Menacing Tides

New ideas of security spelled the end of piracy on the Mediterranean Sea during the nineteenth century. As European states ended their military conflicts and privateering wars against one another, they turned their attention to the 'Barbary pirates' of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Naval commanders, diplomats, merchant lobbies and activists cooperated for the first time against this shared threat. Together, they installed a new order of security at sea. Drawing on European and Ottoman archival records - from diplomatic correspondence and naval journals to songs, poems and pamphlets - Erik de Lange explores how security was used in the nineteenth century to legitimise the repression of piracy. This repression brought European imperial expansionism and colonial rule to North Africa. By highlighting the crucial role of security within international relations, Menacing Tides demonstrates how European cooperation against shared threats remade the Mediterranean and unleashed a new form of collaborative imperialism.

Menacing Tides shows how piracy disappeared from the Mediterranean through European security cooperation, enabling imperial expansion.

The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history. In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights. Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.

Cliff House may be haunted, but no ghost is as scary as the family’s secret history Holly Howe is just beginning to succeed in in the cutthroat world of New York modeling when a car accident ruins her good looks forever and she is forced to retreat to the backwoods of Canada, to recuperate in her brother’s ramshackle country house. But Howe Hill is a wreck—dusty, ugly, and utterly lacking in modern facilities—and her brother is no more hospitable. So when Holly hears of a job in town taking care of Mrs. Partlett, an elderly, widowed invalid, she leaps at the opportunity. If nothing else, the Partlett mansion must have indoor plumbing. But Holly soon finds that while Cliff House is eerie by day, it’s terrifying by night. The other housekeeper is convinced it’s haunted by the ghost of Mr. Partlett, but Holly fears no poltergeist. It’s the old widow in the upstairs room that frightens her—and the secrets that lurk behind her dull, silver eyes.

When an angel falls from Heaven to be trapped by the weight of evil, the Earth shakes in fear of the night as humankind struggles to turn to the light and the lost have no way to be found. Salvation is at the very brink of collapse as the remaining beacon of hope is doused in the flames of Hell leading the worlds to the edge of war. And yet in Hell the passage to power is smeared in deceit with creatures deserting their master as mysterious new arrivals present themselves and what had been sure appears blurred in the unravelling lies. The delight in the pain of the innocent blinds the Devil to the depths of betrayal which quietly eats into the heart of Hell where feigned stability is crumbling to chaos as control of the Earth is becoming a higher prize to take at a heavier cost. The third in a five part story which forces you to confront the darkest monsters that will drag you into the shadow

Arguing that policy has become an increasingly central concept and instrument in the organisation of contemporary societies and that it now impinges on all areas of life so that it is virtually impossible to ignore or escape its influence, this book argues that the study of policy leads straight into issues at the heart of anthropology.

From Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed the responsibility to bring security in the Middle East. The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to 'liberate', 'secure' and 'educate' local populations. They staged first 'humanitarian' interventions in history and established hitherto unseen international and local security institutions. Consulting fresh primary sources collected from some thirty archives in the Middle East, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe, Dangerous Gifts revisits the late eighteenth and nineteenth century origins of these imperial security practices. It explicates how it all began. Why did Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Levant tend to result in further turmoil and civil wars? Why has the region been embroiled in a paradox-an ever-increasing demand despite the increasing supply of security-ever since? It embeds this highly pertinent genealogical history into an innovative and captivating narrative around the Eastern Question, emancipating the latter from the monopoly of Great Power politics, and foregrounding the experience of the Levantine actors. It explores the gradual yet still forceful opening up of the latter's economies to global free trade, the asymmetrical implementation of international law in their perspective, and the secondary importance attached to their threat perceptions in a world where political and economic decisions were ultimately made through the filter of global imperial interests.