences between Anglo-American, European and Asian economic models the historical development of markets globalisation: its extent and its impact the costs and the benefits of markets With chapters by Will Hutton, John Gray and Eric Hobsbawm, this reader provides an excellent introduction.
Download or read book Understanding Business written by Vivek Suneja and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do markets work? This reader introduces the student to the workings of the market, explaining both the reasons for its success and its shortcomings. Throughout, the text encourages a critical approach demonstrating the diversity of market economies. In particular it explores: the social nature of market economies the range of approaches to the study of the market: Marxist, Austrian, Keynesian and institutional economics are discussed as alternatives to the neo-classical mainstream the differences between Anglo-American, European and Asian economic models the historical development of markets globalisation: its extent and its impact the costs and the benefits of markets With chapters by Will Hutton, John Gray and Eric Hobsbawm, this reader provides an excellent introduction.
Download or read book The Dynamics of Ancient Empires written by Ian Morris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's first known empires took shape in Mesopotamia between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, beginning around 2350 BCE. The next 2,500 years witnessed sustained imperial growth, bringing a growing share of humanity under the control of ever-fewer states. Two thousand years ago, just four major powers--the Roman, Parthian, Kushan, and Han empires--ruled perhaps two-thirds of the earth's entire population. Yet despite empires' prominence in the early history of civilization, there have been surprisingly few attempts to study the dynamics of ancient empires in the western Old World comparatively. Such grand comparisons were popular in the eighteenth century, but scholars then had only Greek and Latin literature and the Hebrew Bible as evidence, and necessarily framed the problem in different, more limited, terms. Near Eastern texts, and knowledge of their languages, only appeared in large amounts in the later nineteenth century. Neither Karl Marx nor Max Weber could make much use of this material, and not until the 1920s were there enough archaeological data to make syntheses of early European and west Asian history possible. But one consequence of the increase in empirical knowledge was that twentieth-century scholars generally defined the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of their specialties more narrowly than their Enlightenment predecessors had done, shying away from large questions and cross-cultural comparisons. As a result, Greek and Roman empires have largely been studied in isolation from those of the Near East. This volume is designed to address these deficits and encourage dialogue across disciplinary boundaries by examining the fundamental features of the successive and partly overlapping imperial states that dominated much of the Near East and the Mediterranean in the first millennia BCE and CE. A substantial introductory discussion of recent thought on the mechanisms of imperial state formation prefaces the five newly commissioned case studies of the Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Roman, and Byzantine empires. A final chapter draws on the findings of evolutionary psychology to improve our understanding of ultimate causation in imperial predation and exploitation in a wide range of historical systems from all over the globe. Contributors include John Haldon, Jack Goldstone, Peter Bedford, Josef Wiesehöfer, Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel, and Keith Hopkins, whose essay on Roman political economy was completed just before his death in 2004.
Download or read book A Great War in South India written by Ravi Ahuja and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines documents from the wars between the British colonial power and the South Indian regional power Mysore between 1766 and 1799. It transcribes and makes available for the first time the rich German documentation of a war that was as destructive as the Thirty Years War in Germany.
Download or read book War in the Eighteenth Century World written by Jeremy Black and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-07 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing eighteenth-century warfare in a truly global context, Jeremy Black challenges conventional accounts and offers a reappraisal of debates in Western and Asian history. This concise, up-to-date survey assumes little prior knowledge and provides cutting-edge historical insights into a crucial period of world history.
Download or read book Colonialism written by Lorenzo Veracini and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-12 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonialism: A Global History interprets colonialism as an unequal relationship characterised by displacement and domination, and reveals the ways in which this relationship has been constitutive of global modernity. The volume focuses on colonialism’s dynamism, adaptability, and resilience. It appraises a number of successive global colonial ‘waves’, each constituting a specific form of colonial domination, each different from the previous ones, each affecting different locales at different times, and each characterised by a particular method of exploiting colonised populations and territories. Outlining a succession of distinct colonising conjunctures, and the ways in which they ‘washed over’ what is today understood as the ‘Global South’, shaping and reshaping institutions and prompting diverse responses from colonised communities, Colonialism: A Global History also outlines the contemporary relevance of this unequal relation. Overall, it provides an original definition of colonialism and tells the global history of this mode of domination’s evolution and reach. The broad chronological and geographical scope makes this volume the ideal resource for all students and scholars interested in globalisation, colonialism, and empire.
Download or read book China s Last Empire written by William T. Rowe and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. The Great Qing was the second major Chinese empire ruled by foreigners. Three strong Manchu emperors worked diligently to secure an alliance with the conquered Ming gentry, though many of their social edicts—especially the requirement that ethnic Han men wear queues—were fiercely resisted. As advocates of a “universal” empire, Qing rulers also achieved an enormous expansion of the Chinese realm over the course of three centuries, including the conquest and incorporation of Turkic and Tibetan peoples in the west, vast migration into the southwest, and the colonization of Taiwan. Despite this geographic range and the accompanying social and economic complexity, the Qing ideal of “small government” worked well when outside threats were minimal. But the nineteenth-century Opium Wars forced China to become a player in a predatory international contest involving Western powers, while the devastating uprisings of the Taiping and Boxer rebellions signaled an urgent need for internal reform. Comprehensive state-mandated changes during the early twentieth century were not enough to hold back the nationalist tide of 1911, but they provided a new foundation for the Republican and Communist states that would follow. This original, thought-provoking history of China’s last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.
Download or read book A Most Damnable Invention written by Stephen R. Bown and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel's discovery of dynamite made possible the famous industrial megaprojects that transformed the countryside and defined the era, including the St. Gothard rail tunnel through the Alps, the clearing of New York harbor, the Panama Canal, and countless others. Dynamite also caused terrible injuries and great loss of life, and, in some cases, incalculable and irreparable environmental damage. Nobel was one of the richest men in a society rapidly transforming under the power of his invention, but with a troubled conscience, he left his estate to the establishment of the world-famous prizes that bear his name. As the use of explosives soared and growing populations consumed more food, nations scrambled for the scarce yet vital organic ingredient needed for both. The quest for nitrates takes us from the rural stables and privies of preindustrial Europe to the monopoly trading plantations in India and to the Atacama Desert in South America. Nitrates were as valuable in the nineteenth century as oil is in the twenty-first and were the cause of similar international jockeying and power politics. The "nitrogen problem" of creating inorganic nitrates was solved by an enigmatic German scientist named Fritz Haber. His breakthrough not only prolonged the First World War but became the foundation of the green revolution and the tripling of world population since then. Haber is also known as the "father of gas warfare" for his work on poison gas. When he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry, it sparked international outrage and condemnation. A Most Damnable Invention is a human tale of scientific obsession, shadowy immorality, and historical irony, and a testament to the capacity for human ingenuity during times of war.
Download or read book The Emergence of the Gulf States written by John Peterson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 The Emergence of the Gulf States covers the history of the Gulf from the 18th century to the late 20th century. Employing a broad perspective, the volume brings together experts in the field to consider the region's political, economic and social development. The contributions address key themes including the impact of early history, religious movements, social structures, identity and language, imperialism, 20th-century economic transformation and relations with the wider Indian Ocean and Arab world. The work as a whole provides a new interpretive approach based on new research coupled with extensive reviews of the relevant literature. It offers a valuable contribution to the knowledge of the area and sets a new standard for the future scholarship and understanding of this vital region.
