An important revisionist history that casts eighteenth-century British politics and imperial expansion in a new light In this bold debut work, historian James M. Vaughn challenges the scholarly consensus that British India and the Second Empire were founded in "a fit of absence of mind." He instead argues that the origins of the Raj and the largest empire of the modern world were rooted in political conflicts and movements in Britain. It was British conservatives who shaped the Second Empire into one of conquest and dominion, emphasizing the extraction of resources and the subjugation of colonial populations. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Vaughn shows how the East India Company was transformed from a corporation into an imperial power in the service of British political forces opposed to the rising radicalism of the period. The Company's dominion in Bengal, where it raised territorial revenue and maintained a large army, was an autocratic bulwark of Britain's established order. A major work of political and imperial history, this volume offers an important new understanding of the era and its global ramifications.

In response to the events of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a "war on terror" ushering in an era of anti-Muslim racism, or Islamophobia. However, 9/11 alone did not create Islamophobia. This book examines the current backlash within the context of Islamophobia's origins, in the historic relationship between East and West. Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of media studies and Middle East studies at Rutgers University and the author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike. Kumar has contributed to numerous outlets including the BBC, USA Today, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This book provides a unique conception of US empire building, linking overseas expansion with: 1) the growth of a police state and declining living standards; 2) advanced technologically driven global spying on adversaries and allies with declining economic competitiveness and military defeats; 3) large scale, long term commitments of economic and military resources to wars in the Middle East to the detriment of major corporate interests, but for the benefit of a pariah state, Israel; and 4) the power of a foreign state (Israel) over US policy via its domestic pro-Zionist power configuration. The interplay of these four specific features of US empire building has no past or present precedent among imperial states. Because of Israeli-Zionist influence on US imperial policy, the main targets and objectives of imperial wars are located in the Middle East. The objectives of Israeli and Zionist- influenced US policy in the Middle East is to enhance Israeli regional power and the dispossession of the Palestinian people. The trillion dollar cost of US wars for Israel, however, has alienated the vast majority of US society and driven a wedge between the political elite backing new wars for Israel, and the public prioritizing of domestic economic welfare. This study highlights how the domestic foundations of empire building have deteriorated and forced the imperial presidency to modify its approach, seeking diplomatic negotiations over new military interventions, specifically in the cases of Syria and Iran. Imperial politics is viewed as a multi-sided power struggle between military and economic elites, Israel and the Zionist power configuration, overseas resistance movements and nationalist regimes, and the US public. The resolution of this power struggle is more than an academic question; it will determine whether the US will become a full blown police state, ruled by the pawns of a racist-colonial state engaged in endless wars or return to its roots as an independent democratic republic “free of foreign entanglements”.

In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the "War on Terror." Importantly, Kumar contends that Islamophobia is best understood as racism rather than as religious intolerance. An innovative analysis of anti-Muslim racism and empire, Islamophobia argues that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, which in turn sustains empire. This book, now updated to include the end of the Trump's presidency, offers a clear and succinct explanation of how Islamophobia functions in the United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a body of ideas that take various forms: liberal, conservative, and rightwing. The matrix of anti-Muslim racism charts how various institutions-the media, think tanks, the foreign policy establishment, the university, the national security apparatus, and the legal sphere-produce and circulate this particular form of bigotry. Anti-Muslim racism not only has horrific consequences for people in Muslim-majority countries who become the targets of an endless War on Terror, but for Muslims and those who "look Muslim" in the West as well.

How empires have used diversity to shape the world order for more than two millennia Empires—vast states of territories and peoples united by force and ambition—have dominated the political landscape for more than two millennia. Empires in World History departs from conventional European and nation-centered perspectives to take a remarkable look at how empires relied on diversity to shape the global order. Beginning with ancient Rome and China and continuing across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine empires' conquests, rivalries, and strategies of domination—with an emphasis on how empires accommodated, created, and manipulated differences among populations. Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires that sustained state power for centuries. They delve into the militant monotheism of Byzantium, the Islamic Caliphates, and the short-lived Carolingians, as well as the pragmatically tolerant rule of the Mongols and Ottomans, who combined religious protection with the politics of loyalty. Burbank and Cooper discuss the influence of empire on capitalism and popular sovereignty, the limitations and instability of Europe's colonial projects, Russia's repertoire of exploitation and differentiation, as well as the "empire of liberty"—devised by American revolutionaries and later extended across a continent and beyond. With its investigation into the relationship between diversity and imperial states, Empires in World History offers a fresh approach to understanding the impact of empires on the past and present.

When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive public school systems, and they set up American-style elections and governmental institutions. The officials aimed their lessons in democratic government at the political elite: the relatively small class of the wealthy, educated, and politically powerful within each colony. While they retained ultimate control for themselves, the Americans let the elite vote, hold local office, and formulate legislation in national assemblies. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.

This provocative book examines the teachings of political theorist Leo Strauss and the ways in which they have been appropriated, or misappropriated, by senior policymakers.