Global Empire

Conquerors tells the almost forgotten story of how Portugal's navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition of Vasco da Gama to India, and beat the Spanish to the spice kingdoms of the East - then set about creating the first long-range maritime empire.

Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially recast the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia. We see how industrial capitalism then reshaped these worlds of cotton into an empire, and how this empire transformed the world.

"The Global Empire" has correctly been described as Bard & Söderqvist's philosophically most profound work. In this book, they explore what a world view is, how it is constructed, how it is defended under pressure from surrounding technological change, and how it finally implodes and must be replaced at the tipping point that is called a paradigm shift. The authors then move ahead and construct a new credible world view for the internet age.

The British Empire was the largest in all history: the nearest thing to global domination ever achieved. The world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain's age of empire. The global spread of capitalism, telecommunications, the English language, and the institutions of representative government - all these can be traced back to the extraordinary expansion of Britain's economy, population, and culture from the 17th century until the mid-20th. On a vast and vividly colored canvas, Empire shows how the British Empire acted as midwife to modernity.

A deeply researched investigation that reveals how the United States is like a spider at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control, which it weaves in the form of globe-spanning networks such as fiber optic cables and obscure payment systems America’s security state first...

In the 6th century AD, the Near East was divided between two venerable empires: the Persian and the Roman. A hundred years on and one had vanished forever, while the other seemed almost finished. Ruling in their place were the Arabs: an upheaval so profound that it spelt, in effect, the end of the ancient world. In The Shadow of the Sword, Tom Holland explores how this came about.

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers-the United States, China, and the European Union-is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires, her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come.

Richly informed and written in an engaging style, Against Empire exposes the ruthless agenda and hidden costs of the U.S. empire today. Documenting the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad, Parenti shows how the conversion to a global economy is a victory of finance capital over democracy.

The evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement. In this exciting and sweeping history - the third in his trilogy of books on the ancient world - Tom Holland describes how the Arabs emerged to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion in a matter of decades, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds to create an imperial civilization.

An urgent rethinking of the Western approach to mental health, which treats the symptoms rather than the exploitative systems causing our distress—by a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Medical School physician-anthropologist—offering lessons from the rest of the world. What if the mainstay of...

In this landmark work, acclaimed historian Joshua Freeman has created an epic portrait of a nation both galvanized by change and driven by conflict. Beginning in 1945, the economic juggernaut awakened by World War II transformed a country once defined by its regional character into a uniform and cohesive power and set the stage for the United States’ rise to global dominance. Meanwhile, Freeman locates the profound tragedy that has shaped the path of American civic life.

A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian one at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent's anticipated rise to dominance.

As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions, the history of Portuguese exploration is now almost forgotten. But Portugal's navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition of Vasco da Gama to India and beat the Spanish to the spice kingdoms of the East - then set about creating the first long-range maritime empire.

How Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us...

A spectacular generational saga of the making (and undoing) of a family dynasty: the riveting untold story of the gilded Jewish Bagdadi Sassoons, who built a vast empire through global finance and trade—cotton, opium, shipping, banking—that reached across three continents and ultimately...

A caravan leaves the grasslands at dawn and months later a Venetian ledger records its cargo sold for silver. Between those moments lies a revolutionary system built by horsemen of the steppe. Relay posts, passports, merchant partnerships, and guarded ports stitched Asia, the Middle East, and Europe into a single communicative world. This sweeping history reveals how speed and security created the first connected age, moving ideas and faiths alongside silk and silver, and carrying a microscopic killer that would become the Black Death. Drawing on Persian, Arabic, Chinese, and Latin ...

This New York Times bestseller is a “masterful” (The Washington Post), “juicy tour of the company [Jeff] Bezos built” (The New York Times Book Review), revealing the most important business story of our time by the bestselling author of The Everything Store. Almost ten years ago...

From frozen glaciers to towering skyscrapers — this is the complete epic history of one of America’s most powerful and transformative cities. Empire of the Prairie takes readers on a sweeping historical journey through Chicago’s rise from a marshy portage on the edge of Lake Michigan to a global center of finance, architecture, industry, culture, and innovation. This deeply researched and narrative-driven chronicle captures every defining era of the city: ✔ The geological forces that shaped the land thousands of years ago ✔ Indigenous stewardship and the significance of the ...

In A Banker's Journey, financial journalist and historian Daniel Gross, who, like Edmond Safra, traces his heritage to Aleppo, Syria, reconstructs the public life of an intensely private man. With exclusive access to Safra's personal archives, Gross tracks the banker's remarkable journey from Beirut to Milan, São Paulo, Geneva, and New York—to the pinnacle of global finance.

The phenomenon of “conspiracy” or “fringe” theories has always been with people, which makes sense since captivating and entertaining hypotheses arouse the public interest with seemingly sound conclusions that are often based on incomplete, unrelated, or erroneous suppositions. However, with the correct tweaking, they often appear to propound airtight arguments. Conspiracy theories make good use of real or imagined individuals or organizations operating behind a curtain of secrecy manipulating the action.