Essays that suggest new ways of understanding the role that US actors and agencies have played in Latin America." - publisher.

Between 1350 and 1750 the world reached a tipping point of global connectedness. In this volume of the acclaimed series A History of the World, noted international scholars examine five critical geographical areas where exploration and empire building led to expanding interaction--early signals on every continent of a shrinking globe.

Much has been written about the forging of a British identity in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the multiple kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. But the process also ran across the Irish sea and was played out in North America and the Caribbean. In the process, the indigenous peoples of North America, the Caribbean, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand were forced to redefine their identities. This text integrates the history of these areas with British and imperial history. With contributions from both sides of the Atlantic, each chapter deals with a different aspect of British encounters with indigenous peoples in Colonial America and includes, for example, sections on "Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race" and "Hunting and the Politics of Masculinity in Cherokee treaty-making, 1763-1775". This book should be of particular interest to postgraduate students of Colonial American history and early modern British history.

This book critically examines the influence of International Society on East Asia, and how its attempts to introduce ‘civilization’ to ‘barbarous’ polities contributed to conflict between China and Japan. Challenging existing works that have presented the expansion of (European) International Society as a progressive, linear process, this book contends that imperialism – along with an ideology premised on ‘civilising’ ‘barbarous’ peoples – played a central role in its historic development. Considering how these elements of International Society affected China and Japan’s entry into it, Shogo Suzuki contends that such states envisaged a Janus-faced International Society, which simultaneously aimed for cooperative relations among its ‘civilized’ members and for the introduction of ‘civilization’ towards non-European polities, often by coercive means. By examining the complex process by which China and Japan engaged with this dualism, this book highlights a darker side of China and Japan’s socialization into International Society which previous studies have failed to acknowledge. Drawing on Chinese and Japanese primary sources seldom utilized in International Relations, this book makes a compelling case for revising our understandings of International Society and its expansion. This book will be of strong interest to students and researcher of international relations, international history, European studies and Asian Studies.

Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science. Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.

Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners—all prominent, educated Indians—represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration. Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.

Examines the cities of Algeria and Tunisia under French colonial rule and those of the Ottoman Arab provinces, providing a nuanced look at cross-cultural exchanges.