Between 1500 and 1750, European expansion and global interaction produced vast wealth. As goods traveled by ship along new global trade routes, piracy also flourished on the world’s seas. Pillaging the Empire tells the fascinating story of maritime predation in this period, including the perspectives of both pirates and their victims. Brushing aside the romantic legends of piracy, Kris Lane pays careful attention to the varied circumstances and motives that led to the rise of this...

This text demonstrates that there is a politics model that unifies the discipline and structures its relationship to the other social sciences. It shows how this model underlies important works of applied research in all the main political science subfields.

A "wide-ranging, vivid" narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean ( The Observer).Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire's Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the nort...

In Masters of War, Clara Nieto adeptly presents the parallel histories of the countries of Latin America, histories that are intertwined, each reflecting the United States’ "coherent policy of intervention" set into motion by the Monroe Doctrine. As the value of this continued policy comes increasingly into question, Nieto argues for the need to evaluate the alarming precedent set in Latin America: the institution of client dictatorships, the roles played by the interests of U.S. corporati...

The epic story of the forgotten Irish men and women who changed the face of Latin America forever.In the early nineteenth century, thousands of volunteers left Ireland behind to join the fight for South American independence. Lured by the promise of adventure, fortune and the opportunity to take a stand against colonialism, they braved the treacherous Atlantic crossing to join the ranks of the Liberator, Símon Bolívar, and became instrumental in helping oust the Spanish from Colombia, Pana...

Like snapshots of everyday life in the past, the compelling biographies in this book document the making of the Black Atlantic world since the sixteenth century from the point of view of those who were part of it. Centering on the diaspora caused by the forced migration of Africans to Europe and across the Atlantic to the Americas, the chapters explore the slave trade, enslavement, resistance, adaptation, cultural transformations, and the quest for citizenship rights. The variety of experi...

The War of the Triple Alliance is the largest single conflict in the history of South America.Drawing Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay into conflict the war was characterized by extraordinarily high casualty rates, and was to shape the future of an entire continent – depopulating Paraguay and establishing Brazil as the predominant military power.Despite the importance of the war, little information is available in English about the armies that fought...

This is an original survey of the economic and social history of slavery of the Afro-American experience in Latin America and the Caribbean. The focus of the book is on the Portuguese, Spanish, and French-speaking regions of continental America and the Caribbean. It analyzes the latest research on urban and rural slavery and on the African and Afro-American experience under these regimes. It approaches these themes both historically and structurally. The historical section provides a detai...

In the generations after emancipation, hundreds of thousands of African-descended working-class men and women left their homes in the British Caribbean to seek opportunity abroad: in the goldfields of Venezuela and the cane fields of Cuba, the canal construction in Panama, and the bustling city streets of Brooklyn. But in the 1920s and 1930s, racist nativism and a brutal cascade of antiblack immigration laws swept the hemisphere. Facing borders and barriers as never before, Afro-Caribbean ...

Hurricanes have long been a fact of life in the Bahamas. With extensive exposed coastlines jutting out of the Atlantic and uniquely flat lands and shallow coastal waters, these islands had seen many tempests before there was a Bahamas as we know it today.Hurricanes have shaped the islands landscape and, in a sense, their people as well. In the history of the Bahamasoften considered a patriarchal society in which the hurricanes traditionally bore the names not of women, but of the i...

Means provides the first major study of both the historical development of private law in a Latin American country and the shifting role of business corporations or share companies in Latin American development. He shows that Colombia’s corporate law provisions for commercial codes held only a tenuous relationship to reality and that, even today, Colombia’s commercial development continues to be affected by a paucity of legal scholars, case reports, and legal journals.

Following Napoleon's installation of his brother as King of Spain, in 20 years of warfare the nations of Spanish America wrested their independence from the mother country and shaped the Americas we know today.The Wars of South American Independence began with confused, scattered uprisings in 1809 and ended with a half-hearted expedition against Mexico in 1829. The South American revolutions heralded Spain's downfall as a world power and marked the first expression...