The Transit of Empire PDF Download

Author: Jodi A. Byrd
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452933170
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

View

Book Description
Examines how “Indianness” has propagated U.S. conceptions of empire

Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942706
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

View

Book Description
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment. In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming, assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and street. Games of Empire forcefully connects video games to real-world concerns about globalization, militarism, and exploitation, from the horrors of African mines and Indian e-waste sites that underlie the entire industry, the role of labor in commercial game development, and the synergy between military simulation software and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified by Full Spectrum Warrior to the substantial virtual economies surrounding World of Warcraft, the urban neoliberalism made playable in Grand Theft Auto, and the emergence of an alternative game culture through activist games and open-source game development. Rejecting both moral panic and glib enthusiasm, Games of Empire demonstrates how virtual games crystallize the cultural, political, and economic forces of global capital, while also providing a means of resisting them.

Author: Peter Turchin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780452288195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

View

Book Description
Argues that the key to the formation of an empire lies in a society's capacity for collective action, resulting from people banding together to confront a common enemy, and describing how the growth of empires leads to a growing dichotomy between rich and poor, increasing conflict instead of cooperation, and inevitable dissolution. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Author: Johann P. Arnason
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444390201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 549

View

Book Description
Through a series of original essays by leading international scholars, The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives offers a comparative historical analysis of the Roman empire’s role and achievement and, more broadly, establishes Rome’s significance within comparative studies. Fills a gap in comparative historical analysis of the Roman empire’s role and achievement Features contributions from more than a dozen distinguished scholars from around the world Explores the relevance of important comparativist themes of state, empire, and civilization to ancient Rome

Author: Christian Laes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139868101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

View

Book Description
Modern society has a negative view of youth as a period of storm and stress, but at the same time cherishes the idea of eternal youth. How does this compare with ancient Roman society? Did a phase of youth exist there with its own characteristics? How was youth appreciated? This book studies the lives and the image of youngsters (around 15–25 years of age) in the Latin West and the Greek East in the Roman period. Boys and girls of all social classes come to the fore; their lives, public and private, are sketched with the help of a range of textual and documentary sources, while the authors also employ the results of recent neuropsychological research. The result is a highly readable and wide-ranging account of how the crucial transition between childhood and adulthood operated in the Roman world.

Author: Anthony Pagden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521198275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

View

Book Description
The entire course of modern Western history has been shaped by the rise and fall of the great European empires. The Burdens of Empire examines different aspects of this long history, focusing on how political theorists, jurists, historians and others sought to explain what an empire is and to justify its very existence.

Author: Gerard Friell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113578261X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

View

Book Description
Emperor Theodosius (379-95) was the last Roman emperor to rule a unified empire of East and West and his reign represents a turning point in the policies and fortunes of the Late Roman Empire. In this imperial biography, Stephen Williams and Gerry Friell bring together literary, archaeological and numismatic evidence concerning this Roman emperor, studying his military and political struggles, which he fought heroically but ultimately in vain. Summoned from retirement to the throne after the disastrous Roman defeat by the Goths at Adrianople, Theodosius was called on to rebuild the armies and put the shattered state back together. He instituted a new policy towards the barbarians, in which diplomacy played a larger role than military might, at a time of increasing frontier dangers and acute manpower shortage. He was also the founder of the established Apostolic Catholic Church. Unlike other Christian emperors, he suppressed both heresy and paganism and enforced orthodoxy by law. The path was a diffucult one, but Theodosius (and his successor, Stilicho) had little choice. This new study convincingly demonstrates how a series of political misfortunes led to the separation of the Eastern and Western empires which meant that the overlordship of Rome in Europe dwindled into mere ceremonial. The authors examine the emperor and his character and the state of the Roman empire, putting his reign in the context of the troubled times.

Author: Lars Brownworth
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307407969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

View

Book Description
Filled with unforgettable stories of emperors, generals, and religious patriarchs, as well as fascinating glimpses into the life of the ordinary citizen, Lost to the West reveals how much we owe to the Byzantine Empire that was the equal of any in its achievements, appetites, and enduring legacy. For more than a millennium, Byzantium reigned as the glittering seat of Christian civilization. When Europe fell into the Dark Ages, Byzantium held fast against Muslim expansion, keeping Christianity alive. Streams of wealth flowed into Constantinople, making possible unprecedented wonders of art and architecture. And the emperors who ruled Byzantium enacted a saga of political intrigue and conquest as astonishing as anything in recorded history. Lost to the West is replete with stories of assassination, mass mutilation and execution, sexual scheming, ruthless grasping for power, and clashing armies that soaked battlefields with the blood of slain warriors numbering in the tens of thousands.

Author: Ulrike Stark (Dr. phil.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hindi imprints
Languages : en
Pages : 616

View

Book Description

Author: Jon Wilson
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610392949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

View

Book Description
The popular image of the British Raj-an era of efficient but officious governors, sycophantic local functionaries, doting amahs, blisteringly hot days and torrid nights-chronicled by Forster and Kipling is a glamorous, nostalgic, but entirely fictitious. In this dramatic revisionist history, Jon Wilson upends the carefully sanitized image of unity, order, and success to reveal an empire rooted far more in violence than in virtue, far more in chaos than in control. Through the lives of administrators, soldiers, and subjects-both British and Indian-The Chaos of Empire traces Britain's imperial rule from the East India Company's first transactions in the 1600s to Indian Independence in 1947. The Raj was the most public demonstration of a state's ability to project power far from home, and its perceived success was used to justify interventions around the world in the years that followed. But the Raj's institutions-from law courts to railway lines-were designed to protect British power without benefiting the people they ruled. This self-serving and careless governance resulted in an impoverished people and a stifled society, not a glorious Indian empire. Jon Wilson's new portrait of a much-mythologized era finally and convincingly proves that the story of benign British triumph was a carefully concocted fiction, here thoroughly and totally debunked.