Cambridge professor and renowned historian Anthony Pagden covers a vast subject in a compact package with Peoples and Empires. This wide-ranging and intellectually stimulating work examines the origins and history of the West with terse, efficient prose. With a captivating narration by Robert O'Keefe, listeners will find this work enjoyable and utterly absorbing.
About the Author :
Anthony Pagden has been a fellow of Merton College, Oxford; University Reader in Intellectual History at Cambridge University; a fellow of King's College; and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a professor in the history and political science departments at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books on European imperialism and the European understanding of non-European cultures. Among his recent publications are Peoples and Empires and Europeans and the Rest of the World. He also contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. He lives in Los Angeles.
Review :
"Although responsible for horrific human suffering and the inevitable curtailment of certain freedoms, European empires often became bastions of cultural diversity and afforded both the colonists and the colonized unique educational, economic, and social opportunities that might otherwise never have been enjoyed. This engrossing chronicle of the history of European imperialism mirrors, to a certain extent, the history of modern Western civilization."
-- "Booklist"
"Elegant...Pagden's chapters on the Spanish Empire are exemplary, yet the chapter on slavery and the admission that this institution irreparably stains Europe's empires allows him to discuss the demise of empire, the rise of nationalism, and the directions in which these developments could take civilization. Recommended."
-- "Library Journal"
"Masterly...Pagden has an unerring sense of evidence, given of lucidity, an eye for a good story, a sharp taste for argument, and a vivid, pithy way with words...He combines without obvious contrivance a survey and a story, with broad horizons and a perfect pace."
-- "Felipe Fernández-Armesto, award-winning historian"
"O'Keefe tackles a plethora of international names confidently, and his impressive diction is crisp, yet smooth and seamless."
-- "AudioFile"
"Pagden handles the topic with skill, learning, wit, and balance...and he impressively illustrates the ways in which the history of empire has for many centuries past in fact the history of the human race."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Two thousand years of empire compressed into two hundred pages, without sacrifice of detail or lucidity. The breadth of vision is phenomenal."
-- "Roy Porter, renowned historian"
