Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London.

    The books tell the story of the dazzling Norman kingdom of Sicily founded in the 11th century by an enterprising band of adventurers from Normandy under Robert Guiscard. The state they founded was outstanding in medieval civilization.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    'War From The Ground Up' offers a distinctive perspective in its consideration of the concept of contemporary warfare.

    Yet, in the Sino-Dutch War--Europe's first war with China--the Dutch met their match in a colorful Chinese warlord named Koxinga. Part samurai, part pirate, he led his generals to victory over the Dutch and captured one of their largest and richest colonies--Taiwan. How did he do it? Examining the strengths and weaknesses of European and Chinese military techniques during the period, Lost Colony provides a balanced new perspective on long-held assumptions about Western power, Chinese might, and the nature of war.It has traditionally been asserted that Europeans of the era possessed more advanced science, technology, and political structures than their Eastern counterparts, but historians have recently contested this view, arguing that many parts of Asia developed on pace with Europe until 1800. While Lost Colony shows that the Dutch did indeed possess a technological edge thanks to the Renaissance fort and the broadside sailing ship, that edge was neutralized by the formidable Chinese military leadership. Thanks to a rich heritage of ancient war wisdom, Koxinga and his generals outfoxed the Dutch at every turn.Exploring a period when the military balance between Europe and China was closer than at any other point in modern history, Lost Colony reassesses an important chapter in world history and offers valuable and surprising lessons for contemporary times.-- "Library Journal"

    Scipio Africanus, surely the greatest general that Rome produced, suffered both these fates. Today scholars celebrate the importance of Hannibal, even though Scipio defeated the legendary general in the Second Punic War and was the central military figure of his time. In this scholarly and heretofore unmatched military biography of the distinguished Roman soldier, Richard A. Gabriel establishes Scipio’s rightful place in military history as the greater of the two generals.  Before Scipio, few Romans would have dreamed of empire, and Scipio himself would have regarded such an ambition as a danger to his beloved republic. And yet, paradoxically, Scipio’s victories in Spain and Africa enabled Rome to consolidate its hold over Italy and become the dominant power in the western Mediterranean, virtually ensuring a later confrontation with the Greco-Macedonian kingdoms to the east as well as the empire’s expansion into North Africa and the Levant. The Roman imperium was being born, and it was Scipio who had sired it. Gabriel draws upon ancient texts, including those from Livy, Polybius, Diodorus, Silius Italicus, and others, as primary sources and examines all additional material available to the modern scholar in French, German, English, and Italian. His book offers a complete bibliography of all extant sources regarding Scipio’s life. The result is a rich, detailed, and contextual treatment of the life and career of Scipio Africanus, one of Rome’s greatest generals, if not the greatest of them all.

    Bennison contradicts the common assumption that Islam somehow interrupted the smooth flow of Western civilization from its Graeco-Roman origins to its more recent European and American manifestations. Instead, she places Islamic civilization in the longer trajectory of Mediterranean civilizations and sees the ‘Abbasid Empire (750–1258 CE) as the inheritor and interpreter of Graeco-Roman traditions.At its zenith the ‘Abbasid caliphate stretched over the entire Middle East and part of North Africa, and influenced Islamic regimes as far west as Spain. Bennison’s examination of the politics, society, and culture of the ‘Abbasid period presents a picture of a society that nurtured many of the “civilized” values that Western civilization claims to represent, albeit in different premodern forms: from urban planning and international trade networks to religious pluralism and academic research. Bennison’s argument counters the common Western view of Muslim culture as alien and offers a new perspective on the relationship between Western and Islamic cultures.

    Its brief rule ended in 'Bloody Week' - the brutal massacre of as many as 15,000 Parisians, and perhaps even more, who perished at the hands of the provisional government's forces. By then, the city's boulevards had been torched and its monuments toppled. More than 40,000 Parisians were investigated, imprisoned or forced into exile - a purging of Parisian society by a conservative national government whose supporters were considerably more horrified by a pile of rubble than the many deaths of the resisters.In this gripping narrative, John Merriman explores the radical and revolutionary roots of the Commune, painting vivid portraits of the Communards - the ordinary workers, famous artists and extraordinary fire-starting women - and their daily lives behind the barricades, and examining the ramifications of the Commune on the role of the state and sovereignty in France and modern Europe. Enthralling, evocative and deeply moving, this narrative account offers a full picture of a defining moment in the evolution of state terror and popular resistance.

