Rethinking The History Of Empire

This book forms part of the scholarly rejection of the ‘experts’ of empire and calls for us to centre our understanding of colonial praxis upon the lives of the colonised peoples of the past and the present. Western publics are constantly being told by ‘experts’ that they ought to rethink the history of empire. They are told that their (presumed) guilt regarding their countries’ imperial pasts can be assuaged: if people were only able to deploy a ‘balanced scorecard’ they would then recognise that imperialists brought roads as well as death, schools as well as national borders, and hospitals as well as racialised forms of ethnic conflict. Building around an essay by the Algerian writer Hosni Kitouni (here translated into English for the first time), this book shows how the genre and forms of imperial history mirror the actions of colonists and the documents they left behind, erasing the suffering of indigenous people and the after-effects of empire, which last into the present and will continue into the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

This volume brings together the seminal essays of John M. Murrin on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. 'Rethinking America' explains why a constitutional argument within the British Empire escalated to produce a revolutionary republic.

In recent years, the historiography of nineteenth-century Spain and Latin America has been invigorated by interdisciplinary engagement with scholars working on topics such as empire, slavery, abolition, race, identity, and captivity. No scholar better exemplified these developments than Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, a specialist on Spain and its Caribbean colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico. A brilliant career was cut short in 2015 when he died at the age of 48. Rethinking Atlantic Empire takes Schmidt-Nowara’s work as a point of departure, charting scholarly paths that move past reductive national narratives and embrace transnational approaches to the entangled empires of the Atlantic world.

This book investigates perceptions, modes, and techniques of Venetian rule in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean (1400–1700) between colonial empire, negotiated and pragmatic rule; between soft touch and exploitation; in contexts of former and continuous imperial belongings; and with a focus on representations and modes of rule as well as on colonial daily realities and connectivities.

In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the contributors to this volume ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. The essays offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, they examine the history of nation-making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called globalization is here placed in a historical context. A cast of distinguished historians from the United States and abroad examines the historiographical implications of such a reframing and offers alternative interpretations of large questions of American history ranging from the era of European contact to democracy and reform, from environmental and economic development and migration experiences to issues of nationalism and identity. But the largest issue explored is basic to all histories: How does one understand, teach, and write a national history even as one recognizes that the territorial boundaries do not fully contain that history and that within that bounded territory the society is highly differentiated, marked by multiple solidarities and identities? Rethinking American History in a Global Age advances an emerging but important conversation marked by divergent voices, many of which are represented here. The various essays explore big concepts and offer historical narratives that enrich the content and context of American history. The aim is to provide a history that more accurately reflects the dimensions of American experience and better connects the past with contemporary concerns for American identity, structures of power, and world presence.

The Inka conquered an immense area extending across five modern nations, yet most English-language publications on the Inka focus on governance in the area of modern Peru. This volume expands the range of scholarship available in English by collecting new and notable research on Qullasuyu, the largest of the four quarters of the empire, which extended south from Cuzco into contemporary Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. From the study of Qullasuyu arise fresh theoretical perspectives that both complement and challenge what we think we know about the Inka. While existing scholarship emphasizes the political and economic rationales underlying state action, Rethinking the Inka turns to the conquered themselves and reassesses imperial motivations. The book’s chapters, incorporating more than two hundred photographs, explore relations between powerful local lords and their Inka rulers; the roles of nonhumans in the social and political life of the empire; local landscapes remade under Inka rule; and the appropriation and reinterpretation by locals of Inka objects, infrastructure, practices, and symbols. Written by some of South America’s leading archaeologists, Rethinking the Inka is poised to be a landmark book in the field.

What is the study of Roman history all about? What are its aims? What is its place within the discipline of Classics? These and many other questions are asked by Jerry Toner who has seen many changes in the field of Roman history since he first emerged from Cambridge as a budding Roman historian. This short book looks at the transformations that have taken place in research methodology and in the nature of the discipline in recent times. One for the undergraduate.

As Spain rebuilt its colonial regime in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish American revolutions, it turned to history to justify continued dominance. The metropolitan vision of history, however, always met with opposition in the colonies.The Conquest of History examines how historians, officials, and civic groups in Spain and its colonies forged national histories out of the ruins and relics of the imperial past. By exploring controversies over the veracity of the Black Legend, the location of Christopher Columbus's mortal remains, and the survival of indigenous cultures, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's richly documented study shows how history became implicated in the struggles over empire. It also considers how these approaches to the past, whether intended to defend or to criticize colonial rule, called into being new postcolonial histories of empire and of nations.