Building the Devil’s Empire is the first comprehensive history of New Orleans’s early years, tracing the town’s development from its origins in 1718 to its revolt against Spanish rule in 1768. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s picaresque account of New Orleans’s wild youth features a cast of strong-willed captives, thin-skinned nobles, sharp-tongued women, and carousing travelers. But she also widens her lens to reveal the port city’s global significance, examining its role in the French Empire and the Caribbean, and she concludes that by exemplifying a kind of rogue colonialism—where governments, outlaws, and capitalism become entwined—New Orleans should prompt us to reconsider our notions of how colonialism works. "[A] penetrating study of the colony's founding."—Nation “A brilliant and spirited reinterpretation of the emergence of French New Orleans. Dawdy leads us deep into the daily life of the city, and along the many paths that connected it to France, the North American interior, and the Greater Caribbean. A major contribution to our understanding of the history of the Americas and of the French Atlantic, the work is also a model of interdisciplinary research and analysis, skillfully bringing together archival research, archaeology, and literary analysis.”—Laurent Dubois, Duke University

Through a specific architectural lens, this book exposes the role the British Empire played in the development of apartheid. Through reference to previously unexamined archival material, the book uncovers a myriad of mechanisms through which Empire laid the foundations onto which the edifice of apartheid was built. It unearths the significant role British architects and British architectural ideas played in facilitating white dominance and racial segregation in pre-apartheid Cape Town. To achieve this, the book follows the progenitor of the Garden City Movement, Ebenezer Howard, in its tripartite structure of Country/Town/Suburb, acknowledging the Garden City Movement's dominance at the Cape at the time. This tripartite structure also provides a significant match to postcolonial schemas of Self/Other/Same which underpin the three parts to the book. Much is owed to Edward Said's discourse-analytical approach in Orientalism - and the work of Homi Bhabha - in the definition and interpretation of archival material. This material ranges across written and visual representations in journals and newspapers, through exhibitions and events, to legislative acts, as well as the physicality of the various architectural objects studied. The book concludes by drawing attention to the ideological potency of architecture which tends to be veiled more so through its ubiquitous presence and in doing so, it presents not only a story peculiar to Imperial Cape Town, but one inherent to architecture more broadly. The concluding chapter also provides a timely mirror for the machinations currently at play in establishing a 'post-apartheid' architecture and urbanity in the 'new' South Africa.

The King James Bible teaches that God created the entire universe in Six Days, that all the Holy Angels (for they all still were) sang together and shouted for joy, and that God saw that Everything that He had made was very Good (for it all still was). Then, the Seventh Day, Everything... changed-save only God, the Elect Holy Angels, and their heavenly Abode. This book is about Who, and What, and Why, and How those Changes were made. It is the Story of Life and Death, Holiness and Sin, Heaven and Hell, Angels and Demons, The Seed of The Woman and The The Seed of The Serpent. It is the Story of the single Throne of God and of many Unidentified Flying Objects. It is the Story of the Human Race...and of Another Race, which only looks human...and of still Others, which don't at all. It is the Story of an Innocent Man, Who died on a Cross and rose to be Lord on the Throne of Heaven...and of a Guilty Cherub, who fell from Glory and will rot forever in a Lake of Fire. This book is The Story of The Ever War.

The myths of peace and democracy in Africa are at the heart of this volume. Democracy and peace have become buzz words across postcolonial Africa. The gospel of democracy and peace is preached by national governments and by civil society and international organisations alike. But to what extent are the ongoing sideshows and charades of quasi-oligarchies in Africa really democracy? What do ordinary Africans mean when they hunger and thirst for democracy and peace? Positive and noble as the loud sounding rhetoric about democracy and peace in Africa might seem, the reality of propaganda and dissemblance and of multi-dimensional violence are simply too overwhelming not to be disillusioning. This book interrogates the rampant violence, enduring conflicts, autocratic governance, and facades of democracy amidst claims and calls for enduring peace on the continent. This is a monumental resource book for human rights activists, conflict management practitioners, civil society activists, political scientists, statesmen and development practitioners. It poses a challenge to those African governments who claim to embrace principles of democracy and respect for human rights to rethink and reconsider their role as ambassadors of peace, hope, transformation, and good governance.