Whither the US empire? Despite Washington's military supremacy, its economic foundations have been weakening since the Vietnam war – accelerated by the great recession and credit-rating downgrade – and its global authority dented by the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this accessible, punchy text, Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay intervene in the debates that surround the US's status as an Empire. They survey the arguments amongst Marxist and critical scholars, from Immanuel Wallerstein and others who argue that the US is in decline, to those who maintain that it remains a robust superpower. By explaining how America's neo-imperial system of governance has been working since WWII, Fouskas and Gökay link the US's domestic and foreign vulnerabilities.

The Fall of the US Empire argues that the time has come to understand the US empire not by its power but by its systemic vulnerabilities of financialisation, resource depletion and environmental degradation. Its informed and accessible style will have wide appeal to students looking for an introduction to these issues.

From the founding of the United States, enduringly consequential debates over Indigeneity and immigration have occurred on the battlefield and in Congress, in courtrooms, at territorial borders, and in mainstream culture. In Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire, Leah Perry traces the ways that the US created its empire through public pedagogies—which she defines as policy and media discourses—surrounding Indigenous dispossession, gendered state violence, and racialized immigration. These pedagogies have propelled the expansion of US empire, including the redrawing of the US as a neoliberal democracy. Perry argues that by changing the discourse around gender, race, immigration, and Indigeneity, the United States has continued its imperial project through different eras, always predicated on Indigenous dispossession.

In exploring crucial components of empire, such as welfare, eugenics, disability, sexual violence, foodways, queerness, and policing, Perry interrogates violence against Indigenous peoples and against immigrants, examining these not independently—as is so often the case—but as co-constitutive. Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire thus intervenes in and fills a gap in immigration studies, Indigenous studies, race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and US history.

Under martial law during World War II, Hawaiʻi was located at the intersection of “home front” and “war front.” In Settler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She demonstrates how settler militarism operated through a regime of racial liberal biopolitics that purported to protect all people in Hawaiʻi even as it intensified the racial and colonial differentiation of Kanaka Maoli, Asian settlers, and white settlers. Nebolon identifies settler militarism’s inherent contradiction: it depends on life, labor, and land to reproduce itself, yet it avariciously consumes those same lives and natural resources that it needs to subsist via violent and extractive projects. From vaccination and blood bank programs to the administration of internment and prisoner of war camps, Nebolon reveals how settler militarism and racial liberal biopolitics operated together in the service of capitalism. Collectively, the social reproduction of these regimes created the conditions for the late-twentieth-century expansion of US military empire.