The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World

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. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)