Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (Modern Library Chronicles)
by Anthony Pagden
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anthony PagdenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2003-01-07
ISBN: 0812967615
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Modern Library
Book Reviews of Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (Modern Library Chronicles)
Book Review: Readable, Cohesive Summary
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is a fantastic introduction to the topic of European empire, granting readers a valuable global scope to the concept of empire. I would especially recommend this to any undergraduate student undertaking courses related to this topic (a good many). However, the books is not without its drawbacks or omissions, and these are not related simply due to the unnecessarily limited scope of considering such a broad topic in so few pages. Rather, they seem motivated by a) an unwillingness to consider the spread of European empire to polities based outside the continent of Europe itself and b) an odd and unjustifiably benign omission of the United States. However, although I discuss these points more fully below, this is not to detract from the value of this book. These points simply complement and broaden (for the modern period) Pagden's compact and generally excellent tract on the history of empire.
1) Pagden's omission of any detailed reference to 19th and 20th century Imperial Japan is unfortunate. The author neglects to make the valuable point that European concepts of empire were so thoroughly disseminated in this period that a distant Asian nation attempted "modernisation" through a blantant mediation of European imperialism, from architecture to government.
2) Even more surprising is Pagden's apparent unwillingness to consider the United States as an empire. He facetiously notes that Britain now refers to its fourteen remaining "colonies" as "dependant territories," and that Spain and France continue to retain vestiges of their former empires in the form of islands and enclaves, but neglects to include the US's retention of Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands. Of course, these islands are ruled generally with the support of the current indigenous population, but so too are most of those of the existing European "colonies." Of course, Pagden is originally a South American, and perhaps this explains his need to designate the Falkland Islands as the "Malvinas Islands." In a "story" that concludes on "the end of empire" it seems a petty, and one could say hypocritical, act to implicitly buttress the Argentine claim on a chain of barren rocks inhabited by a small population that defines itself as "British."
3) Pagden also makes a glaring faux pas in his conclusion by asserting that "unlike any of the previous empires, those that had grown up after the beginning of the nineteenth century had rarely, except in southern Africa, exported many of their own peoples or created substantial Creole elites." Apparently Australia and New Zealand do not exist, except in the end of his conclusions to serve, especially the former, as evidence of national guilt for the excesses of its imperial foundations. Whilst this may seem sensitive, Pagden seems to be unduly critical of Britain, and to spare the United States of the same treatment by simply omitting it. More importantly Pagden, surprisingly for an intellectual and cultural historian, seems to fail to note that a global history (or one at the very least about the European concept of America) must consider America as a "European" society, at least in the nineteenth century. Conceiving of "manifest destiny", and later America's mini-empire in the Pacific and Carribean, as not part of the greater experience of nineteenth century European empire seems an unfounded semi-nationalistic, and inward looking, defence for his new home country.
Summary of Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (Modern Library Chronicles)
Written by one of the world's foremost historians of human migration, Peoples and Empires is the story of the great European empires-the Roman, the Spanish, the French, the British-and their colonies, and the back-and-forth between "us" and "them," culture and nature, civilization and barbarism, the center and the periphery. It's the history of how conquerors justified conquest, and how colonists and the colonized changed each other beyond all recognition.General Books
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