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Among the magnificent gems and jewels left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. For the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids green was—as it remains for all Muslims—the color of Paradise, reserved for the Prophet Muhammad and his descendants. Tapping a wide range of sources, this book traces the complex web of global trading networks that funneled emeralds from backland South America to populous Asian capitals between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This book reveals the bloody conquest wars and forced labor regimes that accompanied their production. It is a story of trade, but also of transformations—how members of profoundly different societies at opposite ends of the globe assigned value to a few thousand pounds of imperfectly shiny green rocks.

From 1850 to 1914, Brazil enjoyed a long period of political and financial stability that was interrupted just once. During this rupture in 1889–1894, the country suffered two successful coups-d'etat, military government, civil war, and a disastrous decline in the value of the national currency. The five years of disorder and crisis came in the wake of the nation's abolition of slavery and related financial repercussions. This book examines Brazil's crisis years, for the first time setting post-slavery financial decisions within their international and local historical contexts. Arguing against the “European dependency” interpretation of Brazil's history, this book explains how planters' demands for easy credit after abolition were met with shortsighted economic policies. The failure of the expansionary monetary policy of the 1890s not only illuminates Brazil's history, it also suggests lessons relevant to financial and political decisions being made today.

George I. Sánchez is the most important intellectual and one of the most important activists of the “Mexican American Generation” between the New Deal and the Great Society. From humble New Mexico beginnings, Sánchez used education as a means of advancement first as a teacher, then as an educational bureaucrat, and finally as a professor. Intimately connected to some of the leading national philanthropies with regard to civil rights and with different levels of government in the U.S. and abroad, George Sánchez made bettering humankind his life's work. While he was involved in many issues, Sánchez was most invested in the idea of integration. He sought to unleash the revolutionary potential of schools by abolishing the school segregation of Mexican Americans in the United States. He was an academic activist interested in the integration of Mexican Americans in all facets of national life. Through this biography, the author will not only tell the life and work of a fascinating individual, but also relate much of the twentieth-century Chicana/o experience. Despite enduring serious professional difficulties, particularly over his civil rights activism, as well as major challenges his personal life, George Sánchez still fought racial prejudice as if he had nothing to lose. He did. And yet he continued for decades to fight those good fights.

Going against the grain of most existing scholarship, this book explores the archives of colonial Mexico to uncover a history of “futuremaking.” While historians and historical anthropologists of Latin America have long focused on historical memory, this book rejects this approach and its assumptions about time experience. Ranging widely across economic, political, and cultural practices, the book reveals how colonial subjects used the resources of tradition and Catholicism to craft new futures.

This innovative study explores the transition in Brazil from a hegemonically Catholic society to a religiously pluralistic society. The book shows that the rise of religious pluralism was fraught with conflict and violence, as Catholic bishops, priests, and friars organized intense campaigns against Protestantism. These episodes of religious violence were not isolated outbursts of reactionary rage, but rather formed part of a longer process through which religious groups articulated their vision for Brazil's national future. The book begins with a background on Catholic–Protestant relations in the Brazilian Northeast. It suggests a new religious history of modern Latin America that puts religious pluralism at the center rather than at the margins of historical analysis. In doing so it seeks to understand the ways in which religious competition and conflict redefined traditional relationships between church and state, lay and clergy, popular and official religion, and local and national interests.

This book on the Yaqui people of the north Mexican state of Sonora examines the history of Yaqui-Spanish interactions from first contact in 1533 through Mexican independence in 1821. It deals with the colonial history of the Yaqui people and presents a portrait of the colonial experience of the indigenous peoples of Mexico's Yaqui River Valley. In examining native engagement with the forces of the Spanish empire, the book identifies three ironies that emerged from the dynamic and ambiguous relationship of the Yaquis and their conquerors: the strategic use by the Yaquis of both resistance and collaboration; the intertwined roles of violence and negotiation in the colonial pact; and the surprising ability of the imperial power to remain effective despite its general weakness.