Showing papers on "Empire published in 1975"

The Twelve Caesars

Abstract: As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, Suetonius gained access to the imperial archives and used them (along with carefully gathered eye-witness accounts) to produce one of the most colourful biographical works in history. "The Twelve Caesars" chronicles the public careers and private lives of the men who wielded absolute power over Rome, from the foundation of the empire under Julius Caesar and Augustus, to the decline into depravity and civil war under Nero, and the recovery and stability that came with his successors. A masterpiece of anecdote, wry observation and detailed physical description, "The Twelve Caesars" presents us with a gallery of vividly drawn - and all too human - individuals.

Proconsuls, Assizes and the Administration of Justice under the Empire*

Abstract: Vespasian, when he was proconsul of Africa, was pelted with turnips during a riot at Hadrumetum; Galba, when he was legate of Hispania Citerior, received the news of the revolt of Vindex while holding assizes in the far south-east of his province at New Carthage; the famous confrontation between Antoninus Pius, when proconsul of Asia, and the sophist Polemo, when the latter returned home and expelled Pius from his lodgings, occurred at Smyrna. Such instances and anecdotes could be easily multiplied, for governors and their legates did not administer justice by permanently holding court in the capital city—be it Carthage, Tarraco or Ephesus—of their province. Instead they toured their area of administration and held judicial sessions at certain privileged towns—assize centres—of the province. This contention is of prime importance for our conception of the administration of the Roman empire. The first purpose of this article is to assemble the evidence for the actual working of the assize system and the dispensation of justice within it, and the consequences for provincial litigants. The problems faced by a provincial litigant, wishing to gain access to the proconsul's tribunal, may provide a further control for our assessment of the practical, rather than theoretical, operation of Roman judicial procedure. Secondly, I hope, if only impressionistically, to suggest the types of constraint which this framework of a peregrinatory system of justice set on any Roman governor in his non-judicial relations with his subjects.

Theoretical thinking in sociology

Abstract: Abbreviations Preface 1. Setting the scene 2. The Bohemian rebellion and its aftermath, 1618-24 3. The triumph of militance, 1624-9 4. The clash of Catholic interests, 1629-31 5. Collapse and recovery in Germany, 1631-5 6. France and Spain until the demise of Richelieu and Olivares, 1635-42/43 7. The Empire after the Peace of Prague, 1635-45 8. Carafa and the struggle over the peace of Westphalia, 1645-9 9. Conclusion Bibliography and sources Index.

The Administrators of Roman Egypt

Abstract: Before A.D. 70 the prefecture of Egypt was the greatest prize in an equestrian career—four praetorian prefects were promoted to it—and thereafter it ranked only just below the praetorian prefecture, to which no fewer than fourteen governors of Egypt were advanced between 70 and 235. In the other great provinces of the empire legati Augusti pro praetore could leave finance to the procurators, while proconsuls perhaps soon came to retain little of their original responsibility for the collection of taxes, and had no army to command. The prefect of Egypt combined fiscal with military and judicial functions. So did the presidial procurators of such areas as Mauretania or Noricum, but the importance of Egypt and the complexity of its administration set the prefect far above them. Egypt was probably the most populous province in the empire and contributed more than any other to the revenues, partly in grain that provided much of Rome's essential food, and its exploitation was a vast public enterprise of which the prefect was the managing director. He also had to do justice not only under Roman law but under the traditional laws of the native Egyptians and of the Greek settlers, among subjects who were both litigious and turbulent. Only defence against external attack was a simpler problem than in other frontier regions.

