We in the 21st century like to think of our time as the era of globalization. In fact, the birth of that era took place some five hundred years ago--as the author shows in this fascinating, original work of economic history. He traces the roots of globalization to the rapacious pursuit of gold, silver, and copper in the 16th century, when empires were won and lost based on their ability to find, exploit, or control increasingly large volumes of mineral wealth. This book tells the story of how the closely-related states of Portugal, Spain, and the later Dutch Republic were able to check the powerful Ottoman Empire, supersede the great Italian city-states, and overturn centuries of Muslim commercial domination in Africa and Asia. Their phenomenal rise to power was achieved mainly through the exploitation of mineral resources in Central Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Japan. In the process, they created the first multinational corporations, launched scores of boomtowns, and squandered huge amounts of capital. The Europeans also destroyed indigenous societies across the globe through policies of colonial subjugation that still cast a shadow on our contemporary world. This lively narrative includes larger-than-life characters--the epic voyagers Columbus, Da Gama, and Magellan; the great Iberian monarchs and their merchant bankers; and conquistadors like Cortes and Pizarro--as well as obscure entrepreneurs who scoured the globe for precious metals, introduced important new technologies, and made the first European visits to Japan and New York harbor. He documents how the mineral wealth that funded the first global empires was dissipated in a series of never-ending wars in Europe, culminating in a succession of Spanish state bankruptcies, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the rise of the Dutch Republic in the northern half of the Spanish Netherlands. The underestimated Dutch emerged as the world's most powerful trading nation at century's end. It was they who co-opted the Iberian achievements and served as a commercial bridge to the later triumphs of the British Empire and the United States. This engrossing popular history makes many intriguing connections between sources of economic wealth and the rise of empires, showing that the forces of globalization have been five centuries in the making.

Quantifiable citizenship in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for "population" in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred instead in the work of colonial writers who found in the act of counting the "vast numbers" of Indians who held her captive a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. Counting Bodies explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary pre-history of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine and even intimate interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.

This book explores the development of navigation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines the role of men of science, seamen and practitioners across Europe, and the realities of navigational practice, showing that old and new methods were complementary not exclusive, their use dependent on many competing factors.

This study seeks to explain the impact of historical narratives on the inclusiveness and pluralism of citizenship models. Drawing on comparative historical analysis of two post-imperial core countries, Turkey and Austria, it explores how narrative forms operate to support or constrain citizenship models.

Modern perceptions of race across much of the Global South are indebted to the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, who in works such as The Masters and the Slaves claimed that Portuguese colonialism produced exceptionally benign and tolerant race relations. This volume radically reinterprets Freyre's Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world. Encompassing Brazil as well as Portuguese-speaking societies in Africa, Asia, and even Portugal itself, it places an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation to challenge the conventional understanding of twentieth-century racialization, proffering new insights into such controversial topics as human plasticity, racial amalgamation, and the tropes and proxies of whiteness.

Studies of colonialism and empire have increasingly drawn attention to the problem of conceptualizing the political logic of colonial projects and the circumstances of state formation in colonial contexts. However, the nature and workings of the colonial state remains under-theorized and under-analysed. This volume addresses the analytical challenges of the colonial state from a variety of theoretical and thematic angles, and across a range of empirical cases that stretch over a vast span historically and geographically, to provide a new approach to analyzing the colonial state and its governmental practices.

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish. Over the next two decades, these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of global civilization-in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized-within the borders of their supposedly anti-imperial nation-state. As state institutions remained fragile, long-debated questions of who should be included in the nation re-emerged with new urgency, turning Volhynia's mainly Yiddish-speaking towns and Ukrainian-speaking villages into vital testing grounds for competing Polish national visions. By the eve of World War II, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union growing in strength, schemes to ensure the loyalty of Jews and Ukrainians by offering them a conditional place in the nation were replaced by increasingly aggressive calls for Jewish emigration and the assimilation of non-Polish Slavs. Drawing on research in local and national archives across four countries and utilizing a vast range of written and visual sources that bring Volhynia to life, On Civilization's Edge offers a highly intimate story of nation-building from the ground up. We eavesdrop on peasant rumors at the Polish-Soviet border, read ethnographic descriptions of isolated marshlands, and scrutinize staged photographs of everyday life. But the book's central questions transcend the Polish case, inviting us to consider how fears of national weakness and competitions for local power affect the treatment of national minorities, how more inclusive definitions of the nation are themselves based on exclusions, and how the very distinction between empires and nation-states is not always clear-cut.

