Unconquered States
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In the heyday of empire, most of the world was ruled, directly or indirectly, by the European powers. Unconquered States explores the struggles for sovereignty of the few nominally independent non-Western states in the imperial age. It examines the ways in which countries such as China, Ethiopia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Siam managed to keep European imperialism at bay, whereas others, such as Hawai'i, Korea, Madagascar, Morocco, and Tonga, long struggled, but ultimately failed, to maintain their sovereignty.
The chapters in this book address four major aspects of the relations these countries had with the Western imperial powers: armed conflict and military reform, unequal treaties and capitulations, diplomatic encounters, and royal diplomacy. Bringing together scholars from five continents, this book provides the first comprehensive global history of the engagement of the independent non-European states with the European empires, reshaping our understanding of sovereignty, territoriality, and hierarchy in the modern world order.
H. E. Chehabi is Professor of International Relations and History Emeritus, Boston University, and Honorary Professor, School of History, University of St. Andrews. He studied geography and history at the University of Caen and international relations at Science Po before going to Yale University, where he received his PhD in political science. He has taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and Boston University. He has held a Humboldt Fellowship as well as fellowships at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.
David Motadel is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). A graduate of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar, he has held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Sciences Po, and the Sorbonne. He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2014), which was awarded the Ernst Fraenkel Prize, and the editor of a volume on Islam and the European Empires (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2018, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.