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This open-access book offers a clear and thorough exploration of Asia's history from an international relations perspective. The book investigates key political, economic, and cultural forces defining Asia. It highlights the historical and current significance of the Indo-Pacific region, particularly shedding light on its strategic role in global geopolitics. Through detailed historical analyses, the authors guide readers toward a comprehensive understanding of Asia's complex international relations, from colonization and imperialism, through the Cold War, into decolonization and the wave of democratization in the region, to the rise of China, unpacking the various dimensions of regionalism in Asia. This book serves as a practical scholarly resource for advanced students, researchers, and lecturers interested in understanding the region's past and its implications for future geopolitical dynamics. It is relevant to historians focused on Asia and to international relations and political science scholars interested in the shift to an Asian world order, from past to present.

Mining finance houses were substantial public corporations with access to money markets in the City of London, the world's leading capital market for mining. These institutions became dominant at the inception of colonial rule and, in varying forms, remained so throughout the twentieth century.Drawing on a rich corpus of primary sources, this book analyses the Western colonial origins of the mining industry and its post-colonial legacies in the Central African Copperbelt. It provides insights into the operations of the global business of mining: in particular, how these processes took place, why they were considered desirable by various interest groups, and the impact that these processes continue to have on physical and human environments in parts of the world where they took place. It also turns its gaze to the City of London looking at who the financiers were and the nature of the power which they wielded. A long-term perspective on mining finance reveals that thus far the colonial governments have been the main focus in the history of imperialism in Central Africa, with little focus in many instances on the mining finance houses which have outlived them.The book is a significant contribution to the economic, financial and business history of mining and extractive industries, Central Africa, the City of London and early forms of financial capitalism.

This prescient Handbook examines inequalities in humanitarianism at multiple levels, highlighting the long-lasting impact of colonialism on contemporary power relations.Silke Roth, Bandana Purkayastha and Tobias Denskus bring together esteemed experts from the global north and south who introduce crucial research ethics frameworks and methodologies in order to study humanitarianism and inequality. Adopting an intersectional approach, this Handbook demonstrates the ways in which race, gender, class and other sources of inequality intersect in relation to a range of contemporary issues including the role of the media and technology, the COVID-19 pandemic, linguistic inequality, trafficking, and refugee protection and assistance. Looking ahead, the contributors stress the need for academics and practitioners to reflect on the inequalities that both underpin and are perpetuated by humanitarian contexts.Providing a detailed overview of the ways in which inequality has affected the development and transformation of humanitarianism, this Handbook will be essential reading for academics, students and researchers of humanitarian and development studies, international relations, and sociology and social policy. It will also be of interest to public policymakers focussing on humanitarianism and striving for global equality.

In the age of European expansion, pearls became potent symbols of imperial supremacy. Pearls for the Crown demonstrates how European art legitimated racialized hierarchies and inequitable notions about humanity and nature that still hold sway today.When Christopher Columbus encountered pristine pearl beds in southern Caribbean waters in 1498, he procured the first source of New World wealth for the Spanish Crown, but he also established an alternative path to an industry that had remained outside European control for centuries. Centering her study on a selection of key artworks tied to the pearl industry, Mónica Domínguez Torres examines the interplay of materiality, labor, race, and power that drove artistic production in the early modern period. Spanish colonizers exploited the expertise and forced labor of Native American and African workers to establish pearling centers along the coasts of South and Central America, disrupting the environmental and demographic dynamics of their overseas territories. Drawing from postcolonial theory, material culture studies, and ecocriticism, Domínguez Torres demonstrates how, through use of the pearl, European courtly art articulated ideas about imperial expansion, European superiority, and control over nature, all of which played key roles in the political circles surrounding the Spanish Crown.This highly anticipated interdisciplinary study will be welcomed by scholars of art history, the history of colonial Latin America, and ecocriticism in the context of the Spanish colonies.

The Romans who established their rule on three continents and the Europeans who first established new homes in North America interacted with communities of Indigenous peoples with their own histories and cultures. Sweeping in its scope and rigorous in its scholarship, Empires and Indigenous Peoples expands our understanding of their historical parallels and raises general questions about the nature of the various imperial encounters. In this book, leading scholars of ancient Roman and early anglophone North America examine the mutual perceptions of the Indigenous and the imperial actors. They investigate the rhetoric of civilization and barbarism and its expression in military policies. Indigenous resistance, survival, and adaptation form a major theme. The essays demonstrate that power relations were endlessly adjusted, identities were framed and reframed, and new mutual knowledge was produced by all participants. Over time, cultures were transformed across the board on political, social, religious, linguistic, ideological, and economic levels. The developments were complex, with numerous groups enmeshed in webs of aggression, opposition, cooperation, and integration. Readers will see how Indigenous and imperial identities evolved in Roman and American lands. Finally, the authors consider how American views of Roman activity influenced the development of American imperial expansion and accompanying Indigenous critiques. They show how Roman, imperial North American, and Indigenous experiences have contributed to American notions of race, religion, and citizenship, and given shape to problems of social inclusion and exclusion today.

Agents of European overseas empires involves contributors who specialise on often overlooked aspects of imperial endeavour: ‘private'European interests, companies, merchants or courtiers, who conducted their own activities both with and without the benediction of polities. The chapters adopt intra- as well as inter-imperial perspectives and transport the reader to colonial America, the West Indies, the Cape of Good Hope, Batavia, or Ceylon, through the Dutch, English, French and Spanish empires. Agents of European overseas empires offers crucial insight on how these actors acquired profits and power and, in turn, laid the platforms for European global empires.

