Prince, Pen, and Sword PDF Download

Author: Maaike van Berkel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789004315716
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Maaike van Berkel
Publisher: Rulers & Elites
ISBN: 9789004315709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 654

View

Book Description
A synoptic interpretation of the rulers and elites in Eurasia from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century.

Author: Gowaart Van Den Bossche
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110753022
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

View

Book Description
The so-called Mamluk sultans who ruled Egypt and Syria between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries AD have often been portrayed as lacking in legitimacy due to their background as slave soldiers. Sultanic biographies written by chancery officials in the early period of the sultanate have been read as part of an effort of these sultans to legitimise their position on the throne. This book reconsiders the main corpus of six such biographies written by the historians Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d. 1293) and his nephew Shāfiʿ ibn ʿAlī (d. 1330) and argues that these were in fact far more complex texts. An understanding of their discourses of legitimisation needs to be embedded within a broader understanding of the multi-directional discourses operating across the texts. The study proposes to interpret these texts as "spectacles", in which authors emplotted the reign of a sultan in thoroughly literary and rhetorical fashion, making especially extensive use of textual forms prevalent in the chancery. In doing so the authors reimagined the format of the biography as a performative vehicle for displaying their literary credentials and helping them negotiate positions in the chancery and the wider courtly orbit.

Author: Keelan Overton
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304894X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 466

View

Book Description
In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.

Author: Andrew Phillips
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009064193
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 662

View

Book Description
How did upstart outsiders forge vast new empires in early modern Asia, laying the foundations for today's modern mega-states of India and China? In How the East Was Won, Andrew Phillips reveals the crucial parallels uniting the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the British Raj. Vastly outnumbered and stigmatised as parvenus, the Mughals and Manchus pioneered similar strategies of cultural statecraft, first to build the multicultural coalitions necessary for conquest, and then to bind the indigenous collaborators needed to subsequently uphold imperial rule. The English East India Company later adapted the same 'define and conquer' and 'define and rule' strategies to carve out the West's biggest colonial empire in Asia. Refuting existing accounts of the 'rise of the West', this book foregrounds the profoundly imitative rather than innovative character of Western colonialism to advance a new explanation of how universal empires arise and endure.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004519912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

View

Book Description
This book looks at the fall and persistence of empires from the perspective of the powers that replaced them, and compares several cases between China and the West in the first millennium CE with surprisingly similar beginnings and different outcomes.

Author: Indermit S. Gill
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464801207
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 398

View

Book Description
Eurasian economies have to become efficient more productive, job-creating, and stable. But efficiency is not the same as diversification. Governments need to worry less about the composition of exports and production and more about asset portfolios natural resources, built capital, and economic institutions.

Author: Dominic Lieven
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735222215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

View

Book Description
A dazzling account of the men (and occasional woman) who led the world’s empires, a book that probes the essence of leadership and power through the centuries and around the world. From the rise of Sargon of Akkad, who in the third millennium BCE ruled what is now Iraq and Syria, to the collapse of the great European empires in the twentieth century, the empire has been the dominant form of power in history. Dominic Lieven’s expansive book explores strengths and failings of the human beings who held those empires together (or let them crumble). He projects the power, terror, magnificence, and confidence of imperial monarchy, tracking what they had in common as well as what made some rise to glory and others fail spectacularly, and at what price each destiny was reached. Lieven’s characters—Constantine, Chinggis Khan, Trajan, Suleyman, Hadrian, Louis XIV, Maria Theresa, Peter the Great, Queen Victoria, and dozens more—come alive with color, energy, and detail: their upbringings, their loves, their crucial spouses, their dreadful children. They illustrate how politics and government are a gruelling business: a ruler needed stamina, mental and physical toughness, and self-confidence. He or she needed the sound judgement of problems and people which is partly innate but also the product of education and experience. A good brain was essential for setting priorities, weighing conflicting advice, and matching ends to needs. A diplomatically astute marriage was often even more essential. Emperors (and the rare empresses) could be sacred symbols, warrior kings, political leaders, chief executive officers of the government machine, heads of a family, and impresarios directing the many elements of "soft power" essential to any regime’s survival. What was it like to live and work in such an extraordinary role? What qualities did it take to perform this role successfully? Lieven traces the shifting balance among these elements across eras that encompass a staggering array of events from the rise of the world’s great religions to the scientific revolution, the expansion of European empires across oceans, the great twentieth century conflicts, and the triumph of nationalism over imperialism. The rule of the emperor may be over, but Lieven shows us how we live with its poltical and cultural legacies today.

Author: Catherine Holmes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009021907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 706

View

Book Description
This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic – roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it was exercised, differed. This book focuses on power dynamics and resource-allocation among ruling elites; the legitimisation of power and property with the aid of religion; and on rulers' interactions with local elites and societies. Offering the reader route-maps towards navigating each sphere and grasping the fundamentals of its political culture, this set of parallel studies offers a timely and much needed framework for comparing the societies surrounding the medieval Mediterranean.

Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108606164
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

View

Book Description
The 'mirror for princes' genre of literature offers advice to a ruler, or ruler-to-be, concerning the exercise of royal power and the wellbeing of the body politic. This anthology presents selections from the 'mirror literature' produced in the Islamic Early Middle Period (roughly the tenth to twelfth centuries CE), newly translated from the original Arabic and Persian, as well as a previously translated Turkish example. In these texts, authors advise on a host of political issues which remain compelling to our contemporary world: political legitimacy and the ruler's responsibilities, the limits of the ruler's power and the limits of the subjects' duty of obedience, the maintenance of social stability, causes of unrest, licit and illicit uses of force, the functions of governmental offices and the status and rights of diverse social groups. Medieval Muslim Mirrors for Princes is a unique introduction to this important body of literature, showing how these texts reflect and respond to the circumstances and conditions of their era, and of ours.