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Gorillas, the largest of the apes inhabiting our planet, have been a source of fear, awe, and inspiration to humans. In this book, James L. Newman brings a lifetime of study of Africa to his compelling story of the rich and varied interaction between gorillas and humans since earliest contact. He illuminates the complex relationship over time through the interlinked themes of discovery, exploitation, understanding, and continuing survival. Tragically, the number of free-living gorillas—facing habitat loss, disease, and poaching—has declined dramatically over the course of the past century, and the future of the few that remain is highly uncertain. At the same time, those in zoos and sanc...
Law and Society in Classical Athens, first published in 1987, traces the development of legal thought and its relation to Athenian values. Previously Athens’ courts have been regarded as chaotic, isolated from the rest of society and even bizarre. The importance of rhetoric and the mischief made by Aristophanes have devalued the legal process in the eyes of modern scholars, whilst the analysis of legal codes and practice has seemed dauntingly complex. Professor Garner aims to situate the Athenian legal system within the general context of abstract thought on justice and of the democratic politics of the fifth century. His work is a valuable source of information on all aspects of Athenian law and its relation to culture.
In 1872, a woman known only as "An Earnest Englishwoman" published a letter titled "Are Women Animals?" in which she protested against the fact that women were not treated as fully human. In fact, their status was worse than that of animals: regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses, and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty to women. The Earnest Englishwoman's heartfelt cry was for women to "become–animal" in order to gain the status that they were denied on the grounds that they were not part of "mankind." In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be "human" rather than "animal." How are people ex...
In this comparative-historical analysis of Spanish America, Mahoney offers a new theory of colonialism and postcolonial development. He explores why certain kinds of societies are subject to certain kinds of colonialism and why these forms of colonialism give rise to countries with differing levels of economic prosperity and social well-being. Mahoney contends that differences in the extent of colonialism are best explained by the potentially evolving fit between the institutions of the colonizing nation and those of the colonized society. Moreover, he shows how institutions forged under colonialism bring countries to relative levels of development that may prove remarkably enduring in the postcolonial period. The argument is sure to stir discussion and debate, both among experts on Spanish America who believe that development is not tightly bound by the colonial past, and among scholars of colonialism who suggest that the institutional identity of the colonizing nation is of little consequence.
Mexico’s movement toward independence from Spain was a key episode in the dissolution of the great Spanish Empire, and its accompanying armed conflict arguably the first great war of decolonization in the nineteenth century. This book argues that in addition to being a war of national liberation, the struggle was also an internal war pitting classes and ethnic groups against each other, an intensely localized struggle by rural people, especially Indians, for the preservation of their communities. While local and national elites focused their energies on wresting power from colonial authorities and building a new nation-state, rural people were often much more concerned about keeping villag...
On July 18, 1924, a mob in Tehran killed U.S. foreign service officer Robert Whitney Imbrie. His violent death, the first political murder in the history of the service, outraged the American people. Though Imbrie’s loss briefly made him a cause célèbre, subsequent events quickly obscured his extraordinary life and career. Susan M. Stein tells the story of a figure steeped in adventure and history. Imbrie rejected a legal career to volunteer as an ambulance driver during World War I and joined the State Department when the United States entered the war. Assigned to Russia, he witnessed the October Revolution, fled ahead of a Bolshevik arrest order, and continued to track communist activity in Turkey even as the country’s war of independence unfolded around him. His fateful assignment to Persia led to his death at age forty-one and set off political repercussions that cloud relations between the United States and Iran to this day. Drawing on a wealth of untapped materials, On Distant Service returns readers to an era when dash and diplomacy went hand-in-hand.
Studies of the trade between the Atlantic World and Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries typically focus on the exchanges between Atlantic European countries – especially Portugal, the Netherlands and England – and Asia across the Cape route. In The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons. Circulation, Market, and Consumption of Asian Goods in the Spanish Empire, 1565-1650, José L. Gasch-Tomás offers a new approach to understanding the connections between the Atlantic World and Asia. By drawing attention to the trans-Pacific trade between the Americas and the Philippines, the re-exportation of Asian goods from New Spain to Castile, and the consumption of Chinese silk, Chinese porcelain and Japanese furnishings in New Spain and Seville, this book discloses how New Spanish cities and elites were main components of the spread of taste for Asian goods in the Spanish Empire. This book reveals how New Spanish family and commercial networks channelled the market formation of Asian goods in the Atlantic World around 1600.
Explores the legal relationships of enslaved people and their descendants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish America Atlantic slavery can be overwhelming in its immensity and brutality, as it involved more than 15 million souls forcibly displaced by European imperialism and consumed in building the global economy. Mastering the Law: Slavery and Freedom in the Legal Ecology of the Spanish Empire lays out the deep history of Iberian slavery, explores its role in the Spanish Indies, and shows how Africans and their descendants used and shaped the legal system as they established their place in Iberoamerican society during the seventeenth century. Ricardo Raúl Salazar Rey...