Empire

Henry I. Kurtz describes how, in 1763, the Conspiracy of Pontiac led to an Indian rebellion aimed at ousting the British from their newly won North American territories.

British missions to the Chinese Court had already run into many grievous difficulties. When a mission was despatched to Burma, writes Mildred Archer, they found their problems no less irksome.

John Andrew Boyle describes how, in the early thirteenth century, the Mongol hordes devastated Turkestan and Persia, where the grandson of Genghis Khan founded a dynasty.

John Butt marks the birth of the great missionary, idealist and explorer of Africa, born at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, in March 1813.

One of the strangest episodes in the Spanish conquest of the New World was the quest for the mythical Seven Cities, first believed to stand on a mysterious island far out in the Atlantic Ocean, afterwards magically transported to the depths of America.

Among military adventurers who have served in India, Mildred Archer writes, none was more dashing than the half-Indian leader of the famous Irregular Cavalry Corps known as Skinner’s Horse.

J.J. Saunders continues the story of the first, and perhaps the greatest, of Islam’s Commanders of the Faithful. The Caliph Omar, after triumphantly laying the foundations of the Arab Empire, fell to a Persian Christian assassin in the year 644.

J.J. Saunders describes how, under Muhammad's second successor, the Caliph Omar, the great era of Arab expansion began, that carried the faith of Islam westwards, to Spain, and eastwards, far into the Orient.

‘Whoever is Lord in Malacca, has his hand on the throat of Venice’, wrote a European traveller during the period of the city's greatest glory. G.P. Dartford brings us back to a time when Malacca dominated the trade routes of the East.

When Alexander assumed the despotic state of the Eastern monarchs he had overthrown, he aroused growing resentment among his loyal Macedonian followers. E. Badian carries the story on, to his early death in the year 323 B.C