"In this wide-ranging, ambitious, and highly readable book, Heather Streets-Slater and Trevor Getz make the case for the interdependence of empires and the global from the Mongols through the Iraq war. They skillfully navigate basic definitions, complex processes, and scholarly arguments based on the latest research to support their argument that global empires were totalizing experiences--historically specific yet marking out a distinctive era in world history. Readers will come away not just with a deeper understanding of what the underpinnings of modern imperialism and colonialism are, but with a greater appreciation of what a global perspective on these developments means as well." --Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois "Heather Streets-Salter and Trevor Getz have written a major overview of modern empires and colonialism that covers the last five-hundred years and that brilliantly summarizes the outpouring of new work placing empires in a global context. Paying as much attention to the Ottoman, Mughal, Ming, and Qing Empires as to European colonialism, the work stresses the continuous interaction between colonizer and colonized and is as attentive to gender and identity issues as it is to conquest, collaboration, and resistance. A must read for global historians interested in empires. The footnotes and the bibliography are treasures in themselves." --Robert Tignor, Princeton University "At long last we have a truly comprehensive and comparative study of global empires from the early modern era until the twenty-first century. The authors are to be commended for their unfailingly lucid presentation of the entangled processes, in multiple scales and in many places, which ultimately forged the world that we inhabit today. Empires and Colonies represents both an invaluable classroom text and a rich compendium for scholars." --Julia Clancy-Smith, University of Arizona