It was Thomas Jefferson who envisioned the United States as a great 'empire of liberty.' In the first new one-volume history in two decades, David Reynolds takes Jefferson's phrase as a key to the saga of America - helping unlock both its grandeur and its paradoxes. He examines how the anti-empire of 1776 became the greatest superpower the world has seen, how the country that offered liberty and opportunity on a scale unmatched in Europe nevertheless founded its prosperity on the labour of bl...

For four centuries, people from the Netherlands have gone to America by boat or plane, to explore the country, to trade, to colonise, to settle, to do business, to find a new future or simply to visit the country as a tourist. And for four centuries, Americans, of diverse backgrounds, of native, African or European descent, have come to the Netherlands. These are their stories.

This book begins in the seventeenth century, when settlers commissioned by the West India Company settled on the sou...

In the historiography of the period of Dutch rule in the Cape of Good Hope, from 1652 until 1795, Cape burghers are represented as the perpetual underdogs bristling against the rule of a restrictive Dutch East India Company (VOC). But was this relationship really so antagonistic?

The author places Cape colonial society in the wider context of the Dutch Republic and, in doing so, compares the political structures, institutions and dynamics of the Republic and its overseas settlement. He shows ...

For sixty years, different groups in Europe have put forth interpretations of World War II and their respective countries' roles in it consistent with their own political and psychological needs. The conflict over the past has played out in diverse arenas, including film, memoirs, court cases, and textbooks. It has had profound implications for democratization and relations between neighboring countries.

This collection provides a comparative case study of how memories of World War II have be...

"Being a slave" brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. This volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well ...

Yuval Noah Harari's bestselling phenomenon now in a beautifully packaged new special edition. Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old.

Situated at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Spanish Philippines offer historians an intriguing middle ground of connected histories that raises fundamental new questions about conventional ethnic, regional and religious identities. This volume adds a new global perspective to the history of the Philippines by juxtaposing Iberian, Chinese and Islamic perspectives. By navigating various underexplored archival resources, senior and junior scholars from Asia, Europe and the A...

Large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia is of importance for the understanding of global history. The book provides a description of material life in North-western Europe and East Asia, for the period from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, with a focus on developments in Great Britain and the Dutch Republic on the one hand and China and Japan on the other hand. Like an atlas it provides information, in an accessible format, on the mai...