Sir Banister Fletcher's: A History of Architecture

Abstract: Part 1: Background Prehistoric The Architecture of Egypt The ancient near East Early Asian culture Greece and The Hellenistic kingdoms Part 2: Background Prehistoric Rome and the Roman Empire The Byzantine Empire Early Russia Early Medieval and Romanesque Gothic Part 3: Background Seleucid, Parthian, Sasanian, Hellenistic Umayyad, Abbasid and Spain until the Fall Timurid, Seljuk and pre-Moghul India Safavid Persia, the Ottoman Empire and Moghul India Vernacular Building and the Paradise Garden Part 4: Background Africa The Americas China Japan South Asia South East Asia Part 5: Background Italy France, Spain and Portugal Austria, Germany and Central Europe The Low Countries and Britain Russia and Scandinavia Post Renaissance Europe Part 6: Background Africa The Americas China Japan South East Asia Indian Subcontinent Australasia Part 7: Background Western Europe 1900-45 Western Europe 1945-95 Eastern Europe Russia Middle East Africa N America 1900-50 North America 1950-95 Central and S America China Japan S E Asia Hong Kong and Macau Indian Subcontinent Oceania.

China's Imperial Past : An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture

Abstract: Introduction Part I. The formative age, prehistory-206 BC 1. General history 2. State and society 3. Thought 34. Literature and art Part II. The Early Empire, 206 BC-AD 960: 5. General history 6. Government 7. Society and the economy 8. Thought 9. Literature and art Part III. The Later Empire, 960-1850: 10. General history 11. Government 12. Society and the economy 13. Thought 14. Literature and art Epilogue.

Egyptian Relations with Palestine in the Middle Kingdom

Abstract: Traditional studies of Egypt's relations with Palestine in the Middle Kingdom (1991-1786 B.c.) have usually concluded that there was a significant and extensive Egyptian presence in Palestine at this time; many scholars have followed the lead of W. F. Albright, who argued for a Middle Kingdom political or military empire in the Southern Levant.' Such archaeological and historical data as the Story of Sinuhe, the Execration Texts, the Nesumont and Khusobk stelae, the Djehutihotep statuette from Megiddo, and numerous Middle Kingdom antiquities found in Palestine have often been quoted as evidence either for this empire or at least for a strong Egyptian commercial or diplomatic presence in Palestine in the 12th Dynasty.2 It is my conviction that no such empire existed, and the supposedly close political and economic relations have been much exaggerated. The primary data for this study will be the Egyptian imports and Palestinian copies of Egyptian objects which have been found in Middle Bronze IIA burials and occupational deposits.3 While there has been considerable disagreement among scholars regarding the absolute chronology of the MB IIA Period, it now seems likely that this period encompasses most of the 12th Dynasty,4 while the semi-nomadic MB I Period is

The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case

Abstract: There have been numerous attempts to explain the fall of the Mughal Empire; and I truly feel great hesitation in adding myself to the long list of its exponents. To historians like Irvine and Sarkar, the decline could be explained in terms of a personal deterioration in the quality of the kings and their nobles. The harem influence grew—and women, for some strange unscientific reason, are always supposed to be a bad influence. The kings and nobles became more luxury loving, though no-one has yet established that the Mughals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries enjoyed any less luxurious mode of living than their eighteenth-century successors. Sarkar, in his monumental History of Aurangzib, also elaborated upon the traditionally recognized factor, namely, Hindu–Muslim differences: Aurangzib's religious policy is thought to have provoked a Hindu Reaction that undid the unity that had been so laboriously built up by his predecessors.

Byzantine ‘Nationalism’ and the Nicaean Empire

Abstract: The fall of Constantinople on the night of 13 April 1204 to the Venetians and the soldiers of the fourth crusade is taken as the crucial turning point of the history of the later Byzantine Empire. For many the final period of Byzantine history is nothing but the pathetic survival of a state built on the memories of its former greatness. This is in many ways far too gloomy a picture. Constantinople was to be recovered by the Byzantines in 1261; and we should not forget that the last centuries of Byzantium saw a flowering of Byzantine art and scholarship. This achievement naturally directs our attention to the period of exile, when the foundations of this ‘Last Byzantine Renaissance’, as it has been called, were laid. In exile the Byzantine Empire was re-established and the Byzantine heritage preserved, at a time when both appeared to be in danger of being recreated in a Latin image, for a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch had been established in Constantinople in place of the Byzantine emperor an...

