The purpose of this book is to describe the problems posed in the formulation of international rules for bays at the present time, to investigate the history of the several interests that have influenced the development of such rules, to trace the efforts that have been made to codify the rules, and to suggest a further refinement of the rules. This book seeks to combine the fruits of the writer's experience as a navigator with those of his studies in international law, geography, history ...

"Readers cannot but be provoked and stimulated by this splendidly iconoclastic and refreshing book."—Andrew Porter, New York Times Book ReviewThe Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes's acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultur...

A panoramic global history of the nineteenth centuryA monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudi...

Based on Shelagh Grant’s groundbreaking archival research and drawing on her reputation as a leading historian in the field, Polar Imperative is a compelling overview of the historical claims of sovereignty over this continent’s polar regions. This engaging, timely history examines:the unfolding implications of major climate changesthe impact of resource exploitation on the indigenous peoplesthe current high-stakes game for c...

Settlements of the Doomed is part of the Pocket History series - a conveniently portable, stylishly packaged and eminently collectible set of twelve books that each open a window onto a selection of remarkable stories, characters and themes from the past. History they say is written by the winners. We read about the first settlers arriving in Sydney Cove with modern icon the Opera House in our minds. But the world is scattered with the remnants of other, forgotten settlements. Her...

A highly original history, tracing the least understood and most intractable form of organized human aggression from Ancient Rome through the centuries to the present day.We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and what it isn't, have a long and contested history, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to debates in early modern Europe to our present day. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war "civi...

A thought-provoking and important book that raises essential issues crucial not only for understanding our past but also the present day.In this panoramic history, Jeremy Black tells how slavery was first developed in the ancient world, and reaches all the way to the present in the form of contemporary crimes such as trafficking and bonded labour. He shows how slavery has taken many forms throughout history and across the world - from the uprising of Spartacus, the plantations of t...

The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offe...

From the eighteenth century until the 1950s the British Empire was the biggest political entity in the world. The territories forming this empire ranged from tiny islands to vast segments of the world's major continental land masses. The British Empire left its mark on the world in a multitude of ways, many of them permanent. In this Very Short Introduction, Ashley Jackson introduces and defines the British Empire, reviewing its historiography by answering a series of key question...

Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space.Navigating familiar...

Updated and expanded throughout with new illustrations and new material, this is the long- awaited second edition of a highly acclaimed and interdisciplinary book which quickly established itself as a seminal text in its field.

Asia, the Pacific Islands and the coasts of the Americas have long been studied separately. This essential single-volume history of the Pacific traces the global interactions and remarkable peoples that have connected these regions with each other and with Europe and the Indian Ocean, for millennia. From ancient canoe navigators, monumental civilisations, pirates and seaborne empires, to the rise of nuclear testing and global warming, Matt Matsuda ranges across the frontiers of colonial hi...