Legitimizing Empire

When the United States acquired the Philippines and Puerto Rico, it reconciled its status as an empire with its anticolonial roots by claiming that it would altruistically establish democratic institutions in its new colonies. Ever since, Filipino and Puerto Rican artists have challenged promises of benevolent assimilation and portray U.S. imperialism as both self-interested and unexceptional among empires. Faye Caronan's examination interprets the pivotal engagement of novels, films, performance poetry, and other cultural productions as both symptoms of and resistance against American military, social, economic, and political incursions. Though the Philippines became an independent nation and Puerto Rico a U.S. commonwealth, both remain subordinate to the United States. Caronan's juxtaposition reveals two different yet simultaneous models of U.S. neocolonial power and contradicts American exceptionalism as a reluctant empire that only accepts colonies for the benefit of the colonized and global welfare. Her analysis, meanwhile, demonstrates how popular culture allows for alternative narratives of U.S. imperialism, but also functions to contain those alternatives.

America's empire expanded dramatically following the Spanish-American War of 1898. The United States quickly annexed the Philippines and Puerto Rico, seized control over Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone, and extended political and financial power throughout Latin America. This age of empire, Benjamin Allen Coates argues, was also an age of international law. Justifying America's empire with the language of law and civilization, international lawyers-serving simultaneously as academics, leaders of the legal profession, corporate attorneys, and high-ranking government officials-became central to the conceptualization, conduct, and rationalization of US foreign policy. Just as international law shaped empire, so too did empire shape international law. Legalist Empire shows how the American Society of International Law was animated by the same notions of "civilization" that justified the expansion of empire overseas. Using the private papers and published writings of such figures as Elihu Root, John Bassett Moore, and James Brown Scott, Coates shows how the newly-created international law profession merged European influences with trends in American jurisprudence, while appealing to elite notions of order, reform, and American identity. By projecting an image of the United States as a unique force for law and civilization, legalists reconciled American exceptionalism, empire, and an international rule of law. Under their influence the nation became the world's leading advocate for the creation of an international court. Although the legalist vision of world peace through voluntary adjudication foundered in the interwar period, international lawyers-through their ideas and their presence in halls of power-continue to infuse vital debates about America's global role

This book brings together, for the first time, studies of the professionalisation of accountancy in key constituent territories of the British Empire. The late nineteenth century was a period of intensive activity in terms of both imperialism and professionalisation. A team of expert contributors has examined profession-state engagements between Britain, on the one hand and Canada, South Africa, Australia, Nigeria, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, India and Kenya, and the other with a view to assessing how the organizations of accountancy in the colonies was affecting the metropolitan profession and state agents- and vice versa. Their contributions highlight the peculiarities of the professionalization processes in variant social, economic and political environments linked together by the relays of empire, prompting reflection on both the common and disparate dynamics involved. This book has numerous objectives, including giving historical insight and focus on countries that provide contrasting and variant examples of the uptake of the "British model", and broadening the appeal of accounting history and professionalisation as a taught subject in university accounting departments.

Geopolitics and Empire examines the relations between two phenomena that are central to modern conceptions of international relations. Geopolitics is the understanding of the inter-relations between empires, states, individuals, private companies, NGOs and multilateral agencies as these are expressed and shaped spatially. This view of the world achieved notoriety as the scientific basis claimed by Nazi ideologists of global conquest. However, under this or another name, similar sets of ideas were important on both sides of the Cold War and now have a renewed resonance in debates over the New World Order of the so-called Global War on Terror. Geopolitics is a way of describing the conflicts between states as constrained by both physical and economic space. It makes such conflicts seem inevitable. The argument of the book is that this view of the world continues to appear salient because it serves to make the projection of force overseas seem an inevitable aspect of the foreign policy of states. This quasi-Darwinian view of international relations makes the pursuit of Empire appear a responsibility of larger and more powerful states. Powerful states must become Empires or submit to others seeking something similar. In its associations with Empire, the study of Geopolitics returns continually to the ideas of a British geographer who never himself used the term. Halford Mackinder is the source of many of the ideas of Geopolitics and by examining his ideas both in their original context and as they have been repeatedly rediscovered and reinvented this book contributes to current discussions of the ideology and practices of the US Empire today.

By examining the relationship between international law and empire from early modernity to the present, this volume improves current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped imperial ideas about and structures of world governance.

The various strategies as to how the Ottoman sultans and the ruling elite tried to inculcate their understanding of authority and legitimacy into the Ottoman population are the focus of the articles in this collected volume.

Using case studies of cholera, plague, malaria, and yellow fever, this book analyzes how factors such as public health diplomacy, trade, imperial governance, medical technologies, and cultural norms operated within global and colonial conceptions of political and epidemiological risk to shape infectious disease policies in colonial India.

In the two decades before World War One, Great Britain witnessed the largest revival of anti-slavery protest since the legendary age of emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than campaigning against the trans-Atlantic slave trade, these latter-day abolitionists focused on the so-called 'new slaveries' of European imperialism in Africa, condemning coercive systems of labor taxation and indentured servitude, as well as evidence of atrocities. A Civilized Savagery illuminates the multifaceted nature of British humanitarianism by juxtaposing campaigns against different forms of imperial labor exploitation in three separate areas: the Congo Free State, South Africa, and Portuguese West Africa. In doing so, Kevin Grant points out how this new type of humanitarianism influenced the transition from Empire to international government and the advent of universal human rights in subsequent decades.