Penguin Books Australia

'AN EXCELLENT POLITICAL OVERVIEW'
GUARDIAN

Over the centuries the Middle East has confounded the dreams of conquerors and peacemakers alike. This now-classic book, fully updated to 2009, follows the historic struggles of the region over the last two hundred years, from Napoleon's assault on Egypt, through the slow decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the painful emergence of modern nations, the...

The modern city of Shanghai rose up from truly 'muddy' origins, both in the soft subsoil its foundations were build upon and its early economy based on a trade in opium, or 'foreign mud'.  Forced open to the British by the unequal Treaty of Nanking in 1842, Shanghai did what it does best: it beat the odds to become a 'bawdy and gaudy' metropolis that, 168 years later, commands a place in the contemporary...

'So they went forth, and they were given over to death by the guns.'

—Rangipito, of Ngati Rahiri

In the two decades before the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand was ripped asunder by island-spanning waves of warfare, extreme violence and cannibalism. Great war parties surged the length of the land to avenge historic grievances, killing and burning as they went. Whole peoples were uprooted and found...