'Their fruits be diverse and plentiful, as nutmegs, ginger, long pepper, lemons, cucumbers, cocos, sago, with divers other sorts...' Scholar, spy, diplomat and supreme propagandist for Elizabethan sea power, Richard Hakluyt's accounts of famed explorers mythologised a nation growing rapidly aware of the size and strangeness of the world - and determined to dominate it. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Richard Hakluyt (c 1552-1616). Hakluyt's Voyages and Discoveries is available in Penguin Classics.

A superb selection of poems from both sides of the American Civil War features more than 75 inspired works by Melville, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Whitman, and many others.

The global operations of the East India Companies were profoundly shaped by European perceptions of foreign lands. Providing a cultural perspective absent from existing economic and institutional histories, Ethnography and Encounter is the first book to systematically explore how Company agents’ understandings of and attitudes towards Asian peoples and societies informed institutional approaches to trade, diplomacy, and colonial governance. Its fine-grained comparisons of Dutch and English activities in seventeenth-century South Asia show how corporate ethnography was produced, how it underpinned given modes of conduct, and how it illuminates connections across space and time. Ethnography and Encounter identifies deep commonalities between Dutch and English discourses and practices, their indebtedness to pan-European ethnographic traditions, and their centrality to wider histories of European expansion.

This edited collection is an interdisciplinary study of gems in the early modern world. It examines the relations between the art, science, and technology of gems, and it does so against the backdrop of an expanding global trade in gems. The eleven chapters are organised into three parts. The first part sets the scene by describing how gems moved around the early modern world, how they were set in motion, and how they were pulled together in the course of their travels. The second part is about value. It asks why people valued gems, how they determined the value of a given gem, and how the value of a gem was connected to its perceived place of origin. The third part deals with the skills involved in cutting, polishing, and mounting gems, and how these skills were transmitted and articulated by artisans. The common themes of all these chapters are materials, knowledge and global trade. The contributors to this volume focus on the material properties of gems such as their weight and hardness, on the knowledge involved in exchanging them and valuing them, and on the cultural consequences of the expanding trade in gems in Eurasia and the Americas.