Please note: this event has passed
For the first time in millennia we live without formal empires. But that doesn't mean we don't feel their presence rumbling through history. From Russia's incursions in Ukraine to Brexit; from Trump's 'America-first' policy to China's forays into Africa; from Modi's India to the hotbed of the Middle East, Puri provides a bold new framework for understanding the world's complex rivalries and politics.
The Great Imperial Hangover has been featured in the Financial Times "2020 year ahead in books". It is published by Atlantic Books and copies will be on sale at this event ahead of the release date (which is 16 April).
Advance praise comes from Robert D. Kaplan (The Return of Marco Polo's World) who has called it "an excellent read". And from Paul Strathern (A History of the World in Ten Empires), who considers it "masterly. I found new insights on almost every page. It achieves the remarkable feat of deepening our self-knowledge while at the same time broadening our understanding of the world around us".
About the author
Samir Puri was raised in 1980s and 1990s London in a family that had traversed three continents in three generations, from Asia to Africa to Europe.
He later completed a PhD at Cambridge University in International Relations, worked at RAND, and then the Foreign Office, where his assignments covered counter terrorism, and a year in east Ukraine monitoring the onset of war in 2014.
After government service, Dr Puri became a lecturer in War Studies at King's College London, and also taught at Cambridge and Johns Hopkins.
The Great Imperial Hangover is a distillation of these varied perspectives: from the academic to the practical; from the personal to the political; and from the descendants of the colonized to those of the colonizers.