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Steven Press. 2017. Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 371 pp.
Rogue empires is an old-new European phenomenon, which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the 1880s and 1890s, and witnessed a fierce race among European powers not to grab land and colonize overseas territories, but to obtain treaties to indirectly govern them.
This trend started as an idea in the 1840s, when James Brooke, a common British subject, managed to sign a treaty with the Sultan of Brunei, which "overnight" made him king of the northwestern part of the island of Borneo, known as Sarawak, a dangerous place and a hunting ground for pirates, but not without significant advantages: it was still free of the sway of Dutch colonists present in the southern part of Borneo and enjoyed a strategic location in view of the expansion of trade with China via the First Opium War. More significantly, Brooke, like those who preceded him and those who would follow his scheme, cherished British colonization in Singapore, which started earlier and believed in the benefits of British civilization and...