The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans - lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights - could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

This history deals with the twenty-year period between 1880 and 1900, when virtually all of Africa was seized and occupied by the Imperial Powers of Europe. Eurocentric points of view have dominated the study of this era, but in this book, one of Africa's leading historians reinterprets the colonial experiences from the perspective of the colonized.

Provides the most comprehensive account since the early 1960s of South Africa's "black middle class". 2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The "rise of the black middle class" is one of the most visible aspects of post-apartheid society in South Africa. Yet while it has been a major actor in the country's democratic reshaping, analysis of its role has been all but lacking. Rather, the image presented by the media has been of "black diamonds", consumers of the products of advanced industrial economies, and of corrupt "tenderpreneurs" who use their political connections to obtain contracts. This book seeks to complicate that picture with a much-needed analysis that recounts its historical development in colonial society prior to 1994, before examining the size, shape andstructure of the new black middle class in contemporary South Africa and its relation to its counterparts in the Global South. Roger Southall is Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Jacana

This provocative book is anchored on the insurgent and resurgent spirit of decolonization of the twenty-first century. The author calls upon Africa to turn over a new leaf in the domains of politics, economy, and knowledge as it frees itself from imperial global designs and global coloniality. With a focus on Africa and its Diaspora, the author calls for a radical turning over of a new leaf, predicated on decolonial turn and epistemic freedom. The key themes subjected to decolonial analysis include: (1) decolonization/decoloniality - articulating the meaning and contribution of the decolonial turn; (2) subjectivity/identity - examining the problem of Blackness (identity) as external and internal invention; (3) the Bandung spirit of decolonization as an embodiment of resistance and possibilities, development and self-improvement; (4) development and self-improvement - of African political economy, as entangled in the colonial matrix of power, and the African Renaissance, as weakened by undecolonized political and economic thought; and (5) knowledge - the role of African humanities in the struggle for epistemic freedom. This groundbreaking volume opens the intellectual canvas on the challenges and possibilities of African futures. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Politics and International Relations, Development, Sociology, African Studies, Black Studies, Education, History Postcolonial Studies, and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies.

The administrative state is a powerful tool because it can control the population and, in moments of crisis, help leaders put down popular threats to their rule. But a state does not act; bureaucrats work through the state to carry out a leader's demands. In turn, leaders attempt to use their authority over the state to manage bureaucrats in a way that induces bureaucratic behavior that furthers their policy and political goals. Focusing on Kenya since independence, Hassan weaves together micro-level personnel data, rich archival records, and interviews to show how the country's different leaders have strategically managed, and in effect weaponized, the public sector. This nuanced analysis shows how even states categorized as weak have proven capable of helping their leader stay in power. With engaging evidence and compelling theory, Regime Threats and State Solutions will interest political scientists and scholars studying authoritarian regimes, African politics, state bureaucracy, and political violence.

This Element explores the primary modes by which rulers have exercised power and shaped political relations in Timor-Leste across four distinct periods. The contrast between coercion under colonial rule and consent expressed through the 1999 referendum on independence exerted a powerful influence on scholarship on Timor-Leste's politics and future. Since the restoration of independence in 2002, however, politics in Timor-Leste are best understood in terms of powerful economic constraints during the first Fretilin government (2002-6), and thereafter, thanks to revenue from the country's petroleum reserves, a ruling strategy based on a wide range of inducements (rather than genuine consent).

Offering important new understandings of the Indonesian independence struggle, this fine-grained study explores the international activities in the capitals of interwar Europe of the Perhimpoenan Indonesia (PI), an Indonesian nationalist student organisation based in the Netherlands. Operating in a vibrant political environment, the PI interacted with different anticolonial movements in cities across Europe. Focusing on the period between 1917 and 1931, the book follows the personal journeys of different students to cities such as Zurich, Paris, Brussels and Berlin as they established contacts, joined associations and attended international conferences. Here, the complex reality of movement building is examined, going beyond superficial suggestions of contact and collaboration. The study shows that the activities of the PI reverberated in the Indonesian political landscape, where the new collaborations in Europe were followed with great interest. In this way, the book offers new findings for multiple audiences - Indonesianists and scholars of anticolonial resistance alike. However, it also demonstrates that the political awakening of Indonesian elites should be understood not just as an indigenous response to Dutch rule but also as part of global anticolonial movements and struggles.