In Nation and Empire as Two Trends of Political Organization in the Iron Age Levant MEI Hualong offers an analysis of national and imperial ideologies--two political principles that influenced the establishment, consolidation and expansion of trans-local/trans-tribal polities in the Iron Age Levant. By examining key terminologies, historical accounts and literary sources, MEI argues that the elites of ancient nations may attempt to reshape their political and cultural identity in imperial terms (vice versa, but to a lesser extent). The conceptual transformation from the one to the other is closely related to the political entity's consciousness and understanding of limits and boundaries: political and cultural, real and imagined.

Lenin's texts breaking with Eurocentrism in the socialist movementFired up by the outbreak of the First World War and outraged by the capitulation of most socialist parties to the demands of national bourgeoisies, Lenin sought to understand the deeper roots of the crisis of the world movement. The result was Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which went on to become a core text for the international communist movement. But Lenin also sought to break with the Eurocentrism of the socialist movement, which tended to look down with disdain at or simply reject struggles for self-determination, especially among colonized peoples.This volume, with an introduction by the renowned abolitionist and anti-imperialist theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, brings together the texts on imperialism and those on the national question to provide a window into Lenin's global vision of revolution.

Lawyering Imperial Encounters revisits the relationship between the African continent and global capitalism since the 19th century Scramble. Focused on sites of imperial encounters – in London, Paris, Abidjan, Bujumbura, Kinshasa, Johannesburg or the Hague, it provides an unprecedented account of the correlation between the legacy of legal imperialism and British hegemony, and the uneven and unequal expansion of finance and global justice in the current rush for Africa's'green'minerals. Tracking the role played by legal intermediaries to negotiate and justify Africa's practical and symbolic subaltern position in the global economy, it demonstrates the interconnectedness between political, legal and economic change in capitalism's cores and its so-called peripheries. Embracing the global turn in sociology, history and legal scholarship, it rubs against the functionalist account of global value chains as engines of development. It also constitutes a powerful postcolonial critique of law's double-bind - as both enabler and bulwark against domination.

This is the first book-length study of imperial crossings in Thomas Hardy's novels and short stories. Combining the strengths of world-literary and world-systems analyses with a cultural materialist approach, the study offers unparalleled coverage of global links in Hardy's fiction, engaging, in addition, with a range of dissenting responses – at both formal and thematic registers – to the British world-system's exploitative structures. Hardy's prose outputs reveal that the empire, contrary to popular critical assumptions in postcolonial studies, did not harmonise the classes, genders or regions into a shared national imperial identity, culture or destiny. A major component of the study additionally includes comparative readings of the'modern'world-system and imperial sociality in writings by Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, David Livingstone, and in Chartist poetry. The book will be an invaluable resource to teachers, students and enthusiasts working in the field of world literature, and in Victorian, postcolonial and settler colonial studies.

This book offers a unique perspective on the colonial roots of modern science, technology, and medicine (STM) in South Asia. The book questions the deconstruction of imperial visions and definitions of science and modernity in South Asia. It presents an in-depth analysis of the contested relationship between science, modernity, and colonialism. It explores how new research can contribute to the diversification of perspectives in the history and sociology of modern South Asian studies. The chapters in the book delve into various aspects of STM in South Asia. It covers diverse topics, including the social, cultural, and pedagogic context of early modern Bengal, the popularization of science in colonial Punjab, the Hindi science periodical Vigyan, and the emergence of the Indian science community. The book also examines the intersection of indigenous medical practices, ayurveda, Unani, and medical revivalism and highlights peripheral creativity in science. The contributors engage with the existing historiography to raise new questions concerning the global circulations of scientific knowledge from the perspective of South Asia and the regional appropriation of the same. It connects the history of science and modernity with South Asia's socio-economic and cultural background. It offers valuable insights into the decolonization of STM. It greatly interests scholars and students of modern South Asian history, sociology, social anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society Studies (STS).

Ongoing arguments over how histories are honoured – as evidenced by the conflict between South Korea and Japan over the opening of Tokyo's Heritage Information Centre in June 2020 – reveal the extent to which heritage processes enable states to assert legitimacy and power on a global stage. Here, Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan's Empire shines a timely spotlight on the complicated histories and disputed legacies of various sites associated with Japan's empire in Asia and the Pacific. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this transnational study sees contested memorial spaces as windows for us to explore how borders are created, moved and altered in everyday life. From the Asan Bay Overlook Memorial Wall in Guam and the Puppet Emperor Palace in China to Japan's Ainu Museum and the Cowra War Cemetery in Australia, the diverse range of case studies examined here foreground the complex relationship Japan and its neighbours have with their imperial past and reveal how these relations stand at the intersection of individual actions, societal choices and memory collectives. In doing so, this innovative collection of essays bridges history, geography and heritage studies to provide an invaluable new approach to the study of imperial conflict and memory politics in modern Japan.

An argument against the idea of the indigenous chief as a liberal political figure. Across Africa, it is not unusual for proponents of liberal democracy and modernization to make room for some aspects of indigenous culture, such as the use of a chief as a political figure. Yet for Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, no such accommodation should be made. Chiefs, he argues, in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging pamphlet, cannot be liberals—and liberals cannot be chiefs. If we fail to recognize this, we fail to acknowledge the metaphysical underpinnings of modern understandings of freedom and equality, as well as the ways in which African intellectuals can offer a distinctive take on the unfinished business of colonialism.

