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As the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bee...

From the sixteenth until the twentieth century, British power and influence gradually expanded to cover one quarter of the world's surface. The common saying was that the sun never sets on the British Empire . What began as a largely entrepreneurial enterprise in the early modern period, with privately run joint stock trading companies such as the East India Company driving British commercial expansion, by the nineteenth century had become, especially after 1857, a state-run endeavour, supporte...

Globalization is not the Americanization of the world, argues John Muthyala. Rather, it is an uneven social, cultural, economic, and political process in which the policies and aspirations of powerful nation-states are entangled with the interests of other empires, nation-states, and communities. Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization takes up a bold challenge, critiquing scholarship on American empire that views the United States as either an exceptional threat to the world or...

A study of "the ideological foundations" of the monarchical governments of Southeast Asia, specifically in Hindu-Buddhist cultures, this book examines political thought on the nature of rule.

This timely volume is a collection of essays by accomplished scholars who convincingly argue for the relevance of postcolonial theory in Ireland. Ireland and Postcolonial Theory fuses scholarship, politics, and culture, generating a forceful and radical critique of the legacy of colonialism in the history of Irish culture, while insisting that the consequences of colonialism continue to play themselves out in complex ways. The first two essays focus on debates over how theories developed to expl...

Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention adds to our understanding of the political and economic transformations establishing colonial modernity in Puerto Rico. By focusing on influential physicians' clinical work and their access to a remote and inaccessible rural population, this volume details how rural areas suffered the ravages of social dislocation, unemployment and hunger. Puerto Rican physicians became centrally implicated in the struggle between labour and capital enforcing the islan...

In the past two decades, Marxism has enjoyed a revitalization as a research program and a growth in its audience. This renaissance is connected to the revival of anti-capitalist contestation since the Seattle protests in 1999 and the impact of the global economic and financial crisis in 2007–8. It intersects with the emergence of Post-Marxism since the 1980s represented by thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, Ranajit Guha and Alain Badiou. This handbook explores the development of...

Britain's war against the Zulu people of southern Africa in the late nineteenth century is one of the most famous clashes in the history of the British empire, but her earlier wars against the Xhosa, also in southern Africa, are far less well known. And, although the role Lord Chelmsford played in the Anglo-Zulu War has been recounted in exhaustive detail, his earlier experience against the Xhosa has rarely been explored in the same intensive way. That is why Stephen Manning's absorbing study of...

As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. This book can be read many ways: as a polemic against geopolitics, as a classic social anthropological text, or as a seminal analysi...

A war that has killed over a million Iraqis was a ‘humanitarian intervention’, the US army is a force for liberation, and the main threat to world peace is posed by Islam. Those are the arguments of a host of liberal commentators, ranging from Christopher Hitchens to Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, and Bernard-Henri Levy. In this critical intervention, Richard Seymour unearths the history of liberal justifications for empire, showing how savage policies of conquest—including genoc...

The late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the camera began to be widely available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and to project an image of supremacy across the world.Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers' personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives...

Most writing today by activists and opponents of foreign policy is rooted in the 1960s. Underpinning many of these books is the unquestioned assumption that contemporary British imperialism is an adjunct to American foreign policy. Wherever the United States invades and bombs, Great Britain lays out the carpet and obediently follows. This subservience is jubilantly referred to as a "special relationship" by its supporters; by its detractors it is disparagingly depicted as "America's poodle". Thi...

In this richly comparative analysis of late Muscovite and early Imperial court culture, Ernest A. Zitser provides a corrective to the secular bias of the scholarly literature about the reforms of Peter the Great. Zitser demonstrates that the tsar's supposedly "secularizing" reforms rested on a fundamentally religious conception of his personal political mission. In particular, Zitser shows that the carnivalesque (and often obscene) activities of the so-called Most Comical All-Drunken Council ser...

At its current state of historical development, capital finds its contradictions tending towards an irresolvable character as manifested in multiple crises. The defense of life and the construction of renewed hope for a future require opposition to the domination of capital. This book contributes to that effort by setting out an analysis of the mechanisms on which capital is based.

The cost of war is unforgivably high, but many forget that those who pay the ultimate price rarely receive the medical and psychological care they need upon return home. As America's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to drive on, it's time to expose the traumas faced by American soldiers. Ann Jones shows the dead, wounded, mutilated, brain-damaged, drug-addicted, suicidal, homicidal casualties of our distant wars, taking us on a stunning journey from the devastating moment an America...