History : Europe

This book deals with three main points of the History of the Barbary corsairs : a renewed presentation of privateering, the original and unknown attempt of conversion of the privateers to seaborne trade, their failure and elimination from the Mediterranean after 1816. more...

Price: $132.00

On 11 July 1302, beneath the town walls of Courtrai, the most splendid army of knights in Christendom, the flower of French nobility, was utterly defeated by Flemish rebels, common workers and peasants. The superbly trained noblemen, who had devoted their whole life to the military profession, fully experienced in fighting on horseback in close ranks, were led by an able commander, the count of Artois, victor of a number of campaigns. more...

Price: $85.00

Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Après moi, le déluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness--not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. In this nightmare vision of the future, many prerevolutionary observers predicted that the pressures generated by modern war finance would set off a chain of debt defaults that would either destroy established political orders or cause a sudden lurch into despotic rule. Nor was it clear that constitutional government could keep this possibility at bay. Constitutional government might make public credit more secure, but public credit might undermine constitutional government itself. Before the Deluge examines how this predicament gave rise to a widespread eighteenth-century interest in figuring out how to establish and maintain representative governments able to realize the promise of public credit while avoiding its peril. By doing so, the book throws new light on a neglected aspect of modern political thought and on the French Revolution. more...

Price: $29.95

New interpretation of the medieval history of Greece over the period 1200-1420, focusing on the ethnic identity of the Greeks. more...

Price: $88.00

This volume highlights the complex intra-alliance politics of what was seen as the likeliest flash point of conflict in the Cold War and demonstrates how strongly determinant were concerns about relationships with allies in the choices made by all the major governments. It recounts the evolution of policy during the 1958 and 1961 Berlin crises from the perspective of each government central to the crisis, one on the margins and the military headquarters responsible for crafting an agreed Western military campaign more...

Price: $90.00