Bloomsbury Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge

This thought-provoking and original collection looks at how intellectuals and their disciplines have been shaped, halted and advanced by the rise and fall of empires. It illuminates how ideas did not just reflect but also moulded global order and disorder by informing public policies and discourse. Ranging from early modern European empires to debates about recent American hegemony, Empire and the Social Sciences shows that world history cannot be separated from the empires that made it, and reveals the many ways in which social scientists constructed empires as we know them. Taking a truly global approach from China and Japan to modern America, the contributors collectively tackle a long durée of the modern world from the Enlightenment to the present day. Linking together specific moments of world history it also puts global history at the centre of a debate about globalization of the social sciences. It thus crosses and integrates several disciplines and offers graduate students, scholars and faculty an approach that intersects fields, crosses regions and maps a history of global social sciences. Review There is no single work that tries to view the social sciences with the same kind of global yet at the same time regionally specific historical breadth as the proposed book. [Adelman] opens many windows to the history of the social sciences and their relationships with empires and imperialism --Dominic Sachsenmaier, Professor of Global History, Georg-August-University Göttingen, GermanyThis is an interesting and timely volume that will be of interest to a broad academic readership, including people interested in global history, intellectual history, history of the human sciences, history of empire, history of international institutions, Latin American history, and Asian history. The line-up of contributors is very strong, a wide range of geographical areas are covered and the volume has a broad coherence --Andrew Sartori, Professor of History, New York University, USA About the Author Jeremy Adelman is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University, USA. He has been the recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, as well as recognitions for his pioneering teaching at Princeton. Chair of the Princeton History Department for the last four years, he is also the founder of the Council for International Teaching and Research.