Soldiering through Empire Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific [Hardcover]

In the decades after World War II, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilian contractors across Asia and the Pacific found work through the U.S. military. Recently liberated from colonial rule, these workers were drawn to the opportunities the military offered and became active participants of the U.S. empire, most centrally during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Simeon Man uncovers the little-known histories of Filipinos, South Koreans, and Asian Americans who fought in Vietnam, revealing how U.S. empire was sustained through overlapping projects of colonialism and race making. Through their military deployments, Man argues, these soldiers took part in the making of a new Pacific world—a decolonizing Pacific—in which the imperatives of U.S. empire collided with insurgent calls for decolonization, producing often surprising political alliances, imperial tactics of suppression, and new visions of radical democracy.

Simeon Manis Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. 

"Exhaustively researched and powerfully written, this is a mind-blowing, landmark book. Man brilliantly shows how the freedom and dreams of the formerly colonized, the laboring classes, and the racially marginalized across the Asia Pacific and in the United States came to be mobilized toward the making of the U.S. empire and its perpetual state of war; yet in recuperating largely forgotten transnational oppositional movements he offers hope for a more just future."—Takashi Fujitani, author of Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II

"Soldiering through Empire is a tour de force of methodological innovation that breaks with scholarly traditions of studying national histories in isolation from one another. Instead, Man reveals the mutually constitutive natures of bilateral and polylateral international relations. Moreover, by showinl¢