Empire

Europe knew little about black Africa, writes Steven R. Smith, until the trading voyages of the late sixteenth century.

Christopher Hibbert describes how the massacre at Cawnpore was one of the events in the Indian Mutiny not expected by benevolent British Commanders.

William Gardener describes how Russia's stealthy advance across Siberia led to close relations with China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The term ‘Chimurenga’ has various historical associations. It was originally used to describe the first rising against British rule of the 1890s; the Rhodesian Bush War of the 1970s is known as the Second Chimurenga. J.V. Woolford, writing as the Bush War was ongoing, puts the term in context.

J.M. Brereton introduces Pierre Louis Napolean Cavagnari, a soldier of French-Italian and Irish descent, who played a distinguished part in British relations with Afghanistan, eventually costing him his life.

Ian Beckwith describes how one of the chief first settlers of Virginia came from Lincolnshire farming stock.

Esmond Wright explains how, during the American War of Independence, the island of Bermuda was in sympathetic touch with Patriots as well as with Loyalists.

The arrival in 1833 of a Russian fleet signalled Russian control for several years of the Bosporus and of the Turkish Empire, writes Lansing Collins.

Griffith was neither a spell-binding orator nor a dashing leader; but, writes Richard Davis, he helped to ensure that no authoritarian regime was established in Ireland after 1921.

James Marshall-Cornwall describes a Tudor adventure, ultimately unsuccessful: Willoughby perished on the Kola peninsula; Chancellor reached Moscow and was received by Ivan the Terrible.