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This book is a study of British imperialism's imaginative geography, exploring the pairing of India and the Atlantic world from literature to colonial policy. The book weaves a complex portrait of the imaginative geography of British imperialism. Contrary to most current scholarship, eighteenth-century Britons saw the empire not as separate Atlantic and Indian spheres but as an interconnected whole: the Indies. Crisscrossing the hemispheres, the book traces global histories of race, slavery, and class, from Boston to Bengal. It also reveals the empire to be pervasively present at home, in metropolitan scenes of fashionable sociability. The book reveals how the pairing of the two Indies in discourse helped produce colonial policies that linked them in practice. Combining the methods of literary studies and new imperial history, the book demonstrates how the imaginative geography of the Indies shaped the culture of British imperialism, which in turn changed the shape of the world.

Early medieval communities were thinking seriously about their environments. They saw themselves as part of a complex and dynamic universe that was propelled by interconnected organisms and forces. In that system, even the smallest creatures or events could have far-reaching consequences. The big picture was tied to hyperlocal circumstances. The people who lived in the early medieval West (in what is now northwest Africa and Europe) brought these perspectives to bear on their farming, policy making, and philosophizing. And pigs were both a means and a motivation for doing this. They were a flexible species that could handle a diversity of ecologies. They illustrated the benefits of being adaptable. But they were also a constant reminder that humans had to adapt to their animals and landscapes: total control or assimilation was unthinkable. Pigs were nearly everywhere in the early medieval West, and they left their hoofprints on laws, politics, philosophy, religion, and even humans’ own sense of themselves.

Nine years of age when he came to the throne in 1216, Henry III had to rule within the limits set by the establishment of Magna Carta and the emergence of parliament. Pacific, conciliatory, and deeply religious, Henry brought many years of peace to England and rebuilt Westminster Abbey in honour of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor. He poured money into embellishing his palaces and creating a magnificent court. Yet this investment in ‘soft power’ did not prevent a great revolution in 1258, led by Simon de Montfort, ending Henry's personal rule. This book brings to life Henry's character and reign as never before. The book stresses the king's achievements as well as his failures while offering an entirely new perspective on the intimate connections between medieval politics and religion.

In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions and fairies was commonplace. Among both educated and ordinary people the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. Yet in the eighteenth century such certainties were swept away. Credit for this great change is usually given to science — and in particular to the scientists of the Royal Society. But is this justified? This book argues that those pioneering the change in attitude were not scientists but freethinkers. While some scientists defended the reality of supernatural phenomena, these sceptical humanists drew on ancient authors to mount a critique both of orthodox religion and, by extension, of magic and other forms of superstition. Even if the religious heterodoxy of such men tarnished their reputation and postponed the general acceptance of anti-magical views, slowly change did come about. When it did, this owed less to the testing of magic than to the growth of confidence in a stable world in which magic no longer had a place.

Frederick Barbarossa, born of two of Germany's most powerful families, swept to the imperial throne in a coup d'état in 1152. A leading monarch of the Middle Ages, he legalized the dualism between the crown and the princes that endured until the end of the Holy Roman Empire. This new biography, the first in English in four decades, paints a rich picture of a consummate diplomat and effective warrior. The book mines Barbarossa's recently published charters and other sources to illuminate the monarch's remarkable ability to rule an empire that stretched from the Baltic to Rome, and from France to Poland. Offering a fresh assessment of the role of Barbarossa's extensive familial network in his success, the book also considers the impact of Frederick's death in the Third Crusade as the key to his lasting heroic reputation. An intriguing epilogue explains how Hitler's audacious attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 came to be called “Operation Barbarossa.”

Merlin the Magician has remained an enthralling and curious individual since he was first introduced in the twelfth century though the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. But although the Merlin of literature and Arthurian myth is well known, Merlin the “historical” figure and his relation to medieval magic are less familiar. This book explores just who he was, and what he has meant to Britain. The historical Merlin was no rough magician: he was a learned figure from the cutting edge of medieval science and adept in astrology, cosmology, prophecy, and natural magic, as well as being a seer and a proto-alchemist. His powers were convincingly real—and useful, for they helped to add credibility to the “long-lost” history of Britain that first revealed them to a European public. Merlin's prophecies reassuringly foretold Britain's path, establishing an ancient ancestral line and linking biblical prophecy with more recent times. Merlin helped to put British history into world history. The author also explores the meaning of Merlin's magic across the centuries, arguing that he embodied ancient Christian and pagan magical traditions, recreated for a medieval court and shaped to fit a new moral framework. Linking Merlin's reality and power with the culture of the Middle Ages, the book reveals the true impact of the most famous magician of all time.

The author of this book continues his three-part history of the emergence of Western political thought during the Middle Ages with this second volume in the series. Here, he explores kingship from the tenth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, showing how, under the stresses of religious and cultural development, kingship became an increasingly secular institution.