The British and the Spanish had long been in conflict, often clashing over politics, trade, and religion. But in the early decades of the eighteenth century, these empires signed anasientoagreement ...granting the British South Sea Company a monopoly on the slave trade in the Spanish Atlantic, opening up a world of uneasy collaboration. British agents of the Company moved to cities in the Caribbean and West Indies, where they braved the unforgiving tropical climate and hostile religious environment in order to trade slaves, manufactured goods, and contraband with Spanish colonists. In the process, British merchants developed relationships with the Spanish-both professional and, at times, personal.
The Temptations of Tradetraces the development of these complicated relationships in the context of the centuries-long imperial rivalry between Spain and Britain. Many British Merchants, in developing personal ties to the Spanish, were able to collect potentially damaging information about Spanish imperial trade, military defenses, and internal conflict. British agents juggled personal friendships with national affiliation-and, at the same time, developed a network of illicit trade, contraband, and piracy extending beyond the legal reach of the British South Sea Company and often at the Company's direct expense.
Ultimately, the very smuggling through which these empires unwittingly supported each other led to the resumption of Anglo-Spanish conflict, as both empires cracked down on the actions of traders within the colonies.The Temptations of Tradereveals the difficulties of colonizing regions far from strict imperial control, where the actions of individuals could both connect empires and drive them to war.
•A finite element model was developed to explain the causes of the rupture behavior transition of the Wenchuan earthquake.•The auxiliary stress regime transitioned from SH>Sh>Sv in the southwestern ...segment to SH>Sv>Sh in the northeastern segment.•The stress change associated with the significant first subevent reached 1.0 MPa.•Initial stress and stress change jointly controlled the northeastward rupture of the Mw7.9 Wenchuan earthquake.
The rupture process of the Wenchuan earthquake demonstrated a transition from thrust-dominated slip to northeastward strike-slip motion along the Longmen Shan Fault Zone. The initial stress has been reported as playing a critical role in this process; however, the stress changes, especially those caused by the significant first subevent of the Wenchuan earthquake are not well understood. Here, we employ a three-dimensional finite element model of the Sichuan-Yunnan region to analyze the stress change caused by the significant first subevent and explore the possible influence on the following ruptures. The results indicate that the auxiliary maximum principal compressive stress (SH) associated with the significant first subevent was horizontal and that the auxiliary stress regime was SH>Sh>Sv, supporting the ongoing regional thrust motion near the southwestern segment of the rupture plane. However, in the northeastern segment, the auxiliary stress regime transitioned to SH>Sv>Sh, demonstrating that the stress changes promoted the transition of the rupture behavior from predominantly thrust motion in the southwest to right-lateral strike-slip motion in the northeastern segment, which was also supported by the dominant shear stress change and the subtle normal stress change along the fault plane in the northeastern segment. In addition, our modeled results also indicate that the orientation of the maximum principal compressive stress changed from SEE to northeastward NEE along the strike of Longmen Shan Fault Zone. This anticlockwise rotation hastened the rupture behavior transition, suggesting that both the initial stress and the stress changes associated with the first subevent jointly controlled the following northeastward rupture of the Mw7.9 Wenchuan earthquake.
In a dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb, Robert Zaretsky invites us to ...reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.
An innovative history of deep social and economic
changes in France, told through the story of a single extended
family across five generations Marie Aymard was an
illiterate widow who lived in the ...provincial town of Angoulême in
southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened.
Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record
through two documents: a power of attorney in connection with the
property of her late husband, a carpenter on the island of Grenada,
and a prenuptial contract for her daughter, signed by eighty-three
people in Angoulême. Who was Marie Aymard? Who were all these
people? And why were they together on a dark afternoon in December
1764? Beginning with these questions, An Infinite History
offers a panoramic look at an extended family over five
generations. Through ninety-eight connected stories about
inquisitive, sociable individuals, ending with Marie Aymard's
great-great granddaughter in 1906, Emma Rothschild unfurls an
innovative modern history of social and family networks,
emigration, immobility, the French Revolution, and the
transformation of nineteenth-century economic life. Rothschild
spins a vast narrative resembling a period novel, one that looks at
a large, obscure family, of whom almost no private letters survive,
whose members traveled to Syria, Mexico, and Tahiti, and whose
destinies were profoundly unequal, from a seamstress living in
poverty in Paris to her third cousin, the cardinal of Algiers.
Rothschild not only draws on discoveries in local archives but also
uses new technologies, including the visualization of social
networks, large-scale searches, and groundbreaking methods of
genealogical research. An Infinite History demonstrates
how the ordinary lives of one family over three centuries can
constitute a remarkable record of deep social and economic
changes.
The Treaty of Utrecht of 13 Juny 1713 (Article X), in force today, transfered the Rock of Gibraltar to the United Kingdom. The territory ceded by under Treaty is exposed in an extremely clear manner ...in the text of the Treaty. However, the fact is that a simple glance of the political and geographical map of this area shows how the territory occupied by United Kingdom is not correlated with the area of the Treaty in 1713. This report concerns about the causes that have led to this incoherence between the area expressly ceded by the Treaty and the reality, and the negative impact that this situation has had for Spain.
El Tratado de Utrecht de 13 de junio de 1713 (art. X), hoy vigente, cedía al Reino Unido la plaza de Gibraltar. La zona cedida parece extraordinariamente clara en el texto del tratado. En cambio, lo cierto es que un simple vistazo a un mapa geográfico-político de la zona muestra que el territorio ocupado por el Reino Unido no se corresponde con el área que se determinó en 1713. Este estudio trata de aproximarse a las causas que han llevado a esa incoherencia entre el espacio expresamente cedido en el Tratado y la realidad, así como alguna de las consecuencias negativas que esta situación ha tenido para España.
Many famous antique texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely dismissed, all because the literary style in which they were written is unfamiliar today. So argues Mary Douglas in ...this controversial study of ring composition, a technique which places the meaning of a text in the middle, framed by a beginning and ending in parallel. To read a ring composition in the modern linear fashion is to misinterpret it, Douglas contends, and today's scholars must reevaluate important antique texts from around the world.
Found in the Bible and in writings from as far afield as Egypt, China, Indonesia, Greece, and Russia, ring composition is too widespread to have come from a single source. Does it perhaps derive from the way the brain works? What is its function in social contexts? The author examines ring composition, its principles and functions, in a cross-cultural way. She focuses on ring composition in Homer'sIliad, the Bible's book of Numbers,and, for a challenging modern example, Laurence Sterne'sTristram Shandy, developing a persuasive argument for reconstruing famous books and rereading neglected ones.
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