Browse

Calvinism went global in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as close to a thousand Dutch Reformed ministers, along with hundreds of lay chaplains, attached themselves to the Dutch East India and West India companies. Across Asia, Africa, and the Americas where the trading companies set up operation, Dutch ministers sought to convert “pagans,” “Moors,” Jews, and Catholics and to spread the cultural influence of Protestant Christianity. As Dutch ministers labored under the auspices of the trading companies, the missionary project coalesced, sometimes grudgingly but often readily, with empire building and mercantile capitalism. Simultaneously, Calvinism became entangled with societies around the world as encounters with indigenous societies shaped the development of European religious and intellectual history. Though historians have traditionally treated the Protestant and European expansion as unrelated developments, the global reach of Dutch Calvinism offers a unique opportunity to understand the intermingling of a Protestant faith, commerce, and empire.

Although Harry Dexter White (1892–1948) was arguably the most important U.S. government economist of the twentieth century, he is remembered more for having been accused of being a Soviet agent. During the Second World War, he became chief advisor on international financial policy to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, a role that would take him to Bretton Woods, where he would make a lasting impact on the architecture of postwar international finance. However, charges of espionage, followed by his dramatic testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and death from a heart attack a few days later, obscured his importance in setting the terms for the modern global economy. This book rehabilitates White, delving into his life and work and returning him to a central role as the architect of the world's financial system.

This book is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China's early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. The book traces the formation of lowland North China's agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. The book argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, the book amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.

Latin American governments systematically fail to provide the key public goods for their societies to prosper. This book argues this is because nineteenth-century Latin American state-formation occurred in a period when commerce, rather than war, was the key driver forging countries. Latin American leaders pursued the benefits of international trade at the cost of long-term liabilities built into the countries they forged, notably patrimonial administrations and dysfunctional regional combinations. The book begins with a background on comparative state-formation, introducing the idea that the timing of state-formation in world history is crucial. It develops a theory that explains cases of state-formation with and without state building. It also lays the groundwork for the study of comparative state-formation and highlights the difference between state-formation and smaller-scale political processes. The book examines the two processes of state-formation: territory consolidation and violence monopolization. It then considers how the state-formation in Latin America occurred under extremely auspicious international economic and geopolitical conditions. The book concludes that the nineteenth-century state-formation is a key to understanding some of the most pressing issues in contemporary Latin America. It suggests that some paths of state-formation do not lead to state building, and a subset of them create durable obstacles it.

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) — the only English commoner to become the overall head of state — is one of the great figures of history, but his character was very complex. He was at once courageous and devout, devious and self-serving; as a parliamentarian, he was devoted to his cause; as a soldier, he was ruthless. Cromwell's speeches and writings surpass in quantity those of any other ruler of England before Victoria and, for those seeking to understand him, he has usually been taken at his word. This book untangles the facts from the fiction. Cromwell, pursuing his devotion to God and cementing his Puritan support base, quickly transformed from obscure provincial to military victor. At the end of the first English Civil War, he was poised to take power. The book reveals a man who was both genuine in his faith and deliberate in his dishonesty — and uncovers the inner workings of the man who has puzzled biographers for centuries.

The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History is a comprehensive account of the emergence of the United States from the perspective of trade. The author traces the roots of the American commercial economy from mid-sixteenth-century Tudor England through the early years of the American republic at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The trade of colonial America is notable for the access it offered a wide range of participants. Open access (real or illusory) remains a dominant theme of the American economy to the present day. Colonial trade is notable as well for its readiness to exploit opportunity wherever it lay, and many of those opportunities lay across international borders in violation of the British Navigation Acts. The most significant feature of colonial trade is its intimate links to chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Virtually every aspect of colonial commerce bore some connection—direct or indirect. Most obvious is the slave trade itself, which carried roughly 3.5 million African captives to British America between 1619 and 1807. It was enslaved Africans who produced colonial America’s leading exports — tobacco, sugar, and rice. And enslaved Africans were a conspicuous presence on the docks and in the warehouses of northern colonial ports. This book is an account of opportunity-seeking, risk-taking producers, merchants, and mariners converting the potential of the New World into individual livelihoods and national wealth. The history of colonial trade is part of something much larger: the creation of the modern global economy.

