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Zusatztext “Two thousand years of empire compressed into two hundred pages! without sacrifice of detail or lucidity. The breadth of vision is phenomenal.” —Roy Porter “Masterly . . . Pagden has an unerring sense of evidence! a gift of lucidity! an eye for a good story! a sharp taste for argument! and a vivid! pithy way with words. . . . He combines without obvious contrivance a survey and a story! with broad horizons and a perfect pace.” —Felipe Fernández-Armesto “Without condescension! [Pagden] writes lucidly for the educated non-expert. Sketching a huge territory of knowledge! his compact essay belongs to a series . . . which on the strength of this volume is an admirable publishing venture indeed.” — Chicago Tribune Informationen zum Autor Anthony Pagden was educated in Santiago de Chile, London, Barcelona, and Oxford. Over the past two decades, he has been the Reader in Intellectual History at Cambridge, a fellow of King’s College, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Currently a professor of political science at UCLA, he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement , The New Republic , and The New York Times . Klappentext Written by one of the world's foremost historians of human migration, Peoples and Empires is the story of the great European empires—the Roman, the Spanish, the French, the British—and their colonies, and the back-and-forth between "us” and "them,” culture and nature, civilization and barbarism, the center and the periphery. It's the history of how conquerors justified conquest, and how colonists and the colonized changed each other beyond all recognition.1. The First World Conqueror The story of the empires of the peoples of Europe begins in ancient Greece. For the Greeks, who devised the vocabularies with which we still think about how to live our lives, were also, as they described themselves, "extreme travelers." The Cyclopes, one of whom devours Odysseus's crew, are the embodiment of barbarism, because, among their other defects, they know nothing of navigation and have never left their island home. Travel, as we know, broadens the mind. The first person to have made the connection between voyaging (plane) and wisdom (sophia) was supposedly Solon, who also gave the Athenians their laws, and thus created the first true political society in European history. Subsequent Greek history is filled with wanderers in search of knowledge. Sometime in the fifth century B.C., Herodotus, the "father of history," traveled well beyond the limits of his world, to Egypt and to Libya, Babylon, and the Phoenician city of Tyre, even to southern Russia, and reported extensively on what he had found there. Pythagoras, the great sixth-century-B.C. mathematician, journeyed from his native Samos to Egypt and Crete before settling finally in Croton in southern Italy, and the earliest of the ancient geographers, Hecateus of Miletus, visited Egypt even before Herodotus. The knowledge to be gained from travel was almost always, however, also a means to possession. The Greeks were not only great travelers, they were also great colonizers. Beginning in the eighth century B.C. when Corinth established a colony on what is today Corfu, the Greek city-states moved steadily across the entire Mediterranean until by 580 they had occupied, to some degree, all the most obviously desirable areas in the world then available to them. Colonization and conquest on this scale required skilled navigators and relatively large ships. Most of all, however, it required the evolution of a certain kind of warfare. Immanuel Kant believed that human conflict was nature's means of forcing primitive men to leave the settled comfortable boundaries of their homes. There, like grazing cattle, they might be happy, but because they were not also anxious and active, t...
