Series Information:
The History of Civilization

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.

FINANCIAL TIMES BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF 2022 For centuries, Ferdinand Magellan has been celebrated as a hero: a noble adventurer who circumnavigated the globe in an extraordinary feat of human bravery; a paragon of daring and chivalry. Now historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto draws on extensive and meticulous research to conduct a dazzling investigation into Magellan's life, his character and his ill-fated voyage. He reveals that Magellan did not attempt - much less accomplish - a journey around the globe, and that in his own lifetime, the explorer was abhorred as a traitor, reviled as a tyrant and dismissed as a failure. Fernandez-Armesto probes the passions and tensions that drove Magellan to adventure and drew him to disaster: the pride that became arrogance, audacity that became recklessness, determination that became ruthlessness, romanticism that became irresponsibility, and superficial piety that became, in adversity, irrational exaltation. And as the real Magellan emerges, so too do his true ambitions, focused less on circumnavigating the world or cornering the global spice market than on exploiting Filipino gold. Offering up a stranger, darker and even more compelling narrative than the fictional version that has been glorified for half a millennium, Straits untangles the myths that made Magellan a hero.

As the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is prone to sudden, steep waves and dense fogs. These deadly conditions were hazardous to steamers that crossed on busy nineteenth-century trade routes and ships that battled on its surface in the War of 1812. It was the poor visibility of a summer haze that claimed the steamer "Atlantic" and approximately two hundred of its immigrant passengers in 1852. The 1916 Black Friday Storm destroyed four ships, including the "unsinkable" whaleback "James B Colgate," during the twenty-hour tantrum. Tragedies continued well into the twentieth century with the loss of fishing tugs like the "Aletha B," "Richard R" and "Stanley Clipper." A veritable graveyard, Lake Erie's Quadrangle might be responsible for more shipwrecks per square mile than any other region in the world. Author David Frew dives deep to discover the mysteries of some of Lake Erie's most notorious wrecks.

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.

'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 Richard Pococke's Letters from the East (1737-1740), Rachel Finnegan provides edited transcripts of the full run of correspondence from Richard Pococke's famous eastern voyage from 1737-40, together with updated biographical accounts of the author and his correspondents (his mother, Elizabeth Pococke and his uncle and patron, Bishop Thomas Milles).

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.

Marco Polo, Ferdinand Magellan, David Livingstone, Amelia Earhart, Neil Armstrong: these are some of the greatest travellers of all time. This book chronicles their stories and many more, describing epic voyages of discovery from the extraordinary migrations out of Africa by our earliest ancestors to the latest voyages into space. In antiquity, we follow Alexander the Great to the Indus and Hannibal across the Alps; in medieval times we trek beside Genghis Khan and Ibn Battuta. The Renaissance brought Columbus to the Americas and the circumnavigation of the world. The following centuries saw gaps in the global maps filled by Tasman, Bering and Cook, and journeys made for scientific purposes, most famously by von Humboldt and Darwin. In modern times, the last inhospitable ends of the earth were reached - including both poles and the world's highest mountain - and new elements were conquered. With evocative photographs, paintings and portraits, The Great Journeys in History reveals the stories of those who were there first, who explored the unexplored and who set out into the unknown, bringing alive the romance and thrill of travel.

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.