Savor the story of the ultimate warship in Sovereigns of the Sea: The Quest to Build the Perfect Renaissance Battleship, which chronicles the history of Sovereign of the Seas, an immensely powerful floating fortress. You will enjoy this gripping tale of an arms race that created and ruined empires, changed the map of the world, and led Europe out of the Renaissance and into the Modern age. Understand how the Sovereign of the Seas became the model for a whole new generation of warships that would dominate naval warfare until the advent of steam power.
This definitive book on the Sultans of Oman is a thrilling historical account of their action-packed battles, daring expeditions, epic triumphs and ingenious politics in the long nineteenth century. It puts the optic of 'micro-history' on their fascinating lives as they navigated the geopolitics of their time and propelled the politics of the Western Indian Ocean. It offers a comprehensive and in-depth examination of the ambitions of the Omani patriarch Sultan Sayyid Sa?id and his four sons and shows how integral they were to the political culture of the region. Keeping a sensitive finger on the specific temporal and spatial moments in the maritime space that they navigated, it explores their key role in shaping the politics of the Ocean and nurturing the Omani Sultanate on their terms. The groundbreaking narrative sheds light on the role of the Sultans as agents of change, challenging the Eurocentric narrative that views the Indian Ocean as framed in the history of western imperialism and capitalism alone. In addition to its academic rigour, the book is easy to read and engaging, making it an ideal resource for students, scholars and anyone with an interest in the history of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East and South Asia. Its fresh perspective and insightful analysis make it an invaluable contribution to the fast-growing field of Indian Ocean Studies.
Since the financial Armageddon, it’s been guns, gold and lots of slaves. It is 2106. Seventy years have passed since our times collapsed into the mother of all depressions; strangely permanent, brutally profound. No one cares about over-population, mass extinctions or climate change, because they don’t have to. The world is a post-apocalyptic paradise—for a few. One of those ‘few’ is Donald Aldingford, a star barrister much in demand by high society. He suffers the catastrophe of being shot down and jailed for trespassing into private airspace. And while in prison, he picks up alarming rumours about his younger brother Lawrence, who disappeared ten years earlier, aged seventeen. Despite the risk of becoming ‘disappeared’ himself, Donald takes a deeper interest in the world around him. As he closes on the mystery of his long-lost brother, he pierces the last, most dangerous veil of a rotten society. Sovereigns of the Collapse is a gritty dystopian saga about the world we should have seen coming. It contains adult themes and is not recommended for the under-16s.
The contemporary organization of global violence is neither timeless nor natural, argues Janice Thomson. It is distinctively modern. In this book she examines how the present arrangement of the world into violence-monopolizing sovereign states evolved over the six preceding centuries.
The past decade has seen a veritable explosion of investment treaty and other arbitration claims brought against sovereigns. Many of those cases have been filed before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Claims (ICSID), which has its own self-contained rules for enforcement. Given this significant increase in sovereign cases and the issues attendant to sovereign immunity, this treatise is timely in addressing the various issues that arise in enforcing arbitral awards against sovereigns. One of the first questions posed to their counsel by clients considering the initiation of an arbitration proceeding against a sovereign state is whether and how the resulting award can be enforced. The origin of the client’s question is usually based in some knowledge that a state possesses sovereign immunity, along with an uncertain concern about the exceptions to such immunity and the difficulties of enforcement against a sovereign’s assets. This uncertainty is understandable, especially in light of the sometimes confusing and even contradictory court decisions in certain jurisdictions. It is these inquiries in their broadest application that form the subject of this treatise. With contributions by eminent and experienced practitioners of the multiple issues that have arisen in various jurisdictions and the key cases that have created the law of enforcement of obligations against sovereigns, this book will provide access to valuable information, add to the transparency of this subject and further spur the consistent development of this area of law. This book is divided into three parts. The first part is general in nature and includes chapters encompassing the subjects of sovereign immunity in general (including both immunity from jurisdiction and immunity from enforcement), treaty obligations to honor awards, diplomatic protection by a claimant’s government to obtain payment of awards, and conciliation and settlement. The second part of the book deals with the means of enforcing awards. Part three of this treatise addresses the enforcement issues that arise in specific jurisdictions in which enforcement against sovereign assets is often sought - in particular, the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, The Netherlands, and South America.
