In this original study of the Portuguese Empire in the East, the Estado da India, George Souza looks in detail at the activities of Macao. His aim is to enquire into the nature of Portuguese society in China and the South China Sea and explain why the political and economic activities of the Portuguese crown did not inhibit the growth of local entrepreneurial trade. He also examines the nature of Portuguese maritime trade in Asia and analyses the focal role of Macao as an adjunct to the Canton market. The operations of Portuguese private merchants, the so-called 'country traders', are described and tellingly assessed in the wider context of the economic development of China and Southeast Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The eastern Roman Empire was the largest state in western Eurasia in the sixth century. A century later, it was a fraction of its former size. Ravaged by warfare and disease, the empire seemed destined to collapse. Yet it did not die. John Haldon elucidates the factors that allowed the empire to survive against all odds into the eighth century.

Although empires have shaped the political development of virtually all the states of the modern world, "imperialism" has not figured largely in the mainstream of scholarly literature. This book seeks to account for the imperial phenomenon and to establish its importance as a subject in the study of the theory of world politics. Michael Doyle believes that empires can best be defined as relationships of effective political control imposed by some political societies—those called metropoles—on other political societies—called peripheries. To build an explanation of the birth, life, and death of empires, he starts with an overview and critique of the leading theories of imperialism. Supplementing theoretical analysis with historical description, he considers episodes from the life cycles of empires from the classical and modern world, concentrating on the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa. He describes in detail the slow entanglement of the peripheral societies on the Nile and the Niger with metropolitan power, the survival of independent Ethiopia, Bismarck's manipulation of imperial diplomacy for European ends, the race for imperial possession in the 1880s, and the rapid setting of the imperial sun. Combining a sensitivity to historical detail with a judicious search for general patterns, Empires will engage the attention of social scientists in many disciplines.

From the world's foremost intellectual activist, an irrefutable analysis of America's pursuit of total domination and the catastrophic consequences that are sure to follow The United States is in the process of staking out not just the globe but the last unarmed spot in our neighborhood-the heavens-as a militarized sphere of influence. Our earth and its skies are, for the Bush administration, the final frontiers of imperial control. In Hegemony or Survival , Noam Chomsky investigates how we came to this moment, what kind of peril we find ourselves in, and why our rulers are willing to jeopardize the future of our species. With the striking logic that is his trademark, Chomsky dissects America's quest for global supremacy, tracking the U.S. government's aggressive pursuit of policies intended to achieve "full spectrum dominance" at any cost. He lays out vividly how the various strands of policy-the militarization of space, the ballistic-missile defense program, unilateralism, the dismantling of international agreements, and the response to the Iraqi crisis-cohere in a drive for hegemony that ultimately threatens our survival. In our era, he argues, empire is a recipe for an earthly wasteland. Lucid, rigorous, and thoroughly documented, Hegemony or Survival promises to be Chomsky's most urgent and sweeping work in years, certain to spark widespread debate.