English Imperialism

A Financial Times Most Anticipated Book of 2025 A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics. At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its...

This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and, in the process, helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.

Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage.

Based on the groundbreaking research of respected historian Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope 101 reveals an unimaginably devious political system, skillfully manipulated by a handful of elite, which is undermining freedom and democracy as we know it. The goal of those who control the system, in Quigley's own words, is to dominate "all habitable portions of the world." Using deception, theft, and violence, they have achieved more toward this goal than any rulers in human history. However, the Information Age is quickly derailing their plans. The immorality of their system has become nearly impossible to hide.

How do politics shape our world, our lives, and our perceptions? How much of “common sense” is actually driven by the ruling class’ needs and interests? And how are we to challenge the capitalist structures that now threaten all life on the planet? Consequences of Capitalism exposes the deep, often unseen, connections between neoliberal “common sense” and structural power. In making these linkages, we see how the current hegemony keeps social justice movements divided and marginalized. And, most importantly, we see how we can fight to overcome these divisions.

First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans - mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer - whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.

A New York Times Bestseller The world’s leading intellectual offers a probing examination of the waning American Century, the nature of U.S. policies post-9/11, and the perils of valuing power above democracy and human rights In an incisive, thorough analysis of the current international...

The American Empire is finished and will soon become another cautionary tale, tossed upon the trash heap of history, and destroyed by the very same societal issues that plagued the many former empires that share similar fates. It did not have to end this way, but when the most devious and ruthless members of a society are tasked with running the system, the outcome can hardly be in dispute.

Some of the cruelest deeds of Japan's war in Asia did not occur on the battlefield, but in quiet, antiseptic medical wards in obscure parts of China. Far from front lines and prying eyes, Japanese doctors and their assistants subjected human guinea pigs to gruesome medical experiments in the name of science and Japan's wartime chemical and biological warfare research. Author Hal Gold draws upon a wealth of sources to construct a portrait of the Imperial Japanese Army's most notorious medical unit, giving an overview of its history and detailing its most shocking activities.

What really happened in the Marabar caves? Adela Quested arrives in Chandrapore, India, prepared to marry a British magistrate who exemplifies the narrow-minded, anti-Indian projudices of the imperial bureaucracy. But she soon meets the charming and mercurial Dr. Aziz, who offers to show her the "real" India. An expedition to the famed Marabar caves ends in explosive accusations and a schism that foreshadows the eventual end of British rule in India.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil.

In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit takes on the conversations between men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't. The ultimate problem, she shows in her comic, scathing essay, is female self-doubt and the silencing of women. Rebecca Solnit is the author of fourteen books about civil society, popular power, uprisings, art, environment, place, pleasure, politics, hope, and memory, most recently The Faraway Nearby, a book on empathy and storytelling.

To trace the evolution of the American state, Aaron Good takes a deep-politics approach. The term “deep state” was badly misappropriated during the Trump era. In the simplest sense, it here refers to all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. To trace how we arrived at this point, American Exception explores various deep state institutions and history-making interventions.

Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history.

A best-selling journalist’s illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. Empire—whether British or otherwise—informs nearly everything we do.

Central Asia is often seen as a remote and inaccessible land on the peripheries of modern history. Encompassing Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang province of China, it in fact stands at the crossroads of world events. Adeeb Khalid provides the first comprehensive history of Central Asia from the mid-18th century to today, shedding light on the historical forces that have shaped the region under imperial and Communist rule.

T. R. Fehrenbach brilliantly delineates the contrasts and conflicts between the many Mexicos, unraveling the history while weaving a fascinating tapestry of beauty and brutality: the Amerindians, who wrought from the vulnerable land a great indigenous Meso-American civilization by the first millennium BC; the successive reigns of Olmec, Maya, Toltec, and Mexic masters, who ruled through an admirably efficient bureaucracy and the power of the priests, propitiating the capricious gods with human sacrifices; the Spanish conquistadors, and much more.

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), by Vladimir Lenin, describes the function of financial capital in generating profits from imperialist colonialism as the final stage of capitalist development to ensure greater profits. The essay is a synthesis of Lenin's modifications and developments of economic theories that Karl Marx formulated in Das Kapital (1867).

In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States series, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from millennia past through the decades of Western colonization and conquest and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast.

As Chandran Nair shows in this uncompromising new audiobook, a belief in the innate superiority of White people and Western culture - once the driving force behind imperialism - is now woven into the very fabric of globalization. It is so insidious that, as Nair points out, even many non-White people have internalized it, judging themselves by an alien standard. It has no rival in terms of longevity, global reach, harm done, and continuing subversion of other cultures and societies.