Vertical Empire

In 1569 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered more than one million native people of the central Andes to move to newly founded Spanish-style towns called reducciones. This campaign, known as the General Resettlement of Indians, represented a turning point in the history of European colonialism: a state forcing an entire conquered society to change its way of life overnight. But while this radical restructuring destroyed certain aspects of indigenous society, Jeremy Ravi Mumford's Vertical Empire reveals the ways that it preserved others. The campaign drew on colonial ethnographic inquiries into indigenous culture and strengthened the place of native lords in colonial society. In the end, rather than destroying the web of Andean communities, the General Resettlement added another layer to indigenous culture, a culture that the Spaniards glimpsed and that Andeans defended fiercely.

A Vertical Empire provides a description of the British rocketry and space programme from the 1950s to 1970s, detailing the Medium Range Ballistic Missile Blue Streak and its conversion to a satellite launcher as part of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO). This extensively revised second edition includes material only made available in the past ten years and the text is supplemented by numerous photographs, sketches and statistics. The all-British satellite Black Arrow is described, as well as the research rocket Black Knight, the Blue Steel missile and the rocket powered interceptor aircraft.

A Vertical Empire describes the work in rocketry and space research carried out in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. At one time, the programme was as sophisticated as those in the US and Russia. The projects were cancelled one by one as Britain's attempts to keep up militarily with the two superpowers weakened, as a consequence of Treasury pressure and the belief that there was no economic future in space technology.Much of the material in this invaluable book has never been available before, due partly to the 30-Year Rule concerning government documents, and partly to the sensitive military nature of the work. The projects covered include rocket-propelled aircraft, large military missiles such as the medium range ballistic missile Blue Streak, the test rocket Black Knight and the re-entry experiments it carried, and the satellite launcher Black Arrow. In addition, proposed projects that could have been developed from these vehicles are covered in depth. There is also considerable political analysis of why these projects were eventually discontinued.

A Vertical Empire provides a description of the British rocketry and space programme from the 1950s to 1970s, detailing the Medium Range Ballistic Missile Blue Streak and its conversion to a satellite launcher as part of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO). This extensively revised second edition includes material only made available in the past ten years and the text is supplemented by numerous photographs, sketches and statistics. The all-British satellite Black Arrow is described, as well as the research rocket Black Knight, the Blue Steel missile and the rocket powered interceptor aircraft. Contents: Rocket MotorsRocket InterceptorsBlue SteelBlue Streak — The OriginsBlue Streak — The ‘Underground Launcher’Blue Streak — The CancellationBSSLVThe European Launcher Development Organisation — ELDOEuropaBlack KnightBlack Knight and the Re-entry ExperimentsBlack ArrowThe ‘Might Have Beens’ Readership: Readers interested in the history of technology and enthusiasts of British technology. Keywords:Blue Streak;Black Arrow;Black Knight;Blue Steel;Rocket MotorKey Features:It is the only work to give a full and complete overview of the programmeThere are certain areas which are covered only in this book — e.g. the Black Knight research rocketA large amount of new material has become available in various archives over the past ten years, and this material has been incorporated into the new editionReviews: “The technical evolution and never-ending political debates associated with those missile projects are presented in great detail in this well-written and meticulously researched volume.” The Observatory Magazine “This book is to be highly recommended for its objectivity and realistic appraisal of an inspiring example of a can-do spirit. It is required reading for anyone seeking the truth about how Britain let slip one of its greatest engineering opportunities and was profoundly let down by a political elite that abandoned UK skill and world-class performance.” Spaceflight “Hill offers a series of fascinating snapshots on some of the technical and political issues these rocketry and missile programmes faced, often accompanied by his own thoughts and opinions along the way. ” The Aeronautical Journal

The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor's original study ties the colonizers' attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire's rightful place in the global sphere. Bentancor points to the underlying principles of Scholasticism, particularly in the work off Thomas Aquinas, as the basis of the instrumentalist conception of matter and enslavement, despite the inherent contradictions to moral principles. Bentancor grounds this metaphysical framework in a close reading of sixteenth-century debates on Spanish sovereignty in the Americas and treatises on natural history and mining by theologians, humanists, missionaries, mine owners, jurists, and colonial officials. To Bentancor, their presuppositions were a major turning point for colonial expansion and paved the way to global mercantilism.

A Vertical Empire provides a description of the British rocketry and space programme from the 1950s to 1970s, detailing the Medium Range Ballistic Missile Blue Streak and its conversion to a satellite launcher as part of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO). This extensively revised second edition includes material only made available in the past ten years and the text is supplemented by numerous photographs, sketches and statistics. The all-British satellite Black Arrow is described, as well as the research rocket Black Knight, the Blue Steel missile and the rocket powered interceptor aircraft.

In the sixteenth century, in what is now modern-day Peru and Bolivia, Andean communities were forcibly removed from their traditional villages by Spanish colonizers and resettled in planned, self-governed towns modeled after those in Spain. But rather than merely conforming to Spanish cultural and political norms, indigenous Andeans adopted and gradually refashioned the religious practices dedicated to Christian saints and political institutions imposed on them, laying claim to their own rights and the sovereignty of the collective. The People Are King shows how common Andean people produced a new kind of civil society over three centuries of colonialism, merging their traditional understanding of collective life with the Spanish notion of the común to demand participatory democracy. S. Elizabeth Penry explores how this hybrid concept of self-rule spurred the indigenous rebellions that erupted across Latin America in the eighteenth century, not only against Spanish rulers, but against native hereditary nobility, for acting against the will of the comuneros. Through the letters and documents of the Andean people themselves, The People Are King gives voice to a vision of community-based democracy that played a central role in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and continues to galvanize indigenous movements in Bolivia today.

This is a book which holds a very large amount of my ideological beliefs, which form a new ideology quite unlike any other before it. I dream of a better world, a healthier world. A world where people are safe and all products which poison the minds and lead to human destruction don’t exist. A world where animal species are never driven to extinction and co-exist with people rather well, where many natural areas of the world remain untouched, unpolluted and humans are safe from the natural hazards of the world and the unnatural hazards of the world. An economic system which is fair and relatively stable and where jobs are as easy to get as merely talking. A world where every religion is at peace with the other, as are its followers to followers of another. A justice system which is real justice and countries whom many people can say their honestly proud of being a citizen of. A world free of economic corruption and instability. Grasslands as green as the deepest green and forests which have trees not seldom seen. A world where everyone can claim free speech, no matter how outrageous, radical, stupid or barbaric it may sound to those people with differing views. The name of this new ideological belief should be officially called Distributionism. This book mainly focuses on the United Kingdom and what’s best for the United Kingdom, but it can be read comfortably by people who aren’t UK citizens.