My interest in empires began as an undergraduate taking a course in International Political Economy. We were asked to view poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ in the historical perspective of European colonization but asked to see development economics as something entirely new. I couldn’t see the difference. I have since become fascinated not just by the world historical recurrence of this particular type of politics, but also why our understanding of it is occluded through repeated framing of global politics via the nation state. Unless we understand this global history we are at risk of misdiagnosing contemporary problems, and repeating historical patterns. Moreover, we can’t build a world that is truly non-imperial without sustained comparative study.
I wrote
Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire: Marketing Development
This book is part of a new genre of global history and provides enough of a historical sweep to acquaint the non-historian with a view that is not dominated by the nation state as its unit of analysis and Europe as the apex of world historical change.
It’s an accessible work that fills in a lot of gaps in world historical knowledge that often exist because our myths of historical change (like modernization or development) keep us focused on ‘the west’ and ‘the state’.
From my point of view, it’s no longer politically acceptable to be ignorant of history in India, Africa, or the Middle East, by way of example, before European colonization. Viewed through the lens of empire, world history looks very different, and this book shows how doing so is a myth-busting exercise.
Empires--vast states of territories and peoples united by force and ambition--have dominated the political landscape for more than two millennia. Empires in World History departs from conventional European and nation-centered perspectives to take a remarkable look at how empires relied on diversity to shape the global order. Beginning with ancient Rome and China and continuing across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine empires' conquests, rivalries, and strategies of domination--with an emphasis on how empires accommodated, created, and manipulated differences among populations. Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires…
This book is another example of the way that shifting our gaze to empires instead of states provides a radically different perspective.
In this book Jason Sharman takes on the Military Revolution Thesis, an approach to state formation in Europe which hives it off from its deeply imperial context and argues that the modern state is the product of a series of ‘rational’ decisions made through war.
Instead, what Sharman shows is that war making in Early modern Europe was just as external as it was internal and that Europeans had to contend with powers to their east and south that were far more powerful militarily and economically.
The disciplines of political science and international relations tend to treat the formation of the modern state system as if the rest of the world was incidental, irrelevant, or non-existent.
This is another entry in a new genre of historical writing that shows us how much we’re missing if we don’t view historical change in a world historical context.
How the rise of the West was a temporary exception to the predominant world order
What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The conventional answer asserts that superior technology, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a decisive advantage in war over other civilizations from 1500 onward. In contrast, Empires of the Weak argues that Europeans actually had no general military superiority in the early modern era. J. C. Sharman shows instead that European expansion from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries is better…
This is another engaging and accessible contribution to global history and comparative work on empires.
This book is great because of its focus on a few important case studies and because Kumar makes the excellent point that if you focus exclusively on the modern contemporary territorial configuration of Russia, Britain, or the US, you will miss the long patterns of imperial expansion out of which the modern core is a consolidation.
This raises the possibility of a revision of the epitaph above to read: empires make states, and states make empires. Of particular value is Kumar’s focus on the politics of governing different peoples differently particularly when imperial expansion incorporates different faith communities as happened in the Russian case.
This is yet another book that demonstrates how much more sense can be made of global politics when viewed through the lens of empire.
What the rulers of empire can teach us about navigating today's increasingly interconnected world The empires of the past were far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and have much to teach us about navigating our own increasingly globalized and interconnected world. Until now, most recent scholarship on empires has focused on their subject peoples. Visions of Empire looks at their rulers, shedding critical new light on who they were, how they justified their empires, how they viewed themselves, and the styles of rule they adopted toward their subjects. Krishan Kumar provides panoramic and multifaceted portraits of five major European empires--Ottoman,…
This is one of the most enjoyable works of history I’ve ever read.
Immewahr combines a range of vignettes and detailed case studies of the Spanish-American war, the period of US colonization of the Pacific, the green revolution, and the economic impact of synthetics, to the deeply inter-imperial context of 1960s Liverpool out of which the British pop culture phenomenon of The Beatles arose.
Immewahr begins the book by pointing out that turn of the century children’s textbooks were teaching children to see the United States as composed of its non-incorporated territories – the Greater United States. His book is an excellent answer to the American Empire Debate that erupted early in the 21st Century in the context of the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
That debate was so confused because with its state-centric bias it framed the question around the modern metropolitan core. Immewahr’s book shows us how much is obscured by this perspective. If there was ever any remaining doubt about America’s imperial status, Immewahr’s book dispels it.
Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick
A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire
We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories―the islands, atolls, and archipelagos―this country has governed and inhabited?
In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story…
World historical and comparative work on empire is on the rise and what they demonstrate is as a particular type of politics, empires exhibit certain patterns. That is the contention of Julian Go’s comparative work on the US and the UK.
These are cases that have been compared before but instead of comparing them contemporaneously, Go makes a point of comparing them along their ‘hegemonial arc’ of rise and decline.
Go demonstrates through comparison with Britain that a racial politics of differentiation and incorporation in the Westward expansion of the original 13 colonies is a common imperial pattern. This claim is corroborated by other cases as demonstrated by the works of Kumar and Burbank and Cooper.
When read in combination with Immewahr and Kumar, Julian Go’s book shows what was typical empire building in American westward expansion (such as the racialized politics of differentiation and tutelary governance) and atypical and world historically new (such as the acquisition of territory through purchase).
Patterns of Empire comprehensively examines the two most powerful empires in modern history: the United States and Britain. Challenging the popular theory that the American empire is unique, Patterns of Empire shows how the policies, practices, forms and historical dynamics of the American empire repeat those of the British, leading up to the present climate of economic decline, treacherous intervention in the Middle East and overextended imperial confidence. A critical exercise in revisionist history and comparative social science, this book also offers a challenging theory of empire that recognizes the agency of non-Western peoples, the impact of global fields and…
This book makes connections between development aid and colonial policy by examining the similarities between the way the British Department for International Development under New Labour characterised and communicated its development policy with the way that post-colonial theory characterised the main elements of colonial discourse. The book argues that if the discourses are the same, the aims, intentions and material realities are the same. By critically examining the way New Labour promoted its development policy, Biccum contends that this marketing campaign for development is a repetition, augmentation and ultimately much greater success of the work of the Empire Marketing Board of 1926. Against the framing of historical rupture after WWII, Biccum makes an argument for historical continuity between colonisation and development.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
