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193 books match the query 'Empire' and 5 start with u

cover of Ualalapi: Fragments from the End of Empire

Ualalapi

Fragments from the End of Empire

Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa

Tagus Press, 2017

Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa first published Ualalapi: Fragments from the End of Empire in Portuguese in 1987. Named one of Africa's hundred best books of the twentieth century, it reflects on Mozambique's past and present through interconnected narratives related to the last ruler of the Gaza Empire, Ngungunhane. Defeated by the Portuguese in 1895, Ngungunhane was reclaimed for propaganda purposes by Mozambique's post-independence government as a national and nationalist hero. The regime celebrated his resistance to the colonial occupation of southern Mozambique as a precursor to the twentieth-century struggle for independence. In Ualalapi, Ungulani challenges that ideological celebration and portrays Ngungunhane as a despot, highlighting the violence and tyranny that were hallmarks of the Gaza Empire. This fresh look at the history of late nineteenth-century southeast Africa provides a prism through which to examine the machinations of those in power in Mozambique during the 1980s.
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cover of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict

Ukraine and the Empire of Capital

From Marketisation to Armed Conflict

Yuliya Yurchenko

Pluto Press, 2017

Since 1991, nominally independent Ukraine has been in turmoil, with the Orange Revolution and the Maidan protests marking its most critical moments. Now, its borders are threatened and the civil unrest and armed conflict continue to destabilise the country. In order to understand these dramatic events, Yuliya Yurchenko looks to the country’s post-Soviet past in this ambitious analysis of contemporary Ukrainian political economy. 

Providing distinctive and unexplored reflections on the origins of the conflict, Yurchenko unpacks the four central myths that underlie Ukraine's post-Soviet reality: the myth of transition, the myth of democracy, the myth of two Ukraines, and the myth of 'the other'. In doing so, she sheds light on the current intensification of class rivalries in Ukraine, the kleptocracy, resource wars and analyses existing and potential dangers of the rightwing shift in Ukraine's polity, stressing a historic opportunity for change.

Critiquing the concept of Ukraine as ‘transition space’, she provides a sweeping analysis which includes the wider neoliberal restructuring of global political economy since the 1970s, with particular focus on Ukraine's relations with the US, the EU and Russia. This is a book for those wanting to understand the current conflict as a dangerous product of neoliberalism, of the empire of capital.
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cover of Unrepayable Debt: Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire

Unrepayable Debt

Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire

Yukiko Koga

University of Chicago Press, 2026

What does it mean, and take, to repay the unrepayable?

Unrepayable Debt explores belated attempts to reckon with the savage plundering of labor and life under the Japanese empire. Located within global conversations on reparations for colonialism and slavery, and centered on slave labor lawsuits brought by Chinese victims seeking overdue justice in Japanese courts, Yukiko Koga traces a sea change in the legal sphere propelled by an unprecedented transnational redress movement. The lawsuits exposed not only the original violence but also a structure of transitional injustice etched onto the unmaking of the Japanese empire, which left victims silenced and unredressable for decades.

Challenging the idea of reckoning as a discrete event that brings closure through settlements, apology, or compensation, Koga’s ethnography details the slow and messy intergenerational work of reconciliation on the ground. The book shows how the re-pairing of severed relations, separated by lineages of victimhood and perpetration, lies at the core of repair. By bringing to the surface the prolonged and entangled processes of decolonization and deimperialization, Unrepayable Debt compels a rethinking of what redress, repair, and reconciliation mean, how they are practiced, and where accountability lies.

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cover of Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas

Unrequited Conquests

Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas

Roland Greene

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Love poetry dominated European literature during the Renaissance. Its attitudes, conventions, and values appeared not only in courtly settings but also in the transatlantic world, where cultures were being built, power exercised, and policies made. In this major contribution to our understanding of both the Age of Exploration and early modern lyric, Roland Greene argues that love poetry was not simply a reflection of the times but a means of cultural transformation.

European encounters with the Americas awakened many forms of desire, which pervaded the writings of explorers like Columbus and his contemporaries. These experiences in turn shaped colonial society in Brazil, Peru, and elsewhere. The New World, while it could be explored, conquered, and exploited, could never really be "known"—leaving Europe's desire continually unrequited and the project of empire unfulfilled.

Using numerous poetic examples and extensive historical documentation, Unrequited Conquests rewrites the relations between the Renaissance and colonial Latin America and between poetry and history.
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cover of Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily

Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily

By Laura Pfuntner

University of Texas Press, 2019

Sicily has been the fulcrum of the Mediterranean throughout history. The island’s central geographical position and its status as ancient Rome’s first overseas province make it key to understanding the development of the Roman Empire. Yet Sicily’s crucial role in the empire has been largely overlooked by scholars of classical antiquity, apart from a small number of specialists in its archaeology and material culture.

Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily offers the first comprehensive English-language overview of the history and archaeology of Roman Sicily since R. J. A. Wilson’s Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990). Laura Pfuntner traces the development of cities and settlement networks in Sicily in order to understand the island’s political, economic, social, and cultural role in Rome’s evolving Mediterranean hegemony. She identifies and examines three main processes traceable in the archaeological record of settlement in Roman Sicily: urban disintegration, urban adaptation, and the development of alternatives to urban settlement. By expanding the scope of research on Roman Sicily beyond the bounds of the island itself, through comparative analysis of the settlement landscapes of Greece and southern Italy, and by utilizing exciting evidence from recent excavations and surveys, Pfuntner establishes a new empirical foundation for research on Roman Sicily and demonstrates the necessity of including Sicily in broader historical and archaeological studies of the Roman Empire.

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