"Colonial Adventures: Commercial Law and Practice in the Making addresses the question how and to what extend the development of commercial law and practice, from Ancient Greece to the colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were indebted to colonial expansion and maritime trade. Illustrated by experiences in Ancient Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia, the book examines how colonial powers consciously or not reshaped the law in order to foster the prosperity of homeland manufacturers and entrepreneurs or how local authorities and settlers brought the transplanted law in line with the colonial objectives and the local constraints amid shifting economic, commercial and political realities. Contributors are: Alain Clément, Alexander Claver, Oscar Cruz-Barney, Bas De Roo, Paul du Plessis, Bernard Durand, David Gilles, Petra Mahy, David Mirhady, M. C. Mirow, Luigi Nuzzo, Phillip Lipton, Umakanth Varottil, Jakob Zollmann"--

This book explores imperial ideology through the narrative themes of popular texts.

British colonialism provided a rich vein of material for the novelists of the first half of the 20th century. This study, originally published in 1968, looks at five writers and their reaction to the Empire: Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene. It shows how the romantic adventure stories of Kipling's early days, in which the indigenous population plays almost no part, gave rise to the much more important novels of spiritual and moral conflict in which the stereotyped values of Empire are questioned. The decline of colonialism from its apogee in the 1880s within a relatively short period makes the novels discussed a compact group, so that not only is the use of colonial material closely studied, but its impact on the novelists themselves emerges clearly. This is an important study of a major literary theme, linking modern literature and modern history at a vital point.

Colonial Adventure is an epic in free-form verse depicting a slice of British colonial history (1936 - 1977) as experienced by individuals on both sides of the racial conflict. It starts with a British couple who establish a large agricultural operation in what was then Southern Rhodesia, later Rhodesia and now Zimbawe. With the rise of black nationalism, the black majority rebels, leading to a brutal civil war that damages every segment of the population. Of the other shorter stories, all in free-form verse, one concerns a female architect from Haiti, another a retired actor and a third a young boy abandoned by his mother. A fourth poem addresses an over-reaction in the climate of fear about Islam and a fifth an outrage against a teenager seeking to free herself from family domination. Simba Kubwa is a dramatic monologue conducted by an African dictator.

Two English children are told the story of their grandfather's experiences as one of the original Jamestown colonists of 1607.