The introduction begins by tracing the historical ascent of comparativism, studying how comparison became a privileged tool of knowledge production in conjunction with imperialism. It examines the minute rhetorical operations and common tropes involved in Iran/Türkiye comparisons through an analysis of modern international scholarship on the Shahnameh, a classic verse epic associated with Iranian national identity.

Many eighteenth-century theorists of common law attributed its legitimacy in part to its connection to a particular location and history. However, as Britain incorporated Scotland and expanded its imperial reach abroad, British governors often attempted to carry common-law practices to new locations. In his fiction and nonfiction, Sir Walter Scott advocates maintaining Scotland’s common-law system but worries that the very cultural and legal distinctiveness he demands for Scotland prevents Scots from receiving justice under British law. Portraying the consequences of the Norman conquest in Ivanhoe (1819) and internal and external colonialism in Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott demonstrates the difficulties of reconciling the role of custom in common law’s legitimacy with a centralizing imperial state. In both works, the victors’ biases toward their own law mean that history and historical fiction no longer suture past and present, and that law imposes tragedy as well as order.

This chapter introduces the main themes of the volume, Anticolonialism and Social Thought. It provides a brief overview of the history of anticolonialism and argues that anticolonialism in history generates social thought and social theory.

During the 1970s–1980s, “self-reliance” (al-i‘timad al-thati/al-i‘timad ‘ala al-nafis) or “auto-centric” was a central Arab (and indeed Third World) theory of development. Thinkers and institutions broke with models of import-substitution and export-oriented industrialization that dominated developmental planning in republics and right-wing regimes, stemming from notions of development based on integration with the capitalist world system. They created a model implicitly or explicitly based on the Chinese experience of agrarian reform, self-reliance, and sovereign industrialization as the necessary steps to rupture with colonial underdevelopment. These economists, sociologists, and agronomists developed anticolonial and anti-imperialist theories of development based on self-reliance vis-à-vis macroeconomic architecture, technology, agriculture, and industrialization. This essay offers a preliminary genealogy of those ideas, tracing the emergence of these theories across space and time, through the work of major Arab thinkers such as Samir Amin, Mohamed Dowidar, Azzam Mahjoub, and Ismail-Sabri Abdallah.

Classical reception scholarship on Michael Field has primarily focused on the duo’s engagement with ancient Greek poetry, yet the author’s oeuvre contains eight closet dramas and innumerable poems focused on Ancient Rome. This chapter takes a closer look at Michael Field’s Roman Trilogy, comprised of The Race of Leaves (1898), The World at Auction (1901), and Julia Domna (1903), the dramas in which Michael Field grapple most closely with the entanglement between imperial and literary decadence. Through the depiction of queer artists using collaborative art as a form of resistance, the Decadent Trilogy sheds light on Michael Field’s understanding of the resemblance between ancient and modern imperial decadence.

This chapter examines a group of anticolonial and anti-imperialist intellectuals of different political persuasions thinking on Palestinian anticolonial national liberation at key moments in Palestinian history. It argues that central to these thinkers in their analysis of Palestine is a collapse in distinction between 1948- and 1967-occupied Palestine in Zionist settler-colonial ambitions in Palestine; the umbilical relationship between Zionism and US–Euro imperialism; as well as the centrality of Arab ruling classes to Zionist hegemony in Palestine.

This chapter argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper saw Michael Field as a poet of Empire and proposes that scholarship on Michael Field has overlooked the conservative, reactionary social and racial politics of their oeuvre. The chapter surveys Michael Field’s often complex and contradictory responses to race, empire, and imperialism, as seen in their dedicatory verses to various national heroes and their play Brutus Ultor (addressed ‘To The People of England’). The chapter then examines their jingoistic attitude towards the Boer War at the turn of the century, and their orientalised depictions of ‘East’ in plays such as Queen Mariamne (1908), that are revealing of their treatment of racial and ethnic differences.

