Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others - Hardcover

Day, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195340116 ISBN 13: 9780195340112

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

In this bold, sweeping book, David Day surveys the ways in which one nation or society has supplanted another, and then sought to justify its occupation - for example, the English in Australia and North America, the Normans in England, the Spanish in Mexico, the Japanese in Korea, the Chinese in Tibet. Human history has been marked by territorial aggression and expanion, an endless cycle of ownership claims by dominant cultures over territory occupied by peoples unable to resist their advance. Day outlines the strategies, violent and subtle, such dominant cultures have used to stake and bolster their claims - by redrawing maps, rewriting history, recourse to legal argument, creative renaming, use of foundation stories, tilling of the soil, colonization and of course outright subjugation and even genocide. In the end the claims they make reveal their own sense of identity and self-justifying place in the world. This will be an important book, an accessible and captivating macro-narrative about empire, expansion, and dispossession.

About this title

About the Author

David Day has been a research fellow at Clare College in Cambridge and a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Aberdeen and the Centre for Pacific and American Studies at the University of Tokyo. He is currently a research associate at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he is working on a history of Antarctica. His many books include best-selling histories of the Second World War, prize-winning biographies, and a study of Winston Churchill and Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies that has been made into a television documentary. He has also written a highly-praised history of Australia, Claiming a Continent. His books have won or been short-listed for major literary prizes and have been translated into several languages.

Review

"Full of interesting facts and thoughts....This is a book imbued with fine scholarship, but one that deserves a wide readership....Day has an unfailing eye for vivid, arresting avidence."--Times Literary Supplement

"The virtue of Day's book is to bring together wide-ranging examples of conquest in a well-defined argument. It is well expressed and deserves attention. The volume is an important contribution to the ongoing debate on empires and colonies in the various fields that examine this subject such as history, literature, ethnology, law and politics."--European History Quarterly

"Day's provocative and well-written book will require readers in many countries around the globe to come to grips with equally grim and brutal aspects of their history, and that alone makes it a study well worth reading and discussing...This reviewer consequently recommends Conquest highly and looks forward to the debate." --Technology and Culture

"Conquest is an extremely challenging book, particularly for those in 'new world' countries such as Australia and the USA, as it confronts many of the underlying assumptions regarding national identity and legitimacy of tenure."--Teacher

"[Day] sweeps expertly and effortlessly across the globe and into the pages of history to back up his arguments...[Conquest] is as much thought-provoking as it is uncomfortable reading."--Herald Sun

"David Day has written a fascinating account of the way nations have always moved into other people's countries and taken over as the dominant culture. This is still happening of course, as with China and Tibet, and Day ranges over an extraordinary historical panorama to show how universal the practice has been."--Newcastle Herald

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0195340116
• ISBN 13: 9780195340112
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320