Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean

(Paperback)

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A powerful and important reckoning with Britain's imperial legacy and contemporary systemic racism From the 1500s to the mid-twentieth century, the events that took place in the Caribbean - from conquest, colonisation and capitalism to racial slavery, revolution and migration - and the people who forged them played a seminal role in creating modern Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean. By the 1960s, Western global empires had begun to crumble. Yet the British Empire in the Caribbean did not end. Instead, colonialism was replaced with a new type of power whose impact can still be felt- neo-colonialism. Empire Without End offers a new interpretation of the British Empire, its enduring entanglement with the Anglophone Caribbean and the longevity of systemic racism. Taking a longer historical perspective starting in the period of European contact with the Caribbean and ending today, Imaobong Umoren looks at the impact and legacies of racial slavery to explore how later linked histories relating to capitalism, class, labour, war, political economy, poverty, gender and culture are crucial to telling the full story. In doing so, she sets out a compelling strategy to define our roles and responsibilities in challenging the legacy of colonialism and hierarchy - a legacy that continues to blight our society and our politics.

Reviews

Gracefully and insightfully, Empire Without End demonstrates the profound interconnectedness of the contemporary world: the ways in which Britain was made, and the Caribbean unmade, and how politics and culture were profoundly shaped in very different societies. Anyone seeking to understand the upsurge of racial imperialism in our own time cannot afford to miss it -- Pankaj Mishra
This book carefully places todays racial injustice where it belongs in the context of a richly told, unending history of Empire from which we cannot turn away -- Afua Hirsch
A very powerful account of the entanglements between Britain and the Caribbean, from the moment that planters first appreciated the profits they could make from sugar and slavery to Black Lives Matter and the backlash against it -- Alan Lester

Author Bio

IMAOBONG UMOREN is an associate professor of International History at the London School of Economics where she specialises in histories of racism, women and political thought in the Caribbean, Britain and US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Empire Without End received the 2020-2021 British Library Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer's Award.