John Shovlin— For centuries, empires protected the commercial activity of Europeans overseas and secured their access to crucial resources and markets. Commerce requires protection to flourish, officials and merchants understood. At home, laws and courts assured capitalists’ property and governments blocked working-class threats to accumulation. States sought to protect merchants
Geoffrey Parker— The future Charles V first made his presence felt from the womb. In September 1499, Philip summoned ‘a midwife from the city of Lille’ to ‘see and visit’ Joanna; and four months later he sent a courier ‘at the utmost speed, day and night, without sparing men or
Janet M. Hartley— In the late thirteenth century, Muscovy was a small, landlocked principality and a vassal state of the Mongol Empire. By the late the sixteenth century, however, it had experienced an extraordinary expansion of territory under the control of Ivan IV, who styled himself no longer grand prince
By Abbas Amanat — The Persians, and before them the Medes, were among the first people known to the ancient Greeks outside their own geographic sphere. As early as the sixth century BCE, when Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550 BCE–330 BCE), conquered Asia Minor,
Adrian Goldsworthy, an award-winning biographer and historian, has brought ancient Rome to life through a trilogy of biographies of the leaders of the greatest empire of all time. In Caesar: Life of a Colossus and Antony and Cleopatra, Goldsworthy cut through the traditional stories told of these well-known figures, exposing the complexity
On a surface level, Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire exposes and defends an overlooked narrative in American history. His book tells the story of the Comanche people, from their first mention in the ledgers of a Spanish colonial official in 1706 to their decimation by famine and an expanding United States
Paul VanDevelder is a featured author on Smithsonian.com’s History and Archeology page this week, giving readers a sneak peek at his new book, Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory. His latest post sets the scene on what the tribes called “The Great
Congratulations are in order for Pekka Hamalainen, author of Comanche Empire and winner of the 2009 Bancroft Prize. One of the most prestigious honors in the field of history, the Bancroft Prize is awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University to the authors of exceptional works in the fields
If you haven’t heard it already, tune in to Tom Ashbrook’s conversation with Adrian Goldsworthy on NPR’s On Point. From the On Point website: “Hail, Caesar!” they still cry in the movies as once they saluted in the heart of ancient Rome and on battlefields from Gaul to Syria. Julius