[PDF] Territories Of Empire eBook

Author : Daniel Immerwahr
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 10,50 MB
Release : 2019-02-19
Category : History
ISBN : 0374715122

GET BOOK

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 of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.

Author : Hilde De Weerdt
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 542 pages
File Size : 33,43 MB
Release : 2020-05-11
Category : History
ISBN : 1684175631

GET BOOK

"The occupation of the northern half of the Chinese territories in the 1120s brought about a transformation in political communication in the south that had lasting implications for imperial Chinese history. By the late eleventh century, the Song court no longer dominated the production of information about itself and its territories. Song literati gradually consolidated their position as producers, users, and discussants of court gazettes, official records, archival compilations, dynastic histories, military geographies, and maps. This development altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the imperial period. Based on a close reading of reader responses to official records and derivatives and on a mapping of literati networks, the author further proposes that the twelfth-century geopolitical crisis resulted in a lasting literati preference for imperial restoration and unified rule.Hilde De Weerdt makes an important intervention in cultural and intellectual history by examining censorship and publicity together. In addition, she reorients the debate about the social transformation and local turn of imperial Chinese elites by treating the formation of localist strategies and empire-focused political identities as parallel rather than opposite trends."

Author : Victor Bulmer-Thomas
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 461 pages
File Size : 21,72 MB
Release : 2018-03-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0300235194

GET BOOK

A sweeping history of the United States through the lens of empire—and an incisive look forward as the nation retreats from the global stage A respected authority on international relations and foreign policy, Victor Bulmer-Thomas offers a grand survey of the United States as an empire. From its territorial expansion after independence, through hegemonic rule following World War II, to the nation’s current imperial retreat, the United States has had an uneasy relationship with the idea of itself as an empire. In this book Bulmer-Thomas offers three definitions of empire—territorial, informal, and institutional—that help to explain the nation’s past and forecast a future in which the United States will cease to play an imperial role. Arguing that the move toward diminished geopolitical dominance reflects the aspirations of most U.S. citizens, he asserts that imperial retreat does not necessarily mean national decline and may ultimately strengthen the nation-state. At this pivotal juncture in American history, Bulmer-Thomas’s uniquely global perspective will be widely read and discussed across a range of fields.

Author : Hendrik Spruyt
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 39,54 MB
Release : 2018-05-31
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1501717871

GET BOOK

At the dawn of the twentieth century, imperial powers controlled most of the globe. Within a few decades after World War II, many of the great empires had dissolved, and more recently, multinational polities have similarly disbanded. This process of reallocating patterns of authority, from internal hierarchy to inter-state relations, proved far more contentious in some cases than in others. While some governments exited the colonial era without becoming embroiled in lengthy conflicts, others embarked on courses that drained their economies, compelled huge sacrifices, and caused domestic upheaval and revolution. What explains these variations in territorial policy? More specifically, why do some governments have greater latitude to alter existing territorial arrangements whereas others are constrained in their room for maneuver? In Ending Empire, Hendrik Spruyt argues that the answer lies in the domestic institutional structures of the central governments. Fragmented polities provide more opportunities for hard-liners to veto concessions to nationalist and secessionist demands, thus making violent conflict more likely. Spruyt examines these dynamics in the democratic colonial empires of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. He then turns to the authoritarian Portuguese empire and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Finally, the author submits that this theory, which speaks to the political dynamics of partition, can be applied to other contested territories, including those at the heart of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Author : Kate McDonald
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 34,13 MB
Release : 2017-08-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0520967232

GET BOOK

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early 1950s. In a departure from standard histories of Japan, this book shows how debates over the role of colonized lands reshaped the social and spatial imaginary of the modern Japanese nation and how, in turn, this sociospatial imaginary affected the ways in which colonial difference was conceptualized and enacted. The book thus illuminates how ideas of place became central to the production of new forms of colonial hierarchy as empires around the globe transitioned from an era of territorial acquisition to one of territorial maintenance.

Author : Gary Lawson
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 27,90 MB
Release : 2008-10-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 0300128967

GET BOOK

The Constitution of Empire offers a constitutional and historical survey of American territorial expansion from the founding era to the present day. The authors describe the Constitution’s design for territorial acquisition and governance and examine the ways in which practice over the past two hundred years has diverged from that original vision. Noting that most of America’s territorial acquisitions—including the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, and the territory acquired after the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars—resulted from treaties, the authors elaborate a Jeffersonian-based theory of the federal treaty power and assess American territorial acquisitions from this perspective. They find that at least one American acquisition of territory and many of the basic institutions of territorial governance have no constitutional foundation, and they explore the often-strange paths that constitutional law has traveled to permit such deviations from the Constitution’s original meaning.

Author : Katherine G. Morrissey
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 28,59 MB
Release : 2018-09-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1501728997

GET BOOK

Rarely recognized outside its boundaries today, the Pacific Northwest region known at the turn of the century as the Inland Empire included portions of the states of Washington and Idaho, as well as British Columbia. Katherine G. Morrissey traces the history of this self-proclaimed region from its origins through its heyday. In doing so, she challenges the characterization of regions as fixed places defined by their geography, economy, and demographics. Regions, she argues, are best understood as mental constructs, internally defined through conflicts and debates among different groups of people seeking to control a particular area's identity and direction. She tells the story of the Inland Empire as a complex narrative of competing perceptions and interests.

Author : S. Max Edelson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 33,70 MB
Release : 2017-04-24
Category : History
ISBN : 0674978994

GET BOOK

In 1763 British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Keys, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Using maps that Britain created to control its new lands, Max Edelson pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions before the Revolution.

Author : Paul Frymer
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 43,35 MB
Release : 2019-07-16
Category : History
ISBN : 0691191565

GET BOOK

How American westward expansion was governmentally engineered to promote the formation of a white settler nation Westward expansion of the United States is most conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a fair amount of luck. Yet the establishment of the forty-eight contiguous states was hardly a foregone conclusion, and the federal government played a critical role in its success. This book examines the politics of American expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement. Building an American Empire reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered.

Author : Yuri Pines
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 413 pages
File Size : 41,24 MB
Release : 2021-01-21
Category : History
ISBN : 1108488633

GET BOOK

The first comparative study to explore the dynamics of expansion and contraction of major continental empires in Eurasia.