To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States. ø Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde?s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture?not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

What was life like for the British men, women, and children who lived in late imperial India while serving the Raj? Empire Families treats the Raj as a family affair and examines how, and why, many remained linked with India over several generations.Due to the fact that India was never meant for permanent European settlement, many families developed deep-rooted ties with India while never formally emigrating. Their lives were dominated by long periods of residence abroad punctuated by repeated travels between Britain and India: childhood overseas followed by separation from parents and education in Britain; adult returns to India through careers or marriage; furloughs, and ultimately retirement, in Britain. As a result, many Britonsneither felt themselves to be rooted in India, nor felt completely at home when back in Britain. Their permanent impermanence led to the creation of distinct social realities and cultural identities.Empire Families sets out to recreate this society by looking at a series of families, their lives in India, and their travels back to Britain. Focusing for the first time on the experiences of parents and children alike, and including the Beveridge, Butler, Orwell, and Kipling families, Elizabeth Buettner uncovers the meanings of growing up in the Raj and an itinerant imperial lifestyle.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing. "A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.

This book analyses media conglomerates owning multiple media holdings under centralized ownership within and across media markets. It argues that Asian capitalists utilize both a market-oriented ideology and family connections to build their media empires, thereby creating cultural conglomerates that exercise corporate censorship over media markets. It focuses on family-controlled media conglomerates in Korea, specifically the international business giant, Samsung, and its related media companies, Cheil Jedang and JoongAng Ilbo, all of which are controlled by the single Lee family. Utilizing the theoretical approach of political economy of communication, the book examines how and why the Lee family exercise corporate censorship over Korean society. Offering an essential take on Asia’s political economy of communication in order to understand the workings of Asian media empires, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Korean Studies, Korean Business and Mass Communications.

The son of a Yorkshire coal miner seeks a new life with the British Army in the second novel of this historical family saga. Born and raised in Yorkshire, England, Probyn Kilmaster wants more out of life than to follow his father down the pit. He has always admired his convention-defying Aunt Kit and, inspired by her, runs away to join the army. Though he is eager to see the world, war is brewing in South Africa, and his first foreign posting is unlike anything he could imagine. Stationed abroad, Probyn meets an older woman who persuades him to have an unofficial wedding ceremony. But in the aftermath of the whirlwind, he soon yearns for escape. Narrowly avoiding court martial, Probyn returns to England where he hopes to make peace with his family and settle down. Yet even after finding a wife, his happiness is threatened by mistakes from his past . . .

Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and governors. In Venice’s Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean. Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice’s Mediterranean empire by examining how Venetian humanist education related to the task of governing. Taking that relationship as her cue, Maglaque unearths an intimate view of the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. In their writings, it was the affective relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, humanist teachers and their students that were the crucible for self-definition and political decision making. Venice’s Intimate Empire thus illuminates the experience of imperial governance by drawing connections between humanist education and family affairs. From marriage and reproduction to childhood and adolescence, we see how intimate life was central to the Bembo and Coppo families’ experience of empire. Maglaque skillfully argues that it was within the intimate family that Venetians’ relationships to empire—its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures—were determined.

This book argues that political persuasion expanded in early imperial China through diverse written genres, and that what ancient Chinese called wenti jingwei, or genre networks, provides the central means to understand rhetoric and government at the time.

"Laura Briggs has given us a very smart book. She's opened my eyes to Puerto Rican women's centrality to the entire American imperial enterprise. Pay attention to prostitution—debates about it, maneuvers to control it, reliance on it—and we'll gain a more realistic sense of political life. Briggs shows us how true that is. I'm going to recommend this book to everyone."—Cynthia Enloe, author of Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives "A superb analysis of how U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico had profound effects on sex, gender, and racial formations in both nations. Briggs sets new standards for the study of race and gender in U.S. women's history."—Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon