10% off all books and free delivery over £40
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

The New Age of Empire

"A lucid, crucial exposé of the pervasive roots of Imperial racism and the urgent, on-going need to decolonise - “racism is a matter of life and death”"

View All Editions

£10.99 £9.89

In Stock. Same day dispatch on orders before 3pm.

Add To Wishlist
Write A Review Look Inside

LoveReading Says

LoveReading Says

Kehinde Andrews’ The New Age of Empire is an urgent, incisive analysis of the origins of Western Imperialism that lays bare its continued racist legacy. Pointing out that “we urgently need to destroy the myth that the West was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics”, the author makes a powerful argument for the need to “trace how genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones upon which West was built.” Indeed, Andrews discusses how the West concocted scientific theories designed to “prove” its superiority, and shows how the Enlightenment provided “the intellectual basis for Western imperialism.” The chapter covering Kant’s “racial logic” is especially mind-blowing on this. 

While we might live in a different age, centuries-old ideologies run deep in what the author terms today’s “new age of Empire”, with their legacies persisting in the form of racial capitalism, colonial nostalgia (as exemplified by Trump’s “make America great again” slogan and Brexit’s promise to “take back control”), racial patriarchy, and the fallacy of post-racialism - “the delusion that we have moved beyond racism, that we are in a post-racial society.” This is a major, vital point - how can we truly obliterate racism if we pretend it’s been overcome? Answer: we cannot. In the author’s words, “As long as we delude ourselves with rebranding and tinkering at the margins we will never be able to address the issue of racism.”

Framing some arguments in the context of COVID-19 (“the delusions of all being in it together, or that viruses do not discriminate, quickly fell apart as the evidence began to show that Covid-19 simply laid bare existing social inequalities”), and drawing on historic, scientific, philosophical, political and economic discourse, this debunks myths, challenges misplaced self-congratulation and is, quite simply, a must-read, wake-up call.

Joanne Owen

eBooks of the Month

Find This Book In

Primary Genre History
Recommendations:

About

Press Reviews

Author

Collections Featuring This Book

You Might Also Like...

A History of the World in 100 Objects

Neil MacGregor

Paperback

In Stock

£15.29 £16.99

Everest 1922

Mick Conefrey

Paperback

In Stock

£9.89 £10.99

Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

Matthew Strickland

Hardback

In Stock

£15.29 £16.99

Resistance

Halik Kochanski

Paperback

In Stock

£18.00 £20.00

Waterloo The Aftermath

Paul O'Keeffe

Paperback

In Stock

£14.39 £15.99