A Christian imagination of colonial discovery permeated the early modern world, but legal histories developed in very different ways depending on imperial jurisdictions. Indigenous Rights and the Legacies of the Bible: From Moses to Mabo explores the contradictions and ironies that emerged in the interactions between biblical warrants and colonial theories of Indigenous natural rights. The early debates in the Americas mutated in the British colonies with a range of different outcomes after the American Revolution, and tracking the history of biblical interpretation provides an illuminating pathway through these historical complexities. A ground-breaking legal judgement in the High Court of Australia, Mabo v. Queensland (1992), demonstrates the enduring legacies of debates over the previous five centuries. The case reveals that the Australian colonies are the only jurisdiction of the English common law tradition within which no treaties were made with the First Nations. Instead, there is a peculiar development of terra nullius ideology, which can be traced back to the historic influences of the book of Genesis in Puritan thought in the seventeenth century. Having identified both similarities and differences between various colonial arguments, and their overt dependence on early modern theological reasoning, Mark G. Brett examines the paradoxical permutations of imperial and anti-imperial motifs in the biblical texts themselves. Concepts of rights shifted over the centuries from theological to secular frameworks, and more recently, from anthropocentric assumptions to ecologically embedded concepts of Indigenous rights and responsibilities. Bearing in mind the differences between ancient and modern notions of indigeneity, a fresh understanding of this history proves timely as settler colonial states reflect on the implications of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Brett's illuminating insights in this detailed study are particularly relevant for the four states that initially voted against the Declaration: the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

In his new book John A. Hall traces the interactions between nations, states and empires in the making of the modern world. It is commonly assumed that nation states succeeded and replaced empires, relegating empires to the past: Hall argues that this is not the case. Empires have continued alongside nation states, shadowing them and overseeing them in the industrial era. The two world wars were imperial wars, rather than wars between nation states. Even after rapid decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, empires persisted in the USA and the USSR. Furthermore, empires are not finished: the USA retains enormous power, while Russia and China increasingly show imperial dispositions. Empires and nation states do not exist in separate compartments – rather, they often overlap. Consider the USA – both strongly nationalist and the greatest empire in the history of the world. This highly original book will be essential reading for students and scholars in sociology and politics and for anyone interested in the political forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the modern world.

This book documents the unusual courage by different generations of Ambazonians fighting to build a modern postcolonial nation-state in Africa. Written by experts in the field, the chapters analyze the Ambazonia liberation struggle from different perspectives. Examining the tangled origins of the Ambazonian war as well as documenting the region's extensive history of foreign occupation up until recent uprisings erupting in 2016, the contributors expose the unwillingness of the international systems to stand up to mandates and call for complete decolonization of the territory from French Cameroun. This book forces a re-examination of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and post-colonialism in West Africa, especially in the relatively obscure area of black-on-black colonization, and the inadequacy of international instruments in enforcing the universally accepted ideas from the previous century.

How modern data-driven government originated in the creation and use of administrative archives in the British Empire Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives. As the empire expanded in both the Americas and India, however, this system of political knowledge came to be regarded as inadequate in governing the non-English people who inhabited the lands over which the British asserted sovereignty. This posed a key problem for imperial officials: What kind of knowledge was required to govern an empire populated by a growing number of culturally different people? Using files, pens, and paper, the British defined the information order of the modern state as they debated answers to this question. In tracing the rise and deployment of archives in early modern British imperial rule, Asheesh Kapur Siddique uncovers the origins of our data-driven present.

Exploring the history and politics of a powerful and long-lasting idea: the creation and maintenance of European worlds outside of Europe. This textbook provides a broad overview of settler colonialism in the modern era. The author outlines how the founding of new societies was envisaged and practiced around the world, illustrating the specific ways in which settler colonial projects tried to establish ideal and regenerated political bodies. With an updated introduction and an additional chapter examining decolonisation and Indigenous recognition, this second edition brings the study of settler colonialism up to the present day.

This book provides a sweeping overview of East Asian international relations in history from the nineteenth century onwards, with a focus on Korea and its relationship with East Asia and the USA. In contrast with many books which concentrate exclusively on the twentieth century, this book offers a long-term perspective on modernity and modernization in East Asia. It addresses the tributary system, the Meiji Restoration, Japanese imperialism in East Asia, and the Cold War in East Asia. It also incorporates the First and Second Indochina Wars from Vietnam's perspective and expands the geographical scope of East Asia beyond the traditional framework of Korea, Japan, and China. The book begins with the tributary system as a starting point of East Asian modernity in contrast to the old view that the tributary system was not a'modern'system. It rejects the idea that Japan was modernizing while Korea remained stagnant and shows why Japanese colonialism continues to be controversial and problematic. Through the book's emphasis on Vietnam's perspective of the Indochina Wars, it places much value on nationalism, anti-imperialism, and decolonization as forces of modernity and modernization. Relevant to scholars and students in history, international relations, and East Asian studies more broadly, the book brings with it a novel, fresh and innovative approach to East Asian history.

