Global History

Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an "Asian culture" of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China.

In 2008, the universe of Western finance outgrew planet Earth. When Wall Street imploded, a death embrace between insolvent banks and bankrupt states consumed Europe. Half a dozen national economies imploded, and several more came close. But the storm is far from over.... From the aftermath of the Second World War to the present, Varoufakis recounts how the eurozone emerged not as a route to shared prosperity but as a pyramid scheme of debt.

Hip-hop music, a cultural and artistic movement that emerged in the Bronx, New York City, during the early 1970s, has evolved into a global phenomenon with far-reaching impacts on music, fashion, language, and social activism. The genre, characterized by its distinct rhythms, rhymes, and innovative sampling techniques, has transcended geographical and cultural boundaries, leaving an indelible mark on societies across the world.

The environment is collapsing at a rapid rate, and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond? In Planet on Fire, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental re-shaping of the global economy and offer a road map for tackling climate breakdown.

Meet Fizzy Oceans—archivist, researcher, environmentalist and adventurer. On her travels she witnesses The Exodus, the Battle of Gettysburg and Hurricane Katrina, as well as many other historical and real time events. She meets notable individuals including Gandhi, Mark Twain, Jacques Cousteau, The Dalai Llama, Saddam Hussein and even a new species called the Quinngen. Such unique experiences and encounters spanning the world and time as we know them would not be possible for a single individual—especially not for a woman named Amy Birkenstock who works as a medical clerk in Seattle, ...

It has been well-established that many of the injustices that people around the world experience every day are the result of wide-scale structural problems of politics and economics. These are not merely random personal problems or consequences of bad luck or bad planning. Confronted by this fact, it is natural to ask what should or can we do to mitigate everyday injustices? Just Responsibility integrates ways of taking political responsibility into a rich theory of political community, accountability, and leadership in which taking responsibility for injustice itself transforms the fabric of political life.

In the watershed year of 1919, world leaders met in Paris, promising to build a new international order rooted in democracy and social justice. Female activists demanded that statesmen live up to their word. Excluded from the negotiating table, women met separately, crafted their own agendas, and captured global headlines with a message that was both straightforward and revolutionary: Enduring peace depended on recognition of the fundamental humanity and equality of all people.

Dive into the Vibrant World of Surfing: Get Your Copy of "Surfing Lingo" Today! Surfing has evolved from a cherished pastime in ancient Polynesia to a global phenomenon embraced by a passionate community of practitioners. It's more than just a sport; it's a state of mind and a lifestyle that captivates the hearts of many. Whether you're a seasoned surfer or a curious outsider, "Surfing Lingo" is your gateway to understanding the rich culture and language of this thrilling pursuit. This concise collection of surfing terms unveils the vibrant tapestry that makes up the world of surfing. As a ...

The Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges flowing south to the Bay of Bengal, is now little known outside of India. Yet for centuries it was a river of truly global significance, attracting merchants, missionaries, mercenaries, statesmen, labourers, and others from Europe, Asia, and beyond. Hooghly seeks to restore the waterway to the heart of global history. Travelling up and down the river, Robert Ivermee explores themes of enduring concern, among them the dynamics of modern capitalism and the power of large corporations; migration and human trafficking; and more.

Foreign aid organizations collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with mixed results. Part of the problem in these endeavors lies in their execution. Dan Honig argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects, Honig concludes that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery.

In his book, The Great Omission, missionary Jon Nelms “tells it like it is” by exposing the failures in missions and the reasons behind them as he leads the listener to logical, biblical, and proven solutions that, if followed, will allow this to be the first generation to fulfill the Lord’s Great Commission since it was assigned some 2,000 years ago.

Primordial American Terrorists is an interpretation of the events leading to the end of legal slavery in the United States. Along the way, it reveals the duality of the terrorist persona, a profile the author pioneered in his earlier book, Sofia Perovskaya, Terrorist Princess. Primordial American Terrorists tells a story, not only of terrorists who struck suddenly and savagely out of intense passion for a cause, but also, of their direct comparison with equally passionate men and women who dedicated themselves to bringing about social justice through advocacy and other non-violent means.

Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.

Test your knowledge or brush up on it with this unofficial Trivia Book. If you want to remember some of the great moments (with the expanse of time, we couldn’t remember them all!) of one of the most loved television shows ever, this book is for you.

The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity. Seventeen days of sporting competition watched and followed on every continent and in every country on the planet. Simply the greatest show on earth. Yet when the modern games were inaugurated in Athens in 1896, the founders thought them a 'display of manly virtue', an athletic celebration of the kind of amateur gentleman who would rule the world. How was such a ritual invented?

Since the Wall Street Crash in 1929, financial meltdowns have repeatedly sent shockwaves through our world. From the currency crises of the 1980s and 1990s, to Japan's housing crash, the dot com boom and bust, the global financial meltdown, the euro crisis and the COVID pandemic, The Great Crashes tells the stories of ten of these historic events. They serve as a series of cautionary tales, each with their own set of lessons to be learnt. Renowned economist Dr Linda Yueh extracts a three-step framework to help recognise the early signs of a crash and mitigate the effects.

For the Many presents an inspiring look at how US women and their global allies pushed the nation and the world toward justice and greater equality for all. Reclaiming social democracy as one of the central threads of American feminism, Dorothy Sue Cobble offers a bold rewriting of 20th-century feminist history and documents how forces, peoples, and ideas worldwide shaped American politics.

In Chilling Effect, R.J. Pineiro’s newest thriller, William Kiersted is committed to accelerating the effects of climate change through frightening acts of ecological terrorism. Global climatologists Doctors Natasha Shakhiva and Konrad Malone join forces with Rachel Daly from the CIA’s new global climate counterterrorist unit, as well as its Russian counterpart, in an attempt to spoil Kiersted’s plan to cripple humanity, if not outright destroy it.

In US Presidential Elections and Foreign Policy, a team of international scholars examines how the relationship between foreign policy and electoral politics evolved through the latter half of the 20th century. Covering all presidential elections from 1940 to 1992 - from debates over American entry into World War II to the aftermath of the Cold War - the contributors correct the conventional wisdom that domestic issues and the economy are always definitive.

Friends or Just Interests Trade wars often emerge from a cocktail of economic ambition and national pride, but history has repeatedly demonstrated their high costs and low success rates. The interplay between economic isolation and arrogance frequently leads nations to escalate conflicts, assuming their economies can thrive independently. Yet, the reality of global interdependence exposes such assumptions as dangerously flawed. To subdue the hubris that fuels trade wars, one must revisit the historical truth: they are rarely, if ever, victorious. From the 1930s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that ...