Series Information:
The History of Civilization

Revealing a little-known part of North American history, this lively guide tells the fascinating tale of the settlement of the St. Lawrence Valley. It also tells of the Montreal and Quebec-based explorers and traders who traveled, mapped, and inhabited a very large part of North America, and "embrothered the peoples" they met, as Jack Kerouac wrote.Connecting everyday life to the events that emerged as historical turning points in the life of a people, this book sheds new light on Quebec's 450-year history--and on the historical forces that lie behind its two recent efforts to gain independence.

Rural settlements underlie today's cities and still hold over half the world's population. This text excavates the changing forms and functions of these settlements, exploring their origins, development and their future. Settlement is the physical reflection of the social organization of space. Starting with the human dwelling, settlement aggregates into farmsteads, hamlets, villages, towns and cities. Patterns of development can be traced, contours by which a history of a land and its people can be read.;Illustrated with photographs, maps and figures, the book firstly presents detailed case studies of specific sites in both the developed and developing worlds in order to distill the underlying processes behind rural settlement systems, and then builds on this to analyze settlement patterns on the continental and global scales.

Today's cities grew from the rural settlements still home to over half of the world's population. Excavating the changing forms and functions of these settlements, "Landscapes of Settlement" explores their origins, their social and economic development, and their prospects for the future.
Settlement is the physical reflection of the social organization of space. Starting with the human dwelling, settlements aggregate into farmsteads, hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. Emphasizing their impact on present day society, "Landscapes of" "Settlement" traces the course of rural development, deciphering from these contours the history of the land and its people. Out of detailed case studies in both the developed and developing worlds this book distills the underlying processes behind rural settlement systems, and then builds upon this to analyze settlement patterns on the continental and global scales.

William Balfour Baikie was a surgeon, naturalist, linguist, writer, explorer and government consul who played a key role in opening Africa to the Europeans. As an explorer he mapped and charted large sections of the Niger River system as well as the overland routes from Lagos and Lokoja to the major trading centres of Kano, Timbuctu and Sokoto. As a naturalist, major beneficiaries of his work included Kew Gardens and the British Museum for the rare and undiscovered plant and animal species and yet today he remains largely unknown. On 10th December, 1864 Baikie was on his way back to London and was living in his temporary quarters in Sierra Leone. There he worked to regain his health and to complete the various reports and publications expected by the Colonial and Foreign Offices. He had been away from England for seven years and living conditions in West Africa had caused his health to suffer. While his wife and children waited for his return 600 miles away in Lokoja, the city in Nige-ria he had founded, his father waited for his return to Kirkwall, Orkney. Baikie would never return to his wife, nor ever see his father again. In two days, he would be dead and buried at Sierra Leone before his fortieth birthday. In his short life Baikie became such a hero among the Nigerian people 150 years ago that white visitors to the region today are still greeted warmly as 'Baikie'. After studying at University of Edinburgh he was assigned to the Royal Hospital Haslar where he worked with the noted explorers Sir John Richardson and Sir Edward Perry. Baikie's reputation as a naturalist, and the sphere of influence provided by Richardson and Perry, allowed him to enter the elite British scientific community where he also worked alongside the most famous naturalist of the time, Charles Darwin. During his time at Haslar, Baikie made two voyages exploring the Niger and Benue Rivers to establish trading centres for the Liverpool merchant Macgregor Laird. The first was a resounding success. He conducted the first clinical trial using quinine as a preventative for malaria. For the first time in history, his initial exploration of these rivers was conducted without the loss of a single life to fever. Returning to London to a hero's welcome, he was nominated for one of the Royal Geographic Society's prestigious awards. His second voyage was a pure disaster. His ship was wrecked; members of the expedition died and he was stranded for over a year in the vast remote territory known as the Sokoto Caliphate. Following his rescue, he elected to remain alone in Africa for what would be his final years in order to complete his personal mission. Although he was born 4,000 miles away in Orkney, Baikie was designated the King of Lokoja by the ruler of the Sokoto Caliphate. This book defines the man and his accomplishments and reveals how he is so fondly remembered by the Nigerians and yet apparently so totally forgotten by the rest of the world.

This is an annual collection of studies of individuals who have made major contributions to the development of geography and geographical thought. Subjects are drawn from all periods and from all parts of the world, and include famous names as well as those less well known: explorers, independent thinkers and scholars. Each paper describes the geographer's education, life and work and discusses their influence and spread of academic ideas, and includes a select bibliography and brief chronology. The work includes a general index and a cumulative index of geographers listed in volumes published to date.

Having always been fascinated by these singular landscapes, Sergio Rossi reconstructs some of the episodes that have marked the exploration of these territories, such as the dramatic race between Amundsen and Scott to conquer the South Pole, and Captain Shackleton's odyssey to save his crew from certain death. But also modern trips including his own to these remote areas, explaining many aspects of the current science and political competition that is underway. The book leads us on an entertaining overview of all the problems and opportunities that the planet's most forgotten continent offers to humans. A remote mass of ice upon which our future as a species depends and which we cannot continue to ignore any longer.

