Empire Of Diamonds

Author : Adrienne Munich
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2020-05-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813944012

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Empire of Diamonds by Adrienne Munich Pdf

In 1850, the legendary Koh-i-noor diamond, gem of Eastern potentates, was transferred from the Punjab in India and, in an elaborate ceremony, placed into Queen Victoria’s outstretched hands. This act inaugurated what author Adrienne Munich recognizes in her engaging new book as the empire of diamonds. Diamonds were a symbol of political power—only for the very rich and influential. But, in a development that also reflected the British Empire’s prosperity, the idea of owning a diamond came to be marketed to the middle class. In all kinds of writings, diamonds began to take on an affordable romance. Considering many of the era’s most iconic voices—from Dickens and Tennyson to Kipling and Stevenson—as well as grand entertainments such as The Moonstone, King Solomon’s Mines, and the tales of Sherlock Holmes, Munich explores diamonds as fetishes that seem to contain a living spirit exerting powerful effects, and shows how they scintillated the literary and cultural imagination. Based on close textual attention and rare archival material, and drawing on ideas from material culture, fashion theory, economic criticism, and fetishism, Empire of Diamonds interprets the various meanings of diamonds, revealing a trajectory including Indian celebrity-named diamonds reserved for Asian princes, such as the Great Mogul and the Hope Diamond, their adoption by British royal and aristocratic families, and their discovery in South Africa, the mining of which devastated the area even as it opened the gem up to the middle classes. The story Munich tells eventually finds its way to America, as power and influence cross the Atlantic, bringing diamonds to a wide consumer culture.

Author : K'wan
Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2017-10-10
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781250102645

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The Diamond Empire by K'wan Pdf

#1 Essence bestselling author K’Wan returns with The Diamond Empire, the explosive, hard-hitting follow-up novel to the street love story Diamonds and Pearl. It’s about to be an all-out war. While an ambitious rival has taken over Diamonds’s crew, Diamonds lies in wait in exile, carefully planning his next move to comeback and reclaim his position as king of the streets of New York for good. But when an unexpected enemy from the past one-ups Diamonds and beats him at his own game, Diamonds needs to dig deep into his bag of tricks—and make an unlikely alliance—in order to climb back to the top. After opening her heart to Diamonds and then having him disappear, Pearl lives her days in a very dark place. But when her father’s empire is toppled and a gaping power vacuum needs to be filled, Pearl is drawn into the very life her father so desperately wanted to shield her from. Pearl needs to fight tooth and nail to become queen of her father’s kingdom, as Diamonds claws his way back to Pearl.

Author : Nancy Turner Banks
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 486 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2010-05
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781450201711

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AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire by Nancy Turner Banks Pdf

It is a mistake to think that wars only concern armies involved in active engagement. Nothing is farther from the truth. The real forces of evil wage a financial war. The dark princes of debt finance have gained leverage over every important social, economic, and political institution-including the health care delivery system. In AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire, author Nancy Turner Banks draws the connections between free market strategies, the destruction of national sovereignty by the process of globalization, and AIDS as one of the health consequences of a neo-Darwinian philosophy. Through meticulous research, Banks found a medicalpharmaceutical- industrial complex that was taken over one hundred years ago by the titans of financial capitalism. Their aim was to create profit, not to conquer disease. This book of social history points to a cauldron of historical events that contributed to the HIV/AIDS crisis. AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire tells the dramatic story of a financial ideology that is damaging to everything that it means to be human. It is the story of profits over people. In the end, it is the story of hope and how we can regain our sanity and our health in a world gone mad.

Author : Stefan Kanfer
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1995-04-30
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780374524265

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The Last Empire by Stefan Kanfer Pdf

"Timely corporate history--as exciting and poignant as any good tale of derring-do against great odds by all-too-flawed giants. " - Kirkus Reviews With a scholar's precision and a novelist's eye, Stefan Kanfer tells the inside story of De Beers Consolidated Mines - from the nineteenth century diamond rush that transformed Johannes De Beer's humble South African farm into an exotic klondike, to the Oppenheimers' shadow empire that has achieved umatched global reach.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Diamond industry and trade
ISBN : OCLC:953655388

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The Diamond Empire by Anonim Pdf

Author : Janine Farrell-Robert
Publisher : Red Wheel Weiser
Page : 929 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2007-04-01
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781609258801

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Glitter & Greed by Janine Farrell-Robert Pdf

Rare, romantic, and forever: The diamond industry depends on these myths to reap billions of dollars of profit. This sensational investigation explodes such fallacies and reveals how multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns create the impression of rarity and romance. It reveals a very secret and unromantic world, one that is dominated and controlled by a handful of mighty corporations. With Leonardo DiCaprio’s movie The Blood Diamond making more people than ever aware of the seamy side of the diamond trade, Janine Roberts’ explosive exposé, taking us through seven decades of intrigue and manipulation, is the right book at the right time.

Author : William Dalrymple,Anita Anand
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2017-09-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9781635570779

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Koh-i-Noor by William Dalrymple,Anita Anand Pdf

From the internationally acclaimed and bestselling historians William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, the first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, arguably the most celebrated jewel in the world. On March 29, 1849, the ten-year-old leader of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the center of the British fort in Lahore, India. There, in a formal Act of Submission, the frightened but dignified child handed over to the British East India Company swathes of the richest land in India and the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond, otherwise known as the Mountain of Light. To celebrate the acquisition, the British East India Company commissioned a history of the diamond woven together from the gossip of the Delhi Bazaars. From that moment forward, the Koh-i-Noor became the most famous and mythological diamond in history, with thousands of people coming to see it at the 1851 Great Exhibition and still more thousands repeating the largely fictitious account of its passage through history. Using original eyewitness accounts and chronicles never before translated into English, Dalrymple and Anand trace the true history of the diamond and disperse the myths and fantastic tales that have long surrounded this awe-inspiring jewel. The resulting history of south and central Asia tells a true tale of greed, conquest, murder, torture, colonialism, and appropriation that shaped a continent and the Koh-i-Noor itself.

Author : K'wan
Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2016-10-11
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781250102621

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Diamonds and Pearl by K'wan Pdf

From # 1 Essence best-selling Crime Novelist K'Wan comes a tale of forbidden love, high stakes murder and the robbery gone bad that set it all in motion, Diamonds and Pearl. They say that good girls like bad boys, and this was especially true for Pearl Stone. A child born of privilege to a drug baron and reputed killer known in the streets as Big Stone. Although the flashy, fast-paced nature of the streets calls to Pearl, she’s been brought up to look but not touch. But when a young hustler named Diamonds crawls up from the swamps of Louisiana and sets up shop in New York City, everything Pearl was taught flies out the window. Raised in the wild and schooled on the mean streets of New Orleans, Diamonds is no stranger to hard times and is willing to do whatever it takes to stay above the poverty line, including kill. When a robbery turned mass murder goes wrong, Diamonds is forced to flee New Orleans and lands in New York where he meets Pearl, and for the first time finds something he craves more than wealth and power...love. As the stakes get higher, Diamonds has to push away his past if he’s to grab hold of his future—but by doing so, will he show Pearl that all that glitters isn’t gold?

Author : Francesca Cartier Brickell
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Page : 673 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2021-06-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780525621638

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The Cartiers by Francesca Cartier Brickell Pdf

“A dynamic group biography studded with design history and high-society dash . . . [This] elegantly wrought narrative bears the Cartier hallmark.”—The Economist The “astounding” (André Leon Talley) story of the family behind the Cartier empire and the three brothers who turned their grandfather’s humble Parisian jewelry store into a global luxury icon—as told by a great-granddaughter with exclusive access to long-lost family archives “Ms. Cartier Brickell has done her grandfather proud.”—The Wall Street Journal The Cartiers is the revealing tale of a jewelry dynasty—four generations, from revolutionary France to the 1970s. At its heart are the three Cartier brothers whose motto was “Never copy, only create” and who made their family firm internationally famous in the early days of the twentieth century, thanks to their unique and complementary talents: Louis, the visionary designer who created the first men’s wristwatch to help an aviator friend tell the time without taking his hands off the controls of his flying machine; Pierre, the master dealmaker who bought the New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue for a double-stranded natural pearl necklace; and Jacques, the globe-trotting gemstone expert whose travels to India gave Cartier access to the world’s best rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, inspiring the celebrated Tutti Frutti jewelry. Francesca Cartier Brickell, whose great-grandfather was the youngest of the brothers, has traveled the world researching her family’s history, tracking down those connected with her ancestors and discovering long-lost pieces of the puzzle along the way. Now she reveals never-before-told dramas, romances, intrigues, betrayals, and more. The Cartiers also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the firm’s most iconic jewelry—the notoriously cursed Hope Diamond, the Romanov emeralds, the classic panther pieces—and the long line of stars from the worlds of fashion, film, and royalty who wore them, from Indian maharajas and Russian grand duchesses to Wallis Simpson, Coco Chanel, and Elizabeth Taylor. Published in the two-hundredth anniversary year of the birth of the dynasty’s founder, Louis-François Cartier, this book is a magnificent, definitive, epic social history shown through the deeply personal lens of one legendary family.

Author : Frauke Bolten-Boshammer
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2018-10-23
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781925685091

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A Diamond in the Dust by Frauke Bolten-Boshammer Pdf

The powerful true story of how one woman turned outback dust into a diamond empire Within minutes of landing in Kununurra, Frauke Bolten had made up her mind to get on a plane back home to Germany. It was 1981 and the dusty frontier town was no place for a woman. However, Frauke stayed, determined to help her husband carve out a new life farming. Tragedy struck just three years later when Friedrich took his own life and she was left to raise their family alone. Twenty-six years after she sold her first necklace off the back porch, Kimberley Fine Diamonds in Kununurra is now home to one of the world’s largest collections of Argyle pink diamonds, with a client list that includes Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. Frauke is credited for not only pioneering an industry, but for putting the tiny outback town and its precious diamonds on the map. A Diamond in the Dust is a tale of love and loss, hardship and heartache, but ultimately the inspiring story of how a young girl from Germany overcame tragedy to pioneer a diamond empire in one of the most unforgiving terrains on earth.

Author : Margaret Homans
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2015-03-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226351155

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Royal Representations by Margaret Homans Pdf

Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. In Royal Representations, Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt. Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's "rule," Homans explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. Along the way she shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model for women's powers in and out of marriage, how Victoria's dramatic public withdrawal after Albert's death helped to ease the monarchy's transition to an entirely symbolic role, and how Victoria's literary self-representations influenced debates over political self-representation. Homans considers versions of Victoria in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Author : Usha R Balakrishnan
Publisher : World Diamond Museum Limited
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN : 1838048405

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Diamonds Across Time by Usha R Balakrishnan Pdf

- Diamonds Across Time features ten essays by scholars in love with the stone - They present new discoveries, explore historic collections, investigate the trade in diamonds, explain the spectrum of colors, and, most important, discuss the human stories that underpin the adoration for diamonds - The book is illustrated with incredible photographs of rarely seen gems and jewels from closely held collections and reconstructions of historical diamonds, done with the help of state-of-the-art computer technology Diamonds tell stories that are captivating and timeless. On the one hand, they are just stones, pieces of pure carbon with optical properties that make them glitter and sparkle like stars. On the other, they are mystical entities hypnotically drawing the viewer into a time machine as it were, wherein a cinematic montage of their journey unfolds. Diamonds Across Time presents a sweeping overview of diamonds across time and space, featuring ten essays by world-renowned scholars in love the stone. Here, these authors present new discoveries; explore extraordinary collections; investigate histories, science, and trade; the nature of diamonds; legendary gems, jewelry collections, and great designers. Above all, they tell the human stories that underpin the adoration of diamonds. Diamonds Across Time is a richly illustrated publication with high-quality images of gems and jewels, archival documents, rare drawings, and fabulous photographs. The volume places diamonds in the context of the time in which they were discovered, and on the political, social, and cultural stage on which their histories were etched. In a rapidly changing world, diamonds are eternal. They were created by nature and grew in the womb of the earth. They tell stories, and they record history. With this book, diamonds will finally have their own storytellers. The book was compiled and edited by the World Diamond Museum's chief curator and world-renowned jewelry expert Dr. Usha R Balakrishnan. She and nine other distinguished authors wrote ten monographs written in the order in appearance: Introduction; The Nizam Diamond: Bala Koh-i-Noor, in the Sacred Trust of the Nizam of Hyderabad - Usha R. Balakrishnan; Diamonds of the French Crown Jewels: Between East and West - François Farges; A Concise History of Diamonds from Borneo - Derek J. Content; Indian Diamonds and the Portuguese Duriing the Rise of the Mughal Empire - Hugo Miguel Crespo; Two Large Diamonds from India - Jack Ogden; The Romanov Diamonds: History of Splendour - Stefano Papi; The Londonderry Jewels, 1819-1959 - Diana Scarisbrick; Dress to Impress in Southeast Asia - René Brus; Powerful Women, Important Diamonds - Ruth Peltason; One in Ten Thousand: The Unique World of Coloured Diamonds - John M. King.

Author : Edward Jay Epstein
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1982
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : STANFORD:36105005305037

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The Rise and Fall of Diamonds by Edward Jay Epstein Pdf

Author : Adrienne Munich
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0231104812

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Queen Victoria's Secrets by Adrienne Munich Pdf

An unconventional figure in an age that excluded women from government, Victoria was accorded prominence unavailable to any male monarch. Yet as Adrienne Munich argues in this fascinating work, the originality of the solid, dour icon that was Victoria lay, paradoxically, in her very ordinariness. The first book to fully investigate the influence of this icon of British history, Queen Victoria's Secrets demonstrates the firm grasp the queen held on the cultural imagination of her country, exploring how Victoria created and maintained her royal authority. Gracefully weaving together feminist, anthropological, and postcolonial approaches, Munich searches out the myriad, often contradictory incarnations of the queen in the minds of her people. How did Victoria convincingly maintain her power for forty years after Prince Albert's death, never giving up her identity as a grieving widow? How did Victorian society's reverential treatment of their queen conflate with the monarch's plain, middle class public image? These are some of the secrets Munich examines in her richly detailed work. In demonstrating the subtle but powerful ways in which Victoria performed significant cultural work, Queen Victoria's Secrets goes against the grain of Victoria scholarship, which has tended to overlook the queen's political and cultural centrality. This stylish, accessible portrait will be of great interest to those who are fascinated by the myth-making and secrets of the Victorian age.

Author : Renee Rose
Publisher : Burning Desires
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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King of Diamonds by Renee Rose Pdf

"Dark, steamy, and perfect--Renee Rose has mastered this genre." ~USA Today Bestselling Author Alta Hensley I WARNED HER.I told her not to set foot in my casino again. I told herto stay away. Because if I see her around my suite again,I’ll claim her as my own.And once I make her mine, I’m not gonna set her free.I’m king of the Vegas underground and I takewhat I want.So she'd better run. Stay the hell away from my casino.Or I’ll never let her go.King of Diamonds is a stand-alone mafia romance in the Vegas Underground series. No cheating, no cliffhangers.