ABOUT THIS BOOK

In The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven Mark W. Driscoll examines nineteenth-century Western imperialism in Asia and the devastating effects of "climate caucasianism"—the white West's pursuit of rapacious extraction at the expense of natural environments and people of color conflated with them. Drawing on an array of primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, and French, Driscoll reframes the Opium Wars as "wars for drugs" and demonstrates that these wars to unleash narco- and human traffickers kickstarted the most important event of the Anthropocene: the military substitution of Qing China's world-leading carbon-neutral economy for an unsustainable Anglo-American capitalism powered by coal. Driscoll also reveals how subaltern actors, including outlaw societies and dispossessed samurai groups, became ecological protectors, defending their locales while driving decolonization in Japan and overthrowing a millennia of dynastic rule in China. Driscoll contends that the methods of these protectors resonate with contemporary Indigenous-led movements for environmental justice.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mark W. Driscoll is Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is author of Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japanese Imperialism, 1895–1945, and the editor and translator of "Kannani" and "Document of Flames": Two Japanese Colonial Novels, both also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

“Mark W. Driscoll dazzlingly argues that at the origin of the Anthropocene lies the predatory behavior of European colonialism in East Asia—what he daringly terms "climate caucasianism", a historically unprecedented assemblage of extraction, coloniality, ecological devastation, commerce, and war. Driscoll's exquisite and brilliant scholarship demonstrates a simultaneous mastery of Chinese and Japanese languages, cultures, and histories. The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven should be of immediate interest to students in all those fields wishing to understand the multiple entanglements of imperialism, colonialism, ontology, and resistance that underlie the complex assemblage called climate change.”

-- Arturo Escobar, author of Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible

“Mark W. Driscoll's The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven is an ambitious and original study of Japanese and Chinese resistance to Euro-American imperialism. Beyond his compelling focus on race and racism—which rarely get the explicit attention they deserve in East Asian studies—Driscoll turns to Marxism, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism to analyze global histories of extractive capitalism and drug production in this wide-ranging and thrilling analysis. There is no other book like this!”

-- Teemu Ruskola, author of Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law

“Driscoll’s The Whites are Enemies of Heaven is a timely intervention that injects new life into the study of imperialism with its richly detailed source materials and broad conceptual frames. The book is sure to inspire future work which will engage colonial histories through the lens of local eco ontological approaches.”

-- Toulouse-Antonin Roy positions politics

“Mark W. Driscoll’s The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven is an inspiring work.... Driscoll has written a brilliant work on the environmental, social, and economic history of East Asia.”

-- Kenneth Kai-chung Yung H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews

“Tightly argued and well-researched. . . . This work would be an excellent addition to reading lists for graduate students who are studying Postcolonialism and subaltern studies.”

-- Barbara Greene International Social Science Review

“Driscoll, like Weber, is an astute, well-read, and inventive synthesizer of a wide array of texts. . . . [The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven] is a complex and thought-provoking book.”

-- Paul D. Barclay Journal of Japanese Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Madame Butterfly

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.