"Fanonian Practices in South Africa" examines Frantz Fanon's relevance to contemporary South African politics, and by extension, research on postcolonial Africa and the tragic development of postcolonies. Here leading Fanon scholar Nigel C. Gibson offers theoretically informed historical analysis, providing crucial scholarly insights into the circumstances that led to the current hegemony of neoliberalism in South Africa.

The shift to the modern world in East Asia was accomplished in part via the experience of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. Following imperial crisis in the 1930s and 1940s, independent nation states formed from which the political structure of East Asia is based today.

Settler-native conflicts in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and South Africa serve as excellent comparative cases as three areas linked to Britain where insurgencies occurred during roughly the same period. Important factors considered are settler parties, settler mythology, the role of native fighters, settler terror, the role of liberal parties, and the conduct of the war by security forces. Settlers and natives in each area share similar attitudes, liberal parties operate in similar fashions, and there are common explanations for the formation of splinter liberation groups. However, according to Mitchell, the key difference between the cases lies in the behavior of British security forces in comparison to South African and Israeli forces. Mitchell's chapter on liberal parties includes an independent account of the Progressive Federal Party of South Africa, the official parliamentary opposition from 1977 to 1987, along with the first major published account of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland. His study of splinter group formation contains the first major account since 1964 of the Pan-Africanist Party of Azania, including its insurgency campaign in the 1980s and 1990s. Mitchell also contrasts behavior among the Inkatha Party and Labour Party in South Africa with the Social Democrat and Labour Party in Northern Ireland.

When early explorers and settlers arrived in New Zealand, they found the islands already populated by the Polynesian Maori people. This account details the interaction between the Maori leaders and the British Crown from first contact to New Zealand's eventual autonomy. As settlers outnumbered Maori, the struggle for land resulted in war and confiscations, and Maori loss of land and traditional lifestyle was accompanied by widespread ill health. It would be well into the twentieth century before the Crown would have to address promises made to the Maori in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, and the resulting efforts of the Waitangi Tribunal would forever change Maori relations with the Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent). During recent decades, both groups have come to understand the complexity of the situation in New Zealand. The Pakeha have learned Maori sentiments regarding forests, flora, and language; and the Maori have come to realize that today's Pakeha should not be penalized by attempts at redress. The Maori have gradually acquired a larger role in dealing with their own affairs and addressing social inequalities, and recent electoral changes have resulted in a stronger Maori voice in Parliament. While serious tension remains and some Pakeha argue for "one law for all," steps have been taken toward more harmonious relations.

This book brings together the newest and the most innovative scholarship on Nigerian children-one of the least researched groups in African colonial history. It engages the changing conceptions of childhood, relating it to the broader themes about modernity, power, agency, and social transformation under imperial rule.

Describes the life, achievements, rise to power, and influences of the military leader who crowned himself Emperor of the French and established dominance over Europe.

In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business.

William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

This book provides a significant history of Italy's brutal occupation of Libya. Using the lens of the life of the iconic resistance fighter Mohamed Fekini, it tells the story of Libya under Ottoman and Italian rule from the point of view of the colonized. The story begins with the onset of Italian occupation in 1911-12, includes the crucial period of the anti-Italian jihad, from 1921 to 1930, and continues through the postwar creation of a united Libya under King Idris in 1947.

