Robert M. Levine

Kris E. Lane

"Kris Lane weaves a tale of pirate activities in the Americas and of Spanish responses to those activities that reveals aspects of pirate life and culture not usually addressed in the standard histories of Latin America. He demythologizes the pirates of popular culture and places them in their broader historical context in which their activities are seen as more pecuniary than nationalistic. Lane presents a concise narrative of the seaborne attackers of Spain's colonial empire, and, to a much lesser extent, Portugal's. The book's claim to originality and to revisionism is that it presents a concise overview of piracy in American waters during the early modern period--including considerable discussion of the often overlooked piracy in the Pacific"--From a review on H-Net.

Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750

Pillaging the Empire

Bonnie G. Smith

Marc Van de Mieroop

Richard Von Glahn

"A World in the Making is a kind of anthropological journey taken by four historians that assumes all societies are "hot," and all people make history and always have. We argue in our emphasis on lives and livelihoods for a world constructed, altered, renovated, remade by ordinary people even as we acknowledge the genius of individual innovators, disruptors who broke the mold or struck out in some new direction."--Provided by publisher.

A Global History

World in the Making

Kris Lane

In this new and original study of piracy, Kris Lane looks at the often mixed motives behind the phenomenon and the lives of those involved. Rejecting the romantic myth of the Elizabethan swashbuckler, he reveals a world of violence, hardship and fanaticism, in which self-enrichment was an obsession. From the first corsairs of the 16th century to the last of the buccaneers, he traces the rise and fall of a dangerous profession which encompassed slave-running, smuggling and ship-wrecking.

A History of Piracy in the Caribbean and Central America

Blood and Silver

Bernardo de Vargas Machuca

"An English translation and critical edition of a refutation, written about 1603 (revised in 1612) by the soldier Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, of Bartolome de las Casas's famous Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1558)"--Provided by publisher. First published in 1879 as Apologâias y discursos de las conquistas occidentales.

Bernardo de Vargas Machuca's Defense and Discourse of the Western Conquests

Defending the Conquest

Quito has always been one of the most enigmatic of colonial Spanish American cities. The history of its enormous hinterland, only a fraction of which forms the modern Republic of Ecuador, is even less known. This engaging book takes the watershed year 1599 as a starting point for a provocative reinterpretation of the history of Quito, city and colony. The result is a lively narrative that is also an original inquiry into the driving forces behind sixteenth-century Spanish colonialism. In six overlapping topical narratives Lane brings to life a place wracked by civil disturbances, shipwrecks, indigenous uprisings, pirate attacks, maroon intransigence, urban decadence, failed missionary endeavors, sharp economic reorientations, and wily and unpredictable subaltern adaptation and resistance. Drawing from a wealth of recent research on the colonial north Andes and on more than seven years of study in the archives of Ecuador, Colombia, and Spain, Lane presents rich discoveries of interest to economic historians, including a previously unknown gold boom; however, his primary interest is people. He explores the ways both individuals and groups--shipwreck victims, slaves, laborers, merchants, traders--faced obstacles and seized (or missed) opportunities, showing readers not only the basic facts and major themes of colonial life but also the influence and outcome of individual hopes and fears among people from a multitude of races and ethnicities.

City and Colony in Transition

Quito 1599

Among the magnificent gems and jewels left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. For the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids green was—as it remains for all Muslims—the color of Paradise, reserved for the Prophet Muhammad and his descendants. Tapping a wide range of sources, Kris Lane traces the complex web of global trading networks that funneled emeralds from backland South America to populous Asian capitals between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Lane reveals the bloody conquest wars and forced labor regimes that accompanied their production. It is a story of trade, but also of transformations—how members of profoundly different societies at opposite ends of the globe assigned value to a few thousand pounds of imperfectly shiny green rocks.

Kris E. Lane

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