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This book offers a comprehensive overview of the early modern military history of Portugal and its possessions in Africa, the Americas, and Asia from the perspective of the military revolution historiographical debate. The existence of a military revolution in the early modern period has been much debated in international historiography, and this volume fills a significant gap in its relation to the history of Portugal and its overseas empire. It examines different forms of military change in specifically Portuguese case studies but also adopts a global perspective through the analysis of different contexts and episodes in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Contributors explore whether there is...
Argues that systems approaches are necessary in order to identify and understand important features of the world.
Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable , Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”...
Military Revolution and the Thirty Years War 1618–1648 investigates change and decline in military institutions during a period of protracted and destructive European warfare. Conceptual background is provided by the Military Revolution thesis, which argues that changes in military technology and tactics drove revolutionary transformation in the way states organised and waged war in the early modern era. This transformation of military institutions became evident during the long and destructive Thirty Years War in 1618–1648. The outcome of the Military Revolution was the centralised fiscal-military state that possessed a strong claim to the monopoly of violence within its territorial bou...
Macao, the former Portuguese colony in southeast China, has a long and very interesting history of cultural interaction between China and the West. Held by the Portuguese from the 1550s until its return to China in 1999, Macao was up to the emergence of Hong Kong in the later nineteenth century the principal point of entry into China for all Westerners - Dutch, British and others, as well as Portuguese. The relatively relaxed nature of Portuguese colonial rule, intermarriage, the mixing of Chinese and Western cultures, and the fact that Macao served as a safe haven for many Chinese reformers at odds with the Chinese authorities, including Sun Yat-sen, all combined to make Macao a very different and special place. This book explores how Macao was formed over the centuries. It puts forward substantial new research findings and new thinking, and covers a wide range of issues. It is a companion volume to Macao - Cultural Interaction and Literary Representations.
(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the variou...
Eight months into its maiden voyage to the Indies, the Dutch East India Company’s Batavia sank on June 4, 1629 on Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos off the western coast of Australia. Wendy van Duivenvoorde’s five-year study was aimed at reconstructing the hull of Batavia, the only excavated remains of an early seventeenth-century Indiaman to have been raised and conserved in a way that permits detailed examination, using data retrieved from the archaeological remains, interpreted in the light of company archives, ship journals, and Dutch texts on shipbuilding of this period. Over two hundred tables, charts, drawings, and photographs are included.
The Indian Rebellion 1857–1859: A Military History in the Global Context focuses on the military dimension of this conflict, in which Indian rebels waged both conventional and unconventional warfare against the British. In the summer of 1857, British rule almost disintegrated in north India due to the rebellion of the Indians in the Bengal Army. The military mutiny was followed by large-scale peasant uprising. But by mid-1859, the Indian Rebellion collapsed with the military defeat of the rebels. This book is the first one based on archival sources, both from India and the United Kingdom, dealing with the military history of the mid-nineteenth century Indian Rebellion. The volume wrestles ...
The War of American Independence, 1763–1783: Falling Dominoes addresses the military, maritime and naval, economic, key personalities, key societal groups, political, imperial rivalry, and diplomatic dynamics and events from the post-Seven Years’ War era in Great Britain’s North American colonies through the end of the War of American Independence. Beginning in 1763 and moving through the war chronologically, the authors argue that British political and strategic leaders failed to develop an effective strategy to quell the discontent and subsequent revolt in the North American colonies and thus failed to restore allegiance to the Crown. This book describes and analyzes events and the o...