Download or read book The Elusive Empire written by Matthew P. Romaniello and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1552, Muscovite Russia conquered the city of Kazan on the Volga River. It was the first Orthodox Christian victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, a turning point that, over the next four years, would complete Moscow’s control over the river. This conquest provided a direct trade route with the Middle East and would transform Muscovy into a global power. As Matthew Romaniello shows, however, learning to manage the conquered lands and peoples would take decades. Russia did not succeed in empire-building because of its strength, leadership, or even the weakness of its neighbors, Romaniello contends; it succeeded by managing its failures. Faced with the difficulty of assimilating culturally and religiously alien peoples across thousands of miles, the Russian state was forced to compromise in ways that, for a time, permitted local elites of diverse backgrounds to share in governance and to preserve a measure of autonomy. Conscious manipulation of political and religious language proved more vital than sheer military might. For early modern Russia, empire was still elusive—an aspiration to political, economic, and military control challenged by continuing resistance, mismanagement, and tenuous influence over vast expanses of territory.
Download or read book The Elusive Empire written by Matthew P. Romaniello and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire 1713 1763 written by Paul W. Mapp and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A truly continental history in both its geographic and political scope, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 investigates eighteenth-century diplomacy involving North America and links geographic ignorance about the American West to Europeans' grand geopolitical designs. Breaking from scholars' traditional focus on the Atlantic world, Paul W. Mapp demonstrates the centrality of hitherto understudied western regions to early American history and shows that a Pacific focus is crucial to understanding the causes, course, and consequences of the Seven Years' War.
Download or read book Elusive Empires written by Eric Hinderaker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-10-13 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating story that offers a striking interpretation of the origins, progress, and effects of the American Revolution.
Download or read book Adventurism and Empire written by David Narrett and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this expansive book, David Narrett shows how the United States emerged as a successor empire to Great Britain through rivalry with Spain in the Mississippi Valley and Gulf Coast. As he traces currents of peace and war over four critical decades--from the close of the Seven Years War through the Louisiana Purchase--Narrett sheds new light on individual colonial adventurers and schemers who shaped history through cross-border trade, settlement projects involving slave and free labor, and military incursions aimed at Spanish and Indian territories. Narrett examines the clash of empires and nationalities from diverse perspectives. He weighs the challenges facing Native Americans along with the competition between Spanish, French, British, and U.S. interests. In a turbulent era, the Louisiana and Florida borderlands were shaken by tremors from the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution. By demonstrating pervasive intrigue and subterfuge in borderland rivalries, Narrett shows that U.S. Manifest Destiny was not a linear or inevitable progression. He offers a fresh interpretation of how events in the Louisiana and Florida borderlands altered the North American balance of power, and affected the history of the Atlantic world.
Download or read book In Search of Empire written by James Pritchard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-22 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elusive Empire is the first full account of how during 1670 and 1730 French settlers came to the Americas. It examines how they and thousands of African slaves together with Amerindians constructed settlements and produced and traded commodities for export. Bringing together much new evidence, the author explores how the newly constructed societies and new economies, without precedent in France, interacted with the growing international violence in the Atlantic world in order to present a fresh perspective of the multifarious French colonizing experience in the Americas.
Download or read book Selling Empire written by Jonathan Eacott and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2017 Bentley Book Prize, World History Association Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrellas to cottons--to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire. Eacott recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.
Download or read book Britain s Elusive Empire in the Middle East 1900 1921 written by William J. Olson and published by Scholarly Title. This book was released on 1982 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Veiled Empire written by Douglas T. Northrop and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-08 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women—precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.
Download or read book Universal Empire written by Peter Fibiger Bang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The claim by certain rulers to universal empire has a long history stretching as far back as the Assyrian and Achaemenid Empires. This book traces its various manifestations in classical antiquity, the Islamic world, Asia and Central America as well as considering seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European discussions of international order. As such it is an exercise in comparative world history combining a multiplicity of approaches, from ancient history, to literary and philosophical studies, to the history of art and international relations and historical sociology. The notion of universal, imperial rule is presented as an elusive and much coveted prize among monarchs in history, around which developed forms of kingship and political culture. Different facets of the phenomenon are explored under three, broadly conceived, headings: symbolism, ceremony and diplomatic relations; universal or cosmopolitan literary high-cultures; and, finally, the inclination to present universal imperial rule as an expression of cosmic order.