Modern Britain is forged through the redeployment of structures that facilitated and legitimized slavery, exploitation and extermination. This is the 'empire at home' and it is inseparable from the strategies of neo-colonial extraction and oppression of subjects abroad. Here, James Trafford develops the notion of internal colonies, arguing that methods and structures used in colonial rule are re-deployed internally in contemporary Britain in order to recreate and solidify imperial power relations. Using examples including housing segregation, targeted surveillance and counter-insurgency techniques used in the fight against terrorism, Trafford reveals Britain's internal colonialism to be a reactive mechanism to retain British sovereignty. As politics appears limited by nationalism and protectionism, The Empire at Home issues a powerful challenge to contemporary politics, demanding that Britain as an imperial structure must end.

In Colonial Transactions Florence Bernault moves beyond the racial divide that dominates colonial studies of Africa. Instead, she illuminates the strange and frightening imaginaries that colonizers and colonized shared on the ground. Bernault looks at Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, historicizing the most vivid imaginations and modes of power in Africa today: French obsessions with cannibals, the emergence of vampires and witches in the Gabonese imaginary, and the use of human organs for fetishes. Struggling over objects, bodies, agency, and values, colonizers and colonized entered relations that are better conceptualized as "transactions." Together they also shared an awareness of how the colonial situation broke down moral orders and forced people to use the evil side of power. This foreshadowed the ways in which people exercise agency in contemporary Africa, as well as the proliferation of magical fears and witchcraft anxieties in present-day Gabon. Overturning theories of colonial and postcolonial nativism, this book is essential reading for historians and anthropologists of witchcraft, power, value, and the body.

This book shows how Carnival under British colonial rule became a locus of resistance as well as an exercise and affirmation of power. Carnival is both a space of theatricality and a site of politics, where the playful, participatory aspects are appropriated by countervailing forces seeking to influence, control, channel or redirect power. Focusing specifically on the Maltese islands, a tiny European archipelago situated at the heart of the Mediterranean, this work links the contrast between play and power to other Carnival realities across the world. It examines the question of power and identity in relation to different social classes and environments of Carnival play, from streets to ballrooms. It looks at satire and censorship, unbridled gaiety and controlled celebration. It describes the ways Carnival was appropriated as a power channel both by the British and their Maltese subjects, and ultimately how it was manipulated in the struggle for Malta's independence.

This edited volume explores social, economic, political, and cultural practices generated by African, Asian, and Oceanic individuals and groups within the context and aftermath of German colonialism. The volume contributes to current debates on transnational and intercultural processes while highlighting the ways in which the colonial period is embedded in larger processes of globalization.

The 2011 split of Sudan into two nations - and the conflicts that have continued in its wake - has made it a case of ongoing significance for understanding security and state-building in sub-Saharan Africa. Examining both the north-south divide in the two Sudans as well as the spread of political violence from Darfur, this timely study has two aims: First, it shows how slavery and the legacies of colonialism continue to shape the challenges of state formation and political identity. Secondly, it charts out a possible path for overcoming historical obstacles to achieve inclusive citizenship and representative democracy.

In 1955, a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European empires, Asian and African leaders forged new alliances and established anti-imperial principles for a new world order. The conference came to capture popular imaginations across the Global South and, as counterpoint to the dominant world order, it became both an act of collective imagination and a practical political project for decolonization that inspired a range of social movements, diplomatic efforts, institutional experiments and heterodox visions of the history and future of the world. In this book, leading international scholars explore what the spirit of Bandung has meant to people across the world over the past decades and what it means today. It analyzes Bandung's complicated and pivotal impact on global history, international law and, most of all, justice struggles after the end of formal colonialism.

Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw a return to unimpeded cross-border cultural traffic after the end of the Napoleonic emergency. Focusing on modes of translation and appropriation in a variety of literary and cultural forms, this book reconsiders the notion of the supposed intrinsic insularity of Britain through the lens of new key questions about the national, international and transnational features of Romantic-period literature and culture.