The measurement of preindustrial population changes: the Ottoman Empire from the 15th to the 17th century

Abstract: Population increase is a fashionable whipping boy. 'Trouble Parking? Support Family Planning'. Studies of the Ottoman Empire are no exception. As with many claims that population is Pandora's box, there is a current tendency to explain certain broad changes in the Ottoman Empire with terms such as population growth, population pressure, rural depopulation and migration. This is not to deny the place of population as a basic indicator of social and economic importance. The increasing interest in the population of the Empire and its unique archival sources are beginning to add new dimensions to our appreciation of Near Eastern society. 1 As the social and economic fabric of the Ottoman world is pieced together, population parameters are a keystone to be honed with care and circumspection. There is thus need for a thereotical framework if demographic questions are to be looked at in a logical fashion. Even in the absence of statistics that meet modern standards, the researcher must know what he is looking for and what measurement factors may affect the figures. Otherwise it is all too tempting to pick out a few figures to support an argument or use terminology implying precise measurement when none is possible. During the preindustrial period long-term rates of population change were low by modern standards. Thus the questions of method, possible range in the estimates, and error are particularly important.

Land, labour and capital in Natal: The Natal Land and Colonisation Company 1860–1948

Abstract: The history of the London-based Natal Land and Colonisation Company is explored against the background of the evolving political economy of rural Natal. In the early years of the colony, white-controlled farming operations consistently failed. The landholdings of bankrupt colonists passed into the hands of a small group of men with capital. In 1861 this group activated its links with financiers in Britain to float the Natal Land and Colonisation Company. The Company ‘bought’ 250,000 acres of surplus lands from them in return for an injection of metropolitan capital into productive operations to be carried out on the remaining mainly coastal lands, or into further speculative activity. In fact, white-controlled farming activity in the interior continued to stagnate. Money which the Company loaned to white farmers in the 1860s, secured as mortgages on their farms, was not repaid, and the Company took over the lands of the bankrupt until in 1874 it controlled 657,000 acres in Natal. Anxious for a sizeable and more reliable source of income, the Company, in common with some colonists, concentrated on extracting rent from Africans, as yet the only successful farming population of the Natal interior. The increasing importance of this source of income to the Company was rudely interrupted in the 1890s by a fundamental shift in the Natal political economy. New mining centres in South Africa looked to Natal to furnish some of their needs for raw material and labour. The balance of economic and political forces favoured those who demanded labour, not rent, from Natal Africans. The Company switched its capital in good time out of renting land to African farmers and into renting and property development in the growing urban areas of white South Africa. Its properties were brought within the empire of the Eagle Star Insurance Company in 1948.

The minor dynasties of northern iran

Abstract: Among the provinces of the Sāsānian empire, the coastal regions along the southern shore of the Caspian Sea resisted the penetration of the Arabs and Islam most tenaciously. The early history of the Sāsānian dynasty is, however, shrouded in obscurity. The first mention of an Ispahbad ruling Tabaristān in a reliable report concerns the year 79/698. Tabaristān was ruled by Muslim governors residing in Āmul. Their first task was to secure the Muslim domination over the newly subdued territories. Though the nobility was generally left unharmed, some prominent Zoroastrian leaders were killed during the first years of the occupation. The history of the Bāvandid, Ispahbads of Shahriyārkūh in the 4th/ioth century can only fragmentarily be pieced together from occasional references in literary sources and some numismatic evidence. Rūyān in the 4th/10th century came under the rule of a dynasty bearing the title Ustandār. The population of Azarbaijan at the time of the conquest was predominantly Iranian, speaking numerous dialects.

The Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by which They Forced Her Gates Ajar

Abstract: This book tells the fascinating story of the war between England and China that delivered Hong Kong to the English, forced the imperial Chinese government to add four ports to Canton as places in which foreigners could live and trade, and rendered irreversible the process that for almost a century thereafter distinguished western relations with this quarter of the globe-- the process that is loosely termed the "opening of China." Originally published by UNC Press in 1975, Peter Ward Fay's study was the first to treat extensively the opium trade from the point of production in India to the point of consumption in China and the first to give both Protestant and Catholic missionaries their due; it remains the most comprehensive account of the first Opium War through western eyes. In a new preface, Fay reflects on the relationship between the events described in the book and Hong Kong's more recent history.

Studies in the colonial history of Spanish America

Abstract: 1. The Conquistadors and the Rewards of Conquest Bands of warriors in the Reconquest of Spain 2. The Spanish Empire in the Indies: from Christendom to the System of Nation States 3. The Institutions and Founding Ideas of the Spanish State in the Indies 4. Trends in Colonial History and Changes in the Founding 5. The Enlightenment, Enlightened Despotism and the Ideological Crisis in the Colonies 6. The New World in Eschatological and Utopian Writings of the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries 7. The Problem of Periodisation of Post-Columbian History.

Anatolia from shuppiluliumash to the egyptian war of muwatallish

Abstract: This chapter deals with the history of Anatolia from the period of Shuppiluliumash till the Egyptian war of Muwatallish. Shuppiluliumash had already, as crown prince, succeeded in stabilizing the situation during the later part of the reign of Tudkhaliash, his father. He had led the Hittite armies skilfully and successfully and had restored the frontier, particularly in the north and in the east. When Murshilish, son of Shuppiluliumash, ascended the throne, his efforts in the first ten years were concentrated upon the reassertion of Hittite power, mainly in Asia Minor. Under him, the empire spread from the Lebanon and the Euphrates in the south to the mountains of Pontus in the north and to the western reaches of Asia Minor. As field-marshal of the Hittite armies Khattushilish, the younger brother of Murshilish, claims to have conducted numerous campaigns for his brother, both offensively and defensively.

East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain's Mediterranean Crisis, 1936–1939

Abstract: 'We are a very rich and a very vulnerable Empire, and there are plenty of poor adventurers not very far away who look upon us with hungry eyes.' This is how Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain underlined England's acute imperial predicament in 1938 when he was about to launch his policy of European appeasement. What was the relationship between Empire and appeasement in British foreign policy in the last years of the inter-war peace? How did Britain's exposed overseas interests in the Far East, in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean influence diplomatic policies taken in London at the time of the Rhineland occupation, the Anschluss, the Munich crisis, the Prague coup of March 1939, or the invasion of Poland six months later? How closely was the policy of appeasement tied to the burden of global military weakness, and what was the impact of strategic advice on Cabinet decision-making in the Chamberlain era?

The False Joseph II

Abstract: ‘Since I have ascended the throne, and wear the first diadem in the world, I have made philosophy the legislator of my empire.’ Of all the sayings attributed to the Emperor Joseph II, this is easily the most hackneyed. It figures in many surveys of eighteenth-century history, whether old like W. O. Hassall's and A. H. Johnson's or new like those by Stuart Andrews, Maurice Ashley, R. W. Harris and E. N. Williams; in what is regarded as the best biography of Joseph in German, by Viktor Bibl; in the most extended and best known Life in English, Saul K. Padover's The Revolutionary Emperor; in Herbert H. Rowen's collection of documents, From Absolutism to Revolution; in Albert Sorel's L'Europe et la Revolution francaise; in Victor-L. Tapie's The Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy; and in the recent monograph by Walter W. Davis, Joseph II: An Imperial Reformer for the Austrian Netherlands. The remark is the first sentence of a letter which the emperor is supposed to have written to Cardinal Herzan, his minister in Rome, in October 1781, and which goes on:

Wesleyanism and Empire

Abstract: Much as late-Victorian Nonconformists were inclined to take a simplified view of national politics, which they saw as a perpetual conflict between the agents of darkness and the apostles of light, students of the period have tended to take a simplified view of political Nonconformity, which was as multifarious in its secular loyalties as in its theological variations. The self-appointed guardians of the Nonconformist Conscience spoke with many voices, rarely in unison. Indeed, the individual who gave currency to that catchphrase, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, was - much by his Wesleyanism as by his idiosyncrasy - among the least typical of those whom he was alleged to represent.

