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Books > Humanities > History > World history > General
Growing up in Sussex during the turbulent 17th century, John became
involved in the illegal 'owling' trade, where he learnt his
seamanship. Whilst carousing in a Rye inn he was unexpectedly
pressed into the Royal Navy. In 1694, disgruntled with the
ill-fated Spanish Expedition, he joined 'Long Ben' Every's mutiny
setting sail as his coxswain to the Indian Ocean in the Fancy, a
ship of 46 guns,...'and bound to seek our fortunes' as they
declared. It made Henry Every the richest pirate in the world, and
was said, the most profitable raid in history. A popular ballad of
the time proclaimed: "Here's to gentlemen at sea tonight, and a
toast to all free men And when the devil comes to take us home,
he'll drink With old Long Ben!" After the hue and cry, the slippery
Every changed his name and disappeared. On returning to England
John was caught and lost his fortune. Escaping the hangman, he
emerges later as a respectable partner to John Coggs a London
goldsmith banker, trading from the sign of the Kings Head in the
Strand. Unfortunately he became disastrously embroiled in a massive
bankruptcy fraud that shook the city.
WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2022 'Exhilaratingly
whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously
engaging writer, juggling humour, precision, polemic and poetry to
enrich his impossibly telescoped account . . . [making] clear sense
out of very complex narratives' - The Times 'Henry Gee makes the
kaleidoscopically changing canvas of life understandable and
exciting. Who will enjoy reading this book? - Everybody!' Jared
Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel For billions of years,
Earth was an inhospitably alien place - covered with churning seas,
slowly crafting its landscape by way of incessant volcanic
eruptions, the atmosphere in a constant state of chemical flux. And
yet, despite facing literally every conceivable setback that living
organisms could encounter, life has been extinguished and picked
itself up to evolve again. Life has learned and adapted and
continued through the billions of years that followed. It has
weathered fire and ice. Slimes begat sponges, who through billions
of years of complex evolution and adaptation grew a backbone,
braved the unknown of pitiless shores, and sought an existence
beyond the sea. From that first foray to the spread of early
hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted,
undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story
of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance
within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today.
It is our planet like you've never seen it before. Life teems
through Henry Gee's words - colossal supercontinents drift,
collide, and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know
it today. Creatures are engagingly personified, from 'gregarious'
bacteria populating the seas to duelling dinosaurs in the Triassic
period to magnificent mammals with the future in their (newly
evolved) grasp. Those long extinct, almost alien early life forms
are resurrected in evocative detail. Life's evolutionary steps -
from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures
taking to the skies in flight - are conveyed with an alluring,
up-close intimacy.
A work of extraordinary range and striking originality, The Gun,
the Ship, and the Pen traces the global history of written
constitutions from the 1750s to the twentieth century, modifying
accepted narratives and uncovering the close connections between
the making of constitutions and the making of war. In the process,
Linda Colley both reappraises famous constitutions and recovers
those that have been marginalized but were central to the rise of a
modern world. She brings to the fore neglected sites, such as
Corsica, with its pioneering constitution of 1755, and tiny
Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, the first place on the globe
permanently to enfranchise women. She highlights the role of
unexpected players, such as Catherine the Great of Russia, who was
experimenting with constitutional techniques with her enlightened
Nakaz decades before the Founding Fathers framed the American
constitution. Written constitutions are usually examined in
relation to individual states, but Colley focuses on how they
crossed boundaries, spreading into six continents by 1918 and
aiding the rise of empires as well as nations. She also illumines
their place not simply in law and politics but also in wider
cultural histories, and their intimate connections with print,
literary creativity, and the rise of the novel. Colley shows
how-while advancing epic revolutions and enfranchising white
males-constitutions frequently served over the long nineteenth
century to marginalize indigenous people, exclude women and people
of color, and expropriate land. Simultaneously, though, she
investigates how these devices were adapted by peoples and
activists outside the West seeking to resist European and American
power. She describes how Tunisia generated the first modern Islamic
constitution in 1861, quickly suppressed, but an influence still on
the Arab Spring; how Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone-inspired by
the American Civil War-devised plans for self-governing nations in
West Africa; and how Japan's Meiji constitution of 1889 came to
compete with Western constitutionalism as a model for Indian,
Chinese, and Ottoman nationalists and reformers. Vividly written
and handsomely illustrated, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen is an
absorbing work that-with its pageant of formative wars, powerful
leaders, visionary lawmakers and committed rebels-retells the story
of constitutional government and the evolution of ideas of what it
means to be modern.
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