This book offers fresh perspectives on the legacy of colonialism in the North-east frontiers of India, especially the Naga Hills. The book interrogates the presence of British administrators and anthropologists in the Naga Hills as part of a popular discourse on (post) colonialism. It weaves a coherent chronological sequence of events and the prevailing attitudes of administrators-cum-anthropologists to understand the whole process of colonial intervention in the Naga Hills. It examines the conventional notions of'tribes'and'identity'within the context of the Naga Hills. It explores the transformation of Naga Hills through the lens of colonialism, providing a critical perspective on identity and the intricate web of historical narratives. It is a must-read for scholars, anthropologists, historians, and all those intrigued by the multifaceted legacy of colonialism in the Naga Hills.

This book examines the issues arising from British contested history by looking at how it came to be constructed, how it developed, and how attitudes over time have begun to change towards it. It considers how this narrative was first created through the writing of British history. It explores the private spaces of the court, the political places of the state, and the public places of the street. Beyond British shores this history has also been enacted through international heritage sites when objects were removed and taken back to Britain. Conclusively, it explores how the historic spaces of a maritime city, has further entrenched an already complex history of the nation. How this research brings new insights into this field is by looking at it through the lens of place, space, and the spatial turn. The underlining research questions are: What role does place and space play in historical constructions of the past? How do place and space contribute to contested history? How can these places and spaces be re-appropriated and reused, and endowed with new meanings?

A copy of the top-secret memo below recently came into our hands, and we thought we should bring it to your attention!'Dear National Security Elite:In an ideal world, the public would simply accept whatever their leaders—you, in other words—told them. They would comply with restrictions and mandates, not as a matter of mere obedience, but as a matter of unquestionable patriotic duty.But we don't live in an ideal world.And with the fate of the world, especially the world's wars, in the hands of our enlightened, benevolent, and eminentlyresponsible national security elite—in your hands, in other words—we can't afford to risk opening the conversation to an informed public. And we certainly can't risk asking for anything so antiquated as'consent,'either. Not when the stakes are this high.You simply must learn:How to control the narrative—every narrative—in your favor;How to completely capture the media and effectively quash dissent;How destroying liberty creates more liberty in the long (long) run;Why top-down economic planning, here and abroad, is your best friend;How to flout international, and of course domestic, law and get away with it;And much, much more... The danger with any book like this is, obviously, that it may fall into the wrong hands. If any member of the general public should happen upon these pages, the consequences would be fatal. After all, people may realize that the national security elite—you, in other words—are not, in fact, all-powerful harbingers of peace...They may realize that you are, literally, a force for good... armed and relentlessly attempting to bend the planet to your noble will.And that realization would be nothing short of disastrous. Don't let this book fall into the wrong hands!'Merciless in their penetrating analysis, Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail Hall have written the satirical portrait of America's contemporary military-industrial complex. Drawing inspiration from the 1936 classic How to Run a War, by Bruce W. Knight, this book is a must-read for anyone who would know the truth about America's endless wars and the people who run them.... The truth might just set us free. It will certainly make you laugh. Then—really angry.

From 1800 onwards, the Hindu temple occupied a fragile and uneasy proximity to Imperial governance in India. The colonial state sought to regulate and extract the wealth of large temples. Imperial scholars classified the extraordinary diversity of architectural forms from across India, and selected temples were defined as monuments and brought into the custody of Imperial archaeology. Over time, the Imperial literary imagination transformed the Hindu temple from a place of worship and devotion into a space of wealth, sensuality, and violence. However, the Hindu temple also tested the Imperial state. Devotees and trustees manipulated and rejected attempts at governance, and the Hindu temple became a site at which the authority of the state was persistently modified or curtailed. Ruling Devotion combines historical, literary, art historical, and archaeological perspectives to explore the idea of the temple in particular localities, through the formation of pan-British-Indian policy and in the broadest of transnational realms of Imperial culture. Drawing on a huge range and diversity of archival materials, the book explores the preoccupations and frailties of the colonial state in India.

Fired up by the outbreak of the First World War and outraged by the capitulation of most socialist parties to the demands of national bourgeoisies, Lenin sought to understand the deeper roots of the crisis of the world movement. The result was Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which went on to become a core text for the international communist movement. But Lenin also sought to break with the Eurocentrism of the socialist movement, which tended to look down with disdain at or simply reject struggles for self-determination, especially among colonized peoples.This volume, with an introduction by the renowned abolitionist and anti-imperialist theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, brings together the texts on imperialism and those on the national question to provide a window into Lenin's global vision of revolution.

This book investigates the historical economic and legal regimes that legitimated the resource extraction and exploitation of Africa between the 15th and 19th centuries and led to the continent's trajectory of underdevelopment in the world system. The book interrogates the economic and legal structures that supported European intervention in Africa. It explores the trade and private property rights which were to shape the economic future of the continent, most notably the trade in human beings as legitimate private property by European powers. The book then looks at the techniques used to submerge African sovereignty under European sovereignty during the scramble for territorial control in the 19th century, concluding with the validation of occupation in international law following the 1884-85 Berlin Conference. The book argues that the doctrines of trade and property rights sanctioned by international law led to a trend of African dispossession that set the continent on a path to underdevelopment, with long-reaching consequences. This book will be of interest to researchers and students across law, history, economics, international relations, and African studies.

This book is an original study of Cold Rush, an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment - working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended. This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes. Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change. The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes.

This open access book provides fascinating insights into the incredible changes that Vietnam underwent in the long twentieth century as it transformed from an early modern kingdom to a European colony, to a divided land with opposing ideologies, and to a unified country in a globalized world. At each stage in this long century of changes, there were Vietnamese who sought to mold their society into some vision of “modernity.” The book looks at multiple, rather than one form of modernity, and links those forms with the different political moments that Vietnam experienced, in tandem with the outside interlocutors that were maintained during those periods. As such, this book provides a holistic view of the many forms of modernity and their global links that can be found in Vietnam over the course of the long twentieth century. These multiple modernities are documented in this book, and the authors do so by bringing together the strengths of “traditional” language-based area studies scholarship with the insights that an awareness of trans-national and global perspectives provides. Relevant to historians and researchers in the broader arena of Southeast Asian studies with a particular interest in Vietnam—its journey from past to present—this book is a must-read engagement with a country that has undergone and continues to experience, rapid transformation.

An Open Access edition will be available on publication. The murder of George Floyd in 2020, the renewed international take up of the cry Black Lives Matter and the subsequent toppling of a statue commemorating slave-merchant-turned-philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol provoked urgent questions on memorialisation, white privilege, social justice and repair. Debates on how legacies of colonialism and empire in Britain should be addressed spilled out of the scholarly world into the public discourse. In the immediate wake of the statue toppling this book offers a unique, distinctive and timely contribution to those debates: a series of voices and experiences are offered as critical commentaries and accounts of recent interventions on an official heritage narrative. It sets out to break the ‘dead silence', by bringing together diverse perspectives from academics, artists, activists, heritage professionals and tourist guides. The book offers fresh insights, referencing work attending to the impacts and legacies of colonisation primarily in Bath and Bristol, augmented with comparative contributions from Lancaster and Mexico offering significant and pertinent resonances. A range of strategies are explored towards enabling silenced voices to be heard and engage in conversations about how the past is represented, including Co-Creation, new agonistic museum practices, innovative creative and somatic approaches.

In Between Shadows and Noise Amber Jamilla Musser theorizes sensation as a Black feminist method for aesthetic interpretation and criticism that uses the knowledges held by the body to access the unrepresentable. Thinking through Blackness, empire, and colonialism, Musser examines artworks ranging from Ming Smith's Flamingo Fandango, Jordan Peele's Us, and Katherine Dunham's Shango to Samita Sinha's This ember state, Titus Kaphar's A Pillow for Fragile Fictions, and Teresita Fernández's Puerto Rico (Burned) 6. She engages with these works from an embodied situatedness to grapple with the questions and sensations of racialization and difference that the works produce. Throughout, Musser rethinks how we consider the relationships between race, representation, and politics by dwelling in those spaces and concepts that elude Western norms of representation, objectivity, and logic. In so doing, she explores ways of being and knowing that exceed overdetermined parameters while offering a blueprint for sensing, imagining, and living otherwise.

This open access book addresses a question fundamental to the histories of empire and Africa: at the point of the colonial encounter, how was knowledge made? How did different communities, with little or no prior contact, construct meaning about one another? Amidst huge changes in the politics and economics of a continent, on the cusp of almost complete colonization at the hands of European powers at the end of the nineteenth century, how do the specifics of personality and contingency affect knowledge production? An obvious challenge in addressing this sort of question is the frequent lack of African-produced source material; here, we must work within the ‘archives of oppression'and read both along and against the colonial grain in an attempt to restore African agency to this process of knowledge production. Drawing on the previously never-used diaries of explorer Frank Oates, who travelled throughout Matabeleland in the 1870s, the use of a single traveller's experiences in detail affords us the means to consider the fine details of the interactions between Europeans and Africans. Therefore, this study seeks to enhance existing work on race and empire of the nineteenth century by asking: what place do the fragilities, uncertainties, and contingencies of encounters between individuals have in our understanding of how knowledge is made?

This book explores the transformation of the state in Wallachia, an Ottoman tributary principality, between 1740 and 1800, by focusing on three administrative techniques: regulations, paperwork (registers, identification certificates), and weights and measures. The implementation by the central power of regulations, bookkeeping, certificates, and standard units of measurement was not smooth, but it nevertheless heralded the beginning of the struggle against localism and the efforts to extend the boundaries of legitimate state action. The author challenges the (mostly Romanian) historiography of the Phanariot period, which has portrayed the state as a set of institutions undertaking certain responsibilities and has insisted almost exclusively on its extractive function and abusive character. Instead, this book takes a closer look at how the Wallachian state functioned, examining how its means of interacting with its subjects changed in the second half of the eighteenth century. Rethinking the problem of the state in eighteenth-century Wallachia, traditionally regarded as a mere instrument of Ottoman domination, it claims that it was precisely during this time that the bases of modern statehood were laid in a context defined by imperial rivalries (Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian) in the region. Making the case for state formation in the absence of preparation for war, the author also stresses, in contrast to recent contributions that decentre the state, the need to study the process whereby the effect of state coherence is produced. While focusing on Wallachia, this book provides valuable reading for those interested in early modern administrative and legal history, the history of state formation, and Southeast European history more generally.

