China鈥檚 last imperial dynasty governed a vast and culturally diverse territory, encompassing a wide range of local political systems and regional elites. But the Qing empire was built and held together by a single imperial elite: the more than two million members of the hereditary Eight Banner system who were at the core of both the military and the bureaucracy. The banner population was multiethnic, linked by shared membership in a clearly demarcated status group defined in law and administrative practice. Banner people were bound to the court by an exchange of loyal service for institutionalized privilege, a relationship symbolically conceptualized as one of slave to master.

Slaves of the Emperor explores the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building: how to develop an effective bureaucracy with increasing administrative capacity to govern a growing polity while retaining the loyalty of the ruling family鈥檚 most important supporters. David C. Porter traces how the banner system created a service elite through its processes of incorporating new members, its employment of bannermen as technical specialists, its imposition of service obligations on women as well as men, and its response to fiscal and ideological challenges. Placing Qing practices in comparative perspective, he uncovers crucial parallels to similar institutions in Tokugawa Japan, imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Slaves of the Emperor provides a new framework for understanding the structure and function of elites both in China and across Eurasia in the early modern period.

Between 2010 and 2017, Canada experienced an efflorescence of Greek tragedy, led by independent Montreal theatre company Scapegoat Carnivale鈥檚 energetic performances of Euripides鈥檚 Medea and Bacchae and Sophocles鈥檚 Oedipus Tyrannus. The performances featured crisp new translations by co-artistic director Joseph Shragge, large casts, and full-throated sung choruses.

Scapegoat Carnivale鈥檚 trilogy of these familiar but rarely performed plays is at the core of this volume, which includes all three novel play scripts, the company鈥檚 stage directions, and helpful annotations that elucidate Greek names and cultural references and place the textual choices in the context of the productions themselves as well as the long manuscript traditions germane to each tragedy. The result sheds light on both the ancient Greek texts and contemporary performance practice, as do accompanying essays introducing the reader to Greek tragedy in fifth-century Athens, reception theories, each play鈥檚 themes and cultural resonances, and how Scapegoat鈥檚 approach to each play fits into broader global trends of performance and reception.

Scapegoat Carnivale鈥檚 Tragic Trilogy invites readers from all backgrounds to encounter these plays, whether they are looking at Greek tragedy for the first time or the fiftieth. It gives everyone the tools to understand where these plays came from, offers insights into how they can and should be performed now, and shows why they are more relevant than ever in contemporary theatre and in life.

African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses from colonialism. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa.

By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.

This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro's operations from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-NAFTA world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out.

Evolving technology accelerated the flow of matter and energy moving through the extractive systems of exhausted mines and revived profitability over and over again in Mexico's mining districts. Studnicki-Gizbert demonstrates how this serial reanimation of a non-renewable resource was catalyzed by capital and supported by state policy and ideology and how each new cycle imposed ever more harmful consequences on both laborers and natural ecologies. At the same time, however, miners and their communities pursued a contending vision鈥攁 moral ecology鈥攖hat defended the healthy reproduction of life and land. This book's breathtakingly long view brings important perspective to environmental justice conflicts around extraction in Latin America today.

Intimation of Revolution studies the rise of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan in the 1950s and 60s by showcasing the interactions between global politics and local social and economic developments. It argues that the revolution of 1969 and the national liberation struggle of 1971 were informed by the 'global sixties' that transformed the political landscape of Pakistan and facilitated the birth of Bangladesh. Departing from the typical understanding of the Bangladesh as a product of Indo-Pakistani diplomatic and military rivalry, it narrates how Bengali nationalists resisted the processes of internal colonization by the Pakistani military bureaucratic regime to fashion their own nation. It details how this process of resistance and nation-formation drew on contemporaneous decolonization movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America while also being shaped by the Cold War rivalries between the USA, USSR, and China.

In this singular firsthand account, a former migrant worker reveals a disturbing system of exploitation at the heart of Canada鈥檚 farm labour system.

When Gabriel Allahdua applied to the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Canada, he thought he would be leaving his home in St. Lucia to work in a country with a sterling human rights reputation and commitment to multiculturalism. Instead, breakneck quotas and a culture of fear dominated his four years in a mega-greenhouse in Ontario. This deeply personal memoir takes readers behind the scenes to see what life is really like for the people who produce Canada鈥檚 food.

Now, as a leading activist in the migrant justice movement in Canada, Allahdua is fighting back against the Canadian government to demand rights and respect for temporary foreign labourers. Harvesting Freedom shows Canada鈥檚 place in the long history of slavery, colonialism, and inequality that has linked the Caribbean to the wider world for half a millennium鈥攂ut also the tireless determination of Caribbean people to fight for their freedom.