The story of a Venetian-Albanian family in the late sixteenth century forms the basis of a sweeping account of the interaction between East and West Europe and the Ottoman Empire at a pivotal moment in history.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, most of the Christian states of Western Europe were on the defensive against a Muslim superpower - the Empire of the Ottoman sultans. There was violent conflict, from raiding and corsairing to large-scale warfare, but there were also many forms of peaceful interaction across the surprisingly porous frontiers of these opposing power-blocs. Agents of Empire describes the paths taken through the eastern Mediterranean and its European hinterland by members of a Venetian-Albanian family, almost all of them previously invisible to history. They include an archbishop in the Balkans, the captain of the papal flagship at the Battle of Lepanto, the power behind the throne in the Ottoman province of Moldavia, and a dragoman (interpreter) at the Venetian embassy in Istanbul. Through the life-stories of these adventurous individuals over three generations, Noel Malcolm casts the world between Venice, Rome and the Ottoman Empire in a fresh light, illuminating subjects as diverse as espionage, diplomacy, the grain trade, slave-ransoming and anti-Ottoman rebellion. He describes the conflicting strategies of the Christian powers, and the extraordinarily ambitious plans of the sultans and their viziers. Few works since Fernand Braudel's classic account of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, published more than sixty years ago, have ranged so widely through this vital period of Mediterranean and European history. A masterpiece of scholarship as well as story-telling, Agents of Empire builds up a panoramic picture, both of Western power-politics and of the interrelations between the Christian and Ottoman worlds.

The age of European high imperialism was characterized by the movement of plants and animals on a historically unprecedented scale. The human migrants who colonized territories around the world brought a variety of other species with them, from the crops and livestock they hoped to propagate, to the parasites, invasive plants, and pests they carried unawares, producing a host of unintended consequences that reshaped landscapes around the world. While the majority of histories about the dynamics of these transfers have concentrated on the British Empire, these nine case studies--focused on the Ottoman, French, Dutch, German, and British empires--seek to advance a historical analysis that is comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary to understand the causes, consequences, and networks of biological exchange and ecological change resulting from imperialism. Contributors: Brett M. Bennett, Semih Celik, Nicole Chalmer, Jodi Frawley, Ulrike Kirchberger, Carey McCormack, Idir Ouahes, Florian Wagner, Samuel Eleazar Wendt, Alexander van Wickeren, Stephanie Zehnle

Historians have long held that during the decades from the end of the Habsburg-Valois Wars in 1559 until the outbreak in 1618 of the Thirty Years' War, Spanish domination of Italy was so complete that one can refer to the period as a "pax hispanica." In this book, based on extensive research in the papers of the ambassadors who represented Charles V and Philip II, Michael J. Levin instead reveals the true fragility of Spanish control and the ambiguous nature of its impact on Italian political and cultural life.While exploring the nature and weaknesses of Spanish imperialism in the sixteenth century, Levin focuses on the activities of Spain's emissaries in Rome and Venice, drawing us into a world of intrigue and occasional violence as the Spaniards attempted to manipulate the crosscurrents of Italian and papal politics to serve their own ends. Levin's often-colorful account uncovers the vibrant world of late Renaissance diplomacy in which popes were forced to flee down secret staircases and ambassadors too often only narrowly avoided assassination. An important contribution to our understanding of the nature and limits of the Spanish imperial system, Agents of Empire more broadly highlights the centrality of diplomatic history to any consideration of the politics of empire.

From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. Black men and women were mobilized for service in the Spanish-Cuban-American War under the War Department's belief that southern blacks carried an immunity against tropical diseases. Later, in World Wars I and II, black troops were stigmatized as members of a contagious "venereal race" and were subjected to experimental medical treatments meant to curtail their sexual desires. By turns feared as contagious and at other times valued for their immunity, black men and women played an important part in the U.S. military's conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference, even as they exercised their embattled agency at home and abroad. By following the scientific, medical, and cultural history of African American enlistment through the archive of American militarism, this book traces the black subjects and agents of empire as they came into contact with a world globalized by warfare.

Imperial power is at its height. With Palpatine on the throne and his chief enforcer, Darth Vader, leading fleets of Star Destroyers and legions of stormtroopers across the galaxy, the Empire is an unstoppable force for order and peace. But not every political problem requires military might; not every negotiation depends on a show of force. Sometimes all diplomacy needs to succeed is the right man, in the right place, with the willingness to get the job done. No matter what it takes. Collects Star Wars: Agent of the Empire—Iron Eclipse #1–#5.

With the support of Zionists such as Mark Sykes and Wyndham Deedes, Gribbon and Aaronsohn set in train an intelligence operation which greatly helped General Allenby to defeat the Turkish Army in the Levant to give Britain its 'moment' in the Middle East and lay the foundations for a Zionist state.