Winner of the Philippine National Book Award, this pioneering volume reveals how the power of the country's family-based oligarchy both derives from and contributes to a weak Philippine state. From provincial warlords to modern managers, prominent Filipino leaders have fused family, politics, and business to compromise public institutions and amass private wealth--a historic pattern that persists to the present day. Edited by Alfred W. McCoy, An Anarchy of Families explores the pervasive influence of the modern dynasties that have led the Philippines during the past century. Exemplified by the Osmeñas and Lopezes, elite Filipino families have formed a powerful oligarchy--controlling capital, dominating national politics, and often owning the media. Beyond Manila, strong men such as Ramon Durano, Ali Dimaporo, and Justiniano Montano have used "guns, goons, and gold" to accumulate wealth and power in far-flung islands and provinces. In a new preface for this revised edition, the editor shows how this pattern of oligarchic control has continued into the twenty-first century, despite dramatic socio-economic change that has supplanted the classic "three g's" of Philippine politics with the contemporary "four c's"--continuity, Chinese, criminality, and celebrity.

THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India ... A book of beauty' – Gerard DeGroot, The Times In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day. But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War. “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University “Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is an impressive historical piece of research that appeals not only to Southeast Asianists but also to those interested in examining the historical embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police power apparatuses and their apparently inherent propensity to implement illiberal practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs “McCoy’s remarkable book . . . does justice both to its author’s deep knowledge of Philippine history as well as to his rare expertise in unmasking the seamy undersides of state power.”—POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies

"A provocative and innovative reexamination of the trajectory of sociopolitical evolution among Native American groups in California, this book explains the region's prehistorically rich diversity of languages, populations, and environmental adaptations. Ethnographic and archaeological data and evolutionary, economic, and anthropological theory are often presented to explain the evolution of increasing social complexity and inequality. In this account, these same data and theories are employed to argue for an evolving pattern of 'orderly anarchy,' which featured small, inward-looking groups that, having devised a diverse range of ingenious solutions to the many environmental, technological, and social obstacles to resource intensification, were crowded onto what they had turned into the most densely populated landscape in aboriginal North America"--Provided by publishe

Generations of scholars have debated why the Union collapsed and descended into civil war in the spring of 1861. Turning this question on its head, Brian C. Neumann’s Bloody Flag of Anarchy asks how the fragile Union held together for so long. This fascinating study grapples with this dilemma by reexamining the nullification crisis, one of the greatest political debates of the antebellum era, when the country came perilously close to armed conflict in the winter of 1832–33 after South Carolina declared two tariffs null and void. Enraged by rising taxes and the specter of emancipation, 25,000 South Carolinians volunteered to defend the state against the perceived tyranny of the federal government. Although these radical Nullifiers claimed to speak for all Carolinians, the impasse left the Palmetto State bitterly divided. Forty percent of the state’s voters opposed nullification, and roughly 9,000 men volunteered to fight against their fellow South Carolinians to hold the Union together. Bloody Flag of Anarchy examines the hopes, fears, and ideals of these Union men, who viewed the nation as the last hope of liberty in a world dominated by despotism—a bold yet fragile testament to humanity’s capacity for self-government. They believed that the Union should preserve both liberty and slavery, ensuring peace, property, and prosperity for all white men. Nullification, they feared, would provoke social and political chaos, shattering the Union, destroying the social order, and inciting an apocalyptic racial war. By reframing the nullification crisis, Neumann provides fresh insight into the internal divisions within South Carolina, illuminating a facet of the conflict that has long gone underappreciated. He reveals what the Union meant to Americans in the Jacksonian era and explores the ways both factions deployed conceptions of manhood to mobilize supporters. Nullifiers attacked their opponents as timid “submission men” too cowardly to defend their freedom. Many Unionists pushed back by insisting that “true men” respected the law and shielded their families from the horrors of disunion. Viewing the nullification crisis against the backdrop of global events, they feared that America might fail when the world, witnessing turmoil across Europe and the Caribbean, needed its example the most. By closely examining how the nation avoided a ruinous civil war in the early 1830s, Bloody Flag of Anarchy sheds new light on why America failed three decades later to avoid a similar fate.

Jacque Ellul blends politics, theology, history, and exposition in this analysis of the relationship between political anarchy and biblical faith. While he clarifies the views of each and how they can be related, his aim is not to proselytize either anarchists into Christianity or Christians into anarchy. On the one hand, suggests Ellul, anarchists need to understand that much of their criticism of Christianity applies only to the form of religion that developed, not to biblical faith. Christians, on the other hand, need to look at the biblical texts and not reject anarchy as a political option, for it seems closest to biblical thinking. After charting the background of his own interest in the subject, Ellul defines what he means by anarchy: the nonviolent repudiation of authority. He goes on to look at the Bible as the source of anarchy (in the sense of nondomination, not disorder), working through Old Testament history, Jesus' ministry, and finally the early church's view of power as reflected in the New Testament writings.

Osvaldo Bayer's study of working-class retribution, set between 1919 and 1936, chronicles hair-raising robberies, bombings, and tit-for-tat murders conducted by Argentina's working men. Intense repression of labor organizations, newspapers, and meeting places by authorities set off a wave of illegal acts meant to secure funds and settle scores. Escaping similar repression at home, future Spanish Civil War hero Buenaventura Durruti joins the cast on a spree of robberies, ending in a narrow escape back to Europe. Osvaldo Bayer is an anarchist pacifist, author, and screenwriter living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the author of Rebellion in Patagonia (forthcoming from AK Press).