Crossing Continents

For almost a hundred years from the 1860s, the City of London's overseas banks financed the global trade that lay at the core of the British Empire. Foremost among them from the beginning were two start-up ventures: the Standard Bank of South Africa, which soon developed a powerful domestic franchise at the Cape, and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. This book traces their stories in the nineteenth century, their glory days before 1914 - and their remarkable survival in the face of global wars and the collapse of world trade in the first half of the twentieth century. The unravelling of the Empire after 1945 eventually forced Britain's overseas banks to confront a different future. The Standard and the Chartered, alarmed at the expansion of American banking, determined in 1969 on a merger as a way of sustaining the best of the City's overseas traditions. But from the start, Standard Chartered had to grapple with the fading fortunes of its own inherited franchise - badly dented in both Asia and Africa - and with radical changes in the nature of banking. Its British managers, steeped in the past, proved ill-suited to the challenge. By the late 1980s, efforts to expand in Europe and the USA had brought the merged Group to the brink of collapse. Yet it survived - and then pulled off a dramatic recovery. Standard Chartered realigned itself, just in time, with the phenomenal growth of Asia's 'emerging markets', many of them in countries where the Chartered had flourished a century earlier. In the process, the Group was transformed. Trebling its workforce, it brushed aside the global financial crisis of 2008 and by 2012 could look back on a decade of astonishing growth. Recent times have added an eventful postscript to a long and absorbing history. Crossing Continents recounts Standard Chartered's story with a wealth of detail from one of the richest archives available to any commercial bank. The book also affords a rare and compelling perspective on the evolution of international trade and finance, showing how Britain's commercial influence has actually worked in practice around the world over one hundred and fifty years.

The first contacts between Greece, the Aegean and India are generally thought to have occurred at the beginning of the sixth century BC. There is now, however, growing evidence of much earlier but indirect connections, reaching back into prehistory. These were initially between India and its Indus Civilisation (Meluḫḫa) and the Near East and then finally with the societies of the Early and Middle Bronze Age Aegean,with their slowly emerging palace-based economies and complex social structures. Starting in the middle of the third millennium BC but diminishing after approximately 1800 BC, these connections point to a form of indirect or what might be called ‘trickle-down’ contact between the Aegean and India. From the start, until 2500 BC, the objects and commodities that formed this contact were transported overland, through Northern Iran, but after that time, the Harappans took control and we see a structured trade using the sea out through the Persian Gulf. These contacts can also be placed into three categories: (a) the importation of objects manufactured in India or made from Indian commodities imported into the Near East,which eventually found their way to the Aegean and have parallels at Indian sites; (b) the importation of inorganic commodities such as tin, possibly some gold and lapis lazuli, exported from India or Central Asia under Harappan control; and (c) the importation of non-perishable organic commodities. This study views the Aegean as part of a greater trade network and here the author has attempted to both evaluate and re-evaluate what evidence and speculation there are for such contacts, particularly for the commodities such as tin and lapis lazuli as well as more recently discovered objects. It is emphasised that this does not testify to direct cultural and trade links and geographical knowledge between the Harappans and the prehistoric Aegean in the third and second millennia BC; it was just the natural extension of trade between the Near East and India. No goods or commodities arrived directly from India; they accumulated added value as they first built up a distinguished pedigree of ownership in the Near East and Syro-Palestine. In the Early to Late BronzeAges, India was an important resource for valuable and indispensable commodities destined for the elites and developing technologies of much of the Old World. Finally, the author has examined the period after the end of the Bronze Age to the time of Alexander the Great and particularly the period after the sixth century, when Greeks were now beginning to know a little about India. Within 200 years India was known to scholar and non-scholar alike, such as those who witnessed the Persian invasions of Greece or who later became Macedonian and Greek foot soldiers.

Top Deck double deckers offered a revolutionary form of long-distance transport from the 70s to the 90s. The large British Lodekkas carried under-35s vast distances through SE Asia, the Middle East and Australia in a new innovative mode of no-frills adventure tourism. Taken on by Top Deck as a double decker bus driver in early 1977, Trevor Carroll conducted European tours for a year before he was set loose on his first overland tour, London to Kathmandu and return. A three-week dash to Kathmandu had the tour stumbling into the start of the civil war in Afghanistan mixing with a government crackdown and soldiers and tanks on the roads. Trevor describes his exciting and sometimes harrowing experiences on six overland trips as both driver and courier. Finally, he embarked on the massive 20-week Sydney to London tour in 1980 with its third and final leg aboard 'Casper' and its 20 occupants across India, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy. The tour passed through 21 countries and covered 34,000 kilometres, conquering places where the buses' designers never meant it to go. Trevor met his future wife Hilde on tour, and they have now been married for 34 years. Skroo Turner the founder of Top Deck and today's Flight Centre provides an introduction to these stories, his foresight has continued his travel revolution from those lumbering old buses to today's conglomerate, The Flight Centre Group.

