An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire

When India detonated a thermonucleaer device in May 1998, Arundhati Roy wrote ‘The End of Imagination’. Since then she has written with clarity, precision and insight about a range of subjects of the utmost importance. This second volume of her collected non-fiction writing brings together fourteen essays written between June 2002 and November 2004. In these essays Arundhati Roy draws the thread of empire through seemingly unconnected arenas, uncovering the links between America’s war on terror, the growing threat of corporate power, the response of nation states to resistance movements, caste and communal politics in India, the role of NGOs, and the perverse machinery of an increasingly corporatized mass media. Meticulously researched and carefully argued, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire is a necessary work for our times.