"It is difficult to decide which is the more impressive: the authority and control with which Mr. Bendix writes of the traditions, the institutions, and the technological and social developments of cultures as diverse as the British, French, German, Russian, and Japanese, or the skill with which he weaves his separate stories into a persuasive scenario of the modern revolution. A remarkable achievement."--Gordon A. Craig, Stanford University ""Kings or People" is equal to the grandeur of its subject: the political origins of the modern world. With Barrington Moore's "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" and Immanuels Wallerstein's "The Modern World System" which it matches in boldness, while differing radically in perspective, it is one of the truly powerful ventures in comparative historical sociology to have appeared in recent years."--Clifford Geertz "A brilliant achievement that will be equally fascinating for the general reader, the student, and the specialized scholar."--Henry W. Ehrmann

The second book in the red-hot Kings of Sydney series finds Xander King working with his sexy stepsister, Poppy. But can he keep his dark past hidden when their sizzling chemistry takes them from the boardroom to the bedroom? I don’t know what’s worse: hating my stepsister or lusting after her. I knew that hiring Poppy could be a mistake, but what choice did I have? Nobody else wants to work with a King—my crime lord father made sure of that before my brothers and I sent him to prison. It’s not all bad, though; Poppy is a little more open-minded than I remember. It turns out my attraction to her isn’t completely one-sided—apparently, she finds my authority as exciting as I find her body. The animosity between us only makes it more exhilarating… But a dark secret from my past could ruin everything. Poppy’s father used to work with mine, and I know more about his death than she guesses. I’ve been living with the guilt for years, and now that I’m so close to Poppy every day, I don’t know how much longer I can hide it. I could tell her everything and risk our thrillingly wild fling—but am I willing to give up something that feels so good? Sexy. Passionate. Bold. Discover Harlequin Dare, a new line of fun, edgy and sexually explicit romances for the fearless female.

The Men Who Would Be Kings is a set of rules designed for fighting historical or Hollywood colonial battles in the mid to late 19th Century, from the Indian Mutiny to the Boxer Rebellion. Large scale colonial clashes tended to be one-sided affairs, but there are countless reports of brief, frantic skirmishes in every colonial war, where either side could be victorious, and these are the battles that The Men Who Would Be Kings seeks to recreate. Although focusing on the British colonial wars against the Zulus, Maoris and others, these rules will also permit players to explore the empires of France, Germany, and other nations, as well as allowing for battles between rival native factions. Gameplay is very simple, and is driven by the quality of the officers leading your units, in the true spirit of Victorian derring-do and adventure, where larger than life characters such as the (real) Fred Burnaby and the (fictional) Harry Flashman led their troops to glory and medals or a horrible end at the point of a spear tip.

How the imposition of Crown rule across the British Empire during the Age of Revolution corroded the rights of British subjects and laid the foundations of the modern police state. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Empire responded to numerous crises in its colonies, from North America to Jamaica, Bengal to New South Wales. This was the Age of Revolution, and the Crown, through colonial governors, tested an array of coercive peacekeeping methods in a desperate effort to maintain control. In the process these leaders transformed what it meant to be a British subject. In the decades after the American Revolution, colonial legal regimes were transformed as the king’s representatives ruled new colonies with an increasingly heavy hand. These new autocratic regimes blurred the lines between the rule of law and the rule of the sword. Safeguards of liberty and justice, developed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, were eroded while exacting obedience and imposing order became the focus of colonial governance. In the process, many constitutional principles of empire were subordinated to a single, overarching rule: where necessary, colonial law could diverge from metropolitan law. Within decades of the American Revolution, Lisa Ford shows, the rights claimed by American rebels became unthinkable in the British Empire. Some colonial subjects fought back but, in the empire, the real winner of the American Revolution was the king. In tracing the dramatic growth of colonial executive power and the increasing deployment of arbitrary policing and military violence to maintain order, The King’s Peace provides important lessons on the relationship between peacekeeping, sovereignty, and political subjectivity—lessons that illuminate contemporary debates over the imbalance between liberty and security.

Sophist Kings: Persians as Other sets forth a reading of Herodotus' Histories that highlights the consistency with which the Persians are depicted as sophists and Persian culture is infused with a sophistic ideology. The Persians as the Greek 'other' have a crucial role throughout Herodotus' Histories, but their characterisation is far divorced from historical reality. Instead, from their first appearance at the beginning of the Histories, Herodotus presents the Persians as adept in the argumentation of Greek sophists active in mid-5th century Athens. Moreover, Herodotus' construct of the Sophist King, in whom political reason serves human ambition, is used to explain the Achaemenid model of kingship whose rule is grounded in a theological knowledge of cosmic order and of divine justice as the political good. This original and in-depth study explores how the ideology which Herodotus ascribes to the Persians comes directly from fifth-century sophists whose arguments served to justify Athenian imperialism. The volume connects the ideological conflict between panhellenism and imperialism in Herodotus' contemporary Greece to his representation of the past conflict between Greek freedom and Persian imperialism. Detecting a universal paradigm, Sophist Kings argues that Herodotus was suggesting the Athenians should regard their own empire as a betrayal of the common cause by which they led the Greeks to victory in the Persian wars.