The Business of Empire

The Business of Empire
Author: Jason M. Colby
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 080146272X

The link between private corporations and U.S. world power has a much longer history than most people realize. Transnational firms such as the United Fruit Company represent an earlier stage of the economic and cultural globalization now taking place throughout the world. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources in the United States, Great Britain, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, Colby combines "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to provide new insight into the role of transnational capital, labor migration, and racial nationalism in shaping U.S. expansion into Central America and the greater Caribbean. The Business of Empire places corporate power and local context at the heart of U.S. imperial history. In the early twentieth century, U.S. influence in Central America came primarily in the form of private enterprise, above all United Fruit. Founded amid the U.S. leap into overseas empire, the company initially depended upon British West Indian laborers. When its black workforce resisted white American authority, the firm adopted a strategy of labor division by recruiting Hispanic migrants. This labor system drew the company into increased conflict with its host nations, as Central American nationalists denounced not only U.S. military interventions in the region but also American employment of black immigrants. By the 1930s, just as Washington renounced military intervention in Latin America, United Fruit pursued its own Good Neighbor Policy, which brought a reduction in its corporate colonial power and a ban on the hiring of black immigrants. The end of the company's system of labor division in turn pointed the way to the transformation of United Fruit as well as the broader U.S. empire.

The Last Days of Empire and the Worlds of Business and Diplomacy

The Last Days of Empire and the Worlds of Business and Diplomacy
Author: Charles Cullimore
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2021-06-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1526789051

A personal story, a colorful travelogue and an inside experience of politics and international relations, which includes a poignant 'imperial' sidelight with the discovery of his grandmother's grave in India. Charles Cullimore's was a varied life from the end of the British Empire to high-level business and finally with major roles in post-imperial British policy. He rounded off a career appropriately by lecturing at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, underpinning academic study with his hands-on experience in international diplomacy. The account is modest, graphic, full of incident, personality and anecdote, and face-to-face encounters with leading actors. After the 'Devonshire course' for entrants to the Colonial Service came appointment to Tanganyika and here is an intimate personal and 'official' account of district administration and the rise of TANU - Tanganyika African National Union - and decolonisation. The moving letter from Julius Nyerere reproduced in the text sums up a close relationship at the end of empire between the administration and the rising politicians assuming power at decolonisation when Tanganyika became Tanzania shortly after. A spell at ICI in 'personnel' followed in Scotland, Malaysia and Singapore. And then back to government service in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office focussed on Overseas Development, followed by a posting to Bonn at the height of the Cold War. The author came back to British Commonwealth service as Head of Chancery in India, Deputy High Commissioner in Australia, Head of the Central African Department in the FCO covering relations with the 'front-line States' and their conflict with South Africa. Finally, he was High Commissioner in Uganda at the time of state-recovery under Museveni - an intimate account full of fascinating personal contact. A personal story, a colorful travelogue and an inside experience of politics and international relations, which includes a poignant 'imperial' sidelight with the discovery of his grandmother's grave in India.

Monarchy and the End of Empire

Monarchy and the End of Empire
Author: Philip Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2013-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199214239

Examines the relationship between the British government, the Palace, and the modern Commonwealth since 1945 and argues that the monarchy's relationship with the Commonwealth, which was initially promoted by the UK as a means of strengthening imperial ties, increasingly became an impediment to British foreign policy.

Globalists

Globalists
Author: Quinn Slobodian
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674244842

George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year “A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best.” —Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it. “Slobodian’s lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.” —Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion “Fascinating, innovative...Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.” —Adam Tooze, Dissent “The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.” —Boston Review

Human Rights and the End of Empire

Human Rights and the End of Empire
Author: Alfred William Brian Simpson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 1188
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199267897

The European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 established the most effective international system of human rights protection ever created. This is the first book that gives a comprehensive account of how it came into existence, of the part played in its genesis by the British government, and of its significance for Britain in the period between 1953 and 1966.

