Empire & Colonialism

Why did I wrote the book? I was surprised to find that there is no published study of this stone industry, which is the largest private sector employer in the...

Primitive Selves offers a different take on the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Whereas most studies focus on specific policies—such as economic exploitation, compulsory education, assimilation directives, military...

If the casual reader or bookshop-browser were to follow my grandfather’s advice, they would start at the end to see whether my book was worth reading. In this case, they...

These broad questions of authenticity and displacement challenge the political, cultural, and economic habits of city dwellers all over the world. But Naked City is also a very specific book...

From the 1960s onwards, European museum directors managed to hold off restitution claims from African countries for cultural property looted during the colonial era by strategically closing ranks and relying...

It is always a good idea to start at the end. The epilogue of my book takes its cue from the famous question in the Monty Python movie The Life...

A lot of people assume it’s an antinuclear book. When you put “wretched” in the title, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s interpreted that way. I’ve even gotten...

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of Japan’s imperialism that emphasizes the crucial aspects of sexuality, desire and labor beginning around 1880 and ending with the nuclear terrorism of...

This is an ambitious book that grew out of a rather simple question. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, two Hindu leaders on either side of the subcontinent created...

Places are human geographies of space. They name and attribute natures to spaces, marking them and frequently ranking them as self or other, desirable or undesirable, masculine or feminine. “Home”...

Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But...

When street protests prompt controversy and violence, a complex and colorful history of global resistance to tyranny has much to teach us. We see how ordinary people—from enslaved pregnant women to suffering soldiers to Indigenous grandmothers—navigated extraordinary, conflict-ridden times. We learn about quiet acts of resistance,

Cuba in the American Imagination examines the emergence of the idea of Cuba in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The book...

As German nationalists conceived it, the German “nation” was for most of its history an empire. It was first embodied in the Holy Roman Empire; later in the “second” empire,...

What started as a contest for spices between Portugal and Spain had many consequences. It hugely expanded European understanding of the world and allowed people, through the resulting medium of...

The Invention of Rum is my attempt to answer how people living in the Atlantic world invented rum and subsequently wrestled with the wide-ranging implications of its production and …

A debut feature from 1970 that is a documentary, an essay film, a work of autofiction, live action and animation at once — African, French, both, neither. Out of circulation for decades, it left behind a literature that cannot agree on what year it was made or which country made it. Sorting the record out turns out to matter, because the complications are the point.

This book corrects a Eurocentric picture of International Relations (IR) that has dominated the study of international relations over the past decades, and especially the statistical study of IR. If...

Page 6, which shows the difference between the number of states that are included in the data that underpin our book, compared to the number of states identified in existing...

I became interested in this topic because of previous research I had done on postcolonial theory. The book engages deeply with postcolonial theory and the interest in that discipline in...

This book tells the story of one of the greatest showmen in the history of zoos and circuses. Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) may not be well-known today, but his name was...

Most of the existing scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel revolves around Israeli policies and majority-minority relations. This approach reflects in part the dominance of anthropologists and sociologists and social...

This book originated in the search for the origins of contemporary skepticism on the universality of human rights—a skepticism exemplified by the 1990s controversy on “Asian Values,” and more recent...

The book attempts to keep its feet firmly planted in two different worlds. On the one hand, it is a work of history. Moreover, it is a work of history...

Giovanni Batista Belzoni was a towering figure at the beginning of archaeology in Egypt, not for his recognized talents but for his 6’6” height.Nearly 200 years later he is still...

Heroes of Empire tells the story of five colonial figures, two British and three French, who made imperial conquest exciting, even exhilarating, for millions of ordinary citizens.Most British and French...

A fascinating cast of characters populate the pages of the book—individuals who contributed to shaping the idea of Galicia over the course of two centuries.I write about Habsburg emperors like...

While Coffee Nation is about the history of one of the world’s most popular commodities, I use it to consider how North America fit into a world governed by empires...

What comes to mind when you think of opera? For most people, the word summons some variation on belting ladies, black tie, red velvet seats, opulent theatres, and diamond-encrusted snobbery...

We are constantly thinking about what it is that the state ought to do—what sorts of policies it should pursue. But policy implementation gives rise to another, equally important question:...

The nature of this book is that it is full of close-ups. It is made of the details of people’s lives, and the ways that they shaped and were shaped...

These forces built the very foundations of the CIA’s operations. The first plot, Operation PBFORTUNE, was started by the dictators and backed by United Fruit..

Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire....

In 1997, Jared Diamond published his wonderful book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which asked why it was that some societies become rich and powerful and others don’t.His explanation was geographical—it...

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...

The book is highly relevant to contemporary life, in which forms of surveillance have become ubiquitous, although they differ from the ones I describe. It encourages readers to ask how...

