East Asia: Did you mean...?

Pieter de Carpentier (1586-1659) - Governor General of the Dutch East Indies.

Disregarding the extremely inhospitable spots even the most stubborn of us have enough common sense to avoid, humans have managed to cover an extraordinary amount of territory on this earth. Go back 200,000 years, however, and Homo sapiens...

The age-old concept of the “divine right of kings” allowed that a country's ruler received his or her power or authority from God. However, few, if any, were delusional enough to actually believe themselves to be a god. An exception to this...

The Parthians ruled from 247 BCE to 224 CE creating a vast empire that stretched from the Mediterranean in the west to India and China in the east. East of the Caspian Sea there emerged from the steppe of Central Asia a nomadic Scythian tribe...

17th-century Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) navigators were the first Europeans to set foot on Australian soil. Although there is a strong theory that the Portuguese explorer, Cristóvão de Mendonça (1475-1532...

The Portuguese Empire was established from the 15th century and eventually stretched from the Americas to Japan. Very often a string of coastal trading centres with defensive fortifications, there were larger territorial colonies like Brazil...

The network popularly known as the Silk Road refers not to a single route but to a shifting constellation of overland and maritime pathways that connected East and West across more than a millennium. Long before the term was coined in the...

Marco Polo (1254-1324 CE) was a Venetian merchant and explorer who travelled to China and served the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan (l. 1214-1294 CE) between c. 1275 and 1292 CE. Polo's adventures are recounted in his own writings, The Travels...

Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587-1629), an officer of the Dutch East India Company and twice the company's Governor-General in the Dutch East Indies, oil on wood portrait after Jacob Waben, 1629. Westfries Museum, Hoorn, The Netherlands.

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda H. Podany is a unique history of the ancient Near East that compellingly presents the life stories of kings, priestesses, merchants, bricklayers, and others. Rather...