Colonialism & imperialism

Showing 1–16 of 19 results

  • A flat place

    £16.99

    A flat place

    Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father’s car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she’s discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Orkney. These bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma. Noreen suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain’s flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.

    SKU: 9780241544051 Category: Tags: , ,
    £16.99
  • Africonomics

    £25.00

    Africonomics

    ‘A historically insightful read’Financial Times

    ‘A wry, rollicking, and provocative history’ Michael Taylor, author of The Interest

    ‘A thought-provoking analysis of Africa’s relationship with economic imperialism’ Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata, authors of It’s A Continent

    £25.00
  • Black Ghost of Empire

    £10.99

    Black Ghost of Empire

    To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts our society today, we must look at the unfinished way it ended. We celebrate the abolition of slavery – in Haiti after the revolution, in the British Empire in 1833, in the United States during the Civil War. Yet in Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian Kris Manjapra reveals how during each of these supposed emancipations, Black people were in fact dispossessed by the moves that were meant to free them. Ranging across the Americas, Europe and Africa, Manjapra unearths the uncomfortable truths about the Age of Emancipations, 1780-1880. In Britain, reparations were given to wealthy slave owners, not the enslaved, in vast sums that were only paid off in 2015. In Jamaica, Black people were freed only to enter into an apprenticeship period harsher than slavery itself.

    £10.99
  • Broken threads

    £18.99

    Broken threads

    ‘Unforgettable’ SATHNAM SANGHERA

    ‘Spell-binding’ PETER FRANKOPAN

    ‘Fascinating’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

    £18.99
  • Colonial America

    £10.49

    Colonial America

    In this Very Short Introduction, Alan Taylor presents the current scholarly understanding of colonial America to a broader audience. He focuses on the transatlantic and a transcontinental perspective, examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the flows of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas.

    SKU: 9780199766239 Category: Tag:
    £10.49
  • Culture and imperialism

    £14.99

    Culture and imperialism

    Following his profoundly influential study, ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said now examines western culture. From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, ‘Culture and Imperialism’ is a broad, fierce and wonderfully readable account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.

    £14.99
  • Deep water

    £22.00

    Deep water

    The ocean has shaped and sustained life on Earth for billions of years. Its waters contain our past, from the deep history of evolutionary time to exploration and colonialism; our present, as a place of solace and pleasure, and as the highway that underpins the global economy; and – as waters heat and sea levels rise ever higher – our future. ‘Deep Water’ is both a hymn to the beauty, mystery and wonder of the ocean, and a reckoning with our complex relationship to the natural world. It is a book shaped by tidal movements and deep currents, and lit by the presence of other minds and other ways of being. Weaving together science, history and personal reflection, it explores the way the ocean connects every living being on Earth, the origins of the environmental catastrophe that is overtaking us, and the question of what lies ahead.

    £22.00
  • Empireland

    £10.99

    Empireland

    In his brilliantly illuminating book, Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past. In prose that is, at once, both clear-eyed and full of acerbic wit, Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere: from how we live to how we think, from the foundation of the NHS to the nature of our racism, from our distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that imbued the campaign for Brexit and the government’s early response to the Covid crisis. And yet empire is a subject, weirdly hidden from view.

    SKU: 9780241445310 Category: Tag:
    £10.99
  • Empireworld

    £10.99

    Empireworld

    In ‘Empireworld’, award-winning author and journalist, Sathnam Sanghera extends his examination of British imperial legacies beyond Britain. Travelling the globe to trace its international legacies – from Barbados and Mauritius to India and Nigeria and beyond – Sanghera demonstrates just how deeply British imperialism is baked into our world. And why it’s time Britain was finally honest with itself about empire.

    SKU: 9780241997086 Category: Tags: ,
    £10.99
  • Ghosts of the British Museum

    £20.00

    Ghosts of the British Museum

    What if the British Museum isn’t a house of learning, but a vast sinkhole of still-bubbling historic injustice? What if it presents us not with a carefully ordered cross section of history but is instead a palatial trophy cabinet of colonial loot swarming with volatile and errant spirits? When artist and writer Noah Angell first heard murmurs of ghostly sightings at the British Museum he had to find out more. What started as a trickle soon became a landslide as staff old and new, from guards of formidable build to respected curators, brought forth testimonies of their inexplicable supernatural encounters. It became clear that the source of the disturbances was related to the Museum’s contents – unquiet objects, holy plunder, and restless human remains protesting their enforced stay within the colonial collection’s cases, cabinets and deep underground vaults.