Download or read book The Glory of the Empire written by Jean D'Ormesson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Glory of the Empire is the rich and absorbing history of an extraordinary empire, at one point a rival to Rome. Rulers such as Basil the Great of Onessa, who founded the Empire but whose treacherous ways made him a byword for infamy, and the romantic Alexis the bastard, who dallied in the fleshpots of Egypt, studied Taoism and Buddhism, returned to save the Empire from civil war, and then retired “to learn to die,” come alive in The Glory of the Empire, along with generals, politicians, prophets, scoundrels, and others. Jean d’Ormesson also goes into the daily life of the Empire, its popular customs, and its contribution to the arts and the sciences, which, as he demonstrates, exercised an influence on the world as a whole, from the East to the West, and whose repercussions are still felt today. But it is all fiction, a thought experiment worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, and in the end The Glory of the Empire emerges as a great shimmering mirage, filling us with wonder even as it makes us wonder at the fugitive nature of power and the meaning of history itself.
Download or read book Ukraine and the Empire of Capital written by Yuliya Yurchenko and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious analysis of contemporary Ukrainian political economy.
Download or read book Empire written by Nicholas Blechman and published by Springer Science & Business. This book was released on 2004-02 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At a time of global crisis, EMPIRE rallies a coalition of artists, designers, writers, and photographers to protest the mysterious, all-powerful phenomenon that dominates our civilization."--
Download or read book Empire of Words written by John Willinsky and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994-10-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the meaning of a word? Most readers turn to the dictionary for authoritative meanings and correct usage. But what is the source of authority in dictionaries? Some dictionaries employ panels of experts to fix meaning and prescribe usage, others rely on derivation through etymology. But perhaps no other dictionary has done more to standardize the English language than the formidable twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary in its 1989 second edition. Yet this most Victorian of modern dictionaries derives its meaning by citing the earliest known usage of words and by demonstrating shades of meaning through an awesome database of over five million examples of usage in context. In this fascinating study, John Willinsky challenges the authority of this imperial dictionary, revealing many of its inherent prejudices and questioning the assumptions of its ongoing revision. "Clearly, the OED is no simple record of the language `as she is spoke,'" Willinsky writes. "It is a selective representation reflecting certain elusive ideas about the nature of the English language and people. Empire of Words reveals, by statistic and table, incident and anecdote, how serendipitous, judgmental, and telling a task editing a dictionary such as the OED can be." Willinsky analyzes the favored citation records from the three editorial periods of the OED's compilation: the Victorian, imperial first edition; the modern supplement; and the contemporary second edition composed on an electronic database. He reveals shifts in linguistic authority: the original edition relied on English literature and, surprisingly, on translations, reference works, and journalism; the modern editions have shifted emphasis to American sources and periodicals while continuing to neglect women, workers, and other English-speaking countries. Willinsky's dissection of dictionary entries exposes contradictions and ambiguities in the move from citation to definition. He points out that Shakespeare, the most frequently cited authority in the OED, often confounds the dictionary's simple sense of meaning with his wit and artfulness. He shows us how the most famous four-letter words in the language found their way through a belabored editorial process, sweating and grunting, into the supplement to the OED. Willinsky sheds considerable light on how the OED continues to shape the English language through the sometimes idiosyncratic, often biased selection of citations by hired readers and impassioned friends of the language. Anyone who is fascinated with words and language will find Willinsky's tour through the OED a delightful and stimulating experience. No one who reads this book will ever feel quite the same about Murray's web of words.
Download or read book A Perfect Red written by Amy Butler Greenfield and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Perfect Red recounts the colorful history of cochineal, a legendary red dye that was once one of the world's most precious commodities. Treasured by the ancient Mexicans, cochineal was sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519. Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune. Desperate to find their own sources of the elusive dye, the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans tried to crack the enigma of cochineal. Did it come from a worm, a berry, a seed? Could it be stolen from Mexico and transplanted to their own colonies? Pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies -- all joined the chase for cochineal, a chase that lasted more than three centuries. A Perfect Red tells their stories -- true-life tales of mystery, empire, and adventure, in pursuit of the most desirable color on earth.
Download or read book The Russian Empire 1450 1801 written by Nancy Shields Kollmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia's imperial past has shaped modern Russian identity and historical experience. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys the empire's emergence and governance, exploring how the state maintained control of defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources, while tolerating local religions, languages, cultures, and institutions.
Download or read book Empire of Refugees written by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