The Empire Trap

The Empire Trap
Author: Noel Maurer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2013-08-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400846609

How the United States became an imperial power by bowing to pressure to defend its citizens' overseas investments Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. government willingly deployed power, hard and soft, to protect American investments all around the globe. Why did the United States get into the business of defending its citizens' property rights abroad? The Empire Trap looks at how modern U.S. involvement in the empire business began, how American foreign policy became increasingly tied to the sway of private financial interests, and how postwar administrations finally extricated the United States from economic interventionism, even though the government had the will and power to continue. Noel Maurer examines the ways that American investors initially influenced their government to intercede to protect investments in locations such as Central America and the Caribbean. Costs were small—at least at the outset—but with each incremental step, American policy became increasingly entangled with the goals of those they were backing, making disengagement more difficult. Maurer discusses how, all the way through the 1970s, the United States not only failed to resist pressure to defend American investments, but also remained unsuccessful at altering internal institutions of other countries in order to make property rights secure in the absence of active American involvement. Foreign nations expropriated American investments, but in almost every case the U.S. government's employment of economic sanctions or covert action obtained market value or more in compensation—despite the growing strategic risks. The advent of institutions focusing on international arbitration finally gave the executive branch a credible political excuse not to act. Maurer cautions that these institutions are now under strain and that a collapse might open the empire trap once more. With shrewd and timely analysis, this book considers American patterns of foreign intervention and the nation's changing role as an imperial power.

Britain's Declining Empire

Britain's Declining Empire
Author: Ronald Hyam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 14
Release: 2007-02-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316025659

An authoritative political history of one of the world's most important empires on the road to decolonisation. Ronald Hyam's 2007 book offers a major reassessment of the end of empire which combines a study of British policymaking with case studies on the experience of decolonization across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. He describes the dysfunctional policies of an imperial system coping with postwar, interwar and wartime crises from 1918 to 1945 but the main emphasis is on the period after 1945 and the gradual unravelling of empire as a result of international criticism, and the growing imbalance between Britain's capabilities and its global commitments. He analyses the transfers of power from India in 1947 to Swaziland in 1968, the major crises such as Suez and assesses the role of leading figures from Churchill, Attlee and Eden to Macmillan and Wilson. This is essential reading for scholars and students of empire and decolonisation.

Ending Empire

Ending Empire
Author: Hendrik Spruyt
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801489723

At the dawn of the twentieth century, imperial powers controlled most of the globe. Within a few decades after World War II, many of the great empires had dissolved, and more recently, multinational polities have similarly disbanded. This process of reallocating patterns of authority, from internal hierarchy to inter-state relations, proved far more contentious in some cases than in others. While some governments exited the colonial era without becoming embroiled in lengthy conflicts, others embarked on courses that drained their economies, compelled huge sacrifices, and caused domestic upheaval and revolution. What explains these variations in territorial policy? More specifically, why do some governments have greater latitude to alter existing territorial arrangements whereas others are constrained in their room for maneuver? In Ending Empire, Hendrik Spruyt argues that the answer lies in the domestic institutional structures of the central governments. Fragmented polities provide more opportunities for hard-liners to veto concessions to nationalist and secessionist demands, thus making violent conflict more likely. Spruyt examines these dynamics in the democratic colonial empires of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. He then turns to the authoritarian Portuguese empire and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Finally, the author submits that this theory, which speaks to the political dynamics of partition, can be applied to other contested territories, including those at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

End of Empire

End of Empire
Author: Brian Lapping
Publisher:
Total Pages: 560
Release: 1985
Genre: Commonwealth countries
ISBN: 9780246119698

The British Press, Public Opinion and the End of Empire in Africa

The British Press, Public Opinion and the End of Empire in Africa
Author: Rosalind Coffey
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2022-01-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030894568

This book provides fresh insights into how the British press affected both British perceptions of decolonisation in Africa and British policy towards it during the ‘wind of change’ period. It also reveals, for the first time, the extent to which British newspaper coverage was of relevance to African and white settler readerships. British newspapers informed the political strategies and civic cultures of African activists, nationalists, liberal whites in Africa, the staunchest of white settler communities, and the first governments of independent African states and their opponents. The British press, British public opinion and British journalists became etched into the lived experiences of the end of empire affecting Anglo-African and Anglo-settler relations to this day. Arguing that the press cast a transnational web of influence over the decolonisation process in Africa, the author explores the relationships between the British, African and settler public and political spheres, and highlights the mediating power of the British press during the late 1950s. The book draws from a range of British newspapers, official government documents, newspaper archives, interviews, memoirs, autobiographies and articles printed in African and white settler papers. It will be of interest to historians of decolonisation, Africa, the media and the British Empire.