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More than 600 years before the Inka empire ruled the Andean region of South American, during the period known as the Middle Horizon, there were two complex societies: the Tiwanaku and the Wari. In this volume, Katharina J. Schreiber explores the problem of the Middle Horizon through archaeological research in two specific areas: the Carhuarazo Valley and the Jincamocco site. Foreword by Jeffrey R. Parsons.

This is a story of tides and coastlines, winds and waves, islands and beaches. It is also a retelling of indigenous creativity, agency, and resistance in the face of unprecedented globalization and violence. Waves Across the South shifts the narrative of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire; it foregrounds a vast southern zone that ranges from the Arabian Sea and southwest Indian Ocean across to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and the Tasman Sea. As the empires of the Dutch, French, and especially the British reached across these regions, they faced a surge of revolutionary sentiment. Long-standing venerable Eurasian empires, established patterns of trade and commerce, and indigenous practice also served as a context for this transformative era. In addition to bringing long-ignored people and events to the fore, Sujit Sivasundaram opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history, the consequences of historical violence, the legacies of empire, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short. The result is nothing less than a bold new way of understanding our global past, one that also helps us think afresh about our shared future.

Constructing a new approach for centering empire in productions of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference

One of the oldest, most persistent issues in gender and sexuality studies is the dominance of white, northern theorizing and its consequences for what we know about sex, gender, and sexuality. There is an ongoing neglect of the significance of histories of empire and coloniality, particularly in U.S. sociology, where the United States and its theoretical productions are routinely sanitized of such histories. In Webbed Connectivities, Vrushali Patil offers a global historical sociology that reembeds the United States within histories of empire, situating the emergence of northern and U.S.-based concepts and frameworks squarely within these histories.

Webbed Connectivities intercepts the political economy of knowledge production within the social sciences to argue for the work of centering the role of imperial hierarchies in knowledge production and circulation. Patil develops a new approach—webbed connectivities—which tracks imperial processes and impacts across borders, shifting from an emphasis on particular experiences and identities to the constitution and creation of the categories themselves.

A sociologist of feminist thought and gender and sexuality studies, Patil explores the theoretical spaces that spotlighting imperial hierarchies within knowledge production might open, including making productive and essential connections across sites of the global south and north.

Colonial expert and pamphleteer William Knox has received attention in virtually every major study of the American Revolution, yet this is the first biography of Knox ever written.

Knox is best known as undersecretary of state in the American Department of the British government from 1770 to 1782. A prolific and candid commentator, he also made a reputation as a pamphleteer, defending the imperial cause during the decade preceding the Revolution. It had been his experience as provost marshal in Georgia from 1757 to 1762 that convinced Knox of the danger to the empire of the growing "democratic" forces in the American colonies.

While numerous historical works have focused on this or that aspect of Knox's career and thought, such treatment has produced at best a jigsaw portrait. Bellot's comprehensive narrative reveals Knox as a person—one whose Calvinist heritage and Scots-Irish upbringing profoundly influenced his view of empire—and as a historical actor and witness. Here is a look at the events of the revolutionary period through the eyes of a British bureaucrat who had a significant role in both the formation and the execution of British policy. This perspective also provides an excellent case study of the operation of the eighteenth-century British bureaucracy.

The late first- and early second-century Roman senator and historian Cornelius Tacitus, whom Edward Gibbon described as “the first of the historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts,” shaped the development of the modern understanding of history as a crucial vehicle for social analysis. The breadth of his thinking is fully revealed only through analysis of how the political, geographical, and rhetorical theories expounded in his early works influenced his later narrative of the evolution of the Roman monarchy. Tacitus, who was one of the oratorical luminaries of his time, produced a collection of works widely recognized as offering the most authoritative account of Rome’s early imperial history. His oeuvre traditionally is divided into the so-called minor and major works. Writing Imperial History offers the first comprehensive analysis of Tacitus’ five texts and their interconnections and serves to confront longstanding assumptions that have led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and development of his oeuvre and historical thinking. Tracing many of the enduring themes and concerns that Tacitus explores across his works, the book shows how the vision articulated in his earlier texts persists in his later ones and how he used the former as sources for the latter.