About Samir Puri
From Samir’s website: Samir Puri was raised in 1980s London in a family that had traversed three continents in three generations, from Asia to Africa to Europe.
He later completed a Ph.D. at Cambridge University in International Relations, worked at RAND, and then the Foreign Office, where his assignments covered counter-terrorism, and a year in east Ukraine monitoring the onset of war in 2014.
After government service, Dr. Puri became a lecturer in War Studies at King’s College London and also taught at Cambridge and Johns Hopkins. He has since left academia and in 2020 was appointed Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore.
His book, ‘The Great Imperial Hangover‘, is a distillation of these varied perspectives: from the academic to the practical; from the personal to the political; and from the descendants of the colonized to those of the colonizers.
The Shadows of Empire: How Imperial History Shapes Our World
A masterful, thought-provoking, and wide-ranging study of how the vestiges of the imperial era shape society today.
In this groundbreaking narrative, The Shadows of Empire explains (in the vein of The Silk Roads and Prisoners of Geography) how the world’s imperial legacies still shape our lives—as well as the thorniest issues we face today.
For the first time in millennia, we live without formal empires. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel their presence rumbling through history. From Russia’s incursions in Ukraine to Brexit; from Trump’s America-First policy to China’s forays into Africa; from Modi’s India to the hotbed of the Middle East, Samir Puri provides a bold new framework for understanding the world’s complex rivalries and politics.
Organized by region, and covering vital topics such as security, foreign policy, national politics, and commerce, The Shadows of Empire combines gripping history and astute analysis to explain why the history of empire affects us all in profound ways; it is also a plea for greater awareness, both as individuals and as nations, of how our varied imperial pasts have contributed to why we see the world in such different ways.
We are all in the throes of a hangover, Samir Puri writes, a “great imperial hangover.” He explains in “The Shadows of Empire” that we are living in the “first empire-free millennium” in history and yet the legacy of these empires still powerfully shapes our times. He is aware of the notion of informal empires but makes a strong case that there was something distinct and notable about formal empires, which existed from the days of the oldest human civilizations until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. This juxtaposition — imperial legacies in a postimperial world — is an intriguing idea that proves a clever prism through which to look at the world. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Britain’s exit from the European Union and the breakdowns in Iraq and Syria all have deep roots in an imperial past that still casts shadows on the present.
Once you start to think along these lines, you see the shadows of empires everywhere. The day I began the book, I had been reading about a topic that Puri does not discuss but is one more example of his thesis: the roiling debate about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of artifacts that were, over the centuries, taken from across the globe and now sit proudly in the great museums of the West. In recent history, because of the reach of Western power, most countries have either acted as imperialists or found themselves subjugated, and in both cases their national identity was profoundly shaped by the experience. Even the United States has been deeply affected by imperialism, Puri says, arguing that American slavery was an idea imported from Europe’s empires and was “the ultimate manifestation of colonization, not of land but people.” In fact, the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes has described the historical circumstance of African-Americans as “a colony within a nation.”
Puri, an expert on armed conflict who has worked in the British Foreign Office, makes the case that Britain’s two pivotal decisions of the last several decades — joining the United States in the Iraq war and Brexit — were both crucially conditioned by the country’s imperial hangover. Once the world’s greatest imperial power, Britain clung to the idea that it had the military strength, the diplomatic skill and above all the ambition to shape far-flung parts of the globe. In addition, modern-day Iraq was a British creation, cobbled together in 1920 out of three provinces of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. London could once again decide Baghdad’s fate.
Brexit was animated by a view that Britain was not a country defined by its proximity to Europe. In fact, what had often characterized British nationalism was its separation from the Continent. (In Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” John of Gaunt gives voice to a deep-rooted English nationalism when he describes the island nation as “this precious stone set in the silver sea / Which serves it in the office of a wall / Or as a moat defensive to a house, / Against the envy of less happier lands.”) The leading Brexiteers, including now-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, often spoke about a “global Britain,” continuing its historical mission around the world, forging closer ties in particular with its old colonies and dominions from Canada to India to Australia.
The Russian case is in some ways even easier to make. Puri points out that “the evolution of Russia was inextricably linked to its expansion, so much so that it is unclear whether Russia created an empire or the process of imperialism created Russia.” He dates the start of Russia’s European-facing empire to the kingdom of Kievan Rus, which began in the ninth century in Kyiv, the present-day capital of Ukraine. From those modest beginnings grew an empire that at its height, after the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, spanned 11 time zones and comprised almost 200 million people. When you consider this history, Vladimir Putin’s remark that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “a major geopolitical disaster of the century” makes sense, especially if you listen to what he said immediately after: “Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.” These deep imperial ties with Ukraine help explain why Putin’s brazen annexation of Crimea was broadly popular within Russia.
We enter the postimperial 21st century with an unusual geopolitical dynamic. The two leading powers on the planet, the United States and China, both derive a great deal of their internal legitimacy and purpose from the notion that they are anti-imperial nations. In America’s case, its identity is tied to its birth story of rebelling against the British Empire. In China’s case, every schoolchild is taught that the country’s modern history began with Western imperialism humiliating and crippling the Middle Kingdom for over a century. And yet both countries have informal empires. The American one is a vast network of economic alliances and military bases scattered around the world. China, for its part, is trying to develop something quite similar with its huge Belt and Road Initiative, which may swell to 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan.
How will these two distinctive postimperial superpowers interact in the 21st century? What will be the consequences of the imperial shadows cast in this new, emerging bipolar era? Unfortunately, Puri does not have much to say about any of this. Having provided a fresh perspective on all the issues I have raised above, he offers brief and intelligent speculation, but mostly proceeds to simply recount the imperial histories of major countries or parts of the world. Much of this is well written, comprehensive and judicious, but it is still potted history. Having introduced a fascinating subject, Puri declines to fully engage and explore his own thesis. He seems to imply that this task is left to the reader, but that leaves too much to us, and lets the author of this stimulating book off the hook too easily.
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