This edited volume explores the crucial intersections between Indigenous Land-Based Knowledge (ILK), sustainability, settler colonialism, and the ongoing environmental crisis.Contributors from cross-cultural communities, including Indigenous, settlers, immigrants, and refugee communities, discuss why ILK and practice hold great potential for tackling our current environmental crises, particularly addressing the settler colonialism that contributes towards the environmental challenges faced in the world. The authors offer insights into sustainable practices, biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation, and sustainable land management and centre Indigenous perspectives on ILK as a space to practise, preserve, and promote Indigenous cultures. With case studies spanning topics as diverse as land acknowledgements, land-based learning, Indigenous-led water governance, and birth evacuation, this book shows how our responsibility for ILK can benefit collectively by fostering a more inclusive, sustainable, and interconnected world. Through the promotion of Indigenous perspectives and responsibility towards land and community, this volume advocates for a shift in paradigm towards more inclusive and sustainable approaches to environmental sustainability.This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental sociology, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous studies.

This book explores the interplay of Western European exploration and trade, with collecting, cabinets of curiosities and museums, and with the role of booty and plunder in the building of empires from ca.1600 until the end of the 19th century. The book focuses principally on the Dutch, English, Spanish, French and Italian at different times of their colonial power over the course of these 300 years. The achievements of exploration and trade provide the basis for these countries and both the state and individuals to build collections and museums. This involved governments to legitimize the pursuit of booty and subsequently looting whether by themselves, members of the ruling class or privateers. Throughout much of this period, there those who stood up and challenged such practices, passing laws to criminalize, curtail or contain these activities. By the late 18th century, these parallel but disparate activities converged. It was era of Napoleon and his imperial ambitions that drew these disparate activities together, with his support of intellectual inquiry alongside military plunder and collecting. This served as a symbol of imperial power of the French empire that, alongside England and Italy, exploited the wealth and riches of Egypt, India, and China.

This book focuses on the wars that are normally relegated to the periphery of geo-politics at the heart of Europe's'new'military history. The military history of the past two centuries of European history has tended to be viewed in the shadow of total war. The impact and aftermath of the French upheaval of 1792-1815, the mid-century struggles for national unification, the World Wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45, and the prospect of mutually assured destruction in the Cold War, were all framed as a totalization of warfare and as a tragic pretext for projects of human rights, collective security, and political integration. But this emphasis on large wars overlooks the impact of the wars waged by minor powers as well as the small wars and counterinsurgencies waged by great powers overseas. The suppression of southern European revolutions in the 1820s, Belgian independence, Cuban struggles against Spanish rule, and the wars of new imperialism ranging from Aceh to Annual, all shaped the strategic and domestic environment in which the Great War happened, and they reverberated on the post-1918 growth of totalitarianism. Equally the post-1945 wars of decolonization militarized the culture and politics in the democratic and authoritarian states of the old continent, in ways which belied the macro-political identities of the Cold War.

This edited collection provides an in-depth analysis of the imperial, colonial, and postcolonial history of tobacco from 1780 to 1960, which was one of the major periods of change in the global tobacco economy. It brings together case-studies from known and lesser-known tobacco regions of the world to interrogate tobacco's ‘second globalisation', a concept little employed by historians thus far, but one which encapsulates tobacco's central role in Europe's imperial expansion beyond the Atlantic and the social, political, and cultural transformations of global capitalism taking place during the period. The collection fills a gap in the study of commodities of empire, which has examined tobacco primarily for the early modern Atlantic world, or for single empires during the later period. It invites comparison across borders, encompassing political, economic, and sociocultural history, and, with a particular emphasis on trade, knowledge, and labour, juxtaposes micro-histories with a macro-historical perspective. Together, the studies in the volume testify to the importance of tobacco in new places and among new players, challenging the confines of national and imperial historiographical frameworks. They demonstrate the rising dominance of new powerful forces, including transnational corporations, but also a wide range of actors in conflict and negotiation within territorial and imperial confines. By systematically taking into account the agency in Europe's apparent peripheries and the Global South, they critique a simple assumption of the dominance of the West. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book analyses the political discourse and activities of the constitutionalist-monarchist wing of the Polish Great Emigration, which saw the emigration of several thousand people from the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1831 to 1864, after the failure of the November Uprising of 1830–1831. The book examines the political faction of émigrés led by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, which came to be known as ‘Hôtel Lambert'. By analysing the theoretical discourse in the milieu of the Czartoryski faction and, at the same time, by analysing the plans and efforts to put their theoretical stands into practical policy, the book seeks to answer the question of how the leading representatives of the constitutionalist-monarchist wing of the Great Emigration perceived the Austrian Empire and how their ideas about the past, the present, and the assumption of the future of not only the Polish state but also of the whole of Europe, were projected into their ideas and plans concerning the Austrian Empire. Therefore, the author offers not only conclusions concerning the Austrian Empire from the specific Polish point of view but also interesting perspectives about the projected future of the European continent. Thus, its broad scope provides insights for those researching nineteenth-century European politics, diplomacy, and political thought, particularly regarding phenomena such as nationalism, federalism, democracy, constitutionalism, and perpetual peace theory, among others.

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a territorial scramble. Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan's geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires.

Conventional narratives of empires and globalization focus on oceans and coasts, supposing that global connections are seaborne and that historical change proceeds inward from port cities into continental expanses. This book offers a new perspective, examining key inland areas around the world to show how interior regions have shaped global history.Inlands brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts to explore the modern histories of inland regions across North and South America, Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia, from the American heartland to the Yangzi valley, the Great Dismal Swamp to the Arabian Desert. Together, they argue that interior regions provide a fresh vantage point from which to rethink the history of global connection and disconnection. Each chapter reconsiders national, regional, or imperial histories from an inland perspective, demonstrating how such places have spurred global change.Contributors reveal the critical role inlands and their Indigenous inhabitants have played in the development, projection, and contestation of state power, showing how some interiors became essential to empire even as others developed in resistance to it. By examining the struggle to integrate inland regions into wider networks of exchange, this book also sheds light on the unevenness and the limits of contemporary globalization. A new global history of interior spaces, Inlands presents a bold challenge to dominant understandings of the making of today's connected world.