What if history, as we know it, had run another course? Touching on alternate histories of the future and the past, or uchronias, this book encourages deeper consideration of watershed moments in the course of history. Wide-ranging in scope, it examines the Boxer Rebellion in China, the 1848 revolution in France, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and integrates science fiction, history, historiography, sociology, anthropology, and film. In probing the genre of literature and history that is fascinated with hypotheticals surrounding key points in history, the book reaches beyond a mere reimagining of history, exploring the limits and potentials of the futures past. From the most bizarre fiction to serious scientific hypothesis, the book provides a survey of the uses of counterfactual histories, methodological issues on the possible in social sciences, and practical proposals for using alternate histories in research and the wider public.

Britain’s abolition of its slave trade in 1807 was a defining moment in modern history, yet it continues to excite controversy, in part because the nation dominated European trafficking of Africans to America in 1783–1807. Through an analysis of market conditions at the British, African, and West Indian points of the infamous triangular trade, as well as of issues of credit and of agency dilemma involved in their integration, this book seeks to explain that dominance. Though legally sanctioned and justified by contemporary mercantilist and racist ideologies, enslaving Africans was nonetheless challenged by some on grounds of humanity and national identity under the later Stuarts and the Hanoverians. Theologians and philosophers intellectually rationalized those challenges within a larger humanitarian revolution, but rather than identifying it with particular individuals, the book argues that abolition of British slaving ultimately relied on the power of ordinary people to change the world. It shows that British slaving and opposition to it, the latter manifest in imaginative literature, journals, newspapers, and pamphlets as well as in learned tracts, grew in parallel through the 1760s but then came increasingly into conflict in both public imagination and political discourse. Highlighting ideological tensions between Britons’ sense of themselves as free people and their willingness to enslave Africans abroad, the book reveals how from the 1770s such tensions became politicized, even as British slaving activities reached unprecedented levels, ultimately mobilizing public opinion to compel Parliament to confront and begin to resolve them in 1788–1807.

In 1847, Protestant missionary Marcus Whitman was killed after a disastrous eleven-year effort to evangelize the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. By 1897, Whitman was a national hero, celebrated in textbooks, monuments, and historical scholarship as the “Savior of Oregon.” But his fame was based on a tall tale — one that was about to be exposed. This book traces the rise and fall of Marcus Whitman's legend, revealing two patterns in the development of American history. On the one hand is providential history, marked by the conviction that God is an active agent in human history and that historical work can reveal patterns of divine will. On the other hand is objective history, which arose from the efforts of Catholics and other racial and religious outsiders to resist providentialists' pejorative descriptions of non-Protestants and nonwhites. The book examines how these competing visions continue to shape understandings of the American past and the nature of historical truth.

Britain and France waged war eight times in the century following the Glorious Revolution, a mutual antagonism long regarded as a “Second Hundred Years” War. Yet officials on both sides also initiated ententes, free trade schemes, and colonial bargains intended to avert future conflict. What drove this quest for a more peaceful order? This book reveals the extent to which Britain and France sought to divert their rivalry away from war and into commercial competition. The two powers worked to end future conflict over trade in Spanish America, the Caribbean, and India, and imagined forms of empire-building that would be more collaborative than competitive. They negotiated to cut cross-channel tariffs, recognizing that free trade could foster national power while muting enmity. This account shows that eighteenth-century capitalism drove not only repeated wars and overseas imperialism but spurred political leaders to strive for global stability.

The United States has long been conflicted between promoting a united Western Europe in order to strengthen its defense of the West, and fearing that a more united Western Europe might not submit to American political and economic leadership. The era of wholehearted support for European unity was limited to the immediate postwar era. The stances of the past three US presidents—Bush's unilateralism, Obama's insistence on “leading from behind” and Trump's overt hostility toward the European Union—were prefigured by Washington's economic and geopolitical strategies of the 1960s and 1970s. Concentrating on the policies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the book argues that their years in office were the major turning point when “benign hegemony” gave way to an attitude toward Europe that was seldom better than lukewarm, frequently even outright hostile, and that was returned in kind. The book offers a clear and comprehensive examination of transatlantic relations during the Nixon era.