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Hugo Grotius ranks among the influential thinkers of the early-modern period. The hitherto unpublished treatise «Commentarius in Theses XI» provides one of the most comprehensive insights into the young Grotius' concepts of sovereignty, the just war, and the legitimacy of the Dutch Revolt. The present edition with a critical introduction provides an annotated Latin text with English translation.
The Singapore and Melaka Straits are a place where regional and long-distance maritime trading networks converge, linking Europe, the Mediterranean, eastern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent with key centres of trade in Thailand, Indochina, insular Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan. The first half of the 17th century brought heightened political, commercial and diplomatic activity to this region. It had long been clear to both the Portuguese and the Dutch that whoever controlled the waters off modern Singapore gained a firm grip on regional as well as long-distance intra-Asian trade. By the early 1600s Portuguese power and prestige were waning and the arrival of the Dutch East India Company constituted a major threat. Moreover, the rapid expansion and growing power of the Acehnese Empire, and rivalry between Johor and Aceh, was creating a new context for European trade in Asia.
Singapore gained independence in 1965, a city-state in a world of nation-states. Yet its long and complex history reaches much farther back. Blending modernity and tradition, ideologies and ethnicities, a peculiar set of factors make Singapore what it is today. In this thematic study of the island nation, Michael D. Barr proposes a new approach to understand this development. From the pre-colonial period through to the modern day, he traces the idea, the politics and the geography of Singapore over five centuries of rich history. In doing so he rejects the official narrative of the so-called 'Singapore Story'. Drawing on in-depth archival work and oral histories, Singapore: A Modern History is a work both for students of the country's history and politics, but also for any reader seeking to engage with this enigmatic and vastly successful nation.
Villamar examines the role of Portuguese merchants in the formation of the Manila Galleon as a system of trade founded at the end of the sixteenth century. The rise of Manila as a crucial transshipment port was not a spontaneous incident. Instead, it came about through a complex combination of circumstances and interconnections that nurtured the establishment of the Manila Galleon system, a trading mechanism that lasted two and half centuries from 1565 until 1815. Villamar analyses the establishment of the regulatory framework of the trade across the Pacific Ocean as a whole setting that provided legality to the transactions, predictability to the transportation and security to the stakehold...
This book presents extensive new research findings on and new thinking about Southeast Asia in this interesting, richly diverse, but much understudied period. It examines the wide and well-developed trading networks, explores the different kinds of regimes and the nature of power and security, considers urban growth, international relations and the beginnings of European involvement with the region, and discusses religious factors, in particular the spread and impact of Christianity. One key theme of the book is the consideration of how well-developed Southeast Asia was before the onset of European involvement, and, how, during the peak of the commercial boom in the 1500s and 1600s, many polities in Southeast Asia were not far behind Europe in terms of socio-economic progress and attainments.
In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of catastrophes—from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders. During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation’s extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally wor...
This book considers the background to the treatises, their content and significance, and what Grotius actually knew about Southeast Asian polities or Portuguese institutions of trade and diplomacy when he wrote them. --
The Flemish gem trader Jacques de Coutre visited Southeast Asia in the early 17th century, and his lengthy account of his experiences provides a glimpse of Singapore, Johor and the Straits of Melaka during an era for which little written material has survived. This special edition, which presents highlights from the full translation, is designed to provide students, teachers and the wider public with a glimpse of this tumultuous region when it was still controlled by local rulers, and Western colonialism was just gaining a foothold. The author describes dangerous intrigues involving fortune hunters and schemers, as well as local rulers and couriers, adventures that on several occasions nearly cost him his life.
Assessments of Singapore's history invariably revolve around Sir Stamford Raffles' arrival in 1819. Before this date - we've been told - "nothing very much appears to have happened in Singapore". Pre-1819 Singapore was a sleepy, historically insignificant fishing village, little more than the "occasional resort of pirates". This ambitious book, co-written by four of Singapore's foremost historians, offers an assertive re-evaluation of that view, firmly situating Singapore's starting point seven hundred years ago. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary range of archival, textual and cartographical records, as well as the latest archaeological discoveries, the authors cast a singular historical traje...
Jacques de Coutre was a Flemish gem trader who spent nearly a decade in Southeast Asia at the turn of the 17th century. He left history a substantial autobiography written in Spanish and preserved in the National Library of Spain in Madrid. Written in the form of a picaresque tale, with an acute eye for the cultures he encountered, the memoirs tell the story of his adventures in the trading centres of the day: Melaka, Ayutthaya, Cambodia, Patani, Pahang, Johor, Brunei and Manila. Narrowly escaping death several times, De Coutre was inevitably drawn into dangerous intrigues between the representatives of European power, myriad fortune hunters and schemers, and the rulers and courtiers in the palaces of Pahang, Patani, Siam and Johor.