Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800

This is a fascinating and unique account of Britain's rise as a global imperial power told through the lives of over forty individuals from a huge range of backgrounds. Miles Ogborn relates and connects the stories of monarchs and merchants, planters and pirates, slaves and sailors, captives and captains, reactionaries and revolutionaries, artists and abolitionists from all corners of the globe. These dramatic stories give new life to the exploration of the history and geography of changing global relationships, including settlement in North America, the East India Company's trade and empire, transatlantic trade, the slave trade, the rise and fall of piracy, and scientific voyaging in the Pacific. Through these many biographies, including those of Anne Bonny, Captain Cook, Queen Elizabeth I, Pocahontas, and Walter Ralegh, early modern globalisation is presented as something through which different people lived in dramatically contrasting ways, but in which everyone played a part.

Author: Miles Ogborn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 10/30/2008
Pages: 364
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.40w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780521607186

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2009

About the Author
Ogborn, Miles: - Miles Ogborn is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous publications include Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680-1780 (1998) and Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (2007).