The Last Imperialist

The British Empire, one of the most powerful forces in history, was also one of the most humane. Yet at its twilight, few were willing to defy the anti-colonial reaction that condemned millions to despotism under the regimes that replaced it. Sir Alan Burns was among them. In this lively and provocative work of history, Bruce Gilley vindicates Sir Alan’s view that decolonization was poorly managed and too swiftly executed, a view based not on imperialist nostalgia but on a sober assessment of the ravages of the twentieth century. Gilley demonstrates that Burns understood the benefits of colonial rule and correctly foretold the chaos that accompanied its rapid dissolution. Relying on previously unavailable documentation from Burns’s family, The Last Imperialist dethrones the revisionist historians and shatters their unbalanced accusations against European colonialism. This is history writing at its most courageous.

The British Empire, one of the most powerful forces in history, was also one of the most humane. Yet at its twilight, few were willing to defy the anti-colonial reaction that condemned millions to despotism under the regimes that replaced it. Sir Alan Burns was among them. In this lively and provocative work of history, Bruce Gilley vindicates Sir Alan’s view that decolonization was poorly managed and too swiftly executed, a view based not on imperialist nostalgia but on a sober assessment of the ravages of the twentieth century. Gilley demonstrates that Burns understood the benefits of colonial rule and correctly foretold the chaos that accompanied its rapid dissolution. Relying on previously unavailable documentation from Burns’s family, The Last Imperialist dethrones the revisionist historians and shatters their unbalanced accusations against European colonialism. This is history writing at its most courageous.

"The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns' Epic Defense of the British Empires studies Sir Alan Burns' career and his arguments in defense of European colonialism. Bruce Gilley describes Burns' intellectual and policy battles with opponents of colonialism and his efforts to slow the decolonization process"--

"After a long hiatus, when it was seemingly banished to the wilderness of esoteric academic debate, imperialism is back as one of the buzzwords of the day. In the past decade in particular, scholars, policy-makers and political pundits have been using the term with increasing frequency in their commentary on contemporary international relations. Many have invoked it as an old specter only to nervously deny its contemporary applicability. Meanwhile, the term has continued to be applied to a diverse range of economic, political, cultural and linguistic phenomena. The sudden popularity of the term has created confusion about what it means and why we should care about it. Regardless of whether it is used as an invective or an ideal, imperialism has turned into an all-encompassing buzzword that many use, though few can really define. Imperialism Past and Present seeks to clarify the prevailing confusion and provide a clear, concise account of imperialism, as well as to introduce readers to the fundamental logic, as well as the complex manifestations of imperialism. It also aims to offer a succinct review and interpretation of the complex experiences that constituted the history of imperialism. The authors contend that imperialism remains at the heart of recent events and ongoing processes that define contemporary politics, and they look at the way that it applies in the post-Cold War period"--

This is the book which, when first published in 1965, caused such an uproar in the US State Department that a sharp note of protest was sent to Kwame Nkrumah and the $25million of American "aid" to Ghana was promptly cancelled.

Anti-Imperialist Modernism excavates how U.S. cross-border, multi-ethnic anti-imperialist movements at mid-century shaped what we understand as cultural modernism and the historical period of the Great Depression. The book demonstrates how U.S. multiethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labor unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the pre-war “Popular Front” through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades. Impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anti-colonial networks of North/South solidarity. Chapters examine farmworker photographers in California’s central valley, a Nez Perce intellectual traveling to the Soviet Union, imaginations of the Haitian Revolution, the memory of the U.S.–Mexico War, and U.S. radical writers traveling to Cuba. The last chapter examines how the Cold War foreclosed these movements within a nationalist framework, when activists and intellectuals had to suppress the transnational nature of their movements, often rewriting the cultural past to conform to a patriotic narrative of national belonging.

From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So argues Efraim Karsh in this highly provocative book. Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Karsh contends that the region's experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, and that foremost among these is Islam's millenarian imperial tradition. The author explores the history of Islam's imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day. September 11 can be seen as simply the latest expression of this dream, and such attacks have little to do with U.S. international behavior or policy in the Middle East, says Karsh. The House of Islam's war for world mastery is traditional, indeed venerable, and it is a quest that is far from over.

A sweeping, brilliantly vivid history of the sudden end of the British empire and the moment when America became a world superpower. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Winston Churchill's famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the world-wide institution that he had served for most of his life. Britain fought and sacrificed on a worldwide scale to defeat Hitler and his allies-and won. Yet less than five years after Churchill's defiant speech, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian Independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain's Empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned. How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke's book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swiftly paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures though whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself.

Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibals was one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern "civilized" lifestyle is more relevant now than ever before. Identifying the Western compulsion to consume the earth as a sickness, Forbes writes: "Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. . . . These characteristics all push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in. . . . This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism." This updated edition includes a new chapter by the author.

From the acclaimed author of Corelli’s Mandolin, here is a sumptuous, sweeping, powerfully moving new novel about a British family whose lives and loves are indelibly shaped by the horrors of World War I and the hopes for its aftermath. In the brief golden years of the Edwardian era the McCosh sisters—Christabel, Ottilie, Rosie and Sophie—grow up in an idyllic household in the countryside south of London. On one side, their neighbors are the proper Pendennis family, recently arrived from Baltimore, whose close-in-age boys—Sidney, Albert and Ashbridge—shake their father’s hand at breakfast and address him as “sir.” On the other side is the Pitt family: a “resolutely French” mother, a former navy captain father, and two brothers, Archie and Daniel, who are clearly “going to grow up into a pair of daredevils and adventurers.” In childhood this band is inseparable, but the days of careless camaraderie are brought to an abrupt halt by the outbreak of The Great War, in which everyone will play a part. All three Pendennis brothers fight in the hellish trenches at the front; Daniel Pitt becomes an ace fighter pilot with his daredevil tendencies intact; Rosie and Ottilie McCosh volunteer in the hospitals, where women serve with as much passion and nearly as much hardship as the men at the front; Christabel McCosh becomes one of the squad of photographers sending “snaps” of their loved ones at home to the soldiers; and Sophie McCosh drives for the RAF in France. In the aftermath of the war, as “the universal joy and relief were beginning to be tempered by . . . an atmosphere of uncertainty,” everyone must contend with the modern world that is slowly emerging from the ashes of the old. A wholly immersive novel about a particular time and place, The Dust That Falls from Dreams also illuminates the timeless ways in which men and women carry profound loss alongside indelible hope.