Inlands – Empires, Contested Interiors, and the Connection of the World

Conventional narratives of empires and globalization focus on oceans and coasts, supposing that global connections are seaborne and that historical change proceeds inward from port cities into continental expanses. This book offers a new perspective, examining key inland areas around the world to show how interior regions have shaped global history.

Inlands brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts to explore the modern histories of inland regions across North and South America, Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia, from the American heartland to the Yangzi valley, the Great Dismal Swamp to the Arabian Desert. Together, they argue that interior regions provide a fresh vantage point from which to rethink the history of global connection and disconnection. Each chapter reconsiders national, regional, or imperial histories from an inland perspective, demonstrating how such places have spurred global change.

Contributors reveal the critical role inlands and their Indigenous inhabitants have played in the development, projection, and contestation of state power, showing how some interiors became essential to empire even as others developed in resistance to it. By examining the struggle to integrate inland regions into wider networks of exchange, this book also sheds light on the unevenness and the limits of contemporary globalization. A new global history of interior spaces, Inlands presents a bold challenge to dominant understandings of the making of today’s connected world.

Robert S. G. Fletcher is professor of history and Kinder Professor of British History at the University of Missouri. His books include British Imperialism and “The Tribal Question”: Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919–1936 (2015) and The Ghost of Namamugi: Charles Lenox Richardson and the Anglo-Satsuma War (2019).

Alec Zuercher Reichardt is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri.