100 Books Like Brokers of Empire

When people ask for book recommendations on Japan’s empire, Louise Young's Japan’s Total Empire usually tops my list. Young focuses on the empire in Manchuria from 1931 to 1945, and highlights Manchuria as more than a Japanese military conquest—it was also a vast cultural project that mobilized the nation behind state intervention at home and imperial expansion abroad. To tell this story, Young focuses on much more than the army and civilian bureaucracy—she also shows how an ideal Manchukuo was imagined by multiple actors, from the mass media and business groups to intellectuals, settlers, and grassroots associations. Empire in Manchuria mobilized the Japanese state and society to an unprecedented degree, and transformed it in enduring and irrevocable ways.  

This skillful history links politics, economics, and military concerns to the development of Japan’s empire in Manchuria. Beginning with the end of the Russo-Japanese War and concluding with the takeover of Manchuria from 1931, Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka shows how Manchuria remained a looming presence within Japanese political life. More strikingly, he argues against the idea that Japanese imperialism in the 1930s represented a radical break from the past. Far from it, he shows the construction of Manchukuo and Japanese foreign policy “as the denouement of an older story as much as the beginning of a new.”  

Takashi Fujitani offers a surprising historical narrative, telling the story of Korean soldiers in the Japanese army alongside that of Japanese-American soldiers in the United States during World War II. What is striking here is how total global war pushed both the United States and Japan to similar policies toward minority populations. Both abandoned more “vulgar” forms of racism (explicit discrimination) for what Fujitani calls a “polite racism,” where minority groups were now deemed as capable of cultural assimilation. But what really is inspiring is that Fujitani juxtaposes two wartime enemies—the United States and Japan—to show just how similar they actually were. 

Sayaka Chatani begins with a simple question. Why did tens of thousands of young men from across the empire in the 1930s and 1940s enthusiastically embrace Japanese nationalism and volunteer for service in the Japanese military? She finds the answer in village youth associations, which served as a vehicle for youth mobilization in rural Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Her most original argument is that ideological campaigns mattered less than the social mobility and the chance for empowerment that youth associations offered. More strikingly, assimilation was not limited to the colonies. Japanese youths in Tohoku, Chatani shows, were “Japanized” in similar ways to those in Korea and Taiwan. This is an innovative and imaginative book. I cannot praise it highly enough.  

This is probably the first book I ever read that made me think of the American Revolution as an event in global history.

I was mesmerized by how Maya Jasanoff gives voice to the Loyalists—the people American history usually forgets—as they faced uncertain futures as exiles in the remnants of the British empire after 1783.

And Maya writes like I want to write, absorbing readers in the human messiness of loss, loyalty, and belonging. I love how she connects intimate, personal stories to the vast sweep of empire, turning difficult work in dozens of dusty archives into living, breathing drama. 

This book focuses on the financial structure of the British Empire in Africa.

It traces how fiscal systems evolved in line with the two central aims of colonial rule: maintaining law and order on the cheap and promoting export production.

The book shows how efforts by colonial states to balance their budgets influenced their relationships with local elites as well as the imperial government.

Gardner uses quantitative data on public revenue and expenditure as well as qualitative archival records to follow the development of fiscal policies in British Africa from the beginning of colonial rule through the first years of independence, including the upheavals of the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the ultimate handover of power.

For an in-depth study of the politics of colonial taxation, this is certainly one of the best books on the market.  

Ellis has done his research for The Cause on both sides of the Atlantic. He presents his perspective on what happened during the Revolution and how close we came to defeat before we even got started.

I’m devoted to accurate research in all my books. The point of non-fiction, as Ellis demonstrates, is to report the facts and assess the results, without emotional or personal perspective.

This tome was a joy to read.  

I learned a great deal from The Cause.

My book on the American Revolution was published prior to The Cause, which made it so intriguing for me to read. 

A multiple award-winning book that has given new wings to the field of early Caribbean history. Wheat’s insightful book forces to reckon with the extraordinarily close links between the Spanish Caribbean and the African slave trade in which Portuguese merchants played a crucial role. Even though local and peninsular Spaniards ruled, Afrodescendant men and women did most of the labor, cultivated most of the land, defended the colonies against other European powers, and constituted an overwhelming majority of the population, both enslaved and free. The early Spanish colonization of the region started a pattern of profound African cultural influence in the Caribbean that endures until today.

Van Diemen’s Land is the former name for the island at the bottom of Australia now called Tasmania. The British who invaded the island changed the colony’s name after the place became infamous. Not only was it home to the British Empire’s most feared convict stations, but it also had a fearsome reputation as the location of one of the most brutal genocides in the Empire’s history. Nick Brodie draws on extensive, yet previously ignored, archival documents to refute the long-standing myth that the Vandemonian War was fought between hapless convict shepherds at the far reaches of the island colony and the island’s Aboriginal inhabitants. He demonstrates instead how this significant conflict was an orchestrated campaign in which the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony used military and para-military forces to prosecute his war against Aboriginal people. Ultimately, the British won the Vandemonian War and then purposefully covered up the military nature… show more.

Molly Warsh’s American Baroque perhaps best captures my point about the Caribbean as a global space. The book follows pearls harvested off the coast of Venezuela from the beds that produced them, through the enslaved divers who harvested them, the imperial officials who taxed them, the merchants who traded them, all the way to the consumers who valued them. It is a commodity history—a sort of history that often features the Caribbean region prominently—while at the same time offering a rich evocation of the many cultural aspects of the pearl’s role. Laborers who secreted pearls on their person to gain some of the wealth they produced and artisans who created lavish objects featuring pearls are as important to this account as the wealthy and powerful who displayed them in portraits of this era.