In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Prov ince occupied the entirety of a City , and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Prov ince. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Ge...

‘[T]he entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out.’ So wrote Mary Louise Pratt, at the start of Imperial Eyes (1992: 6), her insightful account of colonial travelogue. Pratt’s point provides a pithy summary of one of the central claims of what was, at the time, the still emerging field of postcolonial studies (in which context, of course, Imperial Ey...

Matthew New-Tolley 310213657 Semester 2 2010 On an unremarkable page in the extraordinary book of technological evolution, artisans labour to produce an exquisite vessel, a gift by the priests of Rome to the leader of an empire. Centuries of scientific enterprise and craftsmanship culminate in a single vessel, a dull jade chalice which when presented to the sun blazes crimson. With the collapse...

The period 1700 to 1900 saw the beginnings, and the development, of the British Empire in India. Empire was not planned, at least not in the early stages. In a sense, it just happened. The first British in India came for trade, not territory; they were businessmen, not conquerors. It can be argued that they came from a culture that was inferior, and a political entity that was weaker, than that...

I have recently been renewing my acquaintance with Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling the poet, that is, as distinct from Rudyard Kipling the short-story writer and part-time novelist. R.K. the poet is very much out of favour at present, and has been these twenty years. I suppose this disfavour springs from his identification with the spirit of Empire, with the Raj, with the Great White Sahib, wit...

That definition of bibliotheca – the most common Latin term for library – is taken from the Etymologies of Isidore, Bishop of Seville, a ‘vastly important conduit for classical antiquity into the medieval world’.2 Composed in the first decades of the seventh century AD, by which time most of the Iberian peninsula had been part of the Visigothic kingdom for nearly two centuries, the Etymologies ...

The primary goal of the long-term Subgroup A is to promote collaboration and exchange among nuclear reaction code developers internationally. This document reports on the Subgroup A activities in 2004-2005, both in view of individual codes (TALYS, EMPIRE, GNASH/McGNASH) development, and in regard to the common development of the ModLib library. Notably, several important new code releases were ...

The research project Germania Sacra provides a comprehensive prosopographical database, that makes structured and comparable data of the Church of the Holy Roman Empire available for further research. The database contains approximately 31,000 records of premodern persons, new data is continuously added. This digital index of persons is supplemented by the "Database of Monasteries, Convents and...

This is a fascinating, highly readable, and well-illustrated tome that looks at Muscovite maps created in the seventeenth century as a still poorly exploited source that can inform our understanding of the politics and culture of the time. The book comprises two distinct parts. Chapters 1–4 focus on spatiality in the heartland, scrutinizing local maps drawn to substantiate and defend positions ...

"Civilizations" and "world systems" are alternative labels for the largest macropolitical entities that have existed in human history. These historical civilizations/world systems may be seen as having two polar types of power structure, the "states system" and the "universal empire." Each form has certain characteristic accompaniments, which may promote it, be promoted by it, or both. For stat...