India has become known in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia as ‘the world’s largest democracy’, a ‘natural ally’, the ‘democratic counterweight’ to China and a trading partner of ‘massive economic potential’. This new foreign policy orthodoxy assumes that India will join with these four states and act just as any other democracy would. A set of political and think tank elites has emerged which seek to advance the cause of a culturally superior, if ill-defined, ‘Anglosphere’. Building on postcolonial and constructivist approaches to international relations, this book argues that the same Eurocentric assumptions about India pervade the foreign policies of the Anglosphere states, international relations theory and the idea of the Anglosphere. The assertion of a shared cultural superiority has long guided the foreign policies of the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, and this has been central to these states’ relationships with postcolonial India. This book details these difficulties through historical and contemporary case studies, which reveal the impossibility of drawing India into Anglosphere-type relationships. At the centre of India-Anglosphere relations, then, is not a shared resonance over liberal ideals, but a postcolonial clash over race, identity and hierarchy. A valuable contribution to the much-needed scholarly quest to follow a critical lens of inquiry into international relations, this book will be of interest to academics and advanced students in international relations, Indian foreign policy, Asian studies, and those interested in the ‘Anglosphere’ as a concept in international affairs.

The Anglosphere refers to a community of English-speaking states, nations, and societies centered on Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which has profoundly influenced the direction of world history and fascinated countless observers. This book argues that the origins of the Anglosphere are racial. Drawing on theories of collective identity-formation and framing, the book develops a new framework for analyzing foreign policy, which it then evaluates in case studies related to fin-de-siècle imperialism (1894-1903), the ill-fated Pacific Pact (1950-1), the Suez crisis (1956), the Vietnam escalation (1964-5), and the run-up to the Iraq war (2002-3). Each case study highlights the contestations over state and empire, race and nation, and liberal internationalism and anti-Americanism, taking into consideration how they shaped international conflict and cooperation. In reconstructing the history of the Anglosphere, the book engages directly with the most recent debates in international relations scholarship and American foreign policy

Despite repeated predictions of the demise of America and the English-speaking nations as the world's predominant culture, James C. Bennett believes that this gap will widen in the coming decades. Coining the term anglosphere to describe a loose coalition based on a common language and heritage, Bennett believes that traits common to these countries--a particularly strong and independent civil society; openness and receptivity to the world, its people and ideas; and a dynamic economy--have uniquely positioned them to prosper in a time of dramatic technological and scientific change. In a wide-ranging exploration back to the Industrial Revolution and into the future, The Anglosphere Challenge gives voice to a growing movement on both sides of the Atlantic.

Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire. Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.

The Anglosphere - a transnational imagined community consisting of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK - came to international prominence in the wake of Brexit. The Anglosphere's origins lie in the British Empire and the conflicts of the 20th century. It encompasses an extensive but ill-defined community bonded by language, culture, media, and 'civilisational' heritage founded on the shared beliefs and practices of free-market economics and liberal democracy. Supporters of the Anglosphere argue that it provides a better 'fit' for English-speaking countries at a time when global politics is in a state of flux and under strain from economic crises, conflict and terrorism, and humanitarian disasters. This edited volume provides the first detailed analyses of the Anglosphere, bringing together leading international academic experts to examine its historical origins and contemporary political, social, economic, military, and cultural manifestations. They reveal that the Anglosphere is underpinned by a range of continuities and discontinuities which are shaped by the location of its five core states. The volume reveals that although the Anglosphere is founded on a common view of the past and the present, it continually seeks to realise a shared future which is never fully attained. The volume thus makes an important contribution to debates about the future of the UK outside of the EU, and the potential for the English-speaking peoples to shape the 21st century.

This book analyses the elite project behind Brexit, and considers its framework within the political traditions of English nationalism. Far from being 'Little Englanders', Brexiteers sought to lessen the rupture of leaving the European Union by suggesting a return to alliances with true friends and traditional allies in the Anglosphere.

