Captain Cook made three voyages to the Pacific, discovered the east coast of Australia, stove a hole in his boat within the Great Barrier Reef, tried to find the Northwest Passage, had countless encounters with natives—and died during one of them—and was one of the greatest explorers the world has ever known. His Journals are a sober but fascinating account of how it felt to redefine the boundaries of the known world.

In 1628 the Dutch East India Company loaded the Batavia, the flagship of its fleet, with a king’s ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java; the ship itself was a tangible symbol of the world’s richest and most powerful monopoly.
The company also sent along a new employee to guard its treasure. He was Jeronimus Corneliszoon, a disgraced and bankrupt man with great charisma and dangerously heretical ideas. With the help of a few disgruntled sailors, he hatched a plot to seize the ship and her riches. The mutiny might have succeeded, but in the dark morning hours of June 3, 1629, the Batavia smashed through a coral reef and ran aground on a small chain of islands near Australia. The captain and skipper escaped the wreck, and in a tiny lifeboat they set sail for Java—some 1,500 miles north—to summon help. More than 250 frightened survivors waded ashore, thankful to be alive. Unfortunately, Jeronimus and the mutineers had survived too, and the nightmare was only beginning.

Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe rise to the top, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? Why didn't these powers establish global dominance? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, distinguished economic historian Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional responses--such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution--fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if variables had been at all different, Europe would not have achieved critical military innovations, and another power could have become master of the world.
In vivid detail, Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development and military rivalry. Compared to their counterparts in China, Japan, South Asia, and the Middle East, European leaders--whether chiefs, lords, kings, emperors, or prime ministers--had radically different incentives, which drove them to make war. These incentives, which Hoffman explores using an economic model of political costs and financial resources, resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector from the Middle Ages on, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize.
Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia , the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America’s struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond.

One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren’t. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence.

Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece Benito Cereno . Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia , uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.

When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative–a story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattan–that transforms our understanding of early America.
The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

For courses in Imperialism/Colonialism as well as the second half of the World History survey course, this textbook addresses modern imperialism and colonialism from a truly global and holistic perspective. From the formation of centralized gunpowder empires in Eurasia and parts of Africa to the demise of the bi-polar Cold War world, Modern Imperialism and Colonialism investigates our evolving understanding of the origins, nature, mechanisms, and demise of modern empires. It evaluates empires as structures and also explores the doctrines, ideologies, and practices of imperialism and colonial rule.

Jonathan Israel's 1,231-page blockbuster forms the inaugural volume of a new series, the Oxford History of Early Modern Europe, and offers a comprehensive, integrated account of the northern part of the Netherlands over almost 350 years… The Dutch Republic represents the fruit of 12 years of research, contemplation and writing, and brims over with interesting detail.
— The New York Times Book Review

Israel performs the great service of charting a path through this literature and presents a coherent and comprehensive picture of the Dutch Republic… Comprehensive in scope and yet so clearly and carefully written that it could serve as a textbook for graduate history courses. Because it is so thoroughly researched and up-to-date, it is also the kind of indispensable handbook that deserves a place on every early modernist's bookshelf.
— American Historical Review

Law Wing Sang teaches cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He has a personal anthology of essays (in Chinese) Re-theorizing Colonial Power published by Oxford University Press. His research and teaching areas include historical cultural studies of colonialism; comparative social thought; Hong Kong cultural formation; citizenship and cultural theory.

"Pendergrast has served up a rich blend of anecdote, character study, market analysis, and social history...everything you ought to know about coffee is here."
-New York Times The first comprehensive business and social history of coffee, which describes how coffee has dominated and molded the economies, politics, and social structures of entire countries. Pendergrast's scrupulously researched and lively anecdotal history provides a window through which to view broader themes of modern-day media and marketing, the rise of mass production, colonialism, women's issues, and international commodity schemes.