This volume provides the first comprehensive analysis of international legal debates between 1955 and 1975 related to the formal decolonization process. It is during this era, couched between classic European imperialism and a new form of US-led Western hegemony, that fundamental legal debates took place over a new international legal order for a decolonised world. The book argues that this era presents in essence a battle, a battle that was fought out in particular over the premises and principles of international law by diplomats, lawyers, and scholars. In a moment of relative weakness of European powers, 'newly independent states' and international lawyers from the South fundamentally challenged traditional Western perceptions of international legal structures engaging in fundamental controversies over a new international law. The legal outcomes of this battle have shaped the world we live in today. Contributions from a global set of authors cover contemporary debates on concepts central to the time, such as self-determination, sources and concessions, non-intervention, wars of national liberation, multinational corporations, and the law of the sea. They also discuss influential institutions, such as the United Nations, International Court of Justice, and World Bank. The volume also incorporates contemporary regional approaches to international law in the 'decolonization era' and portraits of important scholars from the Global South.

Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjects of British Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. The book ranges across a series of key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which British and Asian actors wrought quiet battles in the realm of language: in textbooks and language classrooms; in dictionaries, grammars and orthographies; in propaganda and psychological warfare; and in the very planning of language itself. Every attempt to tame Chinese and Malay languages resulted in failures of translation, competence, and governance, exposing both the deep fragility of a monoglot state in polyglot milieux, and the essential untameable nature of languages in motion.

In the 1840s, Italy was a patchwork of states. The North was ruled by the Austrian Empire, the South by the Spanish-descended monarchy of the Two Sicilies. Over the next two decades, after wars led by Savoy/Piedmont and volunteers such as Garibaldi, an independent Kingdom of Italy emerged. These conflicts saw foreign interventions and shifting alliances among minor states, and attracted a variety of local and foreign volunteers.

This second volume in a two part series covers the armies of the Papal States; the duchies of Tuscany, Parma, and Modena; the republics of Rome and San Marco (Venice) and the transitional Kingdom of Sicily; and the various volunteer movements. These varied armies and militias wore a wide variety of highly colourful uniforms which are brought to life in stunning, specially commissioned, full colour artwork from Giuseppe Rava.

Travelling from Madrid to The Valley of the Fallen, through Castile and Leon and across the fiercely contested region of Catalonia, Christopher Finnigan meets a remarkable cast of characters behind some of the biggest political events Spain has witnessed in decades. Whether it is the Indignados left-wing activists rethinking society, the everyday citizens sitting in parliament, or the Catalan separatists fighting for a new nation, The New Spanish Revolutions meets those struggling at the heart of historic change. Spain today finds itself in the grip of immense social upheaval, still shaken by the financial crash of 2008 and still struggling with its fascist past. Against a fragmented and polarised backdrop, Christopher Finnigan discovers how individuals and ideas that were once outside the mainstream are now shaping the nation's future.

Technological progress in the 21st Century still remains monopolized by the developed countries, determining the direction and rhythm of growth in developing countries which must import their technological infrastructure. This colonialised model of industrialisation leads to a perpetual outflow of resources abroad and to structured social exclusion that places narrow limits on democracy and the distribution of overall wellbeing. Development and Democracy examines the conflicting relations between technological development and democracy as they unfold in a challenging environment.

The end of World War I saw the former German protectorate of Togoland split into British- and French-administered territories. By the 1950s a political movement led by the Ewe ethnic group called for the unification of British and French Togoland into an independent multiethnic state. Despite the efforts of the Ewe, the United Nations trust territory of British Togoland was ultimately merged with the Gold Coast to become Ghana, the first independent nation in sub-Saharan Africa; French Togoland later declared independence as the nation of Togo. Based on interviews with former political activists and their families, access to private papers, and a collection of oral and written propaganda, this book examines the history and politics behind the failed project of Togoland unification. Kate Skinner challenges the marginalization of the Togoland question from popular and academic analyses of postcolonial politics and explores present-day ramifications of the contingencies of decolonization.

This book examines the performative life reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives, as well as the way the past is mobilized and reworked in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the 'age of apology'.