Colonialism and Imperialism books

The electrifying story of India's struggle for independence, told in this classic account (first published in 1975) by two fine journalists who conducted hundreds of interviews with nearly all the surviving participants - from Mountbatten to the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi.

A call by an indigenous researcher for the decolonizing of research methods, which critically examines the historical and philosophical base of Western research. The book provides a literature which validates frustrations with various Western paradigms, academic traditions and methodologies.

The apparent glamour of the Indian Raj continues to fascinate long after the British quit the subcontinent. But along with the beauty of the Indian landscape and the privilege of servants and holidays in hill stations, British women in that vanished world faced challenges and fears that came from being an alien ruling minority. These women were at the heart of the imperial enterprise. It was their...

Surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation - a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the 'otherness' of eastern culture, customs and beliefs.

"Hopkins takes readers from the colonial era to today to [posit that], far from diverging, the United States and Western Europe followed similar trajectories throughout this long period, and how America's dependency on Britain and Europe extended much later into the nineteenth century than previously understood"--Dust jacket flap.

The astonishing story of how a small island in the North Atlantic created the largest empire ever known, one which at its height covered a quarter of the earth's surface.

Inglorious Empire tells the real story of the British in India - from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj - revealing how Britain's rise was built upon its plunder of India.

The full story of Winston Churchill's lifelong engagement with Ireland and the Irish. A long overdue book which at last addresses the most neglected part of Churchill's legacy, on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Offers a both controversial and comprehensive historical analysis of how the British Empire worked. This book shows how diverse, contradictory and in many ways chaotic the British Empire really was, controlled by interests that were often at loggerheads, and as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength.

History records only one peaceful transition of hegemonic power: the passage from British to American dominance of the international order. To explain why this transition was nonviolent, Kori Schake explores nine points of crisis between Britain and the U.S., from the Monroe Doctrine to the unequal "special relationship" during World War II.

India Conquered traces the rise and fall of British power in South Asia.

Lost Countries explores the history of those countries that at one point in time existed, and even issued their own stamps, before they were colonized and usurped.

Eminent critic Achille Mbembe reevaluates history and racism, offering a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness-from the Atlantic slave trade to the present-to show how the conjoining of the biological fiction of race with definitions of Blackness have been and continue to be used to uphold oppression.

What the rulers of empire can teach us about navigating today's increasingly interconnected world...

The thrilling account of sixteen extraordinary days in October and November 1956, when the twin crises of Suez and Hungary pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict.

A startlingly original work that demonstrates how and why genocide studies has so far failed to engage with settler colonialism, ecocide and capitalism as key drivers of genocides

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-i Noor, arguably the most celebrated and mythologised jewel in the world. On 29 March 1849, the ten-year-old Maharajah of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the centre of the great Fort in Lahore. There, in a public ceremony, the frightened but dignified child handed over to the British East India Company in a...

Comprehensive history of British conceptions of empire from the 1540s to the 1740s.

This volume is an ideal introduction to the complex and fascinating history of colonies too often neglected in standard textbook accounts.