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Outlaws of the Sea
In Outlaws of the Sea, Robert J. Antony provides a comprehensive account of the history of maritime piracy in coastal south China from the 1630s to the 1940s. He neither romanticizes nor maligns pirates, but rather analyzes them in the context of their times and the broader world in which they lived. The author demonstrates that Chinese piracy was a pervasive force shaping maritime society as it ebbed and flowed between sporadic, small-scale ventures and professional, large-scale enterprises in the modern era. This book offers important new insights into the underside of modern China’s history and the interactions between pirates, foreign traders, local communities, and the state. “How c...
Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes
History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes the author provides glimpses into China’s hidden past through the native’s point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary people, how they told their own stories about themselves, their communities, and their pasts. The author examines historical consciousness as revealed in people’s everyday lives and as expressed through customary rituals, sociocultural conventions, language, and the complex symbolism of common human experiences. The focus is on ethnic groups and individuals who have been routinely discriminated against in mainstream society and t...
The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520–1810
The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520–1810 exposes readers to the little-known history of Chinese piracy in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries through a short narrative and selection of documentary evidence. In this three-hundred-year period, Chinese piracy was unsurpassed in size and scope anywhere else in the world. The book includes a carefully selected and wide range of Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese sources—some translated for the first time—to illustrate the complexity and variety of piratical activities in Asian waters. These documents include archival criminal cases and depositions of pirates and victims, government reports and proclamations, memoirs of coastal residents and pirate captives, and written and oral folklore handed down for generations. The book also illuminates the important role that pirates played in the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations of early modern China and the world. An historical perspective provides an important vantage point to understand piracy as a recurring cyclical phenomenon inseparably connected with the past.
Pirates in the Age of Sail
Pirates in the Age of Sail takes a global perspective to explore the world of pirates between the early sixteenth and middle nineteenth centuries.
Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers
The essays in this book add significantly to the scholarship on East and Southeast Asian history, and in particular to the maritime history of the region we call the Greater China Seas. This is the first book to analyze the whole region from Japan to Southeast Asia as a single, integrated historical and geographical area. This book takes a radical departure from the standard terracentered histories to place the seas at the center rather than at the margins of our inquiries. By focusing on the water we are better able to stitch together the diverse histories of Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. The contributors to this anthology show that, although often dismissed as historically unimportant, pirates and smugglers have in fact played significant roles in the development of the modern world. --
Global Piracy
Many people in the western world maintain the contradictory notions that the pirates of old were romantic social bandits while their modern brethren are brutal thugs, thieves, and villains. In Global Piracy, James E. Wadsworth compiles and contextualizes a wealth of primary source documents which illustrate the global phenomenon of piracy through the eyes and voices of those who experienced it: both the pirates or privateers themselves and their victims. The book allows us to confront our stereotypes by giving us access to “real” pirates in a wide range of historical periods and global regions, from ancient Greece to modern day Nigeria, unfiltered as much as possible by authorial voice o...
Disciplining the State
"What are states, and how are they made? Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral regulation and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power. State-making is, in China as elsewhere, a profoundly normative and normalizing process. This study maps the complex processes of state-making, moral regulation, and social control during three critical reform periods: the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735), the Guomindang’s Nanjing decade (1927-1937), and the Communist Party’s Socialist E...
Pillaging the Empire
Between 1500 and 1750, European expansion and global interaction produced vast wealth. As goods traveled by ship along new global trade routes, piracy also flourished on the world’s seas. Pillaging the Empire tells the fascinating story of maritime predation in this period, including the perspectives of both pirates and their victims. Brushing aside the romantic legends of piracy, Kris Lane pays careful attention to the varied circumstances and motives that led to the rise of this bloodthirsty pursuit of riches, and places the history of piracy in the context of early modern empire building. This second edition of Pillaging the Empire has been revised and expanded to incorporate the latest scholarship on piracy, maritime law, and early modern state formation. With a new chapter on piracy in East and Southeast Asia, Lane considers piracy as a global phenomenon. Filled with colorful details and stories of individual pirates from Francis Drake to the women pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Read, this engaging narrative will be of interest to all those studying the history of Latin America, the Atlantic world, and the global empires of the early modern era.
Unruly People
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Imperial Twilight
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE A Financial Times Book of the Year A Sunday Times Book of the Year ________________________________________ 'Entertaining and well-paced... Platt's compelling book is a sobering read that should focus the minds of those who like to talk of the achievements of the Victorian age without thinking about how those were achieved, or how they were funded.' Peter Frankopan, Spectator ________________________________________ In 1839 Britain embarked on the first of its wars with China, sealing the fate of the most prosperous and powerful empire in Asia, if not the world. Motivated by drug profiteering and free-trade interests, the Opium War helped shaped the China we know today, sparking the eventual fall of the Qing dynasty and the rise of nationalism and communism in the twentieth century. Imperial Twilight is a riveting and revealing account of the end of China's Golden Age and the origins of one of the most unjust wars in history.
