By occupying Syria and the Holy Places of the Hijaz, Ali Bey sought to make Egypt the dominant power in the 18th-century Arab world. P.M. Holt suggests that his policy of expansion, which included an alliance with Russia, has some interesting modern parallels.
John Andrew Boyle describes how, for many years during the mid-thirteenth century, Mongol forces which had already driven deep into Central Europe, threatened to over-run and obliterate the Christian civilization of the West.
D.M. Nicol assesses Justinian's valiant attempt to restore the splendours of Imperial Rome, by turning back the clock to the days of Augustus, and making the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake, concluding it “was impractical and largely a failure. But it was a glorious failure."
From 1565 until the year of Waterloo, great Spanish galleons continued to cross the Pacific, bearing cargoes of American silver. ‘This prodigious voyage’ took a heavy toll of life. Yet still (wrote a Chronicler) ‘the desire of gain prevails...’
E. Badian studies the political background of Alexander’s plans for world conquest.
S. Gopal describes how, in the course of eight years, Dalhousie greatly extended the territories of the East India Company. Today his memory is respected by Indians not as one of the builders of the British Empire but as one of the architects of the Indian Republic.
After centuries of masculine predominance, as the Republic neared its end, a host of notable women crossed the stage of Roman history—the devoted Porcia, the beautiful Julia, the Amazonian Fulvia, described here by J.P.V.D. Balsdon as “a Lady Macbeth of the Roman world”.
E. Badian writes that the efforts of Antiochus Epiphanes to Hellenize his dominions led to a revolt in Judaea under the leadership of the Hasmonaean house, known as the Maccabees, who succeeded in re-asserting Jewish law and the Jewish religion in traditional form.
C.R. Boxer describes how the Dutch East-India Company gave unity to the islands of Indonesia much as the English East-India Company laid the foundations of the British Raj—often unwittingly and by a series of gradual steps.
On May 10th, 1857, while the bells of Meerut rang for divine service, the Sepoys of the Bengal Army rose in revolt against the rule of the British East India Company. That mutiny, Jon Manchip White writes, affords brilliant glimpses of a wilful generation.
