The epic story of the emergence of Portugal, a small, poor nation that enjoyed a century of maritime supremacy thanks to the daring and navigational skill of its explorers--a tactical advantage no other country could match. Portugal's discovery of a sea route to India, campaign of imperial conquest over Muslim rulers, and domination of the spice trade would forever disrupt the Mediterranean and build the first global economy. Author Crowley relies...

In The Rule of Empires, Timothy Parsons gives a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our own historical moment. Parsons uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome, to Britain's "new" imperialism in Kenya, to the Third Reich to parse the features...

How should the United States act in the world? Americans cannot decide. Sometimes we burn with righteous anger, launching foreign wars and deposing governments. Then we retreat―until the cycle begins again. No matter how often we debate this question, none of what we say is original. Every argument is a pale shadow of the first and greatest debate, which erupted more than a century ago. Its themes resurface every time Americans argue whether to...

"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols and the Black Death to the Great Game...

Analyzes the multinational conflicts that set the stage for World War II, the Chinese communist revolution, and the Korean War, documenting Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 diplomatic mission in the Pacific through which the United States forged ill-fated covert agreements.

"The riveting third edition of this New York Times bestselling title expands its focus to China, exposes corruption on an international scale, and offers much-needed solutions. Extensively updated, this edition features fourteen new chapters, including a new introduction and conclusion. The book brings the story of economic hit men (EHMs) up-to-date and focuses on China's EHM strategy. EHMs are highly paid professionals who use development loans to...

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's provocative reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War (and leading into the twentieth century); the next volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner. In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective...