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India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age

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Gurcharan Das

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“In the Roman psyche the East had long been a place of danger, but also a place of plenty. The first Emperor Augustus famously said of Rome that he found a city built in brick but left it in marble – all that money had to come from somewhere. India was repeatedly described in Roman sources as a land of unimaginable wealth. Pliny the Elder complained that the Roman taste for exotic silks, perfumes and pearls consumed the city. ‘India and China [and Arabia] together drain our Empire. That is the price that our luxuries and our womankind cost us.’ It was the construction of the Via Egnatia and attendant road-systems that physically allowed Rome to expand eastwards, while the capture of Egypt intensified this magnetic pull. Rome had got the oriental bug, and Byzantium, entering into a truce with the Romans in 129 BC following the Roman victory in the Macedonian Wars that kick-started Gnaeus Egnatius’ construction of the Via Egnatia, was a critical and vital destination before all longer Asian journeys began.”

Roman EmpireEast Meets WestCultural Exchanges
Book:Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities
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“Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men--some more fluently than others.”

NatureRussiaWildernessHuntingTigersForestTigerPoaching
Book:The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
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“In North America, it's estimated that $1 billion worth of wood is poached yearly. The Forest Service has pegged the value of poached wood from its land at $100 million annually; in recent years, the agency estimates, 1 in 10 trees felled on public lands in the United States were harvested illegally. Associations of private timber companies gauge the value of wood stolen from them at around $350 million annually. In British Columbia, experts put the cost of timber theft from publicly managed forests at $20 million a year. Globally, the black market for timber is estimated at $157 billion, a figure that includes the market value of the wood, unpaid taxes, and lost revenues. Along with illegal fishing and the black-market animal trade, timber poaching contributes to a $1 trillion illegal wildlife-trade industry that is monitored by international crime organizations such as Interpol.”

PoachingBlack Market
Book:Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods
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“Organizations like the World Bank and Interpol have estimated that the global scale of illegal logging generates somewhere between $51 billion and $157 billion annually. Thirty percent of the world's wood trade is illegal, and an estimated 80 percent of all Amazonian wood harvested today is poached. (In Cambodia that number jumps to 90 percent.)”

TreesWoodPoaching
Book:Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods
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