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This second edition of Kris Lane's best-selling Pillaging the Empire retains its concise narrative form, but now includes an updated review of pirate scholarship since the first edition was published in 1998, including a new section on piracy in East and Southeast Asia in the early modern period. Lane's treatment of piracy between 1500 and 1750 remains unique in its broad coverage and inclusion of victims' perspectives. With the inclusion of new material on piracy in East and Southeast Asia, the book is now unique for narrating global piracy. This engaging story of maritime predation from the age of Columbus to the reign of Charles V of Spain is a fascinating account of the complex phenomenon that was the classic age of piracy. The well-known pirate leaders such as Francis Drake and Henry Morgan are present along with lesser-known figures such as Ann Bonny and Mary Read, two of the few female pirates on record. Pillaging the Empire brushes aside many legends, and pays careful attention to the varied circumstances and still more varied motives that led to the rise of this bloodthirsty pursuit of riches.

In 1719, a deadly and highly contagious disease took hold of the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a silver mining metropolis in what is now Bolivia. Within a year, the pathogen had killed some 22,000 people, just over a third of the city's residents. Victims collapsed with fever, body aches, and effusions of blood from the nose and mouth. Most died within days. The great Andean pandemic of 1717-22 was likely the most destructive disease to strike South America since the days of the Spanish conquest. Pandemic in Potosí features the single longest narrative of this nearly forgotten period, penned by local historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, along with shorter treatments of the disease's ravages in Cuzco, Arequipa, and the outskirts of Lima. The "Gran Peste," as it was called, was a pivotal event about which Arzáns wrote at length, because he lived through it, but also because it was believed to have cosmic significance. Kris Lane translates and contextualizes Arzáns's account, which is rich in local detail that sheds light on a range of topics--from therapeutics, devotional life, class relations, gender, and race to conceptions of illness, sin, and human will and responsibility during a major public health crisis. Original narratives of the pandemic, translated here for the first time, help readers see commonalities and differences between past and present disease encounters. Designed for use in courses on Latin American history, this concise work will also interest scholars and students of the history of religion, history of medicine, urban studies, and epidemiology.

In this new and original study of piracy, Kris Lane looks at the often mixed motives behind the phenomenon and the lives of those involved. Rejecting the romantic myth of the Elizabethan swashbuckler, he reveals a world of violence, hardship and fanaticism, in which self-enrichment was an obsession. From the first corsairs of the 16th century to the last of the buccaneers, he traces the rise and fall of a dangerous profession which encompassed slave-running, smuggling and ship-wrecking.

This introductory survey to maritime predation in the Americas from the age of Columbus to the reign of the Spanish king Philip V includes piracy, privateering (state-sponsored sea-robbery), and genuine warfare carried out by professional navies.

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, Kris Lane traces the complex web of global trading networks that funneled emeralds from backland South America to populous Asian capitals between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Lane 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.

"An English translation and critical edition of a refutation, written about 1603 (revised in 1612) by the soldier Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, of Bartolome de las Casas's famous Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1558)"--Provided by publisher. First published in 1879 as Apologâias y discursos de las conquistas occidentales.

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.

Political Capital describes the gradual emergence of the South African business community as a political actor from 1948 to the present. Utilizing more than fifty interviews with key business figures, government officials, and black leaders, as well as numerous other primary sources, the study weaves a detailed historical account of this process. The surge in corporate political activity after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre is discussed in detail, as is the political apathy of the mid-1960s, the resumption of business activism in the 1970s, and the attempt of the new Prime Minister Botha to co-opt the business community. The book's central thesis concerns the cause of business politicization. The author demonstrates that social instability is the key catalyst of political activity, not the short-term calculations of economic health. The book maintains that, once in the political arena, businesses respond to a complex variety of constituency pressures. Co-published with the Harvard University Center for International Affairs.

The essays in this examination analyze the consequences of globalization and offer a thorough analysis of the changes in the way international politics must be understood in light of such globalization. Capturing the morphing nature of politics both within and beyond the state, this volume details the centrifugal migration of politics away from state-based institutions--which occurs in an upward fashion toward the international level, and endows decentralized and private actors with policy making powers. The resulting picture is that of a central state that continues to guide politics, but needs to be complemented with attention to the sub- and the supranational tiers of government.