Echoes of Mutiny explores how the challenges of Indian migrants to racial exclusion in the United States and Canada and British supremacy at home provoked a global inter-imperial collaboration between U.S. and British officials to repress those deemed a threat to the racial and imperial world order.
Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.
Do democratic states bring about greater social and economic equality among their citizens? Modern India embraced universal suffrage from the moment it was free of British imperial rule in 1947—a historical rarity in the West—and yet Indian citizens are far from realizing equality today. The United States, the first British colony to gain independence, continues to struggle with intolerance and the consequences of growing inequality in the twenty-first century. From Boston Brahmins to Mohandas Gandhi, from Hollywood to Bollywood, Nico Slate traces the continuous transmission of democratic ideas between two former colonies of the British Empire. Gandhian nonviolence lay at the heart of the American civil rights movement. Key Indian freedom fighters sharpened their political thought while studying and working in the United States. And the Indian American community fought its own battle for civil rights. Spanning three centuries and two continents, Lord Cornwallis Is Dead offers a new look at the struggle for freedom that linked two nations. While the United States remains the world’s most powerful democracy, India—the world’s most populous democracy—is growing in wealth and influence. Together, the United States and India will play a predominant role in shaping the future of democracy.
"Menace to Empire is a profoundly original and ambitious book, a history of race and empire that traces both the colonial violence and the anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Author Moon-Ho Jung argues that the US national security state as we know it was born out of attempts to repress and silence colonized subjects, from the Philippines and Hawai'i to California and beyond, whose anticolonial aspirations challenged US claims to sovereignty. Jung examines how the contradictions of race, nation, and empire generated waves of revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific--anticolonial, antiracist, and labor movements that exposed and confronted the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored and brutally suppressed those movements by racializing particular politics and distinct communities as seditious, exaggerating fears of pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism under the guise of national security. Menace to Empire transforms familiar themes in American history to highlight the critical role of colonial violence in the formation of radical movements and the antiradical origins of anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics that gave rise to the national security state--the heart and soul of the US empire ever since"--Provided by publisher.
Nation to Nation explores the promises, diplomacy, and betrayals involved in treaties and treaty making between the United States government and Native Nations. One side sought to own the riches of North America and the other struggled to hold on to traditional homelands and ways of life. The book reveals how the ideas of honor, fair dealings, good faith, rule of law, and peaceful relations between nations have been tested and challenged in historical and modern times. The book consistently demonstrates how and why centuries-old treaties remain living, relevant documents for both Natives and non-Natives in the 21st century.
Weaving U.S. history into the larger fabric of world history, the contributors to Crossing Empires de-exceptionalize the American empire, placing it in a global transimperial context. They draw attention to the breadth of U.S. entanglements with other empires to illuminate the scope and nature of American global power as it reached from the Bering Sea to Australia and East Africa to the Caribbean. With case studies ranging from the 1830s to the late twentieth century, the contributors address topics including diplomacy, governance, anticolonialism, labor, immigration, medicine, religion, and race. Their transimperial approach—whether exemplified in examinations of U.S. steel corporations partnering with British imperialists to build the Ugandan railway or the U.S. reliance on other empires in its governance of the Philippines—transcends histories of interimperial rivalries and conflicts. In so doing, the contributors illuminate the power dynamics of seemingly transnational histories and the imperial origins of contemporary globality. Contributors. Ikuko Asaka, Oliver Charbonneau, Genevieve Clutario, Anne L. Foster, Julian Go, Michel Gobat, Julie Greene, Kristin L. Hoganson, Margaret D. Jacobs, Moon-Ho Jung, Marc-William Palen, Nicole M. Phelps, Jay Sexton, John Soluri, Stephen Tuffnell
Before 1882, the U.S. federal government had never formally deported anyone, but that year an act of Congress made Chinese workers the first group of immigrants eligible for deportation. Over the next forty years, lawmakers and judges expanded deportable categories to include prostitutes, anarchists, the sick, and various kinds of criminals. The history of that lengthening list shaped the policy options U.S. citizens continue to live with into the present. Deportation covers the uncertain beginnings of American deportation policy and recounts the halting and uncoordinated steps that were taken as it emerged from piecemeal actions in Congress and courtrooms across the country to become an established national policy by the 1920s. Usually viewed from within the nation, deportation policy also plays a part in geopolitics; deportees, after all, have to be sent somewhere. Studying deportations out of the United States as well as the deportation of U.S. citizens back to the United States from abroad, Torrie Hester illustrates that U.S. policy makers were part of a global trend that saw officials from nations around the world either revise older immigrant removal policies or create new ones. A history of immigration policy in the United States and the world, Deportation chronicles the unsystematic emergence of what has become an internationally recognized legal doctrine, the far-reaching impact of which has forever altered what it means to be an immigrant and a citizen.
During the first four decades of the twentieth century, the British Indian Army possessed an illusion of racial and religious inclusivity. The army recruited diverse soldiers, known as the "Martial Races," including British Christians, Hindustani Muslims, Punjabi Sikhs, Hindu Rajputs, Pathans from northwestern India, and "Gurkhas" from Nepal. As anti-colonial activism intensified, military officials incorporated some soldiers' religious traditions into the army to keep them disciplined and loyal. They facilitated acts such as the fast of Ramadan for Muslim soldiers and allowed religious swords among Sikhs to recruit men from communities where anti-colonial sentiment grew stronger. Consequently, Indian nationalists and anti-colonial activists charged the army with fomenting racial and religious divisions. In Faithful Fighters, Kate Imy explores how military culture created unintended dialogues between soldiers and civilians, including Hindu nationalists, Sikh revivalists, and pan-Islamic activists. By the 1920s and '30s, the army constructed military schools and academies to isolate soldiers from anti-colonial activism. While this carefully managed military segregation crumbled under the pressure of the Second World War, Imy argues that the army militarized racial and religious difference, creating lasting legacies for the violent partition and independence of India, and the endemic warfare and violence of the post-colonial world.
Parivash Jamzadeh demonstrates how the propaganda material used during Alexander the Great’s military campaign to conquer the Achaemenid empire shows multiple layers of Iranian influences. She also shows that the studied sources do not always offer an accurate account of the contemporary Iranian customs and occasionally included historical inaccuracies.
Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the remarkable range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier. Editors Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack have gathered established and emerging scholars in the field to create an anthology that links past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship. The volume’s sixteen chapters address the African American experience within the framework of the West as a multicultural frontier. The result is a fresh perspective on western-U.S. history, centered on the significance of African American life, culture, and social justice in almost every trans-Mississippi state. Examining and interpreting the twentieth century while mindful of events and developments since 2000, the contributors focus on community formation, cultural diversity, civil rights and black empowerment, and artistic creativity and identity. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of new approaches and new sites of knowledge in the field of western history, the authors consider its interconnections with fields such as cultural studies, literature, and sociology. Some essays deal with familiar places, while others look at understudied sites such as Albuquerque, Oahu, and Las Vegas, Nevada. By examining black suburbanization, the Information Age, and gentrification in the urban West, several authors conceive of a Third Great Migration of African Americans to and within the West. The West revealed in Freedom’s Racial Frontier is a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality; a place where freedom is still a frontier for most persons of African heritage.