Download or read book The Trouble with Empire written by Antoinette M. Burton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While imperial blockbusters fly off the shelves, there is no comprehensive history dedicated to resistance in the 19th and 20th century British Empire. The Trouble with Empire is the first volume to fill this gap, offering a brief but thorough introduction to the nature and consequences of resistance to British imperialism. Historian Antoinette Burton's study spans the 19th and 20th centuries, when discontented subjects of empire made their unhappiness felt from Ireland to Canada to India to Africa to Australasia, in direct response to incursions of military might and imperial capitalism. The Trouble with Empire offers the first thoroughgoing account of what British imperialism looked like from below and of how tenuous its hold on alien populations was throughout its long, unstable life. By taking the long view, moving across a variety of geopolitical sites and spanning the whole of the period 1840-1955, Burton examines the commonalities between different forms of resistance and unveils the structural weaknesses of the British Empire.0.
Download or read book Trouble of the World written by Zach Sell and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative new study, Zach Sell returns to the explosive era of capitalist crisis, upheaval, and warfare between emancipation in the British Empire and Black emancipation in the United States. In this age of global capital, U.S. slavery exploded to a vastness hitherto unseen, propelled forward by the outrush of slavery-produced commodities to Britain, continental Europe, and beyond. As slavery-produced commodities poured out of the United States, U.S. slaveholders transformed their profits into slavery expansion. Ranging from colonial India to Australia and Belize, Sell's examination further reveals how U.S. slavery provided not only the raw material for Britain's explosive manufacturing growth but also inspired new hallucinatory imperial visions of colonial domination that took root on a global scale. What emerges is a tale of a system too powerful and too profitable to end, even after emancipation; it is the story of how slavery's influence survived emancipation, infusing empire and capitalism to this day.
Download or read book Empire in Question written by Antoinette Burton and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays written by Antoinette Burton since the mid-1990s trace her thinking about modern British history and engage debates about how to think about British imperialism in light of contemporary events.
Download or read book Ghosts of Empire written by Kwasi Kwarteng and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kwasi Kwarteng is the child of parents whose lives were shaped as subjects of the British Empire, first in their native Ghana, then as British immigrants. He brings a unique perspective and impeccable academic credentials to a narrative history of the British Empire, one that avoids sweeping judgmental condemnation and instead sees the Empire for what it was: a series of local fiefdoms administered in varying degrees of competence or brutality by a cast of characters as outsized and eccentric as anything conjured by Gilbert and Sullivan. The truth, as Kwarteng reveals, is that there was no such thing as a model for imperial administration; instead, appointees were schooled in quirky, independent-minded individuality. As a result the Empire was the product not of a grand idea but of often chaotic individual improvisation. The idiosyncrasies of viceroys and soldier-diplomats who ran the colonial enterprise continues to impact the world, from Kashmir to Sudan, Baghdad to Hong Kong.
Download or read book The Scandal of Empire written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.
Download or read book The Trouble with Empire written by Antoinette Burton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trouble with Empire contends that dissent and disruption were constant features of imperial experience and that they should, therefore, drive narratives of the modern British imperial past. Moving across the one hundred years between the first Anglo-Afghan war and Gandhi's salt marches, the book tracks commonalities between different forms of resistance in order to understand how regimes of imperial security worked in practice. This emphasis on protest and struggle is intended not only to reveal indigenous agency but to illuminate the limits of imperial power, official and unofficial, as well. "Pax Britannica"-the conviction that peace was the dominant feature of modern British imperialism-remains the working presumption of most empire histories in the twenty-first century. The Trouble with Empire, in contrast, originates from skepticism about the ability of hegemons to rule unchallenged and about the capacity of imperial rule to finally and fully subdue those who contested it. The book follows various forms of dissent and disruption, both large and small, in three domains: the theater of war, the arena of market relations, and the realm of political order. Tracking how empire did and did not work via those who struggled against it recasts ways of measuring not simply imperial success or failure, but its very viability across the uneven terrain of daily power. The Trouble with Empire argues that empires are never finally or fully accomplished but are always in motion, subject to pressures from below as well as above. In an age of spectacular insurgency and counterinsurgency across many of the former possessions of Britain's global empire, such a genealogy of the forces that troubled imperial hegemony are needed now more than ever.
Download or read book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire written by H. W. Crocker, III and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an irreverant and humorous look at the four-hundred-year history of the British empire.
Download or read book The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire written by Peter Clarke and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping, brilliantly vivid history of the sudden end of the British empire and the moment when America became a world superpower. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Winston Churchill's famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the world-wide institution that he had served for most of his life. Britain fought and sacrificed on a worldwide scale to defeat Hitler and his allies-and won. Yet less than five years after Churchill's defiant speech, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian Independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain's Empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned. How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke's book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swiftly paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures though whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself.
Download or read book British Imperial Literature 1870 1940 written by Daniel Bivona and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-13 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Imperial Fiction, 1870-1940 traces the gradual process by which the colonial bureaucratic subject was constructed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Daniel Bivona's study offers insightful readings of a number of influential writers who were involved in promoting the ideology of bureaucratic self-sacrifice, the most important of whom are Stanley, Kipling and T. E. Lawrence. He examines how this governing ideology is treated in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and George Orwell. By placing the complexities of individual texts in a much larger historical context, this study makes the original claim that the colonial bureaucrat played an ambiguous but nonetheless central role in both pro-imperial and anti-imperial discourse, his own power relationship with bureaucratic superiors shaping the terms in which the proper relationship between colonizer and colonized was debated.
