This new book provides an excellent resource on the nature of European warfare from the outbreak of the Valois-Habsburg wars to the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
This book integrates research on the production and marketing of basic foodstuffs for local needs into an investigation of slavery and export agriculture. It opens new perspectives for understanding how, during more than three centuries, slavery, plantations, and export agriculture shaped social and economic life in Brazil.
Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900 includes indigenous voices in the debate over European appropriation of overseas territories. It is concerned with European efforts to negotiate with indigenous peoples the cession of their sovereignty through treaties.
Settler Economies in World History is a comparative, wide-ranging historical study of the experience of the modern settler societies that have followed a distinctive economic and institutional path to the present from their neo-European origins.
Tamar Herzog asks how territorial borders were established in the early modern period and challenges the standard view that national boundaries are settled by military conflicts and treaties. Claims and control on both sides of the Atlantic were subject to negotiation, as neighbors and outsiders carved out and defended new frontiers of possession.
The Ideological Origins of the British Empire presents a comprehensive history of British conceptions of empire for more than half a century. David Armitage traces the emergence of British imperial identity from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, using a full range of manuscript and printed sources. By linking the histories of England, Scotland and Ireland with the history of the British Empire, he demonstrates the importance of ideology as an essential linking between the processes of state-formation and empire-building. This book sheds light on major British political thinkers, from Sir Thomas Smith to David Hume, by providing fascinating accounts of the 'British problem' in the early modern period, of the relationship between Protestantism and empire, of theories of property, liberty and political economy in imperial perspective, and of the imperial contribution to the emergence of British 'identities' in the Atlantic world.
A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also attaching legal meanings to familiar geographic categories such as rivers, oceans, islands, and mountains. The resulting legal and spatial anomalies influenced debates about imperial constitutions and international law both in the colonies and at home. This study changes our understanding of empire and its legacies and opens new perspectives on the global history of law.