“Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves,” goes the popular lyric. The fact that the British built the world’s greatest empire on the basis of sea power has led many to assume that the Royal Navy’s place in British life was unchallenged. Yet, as Sarah Kinkel shows, the Navy was the subject of bitter political debate. The rise of British naval power was neither inevitable nor unquestioned: it was the outcome of fierce battles over the shape of Britain’s empire and the bonds of political authority. Disciplining the Empire explains why the Navy became divisive within Anglo-imperial society even though it was also successful in war. The eighteenth century witnessed the global expansion of British imperial rule, the emergence of new forms of political radicalism, and the fracturing of the British Atlantic in a civil war. The Navy was at the center of these developments. Advocates of a more strictly governed, centralized empire deliberately reshaped the Navy into a disciplined and hierarchical force which they hoped would win battles but also help control imperial populations. When these newly professionalized sea officers were sent to the front lines of trade policing in North America during the 1760s, opponents saw it as an extension of executive power and military authority over civilians—and thus proof of constitutional corruption at home. The Navy was one among many battlefields where eighteenth-century British subjects struggled to reconcile their debates over liberty and anarchy, and determine whether the empire would be ruled from Parliament down or the people up.

Discipline and the Other Body reveals the intimate relationship between violence and difference underlying modern governmental power and the human rights discourses that critique it. The comparative essays brought together in this collection show how, in using physical violence to discipline and control colonial subjects, governments repeatedly found themselves enmeshed in a fundamental paradox: Colonialism was about the management of difference—the “civilized” ruling the “uncivilized”—but colonial violence seemed to many the antithesis of civility, threatening to undermine the very distinction that validated its use. Violation of the bodies of colonial subjects regularly generated scandals, and eventually led to humanitarian initiatives, ultimately changing conceptions of “the human” and helping to constitute modern forms of human rights discourse. Colonial violence and discipline also played a crucial role in hardening modern categories of difference—race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. The contributors, who include both historians and anthropologists, address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century and from Asia to Africa to North America. They consider diverse topics, from the interactions of race, law, and violence in colonial Louisiana to British attempts to regulate sex and marriage in the Indian army in the early nineteenth century. They examine the political dilemmas raised by the extensive use of torture in colonial India and the ways that British colonizers flogged Nigerians based on beliefs that different ethnic and religious affiliations corresponded to different degrees of social evolution and levels of susceptibility to physical pain. An essay on how contemporary Sufi healers deploy bodily violence to maintain sexual and religious hierarchies in postcolonial northern Nigeria makes it clear that the state is not the only enforcer of disciplinary regimes based on ideas of difference. Contributors. Laura Bear, Yvette Christiansë, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Dorothy Ko, Isaac Land, Susan O’Brien, Douglas M. Peers, Steven Pierce, Anupama Rao, Kerry Ward

In 1924, Professor Ueno Eizaburo of Tokyo Imperial University adopted an Akita puppy he named Hachiko. Each evening Hachiko greeted Ueno on his return to Shibuya Station. In May 1925 Ueno died while giving a lecture. Every day for over nine years the Akita waited at Shibuya Station, eventually becoming nationally and even internationally famous for his purported loyalty. A year before his death in 1935, the city of Tokyo erected a statue of Hachiko outside the station. The story of Hachiko reveals much about the place of dogs in Japan's cultural imagination. In the groundbreaking Empire of Dogs, Aaron Herald Skabelund examines the history and cultural significance of dogs in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan, beginning with the arrival of Western dog breeds and new modes of dog keeping, which spread throughout the world with Western imperialism. He highlights how dogs joined with humans to create the modern imperial world and how, in turn, imperialism shaped dogs' bodies and their relationship with humans through its impact on dog-breeding and dog-keeping practices that pervade much of the world today. In a book that is both enlightening and entertaining, Skabelund focuses on actual and metaphorical dogs in a variety of contexts: the rhetorical pairing of the Western "colonial dog" with native canines; subsequent campaigns against indigenous canines in the imperial realm; the creation, maintenance, and in some cases restoration of Japanese dog breeds, including the Shiba Inu; the mobilization of military dogs, both real and fictional; and the emergence of Japan as a "pet superpower" in the second half of the twentieth century. Through this provocative account, Skabelund demonstrates how animals generally and canines specifically have contributed to the creation of our shared history, and how certain dogs have subtly influenced how that history is told. Generously illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, Empire of Dogs shows that human-canine relations often expose how people—especially those with power and wealth—use animals to define, regulate, and enforce political and social boundaries between themselves and other humans, especially in imperial contexts.

This book explores the theme of violence, repression and atrocity in imperial and colonial empires, as well as its representations and memories, from the late eighteenth through to the twentieth century. It examines the wide variety of violent means by which colonies and empire were maintained in the modern era, the politics of repression and the violent structures inherent in empire. Bringing together scholars from around the world, the book includes chapters on British, French, Dutch, Italian and Japanese colonies and conquests. It considers multiple experiences of colonial violence, ranging from political dispute to the non-lethal violence of everyday colonialism and the symbolic repression inherent in colonial practices and hierarchies. These comparative case studies show how violence was used to assert and maintain control in the colonies, contesting the long held view that the colonial project was of benefit to colonised peoples.

Presents a short history of Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian empire, from the Mediterranean to Central Asia. This book sets the rise of Alexander's short-lived empire within the broad context of ancient Near Eastern history under Achaemenid Persian rule, as well as against Alexander's Macedonian background.

Contrary to the stereotypical images of torture, narcotics and brutal sexual abuse traditionally associated with Ottoman or 'Turkish' prisons, Kent Schull argues that, during the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918), they played a crucial role in attempts to transform the empire.

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

In this book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is inherently political and is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school where professionals are trained.

The Affect of Difference is a collection of essays offering a new perspective on the history of race and racial ideologies in modern East Asia. Contributors approach this subject through the exploration of everyday culture from a range of academic disciplines, each working to show how race was made visible and present as a potential means of identification. By analyzing artifacts from diverse media including travelogues, records of speech, photographs, radio broadcasts, surgical techniques, tattoos, anthropometric postcards, fiction, the popular press, film and soundtracks—an archive that chronicles the quotidian experiences of the colonized—their essays shed light on the politics of inclusion and exclusion that underpinned Japanese empire. One way this volume sets itself apart is in its use of affect as a key analytical category. Colonial politics depended heavily on the sentiments and moods aroused by media representations of race, and authorities promoted strategies that included the colonized as imperial subjects while simultaneously excluding them on the basis of "natural" differences. Chapters demonstrate how this dynamic operated by showing the close attention of empire to intimate matters including language, dress, sexuality, family, and hygiene. The focus on affect elucidates the representational logic of both imperialist and racist discourses by providing a way to talk about inequalities that are not clear cut, to show gradations of power or shifts in definitions of normality that are otherwise difficult to discern, and to present a finely grained perspective on everyday life under racist empire. It also alerts us to the subtle, often unseen ways in which imperial or racist affects may operate beyond the reach of our methodologies. Taken together, the essays in this volume bring the case of Japanese empire into comparative proximity with other imperial situations and contribute to a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of the role that race has played in East Asian empire.