100 Books Like Western Women and Imperialism

This slim but explosively dramatic book makes everything you were ever told about the history of polar exploration seem like nothing more than random trivia. Lisa Bloom takes those stories you think you know and offers up the hidden realities of them in ways that explain the race, gender, and sexual politics of not just polar exploration but the idea of “modernity” itself as a crutch for justifying the “penetration” of people and spaces existing at the “ends of the earth.”

This book takes a tour through the most impactful and influential popular literature circulating in the 19th and early 20th centuries—the stories that laid the groundwork for a collective Anglo-American consciousness—and explains how these stories produced a set of feminist ideologies that were reliant upon a racist and imperialist imaginary. Whether it is her chapter on the “King and I” in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or her tracking of the “picanninies” romping through “Peter Pan” and a “Passage to India,” Donaldson explains how we came to associate feminism with the ideologies of slavery and colonialism in the deepest recesses of our imaginations.

This book teaches us how German imperialism tied itself to the emancipation of women, by focusing on the expansion of the German state into Africa and the Pacific rim. In the generations leading up to the establishment of the Third Reich, German women made themselves indispensable to German imperialism as nurses, wives, missionaries, mothers, sexual partners, and upholders of racial purity. This is simply one of the smartest books I’ve ever read, making clear the granular details of how empires were built and why gender matters in our understanding of them.

This might be my favorite history book, period. Conor explains how “modern womanhood” in Australia came into being and was marked by the successful managing of one’s (sexualized and objectified) public appearance, including the way “primitive woman” (aboriginal or black) was constructed as a colonialist foil for the modern (white) Australian woman—whether she was a “screen-struck” movie fan, beauty contestant, or flapper. This book makes clear how women, as the principal focus of a newly visual mass media, came to define their “liberation” in sexual as well as racial and nationalist terms.

I found Rappaport’s book to be a really marvelous example of what is now being called “entangled history.” That kind of history picks up one topic and follows it wherever it leads. Because tangible things are easier to trace than intangible things (like ideas or rumors), commodity history is a lively subject, but this is something larger.

Tea has a chemistry to it that people gravitate toward, but there is so much more to the story about why it is so widely consumed in our world today. Once it was a substance grown and sipped in China, but European trading companies also discovered that markets for it could be created. It was famously a commodity deeply entangled in the opium wars, in the new plantation economies of northeastern India and Sri Lanka/Ceylon, and other systems of production.

But Rappaport has so much more to say about the consumption side, too:… show more.

This book is among the most informative and inspiring books ever. The subject treats–the Indian subcontinent’s experience (comparable to that of Ireland) of profit-seeking ‘entrepreneurs’ [especially the predatory East India Company] backed by British governments and opportunistic Western/Christian evangelical forces [giving ‘religious/moral’ ‘justification’ to foreign invasion, occupation and related apartheid type instituted rule–provides need to know detail for those in the West [UK] in an age where those wilfully or through ignorance of the facts are attached to supremacist nostalgic ‘Brexit’ views of yesteryear colonialism as benign, are still poorly challenged.

I am honored to be recognized as a member of the decolonization movement. This book is compelling and deserves mandatory inclusion in world history curricula. 

Not strictly centered on translation and not exactly a conventional book, this collection of essays is often considered the birthplace of the now widely-used (though often misunderstood) concept of “cultural translation.”

Bhabha is a notoriously demanding author, and reading this book can, at times, feel like entering a conversation already in progress. Bhabha will move from Salman Rushdie, through Joseph Conrad or Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida, often within the space of a single paragraph or page. But Bhabha’s intellectual rigour justifies the effort. This challenging but rewarding book unleashes the radical potential of translation studies.

For Bhabha, translation transcends mere linguistic or even cultural exchange to become a tool for grappling with cultural transformation and difference more generally. It is a way of thinking about resistance and religion, innovation and imitation, politics and power. This book was love at first sight for me, and although I… show more.

I ran across this book recently and it resonated with my attempts to expand how we think about the relationship between past and present. In my own thinking about Rome and America, I wanted to move away from just talking about analogies. Storey opens up a way of thinking about the relationship between Rome and America that departs from analogies and explores how America incorporated a Roman logic of empire, not by recalling a past but by grafting itself onto a constellation of images and metaphors that connect past with present. The book is challenging, but opens up a different way of thinking about history.

This book begins with cholera and the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and vampire novels, and then moves forward in time to examine the longstanding continued use of epidemic disease as a metaphor to describe political revolt and terror. Kolb argues that the colonial state has long positioned itself as a hygienic "doctor" treating political "disease," and shows clearly why understanding political activity within the frame of disease is so damaging. Moving through the mid-twentieth century with Camus and Algeria, to Rushdie, 2001, and the shameful history of the US torture memo, Kolb's argument is both historically sweeping and persuasive.   

In this book, Stoler rightly warns us against assuming that colonial violence existed only in the past. But she also shows that it is hard to grasp the effects of colonial power in our contemporary world.

This is because that power wraps “around contemporary problems,” including “toxic dumping in Africa, devastated ‘waste lands,’ precarious sites of residence, ongoing dispossession, or pockets of ghettoized urban quarters,” as well as migration crises the world over.

Imperial formations of power have transformed, adhering “in the logics of governance,” plaiting “through racialized distinctions,” and holding “tight to the less tangible emotional economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments that manifest in bold acts of refusal to abide by territorial restrictions.”

Empires, old and new, intentionally conceal and silence their brutality, failures, and disorderliness and thus keep us in the dark while making us complicit in their violence.