The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created, in the words of George Orwell, a world “horribly stable” and “a peace that is no peace,” increasing power of the state over the individual and of the United States over the world. Atomic Capitalism critically examines this view and assumptions about preponderance of the United States and the state itself by placing nuclear infrastructures in a global and transnational perspective. The discovery of nuclear things— radium, radioactivity, uranium’s properties of fission, and plutonium— powerfully linked nuclear infrastructures to corporate violence, colonialism (settler and non-settler), and genocide, which characterized late nineteenth and twentieth-century Euro-American empires. The uranium cycle and its material infrastructures thus both benefited from and bolstered an extractivist, surveillant, and inegalitarian global system through which capitalist actors and networks benefited by disenfranchising people in faraway colonies, dependent territories, and at home. The outcome has been a complex extractivist web of inequalities that is intrinsically linked to our current economic and environmental crises.

Partition Machine is an exercise in pluralities and interconnections across continents of multiple conceptions and practices of breakups, divisions, partitions, and separations from the nineteenth century to the postwar years. It calls for greater attention to the study of ‘small p partitions’ to compare and connect these practices of spatial injustice across time and space, in contrast to ‘capital P Partitions’ of singular historical accounts of specific territorial separations. Not only does this volume showcase new research on territorial divisions such as those in German and French empires in Africa and Asia and their worldmaking potential, but the volume also presents well-known partitions in new light, such as those of the Ottoman lands, Ireland, Palestine, and Punjab. Divided into two thematic parts— dreams and deeds— that are chronologically organized, the collection of ten essays with an introduction and afterword, connects multiple conceptions and practices of breakups, divisions, partitions, and separations that are seldom treated together.

The volume is partially based on a 2023 British Academy Conference (BAC23\220114) that Jayita Sarkar had convened, with the volume's publication anticipated in 2027. Contributing authors include Glenda Sluga (EUI), Charles Maier (Harvard), Frederick Cooper (NYU), and others.