A compelling study of the global dimensions and local particularities of political activism in Sixties Montreal.

This book explores the reverberating impacts between historical and contemporary imperial laboratories and their metropoles through three case studies concerning violence, surveillance and political economy. The invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 forced the United States to experiment and innovate in considerable ways. Faced with growing insurgencies that called into question its entire mission, the occupation authorities engaged in a series of tactical and technological innovations that changed the way it combated insurgents and managed local populations. The book presents new material to develop the argument that imperial and colonial contexts function as a laboratory in which techniques of violence, population control and economic principles are developed which are subsequently introduced into the domestic society of the imperial state. The text challenges the widely taken for granted notion that the diffusion of norms and techniques is a one-way street from the imperial metropole to the dependent or weak periphery. This work will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, critical security studies and international relations theory.

Examines how “Indianness” has propagated U.S. conceptions of empire

On the eve of the Seven Years' War in North America, the British crown convened the Albany Congress, an Anglo-Iroquois treaty conference, in response to a crisis that threatened imperial expansion. British authorities hoped to address the impending collapse of Indian trade and diplomacy in the northern colonies, a problem exacerbated by uncooperative, resistant colonial governments. In the first book on the subject in more than forty-five years, Timothy J. Shannon definitively rewrites the historical record on the Albany Congress. Challenging the received wisdom that has equated the Congress and the plan of colonial union it produced with the origins of American independence, Shannon demonstrates conclusively the Congress's importance in the wider context of Britain's eighteenth-century Atlantic empire. In the process, the author poses a formidable challenge to the Iroquois Influence Thesis. The Six Nations, he writes, had nothing to do with the drafting of the Albany Plan, which borrowed its model of constitutional union not from the Iroquois but from the colonial delegates' British cousins. Far from serving as a dress rehearsal for the Constitutional Convention, the Albany Congress marked, for colonists and Iroquois alike, a passage from an independent, commercial pattern of intercultural relations to a hierarchical, bureaucratic imperialism wielded by a distant authority.

Christopher Star uncovers significant points of contact between Seneca and Petronius, two important Roman writers long thought to be antagonists. In The Empire of the Self, Christopher Star studies the question of how political reality affects the concepts of body, soul, and self. Star argues that during the early Roman Empire the establishment of autocracy and the development of a universal ideal of individual autonomy were mutually enhancing phenomena. The Stoic ideal of individual empire or complete self-command is a major theme of Seneca’s philosophical works. The problematic consequences of this ideal are explored in Seneca’s dramatic and satirical works, as well as in the novel of his contemporary Petronius. Star examines the rhetorical links between these diverse texts. He also demonstrates a significant point of contact between two writers generally thought to be antagonists—the idea that imperial speech structures reveal the self.

The city states of the Lowlands have lived in peace for decades, bastions of civilization, prosperity and sophistication, protected by treaties, trade and a belief in the reasonable nature of their neighbors. But meanwhile, in far-off corners, the Wasp Empire has been devouring city after city with its highly trained armies, its machines, it killing Art . . . And now its hunger for conquest and war has become insatiable. Only the aging Stenwold Maker, spymaster, artificer and statesman, can see that the long days of peace are over. It falls upon his shoulders to open the eyes of his people, before a black-and-gold tide sweeps down over the Lowlands and burns away everything in its path. But first he must stop himself from becoming the Empire's latest victim.

In this rich interdisciplinary study, Sujani Reddy examines the consequential lives of Indian nurses whose careers have unfolded in the contexts of empire, migration, familial relations, race, and gender. As Reddy shows, the nursing profession developed in India against a complex backdrop of British and U.S. imperialism. After World War II, facing limited vocational options at home, a growing number of female nurses migrated from India to the United States during the Cold War. Complicating the long-held view of Indian women as passive participants in the movement of skilled labor in this period, Reddy demonstrates how these "women in the lead" pursued new opportunities afforded by their mobility. At the same time, Indian nurses also confronted stigmas based on the nature of their "women's work," the religious and caste differences within the migrant community, and the racial and gender hierarchies of the United States. Drawing on extensive archival research and compelling life-history interviews, Reddy redraws the map of gender and labor history, suggesting how powerful global forces have played out in the personal and working lives of professional Indian women.