Download or read book Barbed Wire Imperialism written by Aidan Forth and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : Britain's empire of camps -- Concentrating the "dangerous classes" : the cultural and material foundations of British camps -- "Barbed wire deterrents" : detention and relief at Indian famine campus, 1876-1901 -- "A source of horror and dread" : plague camps in Indian and South Africa, 1896-1901 -- Concentrated humanity : the management and anatomy of colonial campus, c. 1900 -- Camps in a time of war : civilian concentration in southern Africa, 1900-1901 -- "Only matched in times of famine and plague" : life and death in the concentration camps -- "A system steadily perfected" : camp reform and the "new geniuses from India", 1901-1903 -- Epilogue : Camps go global : lessons, legacies, and forgotten solidarities
Download or read book Empireland written by Sathnam Sanghera and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A best-selling journalist’s illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. "Empireland is brilliantly written, deeply researched and massively important. It’ll stay in your head for years.” —John Oliver, Emmy Award-winning host of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" With a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Booker Prize-winner Marlon James A best-selling journalist’s illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. Empire—whether British or otherwise—informs nearly everything we do. From common thought to our daily routines; from the foundations of social safety nets to the realities of racism; and from the distrust of public intellectuals to the exceptionalism that permeates immigration debates, the Brexit campaign and the global reckonings with controversial memorials, Empireland shows how the pernicious legacy of Western imperialism undergirds our everyday lives, yet remains shockingly obscured from view. In accessible, witty prose, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Sathnam Sanghera traces this legacy back to its source, exposing how—in both profound and innocuous ways—imperial domination has shaped the United Kingdom we know today. Sanghera connects the historical dots across continents and seas to show how the shadows of a colonial past still linger over modern-day Britain and how the world, in turn, was shaped by Britain’s looming hand. The implications, of course, extend to Britain’s most notorious former colony turned imperial power: the United States of America, which prides itself for its maverick soul and yet seems to have inherited all the ambition, brutality and exceptional thinking of its parent. With a foreword by Booker Prize–winner Marlon James, Empireland is a revelatory and lucid work of political history that offers a sobering appraisal of the past so we may move toward a more just future.
Download or read book Youth and Empire written by David M. Pomfret and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first study of its kind to provide such a broadly comparative and in-depth analysis of children and empire. Youth and Empire brings to light new research and new interpretations on two relatively neglected fields of study: the history of imperialism in East and South East Asia and, more pointedly, the influence of childhood—and children's voices—on modern empires. By utilizing a diverse range of unpublished source materials drawn from three different continents, David M. Pomfret examines the emergence of children and childhood as a central historical force in the global history of empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is unusual in its scope, extending across the two empires of Britain and France and to points of intense impact in "tropical" places where indigenous, immigrant, and foreign cultures mixed: Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Hanoi. It thereby shows how childhood was crucial to definitions of race, and thus European authority, in these parts of the world. By examining the various contradictory and overlapping meanings of childhood in colonial Asia, Pomfret is able to provide new and often surprising readings of a set of problems that continue to trouble our contemporary world.
Download or read book Imperial Overstretch written by Roger Burbach and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2004-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting insights into the neo-conservative personalities surrounding George W. Bush, this work is a disturbing analysis of the prospects for the US presidency and its global ambitions.
Download or read book The Troubled Empire written by Timothy Brook and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empireÑa millennium and a half in the makingÑwas suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan moved south into China. His Yuan dynasty collapsed in less than a century, but Mongol values lived on in Ming institutions. A second blast of cold in the 1630s, combined with drought, was more than the dynasty could stand, and the Ming fell to Manchu invaders. Against this backgroundÑthe first coherent ecological history of China in this periodÑTimothy Brook explores the growth of autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special attention to ChinaÕs incorporation into the larger South China Sea economy. These changes not only shaped what China would become but contributed to the formation of the early modern world.
Download or read book The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781 1997 written by Piers Brendon and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD NOTABLE BOOK After the American Revolution, the British Empire appeared to be doomed. Yet it grew to become the greatest, most diverse empire the world had seen. Then, within a generation, the mighty structure collapsed, a rapid demise that left an array of dependencies and a contested legacy: at best a sporting spirit, a legal code and a near-universal language; at worst, failed states and internecine strife. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire covers a vast canvas, which Brendon fills with vivid particulars, from brief lives to telling anecdotes to comic episodes to symbolic moments.
Download or read book Empire written by D. C. B. Lieven and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Tsarist and Soviet empires of Russia, Lieven reveals the nature and meaning of all empires throughout history. He examines factors that mold the shape of the empires, including geography and culture, and compares the Russian empires with other imperial states, from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States. Illustrations.
Download or read book Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism written by Adria Lawrence and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first half of the twentieth century, movements seeking political equality emerged in France's overseas territories. Within twenty years, they were replaced by movements for national independence in the majority of French colonies, protectorates, and mandates. In this pathbreaking study of the decolonization era, Adria Lawrence asks why elites in French colonies shifted from demands for egalitarian and democratic reforms to calls for independent statehood, and why mass mobilization for independence emerged where and when it did. Lawrence shows that nationalist discourses became dominant as a consequence of the failure of the reform agenda. Where political rights were granted, colonial subjects opted for further integration and reform. Contrary to conventional accounts, nationalism was not the only or even the primary form of anti-colonialism. Lawrence shows further that mass nationalist protest occurred only when and where French authority was disrupted. Imperial crises were the cause, not the result, of mass protest.
