Sinews Of Empire

Download or read book Sinews of War and Trade written by Laleh Khalili and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How shipping is central to the very fabric of global capitalism In our networked world, the realities governing the international movement of freight are easily forgotten. But maritime transport remains the bedrock of trade. Convoys perpetually crisscross the oceans, carrying gas, oil, ore – indeed, every type of consumable and commodity. These movements, though practically invisible, mean that control of the seas is vital in an age when no nation can survive on domestic products alone. Professor and author Laleh Khalili travelled the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean aboard gigantic container ships to investigate the secretive and sometimes dangerous world of maritime trade. What she discovered was strangely disturbing: brutally exploited seafarers enduring loneliness and risking injury to keep the cogs of trade turning. In the Arabian peninsula’s ports, forbidden places encircled by barbed wire and moats of highways, the dockers struggle for benefits and political rights, as they have for generations. Environmental catastrophes threaten with increasing intensity and frequency. Around the oil-trading nations of the Middle East, a history of British colonialism, modern US imperialism, and local autocracies combine to worsen the conditions of modern seafarers, and piracy persists near the Horn of Africa. From her research riding the sea lanes and visiting the major Middle Eastern ports, Khalili has produced a book that exposes the frayed and tense sinews of modern capital, a physical network without which none of our more abstracted webs and systems could operate.

Download or read book The Sinews of Power written by John Brewer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1989. `The book is a distinguished work - of importance to students of governmental development generally. It is written in a fluent, non-technical manner that should reach a wide audience.' American Historical Review.

Download or read book Sinews of War written by Benjamin Bacon and published by Presidio Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the story of the transport of infantry regiments, artillery, and supplies to the battlefield during the Civil War, showing how the war was really won. Includes bandw photos. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Sinews of Habsburg Power written by William D. Godsey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sinews of Habsburg Power explores the domestic foundations of the immense growth of central European Habsburg power from the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars. With a force that grew irregularly in size from around 25,000 soldiers to as many as half a million in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the Habsburg monarchy participated in shifting international constellations of rivalry from western Europe to the Near East and in some two dozen, partly overlapping armed conflicts. Raising forces of such magnitude constituted a central task of Habsburg government, one that ultimately required the cooperation of society and its elites. The monarchy's composite-territorial structures in the guise of the Lower Austrian Estates -- a leading representative body and privileged corps -- formed a vital, if changing, element underlying Habsburg international success and resilience. With its capital at Vienna, the archduchy below the river Enns (the historic designation of Lower Austria) was geographically, politically, and financially a key Habsburg possession. Fiscal-military exigency induced the Estates to take part in new and evolving arrangements of power that served the purposes of government; in turn the Estates were able in previously little-understood ways and within narrowing boundaries to preserve vital interests in a changing world. The Estates survived because they were necessary, not only thanks to their increasing financial potency, but also because they offered a politically viable way of exacting ever-larger quantities of money, men, and other resources from local society. These circumstances would persist as ruling became more regularized, formalized, and homogenized, and as the very understanding of the Estates as a social and political phenomenon was evolving.

Download or read book An Empire Transformed written by Kate Luce Mulry and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited. In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. These wide-ranging actions offer insights about how restoration officials envisioned authority within a changing English empire. An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.

Download or read book Lever of Empire written by Mark Metzler and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-03-13 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the first full account of Japan’s financial history and the Japanese gold standard in the pivotal years before World War II, provides a new perspective on the global political dynamics of the era by placing Japan, rather than Europe, at the center of the story. Focusing on the fall of liberalism in Japan in late 1931 and the global politics of money that were at the center of the crisis, Mark Metzler asks why successive Japanese governments from 1920 to 1931 carried out policies that deliberately induced deflation and depression. His search for answers stretches from Edo to London to the ragged borderlands of the Japanese empire and from the eighteenth century to the 1950s, integrating political and monetary analysis to shed light on the complex dynamics of money, empire, and global hegemony. His detailed and broad ranging account illuminates a range of issues including Japan’s involvement in the economic dynamics that shook interwar Europe, the character of U.S. isolationism, and the rise of fascism as an international phenomenon.

Download or read book An Imperial State at War written by Lawrence Stone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of eighteenth century history has been transformed by the writings of John Brewer, and most recently, with The Sinews of Power, he challenged the central concepts of British history. Brewer argues that the power of the British state increased dramatically when it was forced to pay the costs of war in defence of her growing empire. In An Imperial State at War, edited by Lawrence Stone (himself no stranger to controversy), the leading historians of the eighteenth century put the Brewer thesis under the spotlight. Like the Sinews of Power itself, this is a major advance in the study of Britain's first empire.