Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire
Examines how the Spanish monarchy managed an empire of unprecedented linguistic diversity, making only sporadic efforts to propagate Spanish during the sixteenth century. Challenges the assumption that the pervasiveness of the Spanish language resulted from deliberate linguistic colonization.
Based on research in Russian, French, and Belgian archives, Latvia's Ordeal traces the complex story of Latvian state-building. Pinning hopes on the outcome of World War I, Latvia's nationalist intelligentsia advocated self-determination and the establishment of a new state within ethnographic borders. Independence emerged in a complex domestic ......
The Last Years of Britain's Presence and Policy in Southern Arabia
This book is an illuminating eye-opener about the recent political history of a region that continues to suffer from grave paucity of material for the purpose of scholarship. Regardless of Southern Arabia's past greatness and current significance and strategic importance to the world at large, so little is known.
Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The ......
Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent and readable stories, full of detail about U.S. imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that could easily have been a song of despair-a lament of lost causes
Spain's American empire began as the serendipitous outgrowth of the search for a shortcut to China. That search derived from two mid-fifteenth-century developments: the Ming Dynasty's decision to adopt a silver standard for its medium of exchange and the Ottoman Turks' capture of Constantinople in 1453. China's great demand for silver and the ......
The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century
Here, Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early seventeenth century, one must first understand the "long sixteenth century"-from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607.
In this intriguing new book, Onianwa Oluchukwu Ignatus investigates Britain's decision to engage the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the relief operations during the Nigerian Civil War. The main area badly ravaged by the conflict being the Republic of Biafra was declared "a frontier of need." Humanitarian concerns and mounting public pressures, both in ......