EBOOK
Wronged by Empire
Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China
Manjari Chatterjee MillerSeries: Studies in Asian Security(0)
About
Although India and China have very different experiences of colonialism, they respond to that history in a similar way-by treating it as a collective trauma. As a result they have a strong sense of victimization that affects their foreign policy decisions even today. Wronged by Empire breaks new ground by blending this historical phenomenon, colonialism, with mixed methods-including archival research, newspaper data mining, and a new statistical method of content analysis-to explain the foreign policy choices of India and China: two countries that are continuously discussed but very rarely rigorously compared. By reference to their colonial past, Manjari Chatterjee Miller explains their puzzling behavior today. More broadly, she argues that the transformative historical experience of a large category of actors-ex-colonies, who have previously been neglected in the study of international relations-can be used as a method to categorize states in the international system. In the process Miller offers a more inclusive way to analyze states than do traditional theories of international relations.
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Reviews
"Manjari Miller's Wronged by Empire provides a refreshing complement to the standard materialist readings of why China and India conduct themselves as they do: by making colonialism the pivot for explaining both their pervasive defensiveness and their conspicuous sense of entitlement, she reminds the international community that it cannot escape China and India's past any more than they themselves
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
"Manjari Chatterjee Miller's erudite and timely book, Wronged by Empire, argues persuasively that trauma theory can be used to understand and explain developing nations' foreign policy decision-making . . . Wronged by Empire is an important work that should be read widely, not only in the academic fields of international relations, political science, and Asian studies, but also by policymakers and
Asian Affairs: An American Review
"Focusing on the two giants, China and India, Wronged by Empire makes a convincing case on how the cognitive effects of colonialism have shaped a 'post-imperial ideology' that emphasizes victimhood and entitlement and is a core driver of the international behavior of these countries, especially with regard to two goals: sovereignty and status. The book is a creative and pioneering contribution to
University of Pennsylvania