edwebbempireseminar

"In Mongolia, Kublai is known as Kublai 'The Wise'," said museum researcher Egiimaa Tseveendorj.  "Genghis Khan is known as a military leader, but Kublai was a king who organised an enormous kingdom, not only by conquering it, but with administration, politics, trade, diplomacy, science, religion and production," she added.  "In the period of Kublai Khan the Silk Road, which facilitated trade with the West, experienced a new era of prosperity."

A newly released report reveals Obama is the greatest arms exporter since the Second World War. The dollar value of all major arms deals overseen by the first five years of the Obama White House now exceeds the amount overseen by the Bush White House in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion

I knew there were record deals with the Saudis, but to outsell the eight years of Bush, to sell more than any president since World War II, was surprising even to me, who follows these things quite closely. The majority, 60 percent, have gone to the Persian Gulf and Middle East, and within that, the Saudis have been the largest recipient of things like US fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, bombs, guns, almost an entire arsenal

The Congressional Research Service found that since October 2010 alone, President Obama has agreed to sell $90.4 billion in arms to the Gulf kingdom.“That President Obama would so enthusiastically endorse arming such a brutal authoritarian government is unsurprising, since the United States is by far the leading arms dealer (with 47 percent of the world total) to what an annual State Department report classifies as the world’s “least democratically governed states,” notes Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Of all the great canals that have ever been dug, which was the most important? Which canal, that is, has had the most outsized role in world history, by fueling trade, war, or empire?

I would give the Suez Canal the nod. Digging it did much the same for British sea power as Panama later did for the United States. It granted the Royal Navy ready access to the Indian Ocean, making possible a liberal empire presided over by an unrivaled fleet. How crucial Suez was to Atlantic powers’ endeavors in Asia became clear in 1904 and 1905. That’s when Japan’s ally, Great Britain, closed the canal to the Russian Navy — and in turn compelled the Russian Baltic Fleet to undertake an epic 20,000-mile voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, and up through the East China and Yellow seas just to meet Japanese Adm. Togo’s tanned, rested, and ready Combined Fleet at Tsushima Strait. The result was predictable: a debacle of the first order.

Suez supplies a second gateway to the larger maritime world, enhancing Mediterranean and North Atlantic countries’ prospects on the high seas immensely

The judges at Thursday’s trial cited a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum that imposed limits on attempts by foreigners to use U.S. courts to seek damages against corporations for human rights abuses abroad.