The New Age of Empire
How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
"Kehinde Andrews is a crucial voice walking in a proud tradition of Black radical criticism and action" Akala
"An uncompromising account of the roots of racism today" Kimberlé Crenshaw
"This clear-eyed analysis insists upon the revolutionary acts of freedom we will need to break out of these systems of violence" Ibram X. Kendi
The New Age of Empire takes us back to the beginning of the European Empires, outlining the deliberate terror and suffering wrought during every stage of the expansion, and destroys the self-congratulatory myth that the West was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead, genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones upon which the West was built, and we are still living under this system today: America is now at the helm, perpetuating global inequality through business, government, and institutions like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.
The West is rich because the Rest is poor. Capitalism is racism. The West congratulations itself on raising poverty by increments in the developing world while ignoring the fact that it created these conditions in the first place, and continues to perpetuate them. The Enlightenment, which underlies every part of our foundational philosophy today, was and is profoundly racist. This colonial logic was and is used to justify the ransacking of Black and brown bodies and their land. The fashionable solutions offered by the white Left in recent years fall far short of even beginning to tackle the West's place at the helm of a racist global order.
Offering no easy answers, The New Age of Empire is essential reading to understand our profoundly corrupt global system. A work of essential clarity, The New Age of Empire is a groundbreaking new blueprint for taking Black Radical thought into the twenty-first century and beyond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Andrews (Back to Black), a professor of Black studies at Birmingham City University, examines in this wide-ranging and scholarly account how the legacies of "genocide, slavery and colonialism" shape the modern world. He blames Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and John Locke for "justifying White supremacy through scientific rationality," and argues that non-European cultures have contributed significantly more to human knowledge than most Westerners realize. The contemporary wealth of the U.S. and England were made possible by the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Caribbean and by the transatlantic slave trade, Andrews contends, and he sees China's financing of infrastructure projects in Angola, Congo, and Zambia in exchange for "almost monopolistic control" of those countries' natural resources as an update on the old system of imperial exploitation. Meanwhile, neoliberalism ("the most advanced stage of development of the new age of empire") and the gutting of social welfare in the 1980s has subjected citizens of the U.S. and U.K. to rising inequality and substandard health care, inflamed racial tensions, and contributed to both countries' mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic. Skillfully interweaving economics, politics, and history to debunk popular narratives of social progress, this searing takedown hits home.