In The Coloniality of the Secular, An Yountae investigates the collusive ties between the modern concepts of the secular, religion, race, and coloniality in the Americas. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, and Enrique Dussel, An maps the intersections of revolutionary non-Western thought with religious ideas to show how decoloniality redefines the sacred as an integral part of its liberation vision. He examines these thinkers'rejection of colonial religions and interrogates the narrow conception of religion that confines it within colonial power structures. An explores decoloniality's conception of the sacred in relation to revolutionary violence, gender, creolization, and racial phenomenology, demonstrating its potential for reshaping religious paradigms. Pointing out that the secular has been pivotal to regulating racial hierarchies under colonialism, he advocates for a broader understanding of religion that captures the fundamental ideas that drive decolonial thinking. By examining how decolonial theory incorporates the sacred into its vision of liberation, An invites readers to rethink the transformative power of decoloniality and religion to build a hopeful future.

What is Colonialism? develops a clear and rigorous account of what colonialism is and how it works. It draws on and synthesizes recent work in cognitive science, affective science, and social psychology, along with Marxism and related forms of analysis.Hogan begins with some fundamental conceptual distinctions, such as the degree to which a group shares beliefs, dispositions, and skills versus the degree to which they share identification with a category. Building on these distinctions, he defines colonialism in terms of political, economic, and cultural autonomy, clarifying the nature of culture and autonomy particularly. He goes on to articulate an invaluable systematic account of the varieties of colonialism. The final chapters outline the motives of imperialists, differentiating these from their ideological rationalizations, and sketching the harms caused by colonialism. The book concludes by considering when, or if, one can achieve a genuinely postcolonial condition. Hogan illustrates these analyses by examining influential literary works—by European writers (such as Joseph Conrad) and by non-Europeans (such as Athol Fugard, Kamala Markandaya, and Wole Soyinka).This accessible and informative volume is the ideal resource for students and scholars interested in colonialism and empire.

The French maritime empire enabled the continued colonization of territories all over the world from the 17th to the 19th centuries and was built upon the backs of those in lower socioeconomic classes. These classes were heavily impacted by social, political and economic structures. Detailed archaeological case studies using an agency perspective indicate that these lower socioeconomic classes were extremely diverse and dynamic groups that constantly negotiated their identities. These stories are not about the kings, military leaders, and politicians, but rather an exploration of the perspective of those who provided the fuel, both willingly and unwillingly, for the French maritime empire.

In archieven, bibliotheken en musea over de hele wereld liggen Nederlandse koloniale bronnen: kilometers aan brieven, verslagen en dagboeken, en depots vol afbeeldingen, kaarten en objecten. Maar de informatie in dit enorme koloniale archief spreekt niet voor zich. Hoe is dit bronnenmateriaal gevormd en welke gevolgen heeft dat voor historisch onderzoek? Hoe ga je als historicus om met racisme, oriëntalisme en eenzijdigheid in koloniale bronnen? En hoe deden historici dat de afgelopen eeuwen? Dit boek biedt handreikingen aan onderzoekers in drie stappen. Deel I bespreekt de diepe verstrengeling van geschiedschrijving met overzeese handel en koloniaal bestuur, en toont hoe die ook na de formele dekolonisatie nog sporen achterlaat in de historiografie. Deel II richt zich op methodologie. Het behandelt hoe en waarom koloniale bronnen gevormd zijn en biedt aanknopingspunten om die opnieuw, vanuit verschillende perspectieven, te analyseren. Deel III geeft een praktisch overzicht van belangrijke archieven, collecties en typen bronnen: uiteenlopend van overheids- en bedrijfsdocumenten tot mondelinge overleveringen, van kerkelijke rapporten tot scheepsjournalen, en van foto's tot digitaal materiaal. Verspreid door het boek staan bovendien interviews met historici, archivarissen en conservatoren in binnen- en buitenland die vernieuwend onderzoek doen in, naar, voorbij en tegen het Nederlandse koloniale archief. Juist nu digitalisering deze bronnen dichterbij brengt dan ooit, is het belangrijk om ze behoedzaam te benaderen en kritische vragen te blijven stellen. Dit boek helpt je op weg.

L'Amérique est un empire qui ne dit pas son nom. De leur conquête sur les Indiens aux offensives militaires à travers le monde, les Américains ont constamment été en guerre, non pour créer des colonies comme un empire classique, mais pour étendre leur puissance politique et diffuser l'American Way of Life. L'Amérique empire raconte l'histoire de cette nation partie de rien et qui domine aujourd'hui tout : finance, culture, technologie, armée, institutions internationales... Peu de grandes décisions dans le monde ne se prennent sans que la Maison Blanche ne soit impliquée. Peu d'empires ont connu un tel rayonnement. Comment l'Amérique en est-elle arrivée là? Comment s'est-elle développée? D'où viennent la fascination et la crainte qu'elle suscite? L'Amérique empire tente de répondre à ces questions et soulève l'inéluctabilité de tout empire : sa chute. L'Amérique traverse en effet des zones de turbulence majeures : enracinement du trumpisme, déroute en Afghanistan, avènement du wokisme, montée de la Chine, résistance de la Russie... Les Etats-Unis révèlent qu'ils sont plus que jamais un colosse aux pieds d'argile. L'Amérique empire est un voyage historique et géopolitique dans le temps qui nous fait remonter aux motivations des indépendantistes des 13 colonies britanniques et nous mène à nos jours au piège de Thucydide chinois et la crise existentielle que traverse les Etats-Unis d'Amérique. De 1776 à aujourd'hui, l'histoire de l'Amérique s'est toujours écrite dans la violence et la passion.