The half century between 1783 and 1833 witnessed the creation of British India. Through his writings, the leading East India Company servant, Sir John Malcolm helped to shape the historical thought of British empire-building in India. Comparing Malcolm with contemporaries such as James Mill, this book uses his works to examine the intellectual history of British expansion in South Asia, shedding light upon the history of orientalism, the origins of indirect rule and the formation of British power in southern and western India. It presents Malcolm as one of the most prolific and influential imperial ideologues of the century before the Indian Uprising of 1857.

The history of Italian colonial affairs has recently attracted renewed interest from historians and economists. It is a complex and involved question. Over the last few years, though perhaps slightly later than the more mature historiography of other European countries, the work of some important scholars has opened up new fields of investigation and research. Recent studies have tried to analyse in greater depth the working mechanisms of the colonial system, broadening the field of investigation also to the perspective of African countries and the political-economic equilibriums of the second half of the 20th century. This study fits into this area of research and analyses crucial aspects of the decolonisation of Somalia, the history of the presence of Italian banking in Somaliland; relations between Italian and Somali institutions; Italian political-monetary policies during the reconstruction and the first economic boom.

This pioneering biography breaks new ground about Colonial America and about James Glen, correcting major misconceptions. Glen was appointed royal governor of Colonial South Carolina in 1738 and came to the colony in 1743 to serve until 1756, the longest tenure of any governor during its Colonial period. Two major themes are stressed: first, Glen had to protect the royal prerogative and follow the dictates of his commission in the face of persistent challenge from the assembly; and second, his role in Indian affairs was critical and dominated much of his time and energy, because Glen had a keen interest in and an aptitude for Indian negotiations.

The first study to bring together such a breadth of data, this book compares responses to colonization in the Iron-Age Mediterranean. From North Syria to Sicily and North Africa, Tamar Hodos explores the responses to these colonies in areas where Greeks and Phoenicians were in competition with one another via the same local communities. Highlighting the diversity of interest displayed by local populations in these foreign cultural offering, Hodos charts their selective adaptation, modification and reinterpretation of Greek and Phoenician goods and ideas as their own cultures evolve. For students of archaeology and history, this will provide an essential resource for their degree course studies.

The violent colonization of Africa by European nations toward the end of the 19th century--a colonization justified by theories about the African Mind promulgated in the Age of Reason--had a profound impact upon the mind of Black Africa. After World War II, the mind of Black Africa rebelled; this rebellion led to a struggle for the self. After Africans achieved political independence, the new African leaders betrayed their own people. Africans now have the responsibility of restoring and reaffirming their true inheritance--the mind of Black Africa.

This book analyzes the memoirs of 42 'missionary kids' - the children of North American Protestant missionaries in countries all over the world during the 20th century. Using a postcolonial lens the book explores ways in which the missionary enterprise was part of, or intersected with, the Western colonial enterprise, and ways in which a colonial mindset is unconsciously manifested in these memoirs. The book explores how the memoirists' sites and experiences are exoticized; the missionary kids' likelihood of learning - or not learning - local languages; the missionary families' treatment of servants and other local people; and gender, race and social class aspects of the missionary kids' experiences. Like other Third Culture Kids, the memoirists are migrants, travelers, border-crossers and border-dwellers who alternate between insider and outsider statuses, and their words shed light on the effects of movement and travel on children's lives and development.

The establishment of a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century and an expansion of the sphere of colonial influence in the eighteenth century made South Africa the only part of sub-Saharan Africa where Europeans could travel with relative ease deep into the interior. As a result individuals with scientific interests in Africa came to the Cape. This book examines writings and drawings of scientifically educated travellers, particularly in the field of ethnography, against the background of commercial and administrative discourses on the Cape. It is argued that the scientific travellers benefited more from their relationship with the colonial order than the other way around.

An examination of how the US military in Hawaii is depicted by museum curators, memorial builders, film makers, and newspaper reporters. These mediums convey information, and engage their audiences, in ways that, together, form a powerful advocacy for the benefits of militarism in the islands.