States are unable to cope with economic turbulence and social disintegration. They face an escalating crisis of legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. Transnational state apparatuses are unable to bridge the gap between a nation-state-based system of political authority and a globalizing economy. The contradiction is deepening between the legitimacy function and the accumulation function of the national state. There is a growing complexity and tension in the relationship between national states and transnational capital as well as between distinct fractions of capital. The mechanisms of consensual domination, or hegemony, are breaking down. The ruling classes are ramping up the global police state and turning to militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression. International tensions and geopolitical conflict are escalating. The evolution of the U.S.-China relationship is indicative of all of these trends and tendencies. The concept of imperialism needs to be updated to twenty-first century realities, with a focus on the relationship between the U.S. and Western states and their intervention, on the one hand, and transnational class exploitation on the other.

James’s modernism is based directly on the psychology he founded, and specifically on his recognition that the self is malleable (or “plastic”), aggregate, distributed, and capable of mental reform. Yet James’s outspoken critique of US imperialism and the lynching of African Americans reflected his understanding of the dangerous potential of conversion – namely, that revolutions in belief carry a measure of uncertainty and risk, not just to individual believers but to the very fabric of democratic thought. Jamesean conversion therefore dramatizes the processes by which consent is staged from within and from without. The self enacts the drama in the form of an internal dialogue in which one imagines one’s “self” inhabiting a particular temporo-spatial location, as if fulfilling the role of a protagonist in a work of fiction. Against that background, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware dramatize the processes through which individuals become plastically transformed under the manipulations of powerful “pattern-setters” of public opinion. By fracturing and fragmenting imperial forms of selfhood, these psychological Bildungsromane inaugurate a reform modernism that registers dissent from the imperial sway of groups, demonstrating the strenuous effort required by individuals to transform oppressive systems from within.

The introduction provides an overview of the volume’s key theoretical concepts and empirical cases. It emphasizes that there have been a variety of antifascisms in Latin America and the Caribbean that were not merely derivative of European antifascism or the product of European exiles. Rather, there were homegrown Latin American and Caribbean antifascist movements forged in the interplay between local, regional, and transnational processes. By placing Latin American and Caribbean antifascists in relation to the broader historiography on antifascism, the introduction illuminates their specific heterogeneous agendas, strategies, and styles as well as their class, racial, ethnic, and gendered dimensions. Latin American and Caribbean antifascists participated in exchanges from the Global South to the Global North and within the Global South. They resembled and yet differed from other Global South antifascisms regarding race and imperialism. The introduction ends by providing an overview of the chapters by placing them within the book’s theoretical framework.

This chapter examines Henry Stimson’s career and his rise to the pinnacle of the US government until his resignation as secretary of state in March 1933. It analyzes his background, the formation of his political views, and the creation of his foreign policy ideas as a committed member of the Republican Party. Specifically, it explores his tortuous relationship with the American empire and how he became an unbridled internationalist.

This chapter focuses on “Hot Time in the Old Town” (1896), a popular US song that played an important role in turn-of-the-century imperial culture. Tracing the Black origins and reputation of this de facto anthem, Stecopoulos demonstrates that white Americans used “raced” domestic culture as a means of asserting a national identity even as they sought to extend the borders of the United States through Caribbean and Pacific conquest. By contrast, African American intellectuals of the era recognized that the popularity of “Hot Time” might offer them a cultural means of legitimating Black claims on national identity.

This chapter concludes the book by reflecting on the implications of the intertwined origins of colonial Hong Kong and British extradition law. In the final analysis, ideas of extradition actuated local, territorial, and limited common law government in mid nineteenth-century Hong Kong. This set Hong Kong apart from China in idea and practice, through processes that disclosed British unilateralism and parochialism. Remarkably, similar processes are now taking place but in reverse, as heated debates about extradition and jurisdiction have arisen in Hong Kong’s postcolonial reassimilation into mainland China.

Starting with George Lukacs’ complaint that naturalist works are incoherent because of their superfluous detail, this chapter argues that incoherence was in fact an effective literary aesthetic for seeing and managing details at a large scale. The large scale that was particularly salient to American naturalism was the global one of American imperial expansion during the Progressive Era, and the essay argues that American empire is a useful framework for understanding naturalism as a literary movement because it brought together an investment in incoherent form with statistical and biopolitical technologies that, like naturalist works, proliferated details. Naturalism in this American context isn’t a failed version of realism. Nor does its incoherence register an inability to represent empire as an emergent global order. Instead, naturalism developed the realist project with a set of conventions that powerfully (and problematically) expressed the form of an emerging and efficacious large-scale global order.