Did Imperial Rome Disarm Her Subjects

Abstract: IN HIs Roman Social Relations 50 B.C.-A.D. 284 (New Haven and London 1974) Professor Ramsay Macmullen presents a sombre picture of the condition of the lower orders in the Roman empire, which in general appears to me to represent the truth only too well. But among the many suggestions he throws out which provoke reflection, at least one may challenge dissent. In his sketch of Roman taxation he urges that the resistance movements it caused "reveal in rough outline a common pattern of desperation: first, initial conquest by the Romans; next, the rapid confiscation of all hidden weapons;" and then assessments and "recurrent spasms of protest against the weight of tribute harshly calculated and still more harshly exacted." His belief that even in the early empire taxation was heavier than is commonly assumed seems to me justifiable, but that is not my subject here. Is it right that disarmament, indeed rapid disarmament, was normally the first act of the conquerors as a prelude to taxation? Macmullen founds this claim on (a) a few texts relating to the disarmament of particular peoples and (b) an interpretation of the law or laws de vi, which in his judgement show that disarmament was universal.' By implication, it was also permanent. There is perhaps some risk that this view will gain credit, unless rebutted. A fuller survey of the evidence suggests to me that disarmament was far from normal and, where attempted, without lasting effect. (a) Macmullen cites a statement of Strabo that "the Gauls had laid down their arms and were now compelled to practise the arts of cultivation."2 But these words, taken along with other passages in which Strabo cele-

Economic and Political Expansion: The Case of Oudh

Abstract: Historians of the early phases of British conquest in India have until recent years given comparatively little attention to the economic elements in British expansion. Historians of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century generally portrayed conquest as a largely defensive reaction to French rivalry or to the instability created by the collapse of the Mughal empire. The commercial functions of the East India Company were largely ignored; if they were mentioned at all it was only to point out that the Directors of the Company believed that costly wars and conquests were incompatible with successful trade and therefore took a jaundiced view of the supposed ambitions of Warren Hastings and Wellesley. Wellesley. In 1948, however, in his John Company at Work, Professor Holden Furber both revealed a much more complex pattern of British economic interests in India, including an extremely vigorous private sector operating in the interstices of the Company's monopoly, and suggested a number of links between ‘economic contact between India and the west’ and the rise of British ‘imperialism’. More recently, historians have begun to examine such links in detail in studies of specific parts of India. The extent to which the British had entrenched themselves in the economic life of Bengal long before Plassey, was noted by Dr Bhattacharya in his The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, a book which prompts questions about the extent to which Siraj-ud-daula or Mir Kasim were victims of British economic success.

The ṭāhirids and ṣaffārids

Abstract: During the 3rd/9th century, four generations of the Tāhirid family succeeded each other hereditarily as governors for the 'Abbāsid caliphs. The practical effects of the trends inaugurated by the Tāhirids were seen in the governmental policies and cultural climate of succeeding dynasties, the Saffārids and Sāmānids in eastern Persia, the various Dailamite and Kurdish dynasties in the west. The founders of the Tāhirid family fortunes were typical of the Persians who had lent their support, first to the anti-Umayyad da'wa of Abū Muslim, and then to the new regime of the 'Abbāsid which in 132/749 emerged from that upheaval. One of the most important aspects of early Saffārid policy, of significance for the spread of Islam in Afghanistan and on the borders of India long after their empire had collapsed, was that of expansion into eastern Afghanistan.