A Vertical Empire provides a description of the British rocketry and space programme from the 1950s to 1970s, detailing the Medium Range Ballistic Missile Blue Streak and its conversion to a satellite launcher as part of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO). This extensively revised second edition includes material only made available in the past ten years and the text is supplemented by numerous photographs, sketches and statistics. The all-British satellite Black Arrow is described, as well as the research rocket Black Knight, the Blue Steel missile and the rocket powered interceptor aircraft.

A Vertical Empire describes the work in rocketry and space research carried out in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. At one time, the programme was as sophisticated as those in the US and Russia. The projects were cancelled one by one as Britain's attempts to keep up militarily with the two superpowers weakened, as a consequence of Treasury pressure and the belief that there was no economic future in space technology.Much of the material in this invaluable book has never been available before, due partly to the 30-Year Rule concerning government documents, and partly to the sensitive military nature of the work. The projects covered include rocket-propelled aircraft, large military missiles such as the medium range ballistic missile Blue Streak, the test rocket Black Knight and the re-entry experiments it carried, and the satellite launcher Black Arrow. In addition, proposed projects that could have been developed from these vehicles are covered in depth. There is also considerable political analysis of why these projects were eventually discontinued.

In 1569 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered more than one million native people of the central Andes to move to newly founded Spanish-style towns called reducciones. This campaign, known as the General Resettlement of Indians, represented a turning point in the history of European colonialism: a state forcing an entire conquered society to change its way of life overnight. But while this radical restructuring destroyed certain aspects of indigenous society, Jeremy Ravi Mumford's Vertical Empire reveals the ways that it preserved others. The campaign drew on colonial ethnographic inquiries into indigenous culture and strengthened the place of native lords in colonial society. In the end, rather than destroying the web of Andean communities, the General Resettlement added another layer to indigenous culture, a culture that the Spaniards glimpsed and that Andeans defended fiercely.

Empire is one of the oldest forms of political organisation and has dominated societies in all parts of the world. Yet, despite the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the apparent end of empire with the breakup of European colonial regimes and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, empire remains powerful in the modern world. The EUs accession policies, the United States War on Terror, Chinas economic developments in Africa, among others, draw accusations of imperial agendas. Empire is no stranger to crisis but, in recent years, the effects of global austerity have forced states, both powerful and weak, to adapt, with varying degrees of success and failure. The confusions, contradictions, and contestations which emerge from imperial crisis point to a vital question how is Austerity changing Empire and how will this shape tomorrows world?This book was published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor's original study ties the colonizers' attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire's rightful place in the global sphere. Bentancor points to the underlying principles of Scholasticism, particularly in the work off Thomas Aquinas, as the basis of the instrumentalist conception of matter and enslavement, despite the inherent contradictions to moral principles. Bentancor grounds this metaphysical framework in a close reading of sixteenth-century debates on Spanish sovereignty in the Americas and treatises on natural history and mining by theologians, humanists, missionaries, mine owners, jurists, and colonial officials. To Bentancor, their presuppositions were a major turning point for colonial expansion and paved the way to global mercantilism.

This enthralling book is the first to uncover the story of New York City merchants who engaged in forbidden trade with the enemy before and during the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War). Ignoring British prohibitions designed to end North America’s wartime trade with the French, New York’s merchant elite conducted a thriving business in the French West Indies, insisting that their behavior was protected by long practice and British commercial law. But the government in London viewed it as treachery, and its subsequent efforts to discipline North American commerce inflamed the colonists.Through fast-moving events and unforgettable characters, historian Thomas M. Truxes brings eighteenth-century New York and the Atlantic world to life. There are spies, street riots, exotic settings, informers, courtroom dramas, interdictions on the high seas, ruthless businessmen, political intrigues, and more. The author traces each phase of the city’s trade with the enemy and details the frustrations that affected both British officials and independent-minded New Yorkers. The first book to focus on New York City during the Seven Years’ War, Defying Empire reveals the important role the city played in hastening the colonies’ march toward revolution.

In the sixteenth century, in what is now modern-day Peru and Bolivia, Andean communities were forcibly removed from their traditional villages by Spanish colonizers and resettled in planned, self-governed towns modeled after those in Spain. But rather than merely conforming to Spanish cultural and political norms, indigenous Andeans adopted and gradually refashioned the religious practices dedicated to Christian saints and political institutions imposed on them, laying claim to their own rights and the sovereignty of the collective. The People Are King shows how common Andean people produced a new kind of civil society over three centuries of colonialism, merging their traditional understanding of collective life with the Spanish notion of the común to demand participatory democracy. S. Elizabeth Penry explores how this hybrid concept of self-rule spurred the indigenous rebellions that erupted across Latin America in the eighteenth century, not only against Spanish rulers, but against native hereditary nobility, for acting against the will of the comuneros. Through the letters and documents of the Andean people themselves, The People Are King gives voice to a vision of community-based democracy that played a central role in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and continues to galvanize indigenous movements in Bolivia today.