For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho) possessed an independent police force that operated within the space of Japan’s informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged with "protecting and controlling" local Japanese communities first in Korea and later in China, these consular police played a critical role in facilitating Japanese imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remarkably, however, this police force remains largely unknown. Crossing Empire’s Edge is the first book in English to reveal its complex history. Based on extensive analysis of both archival and recently published Japanese sources, Erik Esselstrom describes how the Gaimusho police became deeply involved in the surveillance and suppression of the Korean independence movement in exile throughout Chinese treaty ports and the Manchurian frontier during the 1920s and 1930s. It had in fact evolved over the years from a relatively benign public security organization into a full-fledged political intelligence apparatus devoted to apprehending purveyors of "dangerous thought" throughout the empire. Furthermore, the history of consular police operations indicates that ideological crime was a borderless security problem; Gaimusho police worked closely with colonial and metropolitan Japanese police forces to target Chinese, Korean, and Japanese suspects alike from Shanghai to Seoul to Tokyo. Esselstrom thus offers a nuanced interpretation of Japanese expansionism by highlighting the transnational links between consular, colonial, and metropolitan policing of subversive political movements during the prewar and wartime eras. In addition, by illuminating the fervor with which consular police often pressed for unilateral solutions to Japan’s political security crises on the continent, he challenges orthodox understandings of the relationship between civil and military institutions within the imperial Japanese state. While historians often still depict the Gaimusho as an inhibitor of unilateral military expansionism during the first half of the twentieth century, Esselstrom’s exposé on the activities and ideology of the consular police dramatically challenges this narrative. Revealing a far greater complexity of motivation behind the Japanese colonial mission, Crossing Empire’s Edge boldly illustrates how the imperial Japanese state viewed political security at home as inextricably connected to political security abroad from as early as 1919—nearly a decade before overt military aggression began—and approaches northeast Asia as a region of intricate and dynamic social, economic, and political forces. In doing so, Crossing Empire’s Edge inspires new ways of thinking about both modern Japanese history and the modern history of Japan in East Asia.

Weaving U.S. history into the larger fabric of world history, the contributors to Crossing Empires de-exceptionalize the American empire, placing it in a global transimperial context. They draw attention to the breadth of U.S. entanglements with other empires to illuminate the scope and nature of American global power as it reached from the Bering Sea to Australia and East Africa to the Caribbean. With case studies ranging from the 1830s to the late twentieth century, the contributors address topics including diplomacy, governance, anticolonialism, labor, immigration, medicine, religion, and race. Their transimperial approach—whether exemplified in examinations of U.S. steel corporations partnering with British imperialists to build the Ugandan railway or the U.S. reliance on other empires in its governance of the Philippines—transcends histories of interimperial rivalries and conflicts. In so doing, the contributors illuminate the power dynamics of seemingly transnational histories and the imperial origins of contemporary globality. Contributors. Ikuko Asaka, Oliver Charbonneau, Genevieve Clutario, Anne L. Foster, Julian Go, Michel Gobat, Julie Greene, Kristin L. Hoganson, Margaret D. Jacobs, Moon-Ho Jung, Marc-William Palen, Nicole M. Phelps, Jay Sexton, John Soluri, Stephen Tuffnell

Based on a decade of research, The Empires' Edge examines the tremendous damage the militarization of the Pacific has wrought and contends that the great political contest of the twenty-first century is about the choice between domination or the pursuit of a more egalitarian and cooperative future.

Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, Georgia is a country of rainforests and swamps, snow and glaciers, and semi-arid plains. It has ski resorts and mineral springs, monuments and an oil pipeline. It also has one of the longest and most turbulent histories in the Christian or Near Eastern world, but no comprehensive, up-to-date account has been written about this little-known country—until now. Remedying this omission, Donald Rayfield accesses a mass of new material from recently opened archives to tell Georgia’s absorbing story. Beginning with the first intimations of the existence of Georgians in ancient Anatolia and ending with the volatile presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, Rayfield deals with the country’s internal politics and swings between disintegration and unity, and divulges Georgia’s complex struggles with the empires that have tried to control, fragment, or even destroy it. He describes the country’s conflicts with Xenophon’s Greeks, Arabs, invading Turks, the Crusades, Genghis Khan, the Persian Empire, the Russian Empire, and Soviet totalitarianism. A wide-ranging examination of this small but colorful country, its dramatic state-building, and its tragic political mistakes, Edge of Empires draws our eyes to this often overlooked nation.

From 1985 to 2001, the collaborative research initiative known as the Bannu Archaeological Project conducted archaeological explorations and excavations in the Bannu region, in what was then the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, now Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. This Project involves scholars from the Pakistan Heritage Society, the British Museum, the Institute of Archaeology (UCL), Bryn Mawr College and the University of Cambridge. This is the third in a series of volumes that present the final reports of the exploration and excavations carried out by the Bannu Archaeological Project. This volume presents the first synthesis of the archaeology of the historic periods in the Bannu region, spanning the period when the first large scale empires expanded to the borders of South Asia up until the arrival of Islam in the subcontinent at the end of the first and beginning of the second millennium BC. The Bannu region provides specific insight into early imperialism in South Asia, as throughout this protracted period, it was able to maintain a distinctive regional identity in the face of recurring phases of imperial expansion and integration.

On the Edge of Empires explores the mixed culture of North Mesopotamia in the Roman period. This volatile region at the eastern edge of the Roman world became during the imperial period the theater of confrontation for multiple political entities: Rome, Parthia, Sasanian Persia. Roman presence is only recognizable through military installations – forts, barracks, military camps – yet these fascinating lands tell a story of frontier people and soldiers, of trade despite war, and daily life between the Empires. This volume combines archaeological and historical, literary and environmental evidence in order to explore this important borderland between east and west. On the Edge of Empires is a valuable addition to researchers engaged in the historical and archaeological reconstruction of the frontier areas of the Roman Empire, and a fascinating study for students and scholars of the Romans and their neighbours, borderlands in antiquity, and the history and archaeology of empires.

Empires of Tal is a turn based set of rules for 10mm and 15mm miniatures set in fantasy or medieval time period. The game uses a 20mm by 40mm base as the foundation for the rules. Figures sold in 10 or 15mm scale by companies like Eureka Miniatures (eurekamin.com.au), Games Workshop (gamesworkshop.com), Kallistra (kallistra.co.uk) and Pendraken (pendraken.co.uk) are used but not supplied.

This volume is the result of an international conference organized by the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas. Patrick Olivelle has collected and edited the best papers to emerge from the conference. Part I of the book looks at what can be construed from archeological evidence. Part II concerns itself with the textual evidence for the period. Taken together, these essays offer an unprecedented look at Indian culture and society in this distant epoch.

Project Paphlagonia was a multi-period, large-scale programme of regional survey in northcentral Turkey, today the provinces of Çankiri and parts of Karabuek, previously a little explored region. In total, an area of almost 8,500km2 was surveyed between 1997 and 2001, using both extensive and intensive survey techniques. More than 330 sites of archaeological and historical significance were located and recorded. The sites range in date from early prehistoric to Ottoman, and include Palaeolithic camp-sites, Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age settlements and cemeteries, fortified defensive sites of the Hittite and other periods, Phrygian villages and burial tumuli, and a wealth of small towns, villages, farmsteads and hill-top refuges of the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and early Turkish periods. This volume, to be used in conjunction with the Project Paphlagonia website presents synthetic treatments of all these periods as well as studies of the geology, geomorphology and climatology of the region. Studies of long-term settlement trends and patterns complete this publication of an important and productive programme of archaeological and historical survey.

Empire was not fabricated in European capitals and implemented “out there.” Imperial systems affected the metropole as well as the farthest outpost. Empires and the Reach of the Global shows how imperialism has been a shaping force not just in international politics but in the economies and cultures of today’s world.