History

Rome was first ruled by kings, then became a republic. But in the end, after conquering the world, the Republic collapsed. Rome was (read more)

Rome was first ruled by kings, then became a republic. But in the end, after conquering the world, the Republic collapsed. Rome was drowned in blood.

So terrible were the civil wars that the Roman people finally came to welcome the rule of an autocrat who could give them peace. 'Augustus', their new master called himself: 'The Divinely Favoured One'. The lurid glamour of the dynasty founded by Augustus has never faded. (hide)

Michael Pye's The Edge of the World is an epic adventure: from the Vikings to the Enlightenment, from barbaric outpost to global (read more)

Michael Pye's The Edge of the World is an epic adventure: from the Vikings to the Enlightenment, from barbaric outpost to global centre, it tells the amazing story of northern Europe's transformation by sea. "An utterly beguiling journey into the dark ages of the north sea. A complete revelation...Pye writes like a dream.

Magnificent." (Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps). This is a story of saints and spies, of fishermen and pirates, traders and marauders - and of how their wild and daring journeys across the North Sea built the world we know. When the Roman Empire retreated, northern Europe was a barbarian outpost at the very edge of everything.

A thousand years later, it was the heart of global empires and the home of science, art, enlightenment and money. We owe this transformation to the tides and storms of the North Sea. The water was dangerous, but it was far easier than struggling over land; so it was the sea that brought people together.
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Scotland was of grave strategic importance during the war because of its geographical position and its capital was the location of (read more)

Scotland was of grave strategic importance during the war because of its geographical position and its capital was the location of a significant number of important military and civil organisations. Edinburgh Castle became the HQ of the Scottish Home Forces whilst the Forth was a vitally important port and was heavily protected even before the start of the war. Its importance was marked by its attracting the first air raid of the war on mainland Britain when a force of German bombers was sent to attack naval shipping in the Forth on 16th October 1939\.

The raid was intercepted by the RAF which shot down at least two bombers and the entire action was witnessed by many civilians on the ground. The raid also caused the first civilian casualties when two women were injured in Edinburgh and two men machine-gunned in Portobello. Thousands lined the streets days later for the funeral of two of the Luftwaffe airmen.
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In Empire's Crossroads, Carrie Gibson offers readers a vivid, authoritative and action-packed history of the Caribbean. For Gibson, (read more)

In Empire's Crossroads, Carrie Gibson offers readers a vivid, authoritative and action-packed history of the Caribbean. For Gibson, everything was created in the West Indies: the Europe of today, its financial foundations built with sugar money: the factories and mills built as a result of the work of slaves thousands of miles away; the idea of true equality as espoused in Saint Domingue in the 1790s; the slow progress to independence; and even globalization and migration, with the ships passing to and fro taking people and goods in all possible directions, hundreds of years before the term 'globalization' was coined. From Cuba to Haiti, from Dominica to Martinique, from Jamaica to Trinidad, the story of the Caribbean is not simply the story of slaves and masters - but of fortune-seekers and pirates, scientists and servants, travellers and tourists.

It is not only a story of imperial expansion - European and American - but of global connections, and also of life as it is lived in the islands, both in the past and today. (hide)

The status of boundaries and borders, questions of global poverty and inequality, criteria for the legitimate uses of force, the (read more)

The status of boundaries and borders, questions of global poverty and inequality, criteria for the legitimate uses of force, the value of international law, human rights, nationality, sovereignty, migration, territory, and citizenship: debates over these critical issues are central to contemporary understandings of world politics. Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of contributors, including historians, political theorists, lawyers, and international relations scholars, this is the first volume of its kind to explore the racial and imperial dimensions of normative debates over global justice.

Published:28 Feb 2019 (hide)

Readers can discover all about the peculiar history of England from ancient times to Agincourt with volume I of this three-part series. (read more)

Readers can discover all about the peculiar history of England from ancient times to Agincourt with volume I of this three-part series. The unfolding story will tell of early hunter-gatherers and the first farmers; of Roman occupation eventually giving way to the often brutal land-hungry Anglo-Saxons; of Viking incursions and the 1066 Conquest by their cousins, the Normans; and of later incomers from all parts of the globe. (hide)

The dramatic and shocking events of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 are to be the backdrop to Juliet Barker's latest book: a snapshot (read more)

The dramatic and shocking events of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 are to be the backdrop to Juliet Barker's latest book: a snapshot of what everyday life was like for ordinary people living in the middle ages. The same highly successful techniques she deployed inAgincourt and Conquest will this time be brought to bear on civilian society, from the humblest serf forced to provide slave-labour for his master in the fields, to the prosperous country goodwife brewing, cooking and spinning her distaff and the ambitious burgess expanding his business and his mental horizons in the town. The book will explore how and why such a diverse and unlikely group of ordinary men and women from every corner of England united in armed rebellion against church and state to demand a radical political agenda which, had it been implemented, would have fundamentally transformed English society and anticipated the French Revolution by four hundred years.

The book will not only provide an important reassessment of the revolt itself but will also be an illuminating and original study of English medieval life at the time. (hide)

Englishness is an idea, a consciousness and a proto-nationalism. There is no English state within the United Kingdom, no English (read more)

Englishness is an idea, a consciousness and a proto-nationalism. There is no English state within the United Kingdom, no English passport, Parliament or currency, nor any immediate prospect of any. That does not mean that England lacks an identity, although English nationalism, or at least a distinctive nationalism, has been partly forced upon the English by the development in the British Isles of strident nationalisms that have contested Britishness, and with much success.
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HMS Erebus was one of the great exploring ships, a veteran of groundbreaking expeditions to the ends of the Earth. In 1848, it disappeared (read more)

HMS Erebus was one of the great exploring ships, a veteran of groundbreaking expeditions to the ends of the Earth. In 1848, it disappeared in the Arctic, its fate a mystery. In 2014, it was found.

This is its story. Michael Palin - Monty Python star and television globetrotter - brings the remarkable Erebus back to life, following it from its launch in 1826 to the epic voyages of discovery that led to glory in the Antarctic and to ultimate catastrophe in the Arctic.
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***Stocked 17 June 2013***The Etruscans can be shown to have made significant, and in some cases perhaps the first, technical advances (read more)

***Stocked 17 June 2013***The Etruscans can be shown to have made significant, and in some cases perhaps the first, technical advances in the central and northern Mediterranean. To the Etruscan people we can attribute such developments as the tie-beam truss in large wooden structures, surveying and engineering drainage and water tunnels, the development of the foresail for fast long-distance sailing vessels, fine techniques of metal production and other pyrotechnology, post-mortem C-sections in medicine, and more. In art, many technical and iconographic developments, although they certainly happened first in Greece or the Near East, are first seen in extant Etruscan works, preserved in the lavish tombs and goods of Etruscan aristocrats.

These include early portraiture, the first full-length painted portrait, the first perspective view of a human figure in monumental art, specialized techniques of bronze-casting, and reduction-fired pottery (the bucchero phenomenon). Etruscan contacts, through trade, treaty and intermarriage, linked their culture with Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily, with the Italic tribes of the peninsula, and with the Near Eastern kingdoms, Greece and the Greek colonial world, Iberia, Gaul and the Punic network of North Africa, and influenced the cultures of northern Europe. In the past fifteen years striking advances have been made in scholarship and research techniques for Etruscan Studies.
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