A highly personal account of the travels of Max Finkelstein as he retraces, some two hundred years later, the route of Alexander Mackenzie, the first European to cross North America (1793). Mackenzie's water trail is now commemorated as the Alexander Mackenzie Voyageur Route. More than just a travelogue of a canoe trip across Canada, this is an account that crosses more than two centuries. It is an exploration into the heart and mind of Alexander Mackenzie, the explorer, and Max Finkelstein, the "Voyageur-in-Training." Using Mackenzie's journals and his own journal writings, the author creates a view of the land from two vantage points. The author retraced the route of Alexander Mackenzie across North America from Ottawa through to Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, and paddled the Blackwater, Fraser and Peace Rivers, completing the trip in 1999. This route is the most significant water trail in North America, and perhaps the world. "A 'must-read' for everyone who loves wild places and the magic of canoes." - Cliff Jacobson, Outdoor Writer & Consultant "Past and present collide in this journey of discovery across the map of Canada. Max craves the extremes. He relishes in coping with what nature throws at him, punishing himself to find his physical limits and experiencing firsthand the inherent dangers in such a voyage. With Alexander Mackenzie as his guide and inspiration, Max finds the strength to carry on against all odds to forge poignant historical and personal links in this incredible cross-Canada paddling odyssey." - Becky Mason, Artist and Paddler, Chelsea, Quebec

The remarkable story of a small, makeshift library in the town of Daraya, and the people who found hope and humanity in its books during a four-year siege. Daraya lies on the fringe of Damascus, just southwest of the Syrian capital. Yet for four years it lived in another world. Besieged by government forces early in the Syrian Civil War, its people were deprived of food, bombarded by heavy artillery, and under the constant fire of snipers. But deep beneath this scene of frightening devastation lay a hidden library. While the streets above echoed with shelling and rifle fire, the secret world below was a haven of books. Long rows of well-thumbed volumes lined almost every wall: bloated editions with grand leather covers, pocket-sized guides to Syrian poetry, and no-nonsense reference books, all arranged in well-ordered lines. But this precious horde was not bought from publishers or loaned by other libraries--they were the books salvaged and scavenged at great personal risk from the doomed city above. The story of this extraordinary place and the people who found purpose and refuge in it is one of hope, human resilience, and above all, the timeless, universal love of literature and the compassion and wisdom it fosters.

A triumph of historical detective work, Crossing the Continent is the remarkable, never-before-told story of the first black explorer and adventurer in America, Esteban Dorantes. An African slave, Dorantes led an eight-year journey from Florida to California in the early sixteenth century—three hundred years before Lewis and Clark ventured west. An extraordinary true-life saga of courage, trials, and discovery that the Philadelphia Inquirer calls, “an adventure story more thrilling than Defoe or Melville could have imagined,” Crossing the Continent breaks new ground as it challenges the traditional view of American history.

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“An unexpected joy of a book . . . it follows an emotional and culinary journey from childhood in pre-independence Uganda to London in the 21st century.”—The Sunday Times Through the personal story of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s family and the food and recipes they’ve shared together, The Settler’s Cookbook tells the history of Indian migration to the UK via East Africa. Her family was part of the mass exodus from India to East Africa during the height of British imperial expansion, fleeing famine and lured by the prospect of prosperity under the empire. In 1972, expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, they moved to the UK, where Yasmin has made her home with an Englishman. The food she cooks now combines the traditions and tastes of her family’s hybrid history. Here you’ll discover how shepherd’s pie is much enhanced by sprinkling in some chili, Victoria sponge can be enlivened by saffron and lime, and the addition of ketchup to a curry can be life-changing . . . “Alibhai-Brown paints a lively picture of a community that stayed trapped in old ways until it was too late to change . . . [a] brave book.”—The Guardian “For many of us food is the gateway experience into other cultures and lives. Yasmin’s personal story intertwined with the foods which mean so much to her touched me deeply. And made me hungry. You can’t ask for more.”—Gavin Esler, author of Brexit Without the Bullshit: The Facts on Food, Jobs, Schools, and the NHS “It’s beautifully written, as you would expect, and utterly fascinating. There are some wonderful dishes here too.”—Tribune