Pitcairn, a tiny Pacific island that was refuge to the mutineers of HMAV Bounty and home to their descendants, later became the stage on which one imposter played out his influential vision for British control over the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean. Joshua W. Hill arrived on Pitcairn in 1832 and began his fraudulent half-decade rule that has, until now, been swept aside as an idiosyncratic moment in the larger saga of Fletcher Christian's mutiny against Captain Bligh, and the mutineers' unlikely settlement of Pitcairn. Here, Hill is shown instead as someone alert to the full scope and power of the British Empire, to the geopolitics of international imperial competition, to the ins and outs of naval command, the vicissitudes of court politics, and, as such, to Pitcairn's symbolic power for the British Empire more broadly.

A study of one imposter and his influential vision for British control over the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean.

This book tells the story of the language of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian consorts that developed on remote Pitcairn Island in the late 18th century. Most of their descendants subsequently relocated to Norfolk Island. It is an in-depth study of the complex linguistic, ecological and sociohistorical forces that have been involved in the formation and subsequent development of this unique endangered language on both islands.

This book considers the controversy caused by 'nabobs', and the debate regarding British identity and British imperialism in the late eighteenth century.

Building on extensive archival research and important scholarly analysis, Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender examines the life of Galeazzo Ciano, foreign minister of fascist Italy from 1936 to 1943 and Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law. Ciano’s life serves as a lens through which to gain a better understanding of crucial issues of Italian and European fascism, including the fascistization of society and politics, foreign relations, and the problem of succession. The biography follows an innovative thematic structure that focuses on major aspects of Ciano’s life, including his family, his political career, his diplomacy, and his desire to succeed Mussolini. Filling a substantial gap in the existing literature on the history of fascism, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of a key player of Italian fascism other than Mussolini; it also offers a long overdue critical assessment of Ciano’s famous diary, one of the most important texts from the period. Using visual materials such as photographs and films as sources and not just as illustrative material, Tobias Hof allows us to rethink our understanding of fascism and offers a new perspective on the history of fascist Italy.

"A children's book whose sophistication, humour and ironies are nowadays appreciated by both children (aged about 9-13) and adults. Babs lives most contentedly in a large house in the country with her grandmother, her nanny and her brother (their parents are in 'Inja'). Then their grandmother dies and they are sent to live in Kensington with their uncle and his wife. Having run wild in the country, spent hours with the gardener and had a great deal to do and to think about, suddenly they are abandoned in a world of artifice and convention and are expected to behave artificially and conventionally. Babs cannot, of course, stop playing, and the central theme of the book is that she has not learned how to dissemble (as opposed to playing 'let's pretend') but must learn how to do so"--Publisher's website.