What would a genuinely global history of the planet look like? Where and how should one begin to catalogue, chronicle, dissect the millennia of human activity on the planet—the clash of its battles, the collective jingle of its trade, the quiet murmur of its literary production—without employing “Eurocentric/androcentric” frameworks (251)? There’s an almost Borgesian quality to the task Doyle’s book sets for itself—a (legitimate) frustration with much of what falls currently under the rubric of global history drives the book in an almost relentless trajectory to free itself of contemporary frameworks. Doyle names some of her devils early on (Niall Ferguson, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan; 7), and in many ways Inter-imperiality might be described as an attempt to reiterate the ontological insights of Hegel regarding the dialectical truth of our lived identity, extended and expanded through the longue durée of Braudel, but couched crucially in the terminology of feminist, Marxist,...
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