'Nature's Government' is a daring attempt to juxtapose the histories of Britain, western science, and imperialism. It shows how colonial expansion, from the age of Alexander the Great to the twentieth century, led to complex kinds of knowledge. Science, and botany in particular, was fed by information culled from the exploration of the globe. At the same time science was useful to imperialism: it guided the exploitation of exotic environments and made conquest seem necessary, legitimate, and beneficial. Drayton traces the history of this idea of 'improvement' from its Christian agrarian origins in the sixteenth century to its inclusion in theories of enlightened despotism. It was as providers of legitimacy, as much as of universal knowledge, aesthetic perfection, and agricultural plenty, he argues, that botanic gardens became instruments of government, first in Continental Europe, and by the late eighteenth century, in Britain and the British Empire. At the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the rise of which throughout the nineteenth century is a central theme of this book, a pioneering scientific institution was added to a spectacular ornamental garden. At Kew, 'improving' the world became a potent argument for both the patronage of science at home and Britain's prerogatives abroad. 'Nature's Government' provides a portrait of how the ambitions of the Enlightenment shaped the great age of British power, and how empire changed the British experience and the modern world. Richard Drayton was born in the Caribbean and educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. A former Fellow of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, and Lincoln College, Oxford, he has also been Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

In the early sixteenth century, a young English sugar trader spent a night at what is now the port of Agadir in Morocco, watching from the tenuous safety of the Portuguese fort as the local tribesmen attacked the 'Moors'. Having recently departed the familiar environs of London and the Essex marshes, this was to be the first of several encounters Roger Barlow was to have with unfamiliar worlds. Barlow's family were linked to networks where the exchange of goods and ideas merged, and his contacts in Seville brought him into contact with the navigator, Sebastian Cabot. Merchants and Explorers follows Barlow and Cabot across the Atlantic to South America and back to Spain and Reformation England. Heather Dalton uses their lives as an effective narrative thread to explore the entangled Atlantic world during the first half of the sixteenth century. In doing so, she makes a critical contribution to the fields of both Atlantic and global history. Although it is generally accepted that the English were not significantly attracted to the Americas until the second half of the sixteenth century, Dalton demonstrates that Barlow, Cabot, and their cohorts had a knowledge of the world and its opportunities that was extraordinary for this period. She reveals how shared knowledge as well as the accumulation of capital in international trading networks prior to 1560 influenced emerging ideas of trade, 'discovery', settlement, and race in Britain. In doing so, Dalton not only provides a substantial new body of facts about trade and exploration, she explores the changing character of English commerce and society in the first half of the sixteenth century.

The full text of Landor's classic, relating his adventures and misadventures in Tibet. This edition contains all the over 250 original black and white photographs. Complete--includes Volumes I and II and Appendices.

Manifest Destiny, as a term for westward expansion, was not used until the 1840s. Its predecessor was the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal tradition by which Europeans and Americans laid legal claim to the land of the indigenous people that they "discovered." Thus the competition among the United States and European nations to establish claims of who got there first became very important. In the United States, the British colonists who had recently become Americans were competing with the English, French, and Spanish for control of lands west of the Mississippi. Who would be the "discoverers" of the Indians and their lands, the United States or the European countries? We know the answer, of course, but in this book, Miller for the first time explains exactly how the United States achieved victory, not only on the ground, but also in the developing legal thought of the day. The American effort began with Thomas Jefferson's authorization of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, which set out in 1803 to lay claim to the West. Lewis and Clark had several charges, among them the discovery of a Northwest Passage--a land route across the continent--in order to establish an American fur trade with China. In addition, the Corps of Northwestern Discovery, as the expedition was called, cataloged new plant and animal life, and performed detailed ethnographic research on the Indians they encountered. This fascinating book lays out how that ethnographic research became the legal basis for Indian removal practices implemented decades later, explaining how the Doctrine of Discovery became part of American law, as it still is today.

The history of travel has long been constructed and described almost exclusively as a history of "European", male mobility, without, however, explicitly making the gender and whiteness of the travellers a topic. The anthology takes this as an occasion to focus on journeys to Europe that gave "non-Europeans" the opportunity to glance at "Europe" and to draw a picture of it by themselves. So far, little attention has been paid to the questions with which attributes these travellers endowed "Europe" and its people, which similarities and differences they observed and which idea(s) of "Europe" they produced. The focus is once again on "Europe", but not as the starting point for conquests or journeys. From a postcolonial and gender historical view, the anthology's contributions rather juxtapose (self-)representations of "Europe" with perspectives that move in a field of tension between agreement, contradiction and oscillation.

Victorian traveller Mary Kingsley has been portrayed as a victim of 19th-century attitudes towards women, a brave and daring explorer, an anti-imperialist agitator and even a feminist heroine. In this biography, Dea Birkett examines and then confronts all these portraits. Mary Kingsley was neither victim nor rebel, but a late Victorian woman who manipulated the boundaries of her life without ever openly overstepping them. She argued against women's suffrage and for absolute differences between the races. She campaigned to prevent women becoming members of the learned societies in Britain, yet canoed up rapids in West Africa. Africa gave her a new life yet in the end it killed her.