    £20.00
  • Imperial island

    £10.99

    Imperial island

    After World War II, Britain’s overseas empire disintegrated. But over the next seventy years, empire came to define Britain as never before. From immigration and race riots, to the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War, from the simplistic moral equation of Band Aid to the invasion of Iraq, the imperial mindset has dominated Britain’s relationship with itself and the world. The ghosts of empire are there, too, in the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence and in the response to radical Islam, in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics and in scandal of the Windrush deportations – and of course in Brexit. Drawing on a mass of original research into the thoughts and feelings of the British people, pop culture, sport and media, this book tells a story of people on the move and of people trapped in the past, of the end of empire and the birth of multiculturalism, a chronicle of violence and a testament to togetherness.

    £10.99
  • The architecture of modern empire

    £10.99

    The architecture of modern empire

    Over a lifetime spent at the frontline of solidarity and resistance, Arundhati Roy’s words have lit a clear way through the darkness that surrounds us. Combining the skills of the architect she trained to be and the writer she became, she illuminates the hidden structures of modern empire like no one else, revealing their workings so that we can resist. Her subjects: war, nationalism, fundamentalism and rising fascism, turbocharged by neoliberalism and now technology. But also: truth, justice, freedom, resistance, solidarity and above all imagination – in particular the imagination to see what is in front of us, to envision another way, and to fight for it. Arundhati Roy’s voice – as distinct and compelling in conversation as in her writing – explores these themes and more in this collection of interviews with David Barsamian, conducted over two decades, from 2001 to the present.

    £10.99
  • The Carnation Revolution

    £22.00

    The Carnation Revolution

    On the night of 24 April 1974, at five minutes to eleven, a Lisbon radio station broadcasts Portugal’s Eurovision entry. By 6.20 p.m. the next day, Europe’s oldest fascist regime has fallen. Hardly a shot has been fired. As citizens pour into the streets, they offer carnations to the revolutionary soldiers. For the first time in forty-eight years, Portugal is free. The Carnation Revolution winds through the streets of Lisbon as the revolution unfolds, revealing the myriad acts of ordinary and extraordinary resistance that made 25 April possible. It’s the story of daring escapes from five-storey prisons, soldiers disobeying their officers’ orders and simple acts of courage by thousands of citizens. It’s the story of how a group of young captains felled a globe-spanning empire.

    SKU: 9780861547548 Category: Tags: , ,
    £22.00
  • The CIA

    £25.00

    The CIA

    As World War II ended, the United States stood as the dominant power on the world stage. In 1947, to support its new global status, it created the CIA to analyse foreign intelligence. But within a few years, the Agency was engaged in other operations: bolstering pro-American governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling anti-imperial dissenters in the US. The Cold War was an obvious reason for this transformation – but not the only one. Intelligence historian Hugh Wilford draws on decades of research to show the Agency as part of a larger picture, the history of Western empire. While young CIA officers imagined themselves as British imperial agents like T.E. Lawrence, successive US presidents used the covert powers of the Agency to hide overseas interventions from postcolonial foreigners and anti-imperial Americans alike.

    £25.00
  • The fall of the Aztecs

    £8.99

    The fall of the Aztecs

    The Aztec Empire had been blessed by the gods. Its pyramid temples were warmed by the sun, its fields were thick with corn, its bustling marketplaces were full of feathers, pottery and jewellery. But the Emperor Montezuma was troubled by terrifying omens. And when Spanish sailors landed on the shore, seeking their fortunes in a foreign land, nothing would ever be the same.

    £8.99
  • The last days of the Ottoman Empire

    £12.99

    The last days of the Ottoman Empire

    The Ottoman Empire had been one of the major facts in European history since the Middle Ages. By 1914 it had been much reduced, but still remained after Russia the largest European state. Stretching from the Adriatic to the Indian Ocean, the Empire was both a great political entity and a religious one, with the Sultan ruling over the Holy Sites and, as Caliph, the successor to Mohammed. Yet the Empire’s fateful decision to support Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, despite its successfully defending itself for much of the war, doomed it to disaster, breaking it up into a series of European colonies and what emerged as an independent Saudi Arabia. Ryan Gingeras explains how these epochal events came about and shows how much we still live in the shadow of decisions taken so long ago.

    £12.99