Dividing The Spoils

The story of the wars that led to the break-up of Alexander the Great's vast empire after his death in 323 BC and the brilliant cultural developments which accompanied this birth of a new world.

As museums across Europe reckon with the post-colonial legacies of their collections, this volume combines approaches from material anthropology, imperial and military history to shed light on the acquisition and appropriation of objects during British colonial warfare. The authors offer a nuanced view of how the amassing of objects was governed and understood within military culture.

When Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-two, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea in the west all the way to modern-day India in the east. In an unusual compromise, his two heirs—a mentally damaged half brother, Philip III, and an infant son, Alexander IV, born after his death—were jointly granted the kingship. But six of Alexander’s Macedonian generals, spurred by their own thirst for power and the legend that Alexander bequeathed his rule “to the strongest,” fought to gain supremacy. Perhaps their most fascinating and conniving adversary was Alexander’s former Greek secretary, Eumenes, now a general himself, who would be the determining factor in the precarious fortunes of the royal family. James Romm, professor of classics at Bard College, brings to life the cutthroat competition and the struggle for control of the Greek world’s greatest empire.

Chronicles Rome's policies in the Greek East, which began as self-rule so that the Empire could focus on the Carthaginian menace in the West, but later moved to more direct control several decades later.

Presents a short history of Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian empire, from the Mediterranean to Central Asia. This book sets the rise of Alexander's short-lived empire within the broad context of ancient Near Eastern history under Achaemenid Persian rule, as well as against Alexander's Macedonian background.

Everyone has heard of Alexander the Great, the famous conqueror. But what happened after his death to the lands he had conquered? It took forty years of world-changing warfare for his successors to carve up the empire. This thrilling period of unremitting warfare, treachery, assassination, passion, shifting alliances, and mass slaughter, has been neglected. Dividing the Spoils resurrects the fascinating story of this period - both the warfare and theworld-changing cultural developments that were taking place at the same time.

The conclusion of the “majestic” quartet about the waning days of the British empire in India, “a commanding achievement” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). After exploiting India’s divisions for years, the British are departing in such haste that no one is prepared for the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947. The twilight of the raj turns bloody. Against the backdrop of the violent partition of India and Pakistan, A Division of the Spoils illuminates one last bittersweet romance, revealing the divided loyalties of the British as they flee, retreat from, or cling to India. “[These] novels are a spectacular explosion of history set off within the lives of a dozen or so Britons and Indians on the edges of vast change . . . If you want to know where the political world we now live in began, Paul Scott’s novels are a place to start.” —The New York Times Book Review “A rich novel of manners . . . Politics, cultism, police and military interrogation—all moving toward inevitable murder and violence—are integral parts of a carefully crafted, complex novel.” —Library Journal

In this bold, sweeping book, David Day surveys the ways in which one nation or society has supplanted another, and then sought to justify its occupation - for example, the English in Australia and North America, the Normans in England, the Spanish in Mexico, the Japanese in Korea, the Chinese in Tibet. Human history has been marked by territorial aggression and expanion, an endless cycle of ownership claims by dominant cultures over territory occupied by peoples unable to resist their advance. Day outlines the strategies, violent and subtle, such dominant cultures have used to stake and bolster their claims - by redrawing maps, rewriting history, recourse to legal argument, creative renaming, use of foundation stories, tilling of the soil, colonization and of course outright subjugation and even genocide. In the end the claims they make reveal their own sense of identity and self-justifying place in the world. This will be an important book, an accessible and captivating macro-narrative about empire, expansion, and dispossession.