Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others - Softcover

Day, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199668132 ISBN 13: 9780199668137

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2013

Synopsis

The history of the world has been the history of peoples on the move, as they occupy new lands and establish their claims over them. Almost invariably, this has meant the violent dispossession of the previous inhabitants. Whether it is the Normans in England, the Chinese in Tibet, the Germans in Poland, the Indonesians in West Papua, or the British and Americans in North America, the claiming of other people's lands and the supplanting of one people by another has shaped the history of societies from the ancient past to the present day. David Day tells the story of how this happened - the ways in which invaders have triumphed and justified conquest which, as he shows is a bloody and often prolonged process that can last centuries. And while each individual conquest is ultimately unique, nevertheless they often share a number of qualities, from the re-naming of the conquered land and the invention of myth to justify what has taken place, to the exploitation of the conquered resources and people, and even to the outright slaughter of the original inhabitants. Above all, as Day shows in this hugely bold and ambitious book, conquest can have deep and long-lasting consequences - for the conquered, the conquerors, and for the wider course of world history.

About this title

About the Author:

David Day was a research fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and Professor of Australian History at University College Dublin before taking up a Senior Research Fellowship at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he is currently an Honorary Associate in the History Program. His many books include best-selling histories of the Second World War, biographies of Australian prime ministers, and a study of Winston Churchill and Robert Menzies that has been made into a television documentary. His books have won or been short-listed for several literary prizes, with his history of Australia, Claiming a Continent, winning the prestigious non-fiction prize at the Adelaide Festival. His last book, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (2008, also published by Oxford University Press), appeared to acclaim in Australia, Britain, and the United States, and has been translated into several languages.

Review:

"As David Day makes clear in this fascinating new book, no society on earth has been in continuous occupation of the land it has come to regard as its own. Behind the acquisition of land by humans in the recorded history of our species lies not only the high but bloody drama of conquest and
empire, but also a magnificent though sometimes fraudulent web of acquisitory rituals, legal fictions, and mythologies by which land is to be acquired or taken. Day tells a thoroughly engrossing tale of territorial loss and acquisition."

--Thomas Keneally

"highly original... demonstrates a spectacular knowledge of contrasting situations across the globe and forces the reader to rethink old certainties. It should be read by all students of 'supplanting societies' of all races and in all continents."

--David Fieldhouse, University of Cambridge, and author of The Colonial Empires

"Day has an unfailing eye for vivid, arresting detail... he has a genius for comparison, and brilliantly secretes implicit morals inside apparently dispassionate facts."

--Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, TLS 18/07/2008

"Wide ranging and vigorously written....concise and strongly- argued... a clear and stimulating read."

--BBC History Magazine. Jeremy Black. 00/04/2008

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0199668132
• ISBN 13: 9780199668137
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304