Moon-Ho Jung 
Menace to Empire [EPUB ebook] 
Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State

One of Smithsonian Magazine’s Favorite Books of 2022
This history reveals how radical threats to the United States empire became seditious threats to national security and exposes the antiradical and colonial origins of anti-Asian racism.


Menace to Empire transforms familiar themes in American history. This profoundly ambitious history of race and empire traces both the colonial violence and the anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Moon-Ho Jung argues that the US national security state as we know it was born out of attempts to repress and silence anticolonial subjects, from the Philippines and Hawaiʻi to California and beyond.

 

Jung examines how various revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific confronted the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored and brutally suppressed those movements, exaggerating fears of pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics that engendered and haunted the national security state—the heart and soul of the US empire ever since.

Table of Content

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Worlds Empire Made


Introduction: Reckoning with History and Empire

1. Suppressing Anarchy and Sedition

2. Conflating Race and Revolution

3. Fighting John Bull and Uncle Sam

4. Radicalizing Hawai’i

5. Red and Yellow Make Orange

6. Collaboration and Revolution 

Conclusion: America Is Not in the Heart


Notes

Index

About the author

Moon-Ho Jung is Professor of History at the University of Washington and the author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation.