EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL

Empires and the Reach of the Global brings the history of
empires into sharp focus by showing how imperialism has been a shaping
force not just in international politics but in the economies and
cultures of today’s world. Focusing on both the strengths and limits of
imperial power, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton describe the creation and disintegration of the reigning world order in the period from 1870 to 1945.

Using the British, Japanese, and Ottoman empires as case studies, the
authors trace the communication, transportation, and economic networks
that were instrumental to empire building. They highlight the role of
empires as place-making regimes that organize geographic space as
distinct territories. Militaries and missionaries, workplaces and
households, all served as key domains of interaction within these
territories, as colonial officials sought to manage the customs and
lifeways of indigenous populations. Imperial connections contributed to
the shrinking of time and space, but colonial encroachments also
provoked opposition, which often played out in locations of everyday
activity, from fields and factories to schools and prisons. Colonized
territories sponsored a variety of forms of organized resistance, with
full-fledged nationalist movements erupting onto the global scene in the
interwar period.

Ballantyne and Burton stress that empire was not something fabricated
in European capitals and implemented “out there.” Rather, imperial
systems, with their many racial, gendered, and economic forms, affected
empires in all of their parts—the metropole as well as the farthest
outpost.