American power has been subjected to extensive analysis since September 11, 2001. While there is no consensus on the state of US hegemony or even on the precise meaning of the term, it is clear that under George W. Bush the US has not only remained the 'lone superpower' but has increased its global military supremacy. At the same time, the US has become more dependent on its economic, financial and geopolitical relationships with the rest of the world than at any other time in its history, markedly since the events of 9/11. The distinguished scholars in this volume critically interpret US hegemony from a range of theoretical and topical perspectives. They discuss the idea of empire in the age of globalization, critique the Bush doctrine, analyze the ideologies underpinning a new American imperialism and examine the influence of neo-conservatism on US foreign and domestic policy.

The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together. The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution.

This book brings together a series of papers presented at a University of Montreal interdisciplinary conference held in March 2014 and devoted to various little-known facets of the First World War’s cultural and social history. The commemorative activities of the war’s centennial triggered the conference, as this anniversary had precipitated a lively renewal of historical reflections on the causes and consequences of this global conflict. If the commemoration was an occasion to foster a more civic-minded pedagogical approach regarding the meaning of this major historical event, the conference itself strove to engage the rich and substantial body of research about the war that had evolved over the past few decades. While taking national and regional approaches into account, this book also aligns itself with the recent interest in a global history of the Great War that, by not excluding various national traditions, strives to re-examine the causes and consequences of the conflict from a perspective whose scope extends beyond Europe. By engaging in a broader temporal and spatial consideration of the war, this standpoint not only calls into question the relevance of using the nation-state as a singular political and cultural framework with which to understand the conflict, but also, and especially, strives to more clearly apprehend peripheral geopolitical spaces, particularly Africa and the Americas, in the conflict and to integrate them more effectively.

Partners of the Empire offers a radical rethinking of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over this unstable period, the Ottoman Empire faced political crises, institutional shakeups, and popular insurrections. It responded through various reform options and settlements. New institutional configurations emerged; constitutional texts were codified—and annulled. The empire became a political theater where different actors struggled, collaborated, and competed on conflicting agendas and opposing interests. This book takes a holistic look at the era, interested not simply in central reforms or in regional developments, but in their interactions. Drawing on original archival sources, Ali Yaycioglu uncovers the patterns of political action—the making and unmaking of coalitions, forms of building and losing power, and expressions of public opinion. Countering common assumptions, he shows that the Ottoman transformation in the Age of Revolutions was not a linear transition from the old order to the new, from decentralized state to centralized, from Eastern to Western institutions, or from pre-modern to modern. Rather, it was a condensed period of transformation that counted many crossing paths, as well as dead-ends, all of which offered a rich repertoire of governing possibilities to be followed, reinterpreted, or ultimately forgotten.

By considering the distinctiveness of the inter-war years as a discrete period of colonial change, this book addresses several larger issues, such as tracing the origins of decolonization in the rise of colonial nationalism, and a re-assessment of the impact of inter-war colonial rebellions in Africa, Syria and Indochina. The book also connects French theories of colonial governance to the lived experience of colonial rule in a period scarred by war and economic dislocation.

An unravelling of the histories of two closely linked political goals - assimilation and empire - which were in many ways interdependent over the past 500 years. Examines the resilience of assimilative ideology across centuries, continents, and empires.