The French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was home to one of the richest public theatre traditions of the colonial-era Caribbean. This book examines the relationship between public theatre and the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue—something that is generally given short shrift owing to a perceived lack of documentation. Here, a range of materials and methodologies are used to explore pressing questions including the ‘mitigated spectatorship'of the enslaved, portrayals of enslaved people in French and Creole repertoire, the contributions of enslaved people to theatre-making, and shifting attitudes during the revolutionary era. The book demonstrates that slavery was no mere backdrop to this portion of theatre history but an integral part of its story. It also helps recover the hidden experiences of some of the enslaved individuals who became entangled in that story. Joint winner of the The Literary Encyclopedia book prize 2024, category ‘Literatures written in languages other than English'.

Colonial wars have been a very active part of 19th and 20th century history and their importance has often been overlooked. Their study and analysis, in order to understand the contemporary world and current international relations, is as necessary as it is interesting. Examining Colonial Wars and Their Impact on Contemporary Military History approaches the phenomenon of colonial wars with the intention of understanding the most immediate past in order to analyze the contemporary and current scenarios with new tools. It contributes to the dissemination of content without neglecting the considerations of social sciences and history, with a compilation and analytical character. Covering topics such as black-market armaments, imperialism, and military history, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for historians, anthropologists, sociologists, government officials, students and educators of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

Desert islands are the focus of intense geopolitical tensions in East Asia today, but they are also sites of nature conservation. In this global environmental history, Paul Kreitman shows how the politics of conservation have entangled with the politics of sovereignty since the emergence of the modern Japanese state in the mid-nineteenth century. Using case studies ranging from Hawai'i to the Bonin Islands to the Senkaku (Ch: Diaoyu) Isles to the South China Sea, he explores how bird islands on the distant margins of the Japanese archipelago and beyond transformed from sites of resource extraction to outposts of empire and from wartime battlegrounds to nature reserves. This study examines how interactions between birds, bird products, bureaucrats, speculators, sailors, soldiers, scientists and conservationists shaped ongoing claims to sovereignty over oceanic spaces. It considers what the history of desert islands shows us about imperial and post-imperial power, the web of political, economic and ecological connections between islands and oceans, and about the relationship between sovereignty, territory and environment in the modern world.

An eye-opening account of how violence was experienced not just on the frontlines of colonial terror but at home in imperial Britain. When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed'postwar,'it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mass mobilization of resources, but by sentiments of uneasiness and the justifications they generated. Age of Emergency traces facts and feelings about violence as torture, summary executions, collective punishments, and other ruthless methods were employed in'states of emergency.'It examines how Britons at home learned to live with colonial warfare by examining activist campaigns, soldiers'letters, missionary networks, newspaper stories, television dramas, sermons, novels, and plays. As knowledge of brutality spread, so did the tactics of accommodation aimed at undermining it. Some contemporaries cast doubt on facts about violence. Others stressed the unanticipated consequences of intervening to stop it. Still others aestheticized violence by celebrating visions of racial struggle or dramatizing the grim fatalism of dirty wars. Through their voices, Erik Linstrum narrates what violence looked, heard, and felt like as an empire ended, a history with unsettling echoes in our own time. Vividly analyzing how far-off atrocities became domestic problems, Age of Emergency shows that the compromising entanglements of war extended far beyond the conflict zones of empire.

For a little over a decade after the denouement of the Revolutions of 1848, Karl Marx, together with his collaborator Friedrich Engels, worked as a professional journalist. Writing from London for newspapers in the United States and, eventually, Europe, Marx and Engels deepened their analysis of the crisis of revolution that they first began in direct engagement with revolutionary events, most notably in The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In this vast body of largely neglected professional journalism, Marx and Engels elaborated the critical concept of imperialism.This is the first book to select and bring together Marx and Engels's journalism around a conceptual theme, rather than a mere topic. Whatever the subject—capitalist state policy making, mass democracy, the outbreak of the Second Opium War and the suppression of the 1857 Indian Revolt, the rise of credit agencies, or the global significance of the US Civil War—the journalism collected here constellates around the theme of imperialism, a concept Marx and Engels critically appropriated from the liberalism of their day.

First published in 2004. This is Volume III in a collection on Imperialism, Critical Concepts in Historical Studies and includes PART V Cultural and ‘Postcolonial'Critiques.

War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter whose haunting presence both complicated and confounded the spiritual rehabilitation of the nation. Asia and Postwar Japan examines Japanese deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about “Asia,” as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries. Simon Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics—Asia as a symbolic geography, Asia as a space for grassroots engagement, and ultimately, Asia as an aporia of identity and the source of a new politics of hope.