A Cultural History Of Western Empires In Antiquity PDF Download

This volume explores a world that thought deeply about imperial power and emperors but one that perhaps never had an "empire" of its own. These synthetic essays from experts across a wide variety of disciplines mine the intellectual world of this period and begin to demolish the myth of the so-called "Dark Ages," showing how the European Middle Ages were illuminated by vigorous debates that echo today. The story of medieval Western empires is both familiar and foreign. It is a story about politics, culture, religion, society, gender, sex, and economics, and how porous the boundaries between those categories can often be.A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Middle Ages offers a detailed and highly-illustrated account of how we got to where we are, as well as the dangers of not fully understanding why those origins matter.

This fourth volume of A Cultural History of Western Empires explores the intersections and transformations of empire in the late 17th and 18th centuries: an age of "Enlightenment" understood here both as a product of these new forces and as a matrix shaping their emergence and development. As innovative ideas transformed warfare, commerce and agriculture, the great "universal" empires confronted new capitalist forces that both splintered and reinforced imperial relations across the globe. Dutch, English and French trading companies backed by state power increasingly overtook the imperial ascendency of Spain and Portugal, while Ottoman and Russian territorial expansion slowed or halted. Commodities and capital circulated in new ways, along with people and ideas, yet that mobility was hardly a free exchange. The new forces found their first great expression in the global trade in human labour that transformed communities, environments and social relations in Europe, Africa and the Americas.Above all, A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Age of Enlightenment reveals the profound imprint left by the Atlantic slave trade on global conceptions of race, sexuality and power, and the burgeoning imperial rivalry, resentment and resistance that contributed to the explosion of revolutionary change at the end of the 18th century.