Imperialism & Independence in The Books Store

Second edition includes a new introduction by editor Michel Prairie, foreword, maps, chronology and glossary, as well as an index. Thirty-two page photo section features many unpublished photos of the Burkina Faso revolution.

By the mid-1700s substantial differences in life, thought, and interests had developed between the British North American Colonies and the mother country. A distinctly American way of life was rapidly developing. In a few years a new nation would be born and the reverberations from the ensuing conflict would be felt throughout the Western world.

Detailing the entire history of the struggle for independence, from Colonial governments to the early days of the American Republic, The Historical Atlas of the American Revolution uses full-color maps and vivid illustrations in two-page spreads to tell the story of the founding of the United States of America. The book focuses in large part on the land and sea battles of the Revolutionary War, but attention is also paid to the society at large and the international impact of the war for independence.
Coverage includes:

The French and Indian War
George Washington in the West
Native Americans before the War of Independence
Lexington and Concord
Saratoga
Battle of the Chesapeake
Battle of Guilford Courthouse
Battle of Yorktown
Spanish Operations in the South and West
African Americans in the new republic
The Constitution
Foreign Policy after the War
The Emergence of King Cotton

The US is a military giant, better at devastating than pacifying countries. It is politically schizophrenic, split between multilateralism, unilateralism, and an actual inability to rule over foreign lands or control its own supposed client states. It is only a back-seat driver of the global economy, not steering but prodding poorer countries toward an unproductive and unpopular neoliberalism. Finally, it is an ideological phantom, proclaiming attractive values of freedom, democracy, and material plenty to the world, which its militarism brutally contradicts.

During the Raj, one group stands out as having prospered and thrived because of British rule: the Parsis. Driven out of Persia into India a thousand years ago, the Zoroastrian people adopted the manners, dress, and aspirations of their British colonizers, and their Anglophilic activities ranged from cricket to Oxford to tea. The British were fulsome in their praise of the Parsis and rewarded them with high-level financial, mercantile, and bureaucratic posts. The Parsis dominated Bombay for more than a century. But Indian independence ushered in their decline. Tanya Luhrmann vividly portrays a crisis of confidence, of self-criticism, and perpetual agonizing.

This story highlights the dilemmas and paradoxes of all who danced the colonial tango. Luhrmann's analysis brings startling insights into a whole range of communal and individual identity crises and what could be called "identity politics" of this century. In a candid last chapter the author confronts another elite in crisis: an anthropology in flux, uncertain of its own authority and its relation to the colonizers.