Période coloniale

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company....

The definitive history of a powerful family dynasty who dominated Europe for centuries -- from their rise to power to their eventual downfall. Habsburgs ruled much of Europe for centuries. From modest origins as minor German nobles, the family used fabricated documents, invented genealogies...

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" - spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s - when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. Best-selling...

A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all 50 states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an "empire", exercising power around the world. But what about the actual...

It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial...

From the author of 1491—the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas—a deeply engaging new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two...

In this vivid and compelling narrative, the Seven Years' War - long seen as a mere backdrop to the American Revolution - takes on a whole new significance. Relating the history of the war as it developed, Anderson shows how the complex array of forces brought into conflict helped both to create...

A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology. “The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its...

The “compelling [and] vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) true story of a man who claimed to be a survivor of a 1919 British massacre in India, his elaborate twenty-year plan for revenge, and the mix of truth and legend that made him a hero to hundreds of millions. When Sir Michael...

The Sunday Times Bestseller A new assessment of the West’s colonial record In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with...

Drawing on unpublished letters and rare primary sources, King and Woolmans tell the true story behind the tragic romance and brutal assassination that sparked World War I....

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last...

When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against the Turks. The British supported the Arabs' fight for an independent state and sent an intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, to join Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab army and a descendant of the...

Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, written under the pseudonym Linda Brent, details her experiences as a slave in North Carolina, her escape to freedom in the north, and her ensuing struggles to free her children....

The vibrant, sprawling saga of Empress Maria Theresa—one of the most renowned women rulers in history—and three of her extraordinary daughters, including Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of France. Out of the thrilling and tempestuous eighteenth century comes the sweeping family saga of...

On September 13, 1759, a battle was fought on the Plains of Abraham outside the old city of Québec. It was one of the turning-point battles in world history....

In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter M. Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans. Rejecting fragmented histories of nations in the making, this bold revision surveys the shared institutions that bridged difference and...

Often hailed as the godfather of today's elite special forces, Robert Rogers trained and led an unorthodox unit of green provincials, raw woodsmen, farmers, and Indian scouts on "impossible" missions in colonial America that are still the stuff of soldiers' legend. The child of marginalized...

A Dying Colonialism is Frantz Fanon’s seminal work on anticolonialism and the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution....

In the summer of 1754, deep in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania, a very young George Washington suffered his first military defeat, and a centuries-old feud between Great Britain and France was rekindled. The war that followed would be fought across virgin territories, from Nova Scotia to...