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When in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened on the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. This is, Security and Terror contends, the colonial modernity within which we still live. And its enduring features are especially vivid in the current American century, a moment marked by a permanent War on Terror and pervasive capitalist dispossession. Resisting the assumption that September 11, 2001, constituted a historical rupture, Eli Jelly-Schapiro traces the political and philosophic genealogies of security and terror—from the settler-colonial conquest of the New World to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. A history of the present crisis, Security and Terror also examines how that history is registered and reckoned with in significant works of fiction and theory. In critical dialogue with novels by Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Junot Díaz, and Roberto Bolaño, and the theoretical interventions of Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others, Jelly-Schapiro reveals how the erasure of colonial history enables the perpetual reproduction of colonial culture.

Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism's founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, this book turns that latter belief on its head. It shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland. Moreover—and against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatism—the book demonstrates that Burke's defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke's logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between “civilized” societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing “savage” societies from their “civilized” counterparts. The book also shows that Burke's argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism.

Over one thousand Atlantic-born pirates poured into the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, launching an informal global trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, connecting the North American colonies with the rich trading world of the East Indies. This commerce was directed from neither London nor Lisbon, and neither by a chartered trade company nor by the state. Instead, colonial merchants in New York entered into an informal alliance with Euro-American pirates, who functioned as cross-cultural brokers in settlements they founded in Madagascar. This book explores a global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires, exposing the ways in which informal networks created by pirates and merchants enabled American colonists to attain their consumer desires for East India goods—including slaves. These slaves functioned both as commodities and laborers in this network, some eventually obtaining their freedom as a result of their participation in this Indo-Atlantic maritime world.