    2353Taught by Elizabeth VandiverWhitman CollegePh.D., The University of Texas at Austin

    We habitually think of the European past as the history of countries which exist today - France, Germany, Britain, Russia and so on - but often this actually obstructs our view of the past, and blunts our sensitivity to the ever-changing political landscape. Europe's history is littered with kingdoms, duchies, empires and republics which have now disappeared but which were once fixtures on the map of their age - 'the Empire of Aragon' which once dominated the western Mediterranean; the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for a time the largest country in Europe; the successive kingdoms (and one duchy) of Prussia, much of whose history is now half-remembered at best. This book shows the reader how to peer through the cracks of mainstream history writing and listen to the echoes of lost realms across the centuries.

    Fingarette-who thinks the best way to discover Confucius's teaching is by taking him at his word-uses original text as his principal resource in an effort to try to see what it says, what it implies and what it does not say or need not imply.

    A historian and journalist who was one of the earliest and staunchest Afrikaner opponents of apartheid, Hermann Giliomee weaves together life stories and historical interpretation to create a narrative history of the Afrikaners from their beginnings with the colonization of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company to the dismantling of apartheid and beyond. The Afrikaners emphasizes the crucial role played by historical actors without underplaying the impact of social forces over which they had little control. Throughout their history, Giliomee's Afrikaners are both colonizers and colonized. Actual or virtual servants of the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch "burghers" nonetheless owned slaves and commanded servant labor. The British conquests of 1795 and 1806 extended the rights of British subjects to Afrikaners, even as they took away the Afrikaners' political autonomy and confirmed an economic and cultural subordination that was only partly alleviated by their dominance of South African politics in the latter part of the twentieth century.Demographically squeezed between far more numerous Africans (and other nonwhite groups) and their more affluent and culturally confident English compatriots, the Afrikaners forged a language-based national identity in which die-hard defense of privilege and opposition to various forms of British domination are inextricably intertwined with fears about cultural and even physical group survival. This nationalism underlay the Great Trek, in which Afrikaners opposed the abolition of slavery and legalized racial discrimination by the British; the irony of their becoming the twentieth century's first fighters against imperial domination in the Boer War; and the Afrikaners' rise to political dominance over their English rivals and nonwhite South Africans alike, even as they remained economically and culturally subordinate to the former. This same language-based nationalism spawned the blunders and horrors of apartheid, but it also led the Afrikaners to relinquish power peacefully when this seemed the safest route to their survival as a people.While documenting--and in important ways revising--the history of the Afrikaners' pursuit of racial domination (as well as British contributions to that enterprise), Giliomee supplies Afrikaners' own, often divided, perspectives on their history, perspectives not always or entirely skewed by their struggle for privilege at Africans' expense. The result is not only a magisterial history of the Afrikaners but a fuller understanding of their history, which, for good or ill, resonates far beyond the borders of South Africa.

    Thomas Asbridge—a renowned historian who writes with “maximum vividness” (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker)—covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this  big, ambitious, readable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history. From Richard the Lionheart to the mighty Saladin, from the emperors of Byzantium to the Knights Templar, Asbridge’s book is a magnificent epic of Holy War between the Christian and Islamic worlds, full of adventure, intrigue, and sweeping grandeur.

    In this reading of history, China and Japan, the kingdoms of India, Muslim caliphates, the Byzantine Empire and European maritime republics alike enjoyed no absolute dominance over their neighbours and commercial partners - and the egalitarian international trading network that they built endured until European advances in weaponry and ship types introduced radical instability to the system.Abu-Lughod's portrait of a more balanced world is a masterpiece of synthesis driven by one highly creative idea: her world system of interlocking spheres of influence quite literally connected masses of evidence together in new ways. A triumph of fine critical thinking.

    The Aryan Model, which is current today, claims that Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers, or "Aryans," of the native "pre-Hellenes." The Ancient Model, which was maintained in Classical Greece, held that the native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that additional Near Eastern culture had been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest Asia. Moving beyond these prevailing models, Bernal proposes a Revised Ancient Model, which suggests that classical civilization in fact had deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures.This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages-Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, confirms the fact that in Greece an Indo-European people was culturally dominated by speakers of Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic.Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.