Poem cataloging the glories of the British Empire and its colonies, and the battle against the foes that would destroy it. Illustrated by photographs of the beauties of the Empire.

A collection of work that attempts to reflect the diversity of travel literature from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This literature often reveals something of the cultural and gender difference of the travellers, as well as ideas on colonialism, anthropology and slavery.

The history of African Americans begins in Africa, a continent that was home to people with different languages, traditions, histories, and religions. They called themselves Twi, Yoruba, Zulu, Ashanti, and Kumba, among other names. In the early sixteenth century Europeans turned to Africa for the labor force needed to mine, cultivate, and process the bounty of natural resources in the newly colonized Americas. As many as 12 million Africans from varied ethnic backgrounds endured forced migration and enslavement. Out of their suffering was forged a new people--no longer simply Twi, Yoruba, Ashanti, or Kumba. In the Americas, they first became Africans and then African Americans. The First Passage examines the first century of the recorded black presence in the Americas. The ordeal of the Atlantic crossing gave way to the isolation and humiliation of slavery and the loss of friends and family. Some slaves attempted rebellion and escape. Others maintained as many religious and cultural traditions as possible and as the African-American population grew, forged new traditions and new ties of kinship. This history remains at the core of black life in the Americas. Colin Palmer tells a story of extraordinary suffering. But The First Passage is also a timeless lesson in endurance and survival.

In The Apocalypse of Empire, Stephen J. Shoemaker argues that earliest Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest, or liberation, of the biblical Holy Land and situates this belief within a broader cultural environment of apocalyptic anticipation. Shoemaker looks to the Qur'an's fervent representation of the imminent end of the world and the importance Muhammad and his earliest followers placed on imperial expansion. Offering important contemporary context for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam, he surveys the political eschatologies of early Byzantine Christianity, Judaism, and Sasanian Zoroastrianism at the advent of Islam and argues that they often relate imperial ambition to beliefs about the end of the world. Moreover, he contends, formative Islam's embrace of this broader religious trend of Mediterranean late antiquity provides invaluable evidence for understanding the beginnings of the religion at a time when sources are generally scarce and often highly problematic. Scholarship on apocalyptic literature in early Judaism and Christianity frequently maintains that the genre is decidedly anti-imperial in its very nature. While it may be that early Jewish apocalyptic literature frequently displays this tendency, Shoemaker demonstrates that this quality is not characteristic of apocalypticism at all times and in all places. In the late antique Mediterranean as in the European Middle Ages, apocalypticism was regularly associated with ideas of imperial expansion and triumph, which expected the culmination of history to arrive through the universal dominion of a divinely chosen world empire. This imperial apocalypticism not only affords an invaluable backdrop for understanding the rise of Islam but also reveals an important transition within the history of Western doctrine during late antiquity.

This book is an Augustinian interrogation of contemporary Christian accounts of empire, just war, and terrorism. Though Augustine's voice has guided much of the Christian discourse in these conjoined arenas, it has not shielded his work from being misappropriated to serve ends that are inimical to his own. The US "war on terror" is the most recent and egregious example of violence that many theologians have unjustly baptized as "Augustinian." By reading Augustine pastorally rather than merely polemically, this work offers a counter-narrative and an alternative praxis for the American Christian trying to reconcile her baptism with her citizenship.