Wronged by Empire Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China [Hardcover]

Although India and China have very different experiences of colonialism, they respond to that history in a similar wayby 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 Empirebreaks new ground by blending this historical phenomenon, colonialism, with mixed methodsincluding archival research, newspaper data mining, and a new statistical method of content analysisto 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 actorsex-colonies, who have previously been neglected in the study of international relationscan 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.

Manjari Miller'sWronged by Empireprovides 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 can. A rich and rewarding book. 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 Empireis 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 businesspeople who seekl(