In the 1880s, Europeans descended on Africa and grabbed vast swaths of the continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Rogue Empires follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa. Many of them were would-be kings who sought to establish their own autonomous empires across the African continent—often at odds with traditional European governments which competed for control. From 1882 to 1885, independent European businessmen and firms (many of doubtful legitimacy) produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. Steven Press traces the notion of empire by purchase to an unlikely place: the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, where the English adventurer James Brooke bought his own kingdom in the 1840s. Brooke’s example inspired imitators in Africa, as speculators exploited a loophole in international law in order to assert sovereignty and legal ownership of lands which they then plundered for profit. The success of these experiments in governance attracted notice in European capitals. Press shows how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when King Leopold of Belgium and the German Chancellor Bismarck embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas in the Congo, Namibia, and Cameroon.

The man who bought a country -- The emergence of an idea -- King Leopold's Borneo -- Bismarck's Borneo -- Epilogue: "A great act of folly

Rogue Empires takes a new look at the origins and consequences of a key moment in European History: the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Drawing on archival research conducted in ten countries and three languages, the book argues that the flood of rogue empires in Africa came about due to a short-lived European obsession with events happening far away, in Southeast Asia. European investors there had recently promoted an idea of buying empires through "private" purchases of sovereignty: full control over a place's resources and people, with neither monitoring by third parties, nor any accountability to a nation, nor, in most cases, the awareness of affected indigenous peoples. Once this idea made its way back around the world to European capitals, it inspired a number of important figures, notably German chancellor Otto von Bismarck and British Prime Minister William Gladstone, to support a string of copycat ventures in Sub-Saharan Africa.--

A history of US imperialism that uncovers the ever present exploitation, violence and media control that have marked the last two decades of empire.

In Rogue Revolutionaries, Vanessa Mongey revives a lost and fleeting world of cosmopolitan radicalism through the stories of "foreigners of desperate fortune" who sought to ignite revolutions and create their own independent states. Their quest for recognition clashed with the growing power of nation-states and a new international order.

Viking Empires, first published in 2005, is a definitive global history of the Viking World.

“Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about Empire and a small masterpiece of research and conceptual reimagining.” —William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire An award-winning historian places the corporation—more than the Crown—at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today. Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power. Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago. Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.