Seafaring is a mode of travel, a way to traverse maritime space that enables not only the transport of goods and materials but also of people and ideas - communicating and sharing knowledge across the sea and between different lands. Seagoing ships under sail were operating between the Levant, Egypt, Cyprus and Anatolia by the mid-third millennium BC and within the Aegean by the end of that millennium. By the Late Bronze Age (after ca. 1700/1600 BC), seaborne trade in the eastern Mediterranea...

Seafaring is a mode of travel, a way to traverse maritime space that enables not only the transport of goods and materials but also of people and ideas - communicating and sharing knowledge across the sea and between different lands. Seagoing ships under sail were operating between the Levant, Egypt, Cyprus and Anatolia by the mid-third millennium BC and within the Aegean by the end of that millennium. By the Late Bronze Age (after ca. 1700/1600 BC), seaborne trade in the eastern Mediterranea...

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that it never dies peacefully. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warf...

The Colonies of Benevolence are seven impressive cultural landscapes in The Netherlands and Belgium. They tell a story that started 200 years ago. It is a story of the greatest ambitions: eliminating poverty, creating a better life for people, cultivating poor soil... The scale on which this took place was unique.

Two centuries later, the Colonies are embarking on a new future. They are globally unique as testimonies of an Enlightened, utopian experiment and of what followed afterwards.

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Here is a new, fourth edition of this authoritative introductory survey of world prehistory, spanning the past 3,000,000 years and written by a team of twenty-four expert authors. This edition has been radically updated to be more thematic and accessible: chapters are connected by new key themes boxes (climate change, domestication, migration, social inequality and urbanism), which link global regions and encourage big-picture thinking. The text has been streamlined and the book's design comp...

In this concise, lucid and entertaining book, with more than forty maps and illustrations, acclaimed historian John Hirst explores the qualities that have made Europe a world-changing civilisation.

Beginning with a rapid historical overview from the ancient Greeks to the present day (the ‘shortest history’ itself), Hirst goes on to examine what makes Europe unique: its political evolution; the shaping influence of its linguistic boundaries; the crucial role played by power struggles betwe...

Historians not only have knowledge of history, but by writing about it and engaging with other historians from the past and present, they make history themselves. This companion offers young historians clear guidelines for the different phases of historical research; how do you get a good historical question? How do you engage with the literature? How do you work with sources from the past, from archives to imagery and objects, art, or landscapes? What is the influence of digitalisation of th...

'This is a miracle of a book' George Lamming'Compelling. Stuart Hall's story is the story of an age' Owen Jones 'Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial'This is the story, in his own words, of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall: writer, thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his age. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, then still a British colony, Hall found himself caught between two worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in the...

Leiden University was founded as an institution that would embody a particular set of academic ethics that sought to improve society through the acquisition of knowledge. In this book, author Willem Otterspeer draws on the idea of Leiden as 'a “bastion of liberty”' and proposes that concepts such as 'equilibrium' and 'scale' are key to understanding the university as an institution, ultimately showing how universities are a form of social capital, one of Western society’s answers to the...

An accessible, definitive student introduction to geographical thought, this book takes a unique approach that encompasses environmental, historical and social perspectives.