The title of this book is a play upon several important concepts and forces in the ongoing debate about American empire. Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration and its counsels in the U.S. Department of Justice have been both constituting an empire of American hegemony and, in so doing, violating the spirit and the law of the American Constitution at home and abroad. The U.S. Constitution has been doing work in the "nonsovereign" spaces of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Abu Ghraib, Baghdad, and CIA black detention sites around the world. The reach of this constitution is becoming visible in National Security Agency surveillance and data mining of electronic communications between the United States and the rest of the world and in a myriad of other regulatory and legal demands made by the United States both of its citizens and of those living in and traveling among other countries. And, in testing the limits of its wished-for powers, the Bush administration seeks to constitute an imperium that, by its own definition, would be nowhere subject to the long-assumed checks of either the U.S. Constitution, Congress, the courts, or international law, for it operates outside of the boundaries of American sovereignty in defiance of the international community and the United Nations, and in violation of the law of nations. This book is the latest and perhaps sharpest entry in the burgeoning literature of American empire since Hardt and Negri. Its focus on the legal and institutional aspects of empire sets it apart from the literature on this subject.

McDonald (history, U. of Alabama) explores the balance between general and local authority in government. Tracing the concept of states' rights from the Declaration of Independence to the end of Reconstruction, he illuminates the constitutional, political, and economic contexts in which the issues have evolved. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

From the bestselling author of Fatherland and Pompeii, comes the first novel of a trilogy about the struggle for power in ancient Rome. In his “most accomplished work to date” (Los Angeles Times), master of historical fiction Robert Harris lures readers back in time to the compelling life of Roman Senator Marcus Cicero. The re-creation of a vanished biography written by his household slave and righthand man, Tiro, Imperium follows Cicero’s extraordinary struggle to attain supreme power in Rome. On a cold November morning, Tiro opens the door to find a terrified, bedraggled stranger begging for help. Once a Sicilian aristocrat, the man was robbed by the corrupt Roman governor, Verres, who is now trying to convict him under false pretenses and sentence him to a violent death. The man claims that only the great senator Marcus Cicero, one of Rome’s most ambitious lawyers and spellbinding orators, can bring him justice in a crooked society manipulated by the villainous governor. But for Cicero, it is a chance to prove himself worthy of absolute power. What follows is one of the most gripping courtroom dramas in history, and the beginning of a quest for political glory by a man who fought his way to the top using only his voice—defeating the most daunting figures in Roman history.

Drawing on recent trends in both Atlantic and center-periphery literature, this book examines the relationship between the English crown - monarch, privy council, and ancillary bodies - and its Atlantic colonies under the early Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles I, circa 1603-1642.

A comparative study of how the British managed the expansion of empire in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean.

There is no other published book in English studying the constitution of the Roman Republic as a whole. Yet the Greek historian Polybius believed that the constitution was a fundamental cause of the exponential growth of Rome's empire. He regarded the Republic as unusual in two respects: first, because it functioned so well despite being a mix of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy; secondly, because the constitution was the product of natural evolution rather than the ideals of a lawgiver. Even if historians now seek more widely for the causes of Rome's rise to power, the importance and influence of her political institutions remains. The reasons for Rome's power are both complex, on account of the mix of elements, and flexible, inasmuch as they were not founded on written statutes but on unwritten traditions reinterpreted by successive generations. Knowledge of Rome's political institutions is essential both for ancient historians and for those who study the contribution of Rome to the republican tradition of political thought from the Middle Ages to the revolutions inspired by the Enlightenment.