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  • Published: 4 February 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241511145
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

The New Age of Empire

How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World




An essential new work outlining the origin and ongoing reality of global racism, from Britain's leading authority on Black Studies.

The New Age of Empire takes us back to the beginning of the European Empires, outlining the deliberate terror and suffering wrought during every stage of the expansion, and destroys the self-congratulatory myth that the West was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead, genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones upon which the West was built, and we are still living under this system today: America is now at the helm, perpetuating global inequality through business, government, and institutions like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

The West is rich because the Rest is poor. Capitalism is racism. The West congratulations itself on raising poverty by increments in the developing world while ignoring the fact that it created these conditions in the first place, and continues to perpetuate them. The Enlightenment, which underlies every part of our foundational philosophy today, was and is profoundly racist. This colonial logic was and is used to justify the ransacking of Black and brown bodies and their land. The fashionable solutions offered by the white Left in recent years fall far short of even beginning to tackle the West's place at the helm of a racist global order.

Offering no easy answers, The New Age of Empire is essential reading to understand our profoundly corrupt global system. A work of essential clarity, The New Age of Empire is a groundbreaking new blueprint for taking Black Radical thought into the twenty-first century and beyond.

  • Published: 4 February 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241511145
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

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Praise for The New Age of Empire

Andrews is ferocious and brilliant and absolutely indispensable

Junot Diaz

Kehinde Andrews is a crucial voice walking in a proud tradition of Black radical criticism and action

Akala

This book is a provocation. It is not meant to make us comfortable or inspired, but rather to remind us of the hard truth that the West was built on slavery, genocide, and colonialism-the bases of racial capitalism and modern empire. And as Kehinde Andrews argues, we are still living this imperial nightmare, still reaping the consequences of contemporary racialized violence and exploitation. The lesson: no freedom under racism, no future under capitalism, no justice without decolonization.

Robin Kelley

Professor Andrews takes the reader on a journey, and it isn't a comfortable one. I challenge you to pick up this book and read it carefully, once that is done, I am sure the reader will be challenged, in thinking and hopefully actions moving forward.

Dawn Butler

This book is a radical, necessary indictment of the racist structures that produced the current anti-Black world order. Historically rigorous and deeply researched, Kehinde Andrews writes with lucidity about the global tactics of Western imperialism, centuries ago and at present. His clear-eyed analysis insists upon the revolutionary acts of freedom we will need to break out of these systems of violence

Ibram X. Kendi

Skillfully interweaving economics, politics, and history to debunk popular narratives of social progress, this searing takedown hits home

Publisher's Weekly

An uncompromising account of the roots of racism today

Kimberlé Crenshaw