Empire

Robin Hallett describes how, when the maritime powers of Europe were battling for supremacy in the Orient, the isles of the Indian Ocean played their part in history.

Colin Martin describes how, on the frontiers of Caledonia eighteen centuries ago, the Romans kept watch from camp and wall over turbulent northern tribes.

Not until three years after the fall of Jerusalem did Zealot resistance come to a bloody end. S.G.F. Brandon reviews the history of this fanatical sect, whose exemplary devotion and fortitude modern Israelis seek to emulate.

Michael Langley writes how, as early as 1620, an English traveller wrote an enthusiastic report on the wealth of the Gambia and its commercial possibilities.

George Woodcock describes how Malacca was once a city so rich that “its merchants valued garlic more highly than gold,” and how it has slowly dwindled in wealth and importance since the middle of the seventeenth century.

From the time when the Dutch flag was first planted there in 1652, C.R. Boxer describes how the Cape became the maritime half-way house between Europe and Asia.

E. Mary Smallwood asserts that when trouble broke out between rulers and subjects, the fault did not always lie with the Roman administration.

Iris Macfarlane describes how, during the early sixteenth century, two dominant cultures, Mughal and European, first began to spread on Indian soil.

Anthony Bryer describes how, from 1453 to 1923 the dream of a recaptured Byzantium and a resurrected Byzantine Empire continued to haunt the Greek imagination.

While the Pilgrim Fathers were drawing up plans for sailing to America, writes Iris Macfarlane, Thomas Roe in India was laying the foundations in a very different form of British Empire.