Description

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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.

About the Author

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

Praise For…

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"Offering an alternative view of the war, Man shifts the story’s center to the Pacific world, broadening the context so that the Vietnam War is not a discrete event, but a link in a U.S. capitalist-imperialist chain shackling East Asia."
— Journal of American-East Asian Relations

"Soldiering Through Empire is an absolutely essential text for diagnosing, understanding, and resisting the ongoing race war that lies at the very heart of the (neo)liberal capitalist project. From this perspective, radical geographers would be remiss not to read Soldiering Through Empire alongside the work of an emerging cohort of junior scholars in ethnic and American studies that are all, in their own ways, sketching out intellectual and political pathways for confronting and defeating the pernicious forces of racial liberalism."
— Society & Space

“Innovative. . . . In a present defined by the militarization of national borders, Man’s work can help us see the seeds of dissent sprouting below the barbed wire.”
— Public Books

"This is a wide-ranging, analytically rich and insightful book which does not lose sight of the ‘big picture.’"
— Connections