A contrast between the Roman and Chinese empires is that the military was empowered in Rome and disempowered in China. To explain the difference, this paper considers a principal-agent model where the military may revolt, the civilians may shirk, and the social planner chooses a degree of military empowerment, which affects the military’s capability to defend, and that to usurp, the empire. It ...

The Ottoman Empire established in 1299 and continued 6 centuries covering an area of about 5.6 million squared km. The Empire left a large collection of valuable archives interesting to historians from all over the world. Investigation and understanding these documents will shed light on the history of the world. In order to achieve access of the considered information by worldwide scientists, ...

OBJECTIVE--To compile and analyse information contained in non-medical texts of the Byzantine historians and chroniclers concerning arthritis, and to clarify the first use of Colchicum autumnale in the treatment of gout by the fifth century physician, Jacob Psychristus. CONCLUSIONS--This material gives an indication of the problem of arthritis and, in particular, a disease resembling gout that ...

Robert Gordon’s trip to the Mogok ruby mines in northern Burma, as reported in his testament to the Royal Geographical Society in 1888, represents one of the most blatant uses of travel as empire building in the Mekong Region. While European explorers and adventurers had been travelling to and along the region for centuries, most had been intent on mapping, surveying and categorizing its conten...

Before the 1980s, the powerful link between empire and race was marginalised in British imperial history. The postcolonial 'turn' opened up new ways of exploring racial constructions of colonised subjects and stimulated debate over the extent to which representations of the colonised in colonial discourse underpinned imperial power. In Race and Empire, based on an AHRB/C-funded research project...

sanitation. New Zealand distinctiveness is too important to the global historiography of colonization for it to be discussed only in the Antipodes. The term "geography militant" was used by Joseph Conrad in 1924 to describe what he saw as the second epoch in the history of geographical knowledge; roughly the age of heroic exploration from James Cook to the scramble for Africa. The first epoch w...

This paper describes a project that aims to visualize the expansion and decline of the Portuguese Empire. Two distinct forms of visualization were produced, one relating to the expansion and the other to the decline. The first makes use of The Lusiads to extract a general tone for the Portuguese achievements. A series of images were produced displaying the analysis. The second visualization is ...