The Obligation Of Empire

In 'Law's Empire', Ronald Dworkin relects on the nature of the law, its authority, its application in democracy, the prominent role of interpretation in judgement and the relations of lawmakers and lawgivers in the community.

Britannia's Shield: Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton and the Late-Victorian Imperial Defence presents an in-depth, international study of imperial land defence prior to 1914. The book makes sense of the failures, false starts and successes that eventually led to more than 850,000 men being despatched from the Dominions to buttress Britain's Great War effort – an enormous achievement for intra-empire military cooperation. Craig Stockings presents a vivid portrayal of this complex process as it unfolded throughout the late-Victorian Empire through a biographical study of Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton. As a true soldier of the Empire, the difficulties and dramas that followed Hutton's career at every step – from Cairo to Sydney, Aldershot to Ottawa, and Pretoria to Melbourne – provide key insights into imperial defence and security planning between 1880 and 1914. Richly illustrated, Britannia's Shield is an engaging and entertaining work of rigorous scholarship that will appeal to both general readers and academic researchers.

Beginning in the 1860s, the Russian Empire replaced a poll tax system that originated with Peter the Great with a modern system of income and excise taxes. Russia began a transformation of state fiscal power that was also underway across Western Europe and North America. States of Obligation is the first sustained study of the Russian taxation system, the first to study its European and transatlantic context, and the first to expose the essential continuities between the fiscal practices of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Using a wealth of materials from provincial and local archives across Russia, Yanni Kotsonis examines how taxation was simultaneously a revenue-raising and a state-building tool, a claim on the person and a way to produce a new kind of citizenship. During successive political, wartime, and revolutionary crises between 1855 and 1928, state fiscal power was used to forge social and financial unity and fairness and a direct relationship with individual Russians. State power eventually overwhelmed both the private sector economy and the fragile realm of personal privacy. States of Obligation is at once a study in Russian economic history and a reflection on the modern state and the modern citizen.

Some of the nation's most respected scholars of international affairs examine the debates over U.S. grand strategy in light of U.S. security policies and interests in tactical regions around the world. The contributors begin by describing the four grand strategies currently competing for dominance of U.S. foreign policy: neo-isolationism argues that the United States should not become involved in conflicts outside specifically defined national interests selective engagement proposes that the United States, despite its position as the world's only remaining superpower, should limit its involvement in foreign affairs cooperative security advocates that the United States is not and should not act as an imperial country primacy asserts that the United States is an empire and therefore it should conduct an expansive foreign policy. Focusing on regions that present new challenges to U.S. grand strategy, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, the contributors offer the most current examinations of U.S. policies and assess the effectiveness of competing strategies in each region. The Obligation of Empire offers an innovative set of foreign policy initiatives that explore the tensions between global agendas and regionalist approaches. Contributors: Andrew J. Bacevich, Doug Bandow, Dale Davis, Thomas Donnelly, James J. Hentz, Clifford Kiracofe, Charles Kupchan, Jeffrey Stark, S. Frederick Starr, and Brantley Womack. James J. Hentz, associate professor of international studies at the Virginia Military Institute, is the coeditor of New and Critical Security and Regionalism: Beyond the Nation State.