Tag: New Books Network

The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization – Interviews and Reviews

Published on by CIGH Exeter

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter

University of Exeter Professor Martin Thomas’s masterful book The End of Empires and a World Remade (Princeton University Press, 2024) continues to spark discussion, most recently for the New Books Network and H-Diplo.

New Books Network Interview

Martin recently sat down with Morteza Hajizadeh for the New Books Network for a wide-ranging exploration of the book’s key arguments, takeaways, and contemporary resonances. You can listen to the interview here.

H-Diplo Review

The End of Empires was also recently given an insightful review by Eva-Maria Muschik for H-Diplo, which is reposted below:

H-Diplo Review Essay 621

Martin Thomas. The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization. Princeton University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780691190921.

20 March 2025

https://hdiplo.org/to/E621

Review by Eva-Maria Muschik, University of Vienna

Martin Thomas’s The End of Empires is a rich book. Drawing on a wide range of English-language scholarship and a broad base of European archival materials, Thomas puts the issue of violence front and center and reminds us that twentieth-century decolonization was a globally connected process, but not strictly speaking a post-1945 phenomenon. In his understanding, it is also not a finished process. The emphasis throughout the book is on politics, especially individual conflicts, but also transnational networking and international law, economic matters, and the sociology of violence. Readers interested in learning more about the people, ideas, and culture that animated the global history of decolonization may need to turn elsewhere. 

Continue reading “The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization – Interviews and Reviews” →

The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade – A Book Interview with Marc-William Palen

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

Christienna Fryar
SUNY Buffalo State

Cross-posted from New Books in History

conspiracy of free trade coverAccounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of protectionist economic nationalism inspired by German-American economic theorist Friedrich List. The success of Listian protectionism spurred closed-door, aggressive US expansionism and also challenged free-trade orthodoxies in Britain, where political-economic policy also shifted toward protectionism by the end of the nineteenth century.

Listen to the interview here.