From 1565 until the year of Waterloo, great Spanish galleons continued to cross the Pacific, bearing cargoes of American silver. ‘This prodigious voyage’ took a heavy toll of life. Yet still (wrote a Chronicler) ‘the desire of gain prevails...’
J.W. Blake describes how, during the colonial period, just over half a million emigrants—English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, Dutch, Swedish and Finnish—are calculated to have left Europe for a new home in America. Often they reached their goal only at the cost of hideous suffering.
S. Gopal describes how, in the course of eight years, Dalhousie greatly extended the territories of the East India Company. Today his memory is respected by Indians not as one of the builders of the British Empire but as one of the architects of the Indian Republic.
A.F.C. Baber writes that traditions of English local government, carried to the New World, provide an important clue to the success of the Pilgrims' emigration.
C.R. Boxer describes how the Dutch East-India Company gave unity to the islands of Indonesia much as the English East-India Company laid the foundations of the British Raj—often unwittingly and by a series of gradual steps.
Artist and Industrialist have rarely succeeded in establishing a fruitful alliance. But during the latter years of the eighteenth century, writes Neil McKendrick, such an alliance was formed—with results that we admire today. Wedgwood, a great potter, and Stubbs, a celebrated painter, agreed to pool their very different gifts.
D.H. Pennington examines an economic burden that the “poor oppressed people of England” believed no government could relieve them of.
Raymond Tong describes how Britain's connections with West Africa began four centuries ago, when Wyndham sailed to Benin in search of gold and pepper.
Graham Dukes takes the reader on a visit to Amsterdam in her early modern heyday: a state within a state; a rich, self-assured, multicultural city, run by businessmen, for businessmen.
J.W. Newmarch Holmes transports the reader to Novgorod, the hub of a mercantile empire in medieval Russia.