Why did I wrote the book? I was surprised to find that there is no published study of this stone industry, which is the largest private sector employer in the...

Primitive Selves offers a different take on the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Whereas most studies focus on specific policies—such as economic exploitation, compulsory education, assimilation directives, military...

If the casual reader or bookshop-browser were to follow my grandfather’s advice, they would start at the end to see whether my book was worth reading. In this case, they...

These broad questions of authenticity and displacement challenge the political, cultural, and economic habits of city dwellers all over the world. But Naked City is also a very specific book...

From the 1960s onwards, European museum directors managed to hold off restitution claims from African countries for cultural property looted during the colonial era by strategically closing ranks and relying...

It is always a good idea to start at the end. The epilogue of my book takes its cue from the famous question in the Monty Python movie The Life...

A lot of people assume it’s an antinuclear book. When you put “wretched” in the title, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s interpreted that way. I’ve even gotten...

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of Japan’s imperialism that emphasizes the crucial aspects of sexuality, desire and labor beginning around 1880 and ending with the nuclear terrorism of...

This is an ambitious book that grew out of a rather simple question. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, two Hindu leaders on either side of the subcontinent created...

Places are human geographies of space. They name and attribute natures to spaces, marking them and frequently ranking them as self or other, desirable or undesirable, masculine or feminine. “Home”...

Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But...

When street protests prompt controversy and violence, a complex and colorful history of global resistance to tyranny has much to teach us. We see how ordinary people—from enslaved pregnant women to suffering soldiers to Indigenous grandmothers—navigated extraordinary, conflict-ridden times. We learn about quiet acts of resistance,

Cuba in the American Imagination examines the emergence of the idea of Cuba in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The book...

As German nationalists conceived it, the German “nation” was for most of its history an empire. It was first embodied in the Holy Roman Empire; later in the “second” empire,...

What started as a contest for spices between Portugal and Spain had many consequences. It hugely expanded European understanding of the world and allowed people, through the resulting medium of...

The Invention of Rum is my attempt to answer how people living in the Atlantic world invented rum and subsequently wrestled with the wide-ranging implications of its production and …

A debut feature from 1970 that is a documentary, an essay film, a work of autofiction, live action and animation at once — African, French, both, neither. Out of circulation for decades, it left behind a literature that cannot agree on what year it was made or which country made it. Sorting the record out turns out to matter, because the complications are the point.

This book corrects a Eurocentric picture of International Relations (IR) that has dominated the study of international relations over the past decades, and especially the statistical study of IR. If...

Page 6, which shows the difference between the number of states that are included in the data that underpin our book, compared to the number of states identified in existing...

I became interested in this topic because of previous research I had done on postcolonial theory. The book engages deeply with postcolonial theory and the interest in that discipline in...

This book tells the story of one of the greatest showmen in the history of zoos and circuses. Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) may not be well-known today, but his name was...

Most of the existing scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel revolves around Israeli policies and majority-minority relations. This approach reflects in part the dominance of anthropologists and sociologists and social...

This book originated in the search for the origins of contemporary skepticism on the universality of human rights—a skepticism exemplified by the 1990s controversy on “Asian Values,” and more recent...

The book attempts to keep its feet firmly planted in two different worlds. On the one hand, it is a work of history. Moreover, it is a work of history...

Giovanni Batista Belzoni was a towering figure at the beginning of archaeology in Egypt, not for his recognized talents but for his 6’6” height.Nearly 200 years later he is still...

Heroes of Empire tells the story of five colonial figures, two British and three French, who made imperial conquest exciting, even exhilarating, for millions of ordinary citizens.Most British and French...

A fascinating cast of characters populate the pages of the book—individuals who contributed to shaping the idea of Galicia over the course of two centuries.I write about Habsburg emperors like...

While Coffee Nation is about the history of one of the world’s most popular commodities, I use it to consider how North America fit into a world governed by empires...

What comes to mind when you think of opera? For most people, the word summons some variation on belting ladies, black tie, red velvet seats, opulent theatres, and diamond-encrusted snobbery...

We are constantly thinking about what it is that the state ought to do—what sorts of policies it should pursue. But policy implementation gives rise to another, equally important question:...

The nature of this book is that it is full of close-ups. It is made of the details of people’s lives, and the ways that they shaped and were shaped...

These forces built the very foundations of the CIA’s operations. The first plot, Operation PBFORTUNE, was started by the dictators and backed by United Fruit..

Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire....

In 1997, Jared Diamond published his wonderful book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which asked why it was that some societies become rich and powerful and others don’t.His explanation was geographical—it...

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...

The book is highly relevant to contemporary life, in which forms of surveillance have become ubiquitous, although they differ from the ones I describe. It encourages readers to ask how...