Spying, the “world’s second oldest profession,” is hardly limited to the traditional great power countries. Intelligence Elsewhere, nevertheless, is the first scholarly volume to deal exclusively with the comparative study of national intelligence outside of the anglosphere and European mainstream. Past studies of intelligence and counterintelligence have tended to focus on countries such as the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, as well as, to a lesser extent, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. This volume examines the deep historical and cultural origins of intelligence in several countries of critical importance today: India, China, the Arab world, and indeed, Russia, the latter examined from a fresh perspective. The authors then delve into modern intelligence practice in countries with organizations significantly different from the mainstream: Iran, Pakistan, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Indonesia, Argentina, and Ghana. With contributions by leading intelligence experts for each country, the chapters give the reader important insights into intelligence culture, current practice, and security sector reform. As the world morphs into an increasingly multi-polar system, it is more important than ever to understand the national intelligence systems of rising powers and regional powers that differ significantly from those of the US, its NATO allies, and its traditional opponents. This fascinating book shines new light into intelligence practices in regions that, until now, have eluded our understanding.

Why does the world speak English? Why does every country at least pretend to aspire to representative government, personal freedom, and an independent judiciary? In The New Road to Serfdom, British politician Daniel Hannan exhorted Americans not to abandon the principles that have made our country great. Inventing Freedom is a much more ambitious account of the historical origin and spread of those principles, and their role in creating a sphere of economic and political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled. According to Hannan, the ideas and institutions we consider essential to maintaining and preserving our freedoms—individual rights, private property, the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government—are not broadly "Western" in the usual sense of the term. Rather they are the legacy of a very specific tradition, one that was born in England and that we Americans, along with other former British colonies, inherited. The first English kingdoms, as they emerged from the Dark Ages, already had unique characteristics that would develop into what we now call constitutional government. By the tenth century, a thousand years before most modern countries, England was a nation-state whose people were already starting to define themselves with reference to inherited common-law rights. The story of liberty is the story of how that model triumphed. How, repressed after the Norman Conquest, it reasserted itself; how it developed during the civil wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the modern liberal-democratic tradition; how it was enshrined in a series of landmark victories—the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the U.S. Constitution—and how it came to defeat every international rival. Yet there was nothing inevitable about it. Anglosphere values could easily have been snuffed out in the 1940s. And they would not be ascendant today if the Cold War had ended differently. Today we see those ideas abandoned and scorned in the places where they once went unchallenged. The current U.S. president, in particular, seems determined to deride and traduce the Anglosphere values that the Founders took for granted. Inventing Freedom explains why the extraordinary idea that the state was the servant, not the ruler, of the individual evolved uniquely in the English-speaking world. It is a chronicle of the success of Anglosphere exceptionalism. And it is offered at a time that may turn out to be the end of the age of political freedom.

Twenty years ago India was still generally thought of as an archetypal developing country, home to the largest number of poor people of any country in the world, and beset by problems of low economic growth, casteism and violent religious conflict. Now India is being feted as an economic power-house which might well become the second largest economy in the world before the middle of this century. Its democratic traditions, moreover, remain broadly intact. How and why has this historic transformation come about? And what are its implications for the people of India, for Indian society and politics? These are the big questions addressed in this book by three scholars who have lived and researched in different parts of India during the period of this great transformation. Each of the 13 chapters seeks to answer a particular question: When and why did India take off? How did a weak state promote audacious reform? Is government in India becoming more responsive (and to whom)? Does India have a civil society? Does caste still matter? Why is India threatened by a Maoist insurgency? In addressing these and other pressing questions, the authors take full account of vibrant new scholarship that has emerged over the past decade or so, both from Indian writers and India specialists, and from social scientists who have studied India in a comparative context. India Today is a comprehensive and compelling text for students of South Asia, political economy, development and comparative politics as well as anyone interested in the future of the world's largest democracy.

We live in a confused and confusing world. This is partly caused by the massive growth of inter-civilisational contacts driven by economic, cultural and communication changes. It is urgent that we understand each other if we are to survive and thrive, yet most of us know very little about the world outside our own civilisation. This book describes the central features of four great civilisations, their history and culture: China, Japan, Europe and the Anglosphere. Through a comparison of their deeper cultural logic and through investigating their dreams and nightmares, their religious, economic, political and social similarities and differences, we may come to a deeper appreciation of their worlds and our own. Drawing on fifty years of travel through these different civilisations and teaching about them at the University of Cambridge, Alan Macfarlane explores how we can remain different and yet live in some sort of harmony through mutual appreciation and understanding.