Rogue Empires

Download or read book Rogue Empires written by Steven Press and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1880s, Europeans descended on Africa and grabbed vast swaths of the continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Rogue Empires follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa. Many of them were would-be kings who sought to establish their own autonomous empires across the African continent—often at odds with traditional European governments which competed for control. From 1882 to 1885, independent European businessmen and firms (many of doubtful legitimacy) produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. Steven Press traces the notion of empire by purchase to an unlikely place: the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, where the English adventurer James Brooke bought his own kingdom in the 1840s. Brooke’s example inspired imitators in Africa, as speculators exploited a loophole in international law in order to assert sovereignty and legal ownership of lands which they then plundered for profit. The success of these experiments in governance attracted notice in European capitals. Press shows how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when King Leopold of Belgium and the German Chancellor Bismarck embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas in the Congo, Namibia, and Cameroon.

Download or read book Rogue Empires written by Steven Press and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The man who bought a country -- The emergence of an idea -- King Leopold's Borneo -- Bismarck's Borneo -- Epilogue: "A great act of folly

Download or read book The Crimes of Empire written by Carl Boggs and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of US imperialism that uncovers the ever present exploitation, violence and media control that have marked the last two decades of empire.

Download or read book Rogue Revolutionaries written by Vanessa Mongey and published by Early American Studies. This book was released on 2020 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rogue Revolutionaries, Vanessa Mongey revives a lost and fleeting world of cosmopolitan radicalism through the stories of "foreigners of desperate fortune" who sought to ignite revolutions and create their own independent states. Their quest for recognition clashed with the growing power of nation-states and a new international order.

Download or read book Rogue State written by William Blum and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2006-02-13 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rogue State and its author came to sudden international attention when Osama Bin Laden quoted the book publicly in January 2006, propelling the book to the top of the bestseller charts in a matter of hours. This book is a revised and updated version of the edition Bin Laden referred to in his address.

Download or read book Rogue Economics written by Loretta Napoleoni and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Respected economist and journalist Loretta Napoleoni shows how the world is being reshaped by dark economic forces creating victims out of millions of ordinary people whose lives have become trapped inside a fantasy world of consumerism. A world built by organisations both private and public which have accumulated vast fortunes and enormous political influence by regulating, containing and manipulating the market to their own advantage.

Download or read book On Empire written by Eric Hobsbawm and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these four incisive and keenly perceptive essays, one of out most celebrated and respected historians of modern Europe looks at the world situation and some of the major political problems confronting us at the start of the third millennium. With his usual measured and brilliant historical perspective, Eric Hobsbawm traces the rise of American hegemony in the twenty-first century. He examines the state of steadily increasing world disorder in the context of rapidly growing inequalities created by rampant free-market globalization. He makes clear that there is no longer a plural power system of states whose relations are governed by common laws--including those for the conduct of war. He scrutinizes America's policies, particularly its use of the threat of terrorism as an excuse for unilateral deployment of its global power. Finally, he discusses the ways in which the current American hegemony differs from the defunct British Empire in its inception, its ideology, and its effects on nations and individuals. Hobsbawm is particularly astute in assessing the United States' assertion of world hegemony, its denunciation of formerly accepted international conventions, and its launching of wars of aggression when it sees fit. Aside from the naivete and failure that have surrounded most of these imperial campaigns, Hobsbawm points out that foreign values and institutions--including those associated with a democratic government--can rarely be imposed on countries such as Iraq by outside forces unless the conditions exist that make them acceptable and readily adaptable. Timely and accessible, On Empire is a commanding work of history that should be read by anyone who wants some understanding of the turbulent times in which we live.