This book delves into the lives of three Scottish private traders – George Smith of Bombay, George Smith of Canton, and George Smith of Madras – and uses them as lenses through which to explore the inner workings of Britain's imperial expansion and g...

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds...

For sale in CIS only! The end of the Cold War and the (then) receding threat of global nuclear conflagration were meant to usher in a 'peace dividend': concomitantly warfare would decline as states devoted themselves to making money and providing fo...

Dating from the seventeenth century at the height of the Ming Dynasty, the Selden Map of China reveals a country very different from popular conceptions of the time, looking not inward to the Asian landmass but outward to the sea. Discovered in the s...

When it was published in 2015, Andrew Hartman's history of the culture wars was widely praised for its compelling and even-handed account of the way they developed and came to define American politics as the twentieth century drew to its close. Recei...

For sale in CIS only! Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859), Lowland Scottish traveller, East India Company civil servant and educator, was one of the principal intellectual architects of British colonial rule in South Asia. Imbued with liberal views,...

For sale in CIS only! Al Shabaab is one of the century's most successful violent jihadist movements. It has governing power, ruling over millions of Somalis and vast swathes of territory, and kinetic power, committing spectacular acts of violence. B...

In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization. In "Ku Klux Kulture", Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement. Ku Klux...

The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in "The Conquest of Ruins", what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginat...

For sale in CIS only! Are Europeans hard-wired for conflict? Given the enmities that wracked the Greek city-states, or the Valois, Bourbons and Habsburgs, it seems undeniable. The Holy Roman Empire promised peace, but collapsed before it could deliv...