Colonialism

Dark Emu (Bruce Pascoe)

Americans do not understand Australia. At all. If Australia is brought up, they think of a few movie and television stars. They think of a vast red desert, perhaps, with a big rock, what’s-its-name...

Salazar (Tom Gallagher)

What will be the political system of the future, in the lands that are still optimistically, or naively, viewed as containing one American nation? Certainly, the current system is doomed, which necessarily means that...

Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Kurdish Snipers Who Broke ISIS (Azad Cudi)

This book appears, to the casual reader, to be propaganda designed to persuade a Great Power, the United States, to aid the Kurdish fight for independence. Like all good wartime propaganda, it grabs the...

Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (Roger Crowley)

Without specific intention, I seem to have turned into a Roger Crowley fanboy, as shown by that I have now read every one of his books. Crowley is a British maritime historian, all of...

The Samurai (Shūsaku Endō)

The Japanese author Shūsaku Endō is known primarily for his 1966 masterwork, Silence, about the persecution of Christians in mid-seventeenth-century Japan. The backdrop of Silence is the aftermath of the Shimabara Rebellion, a peasant...

Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (Carl Schmitt)

This is a book born of a particular time and place. The time was 1962; the place was postwar Europe. The West was frozen in the glare of spreading Communism, paralyzed by the catastrophic...

Singapore: Unlikely Power (John Curtis Perry)

Singapore is, in some ways, the modern Venice, a maritime city made wealthy by being in the right place, with the right assets, at the right time. Also like Venice, it doesn’t loom large...

Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook (Edward Luttwak)

Given that zombie survival manuals and similar how-to books are today all the rage, on sale at every Costco, Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook seems like a selection from the same genre. ...

Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (William Dalrymple and Anita Anand)

Koh-i-Noor is not about the diamond, to my disappointment.  Oh, sure, it makes an appearance here and there in this book.  But very little is actually said here about the diamond itself, probably because...

At the Edge of the World: The Heroic Century of the French Foreign Legion (Jean-Vincent Blanchard)

Everyone knows about the French Foreign Legion.  Mostly, though, our knowledge ranges from impressionistic to false, derived largely from movies and with an overlay of the kneejerk odium that attends colonialism.  At The Edge...