the sun never sets: making sense of modern empire

the rumors are true...i'm writing a book!

Dear readers,

I’m writing to share a big announcement that I’ve been sitting on for a while now and am finally able to share with you all: I’M WRITING A BOOK!!!

The title is The Sun Never Sets: Making Sense of Modern Empire, and it’s intended to be a sort of ‘crash course,’ geared toward a general left audience, in what it means to understand imperialism in systemic terms and why the contemporary left—particularly those of us located in the imperial core—need to center anti-imperialism and international solidarity as a core pillar of our politics. The idea is to draw on a rich tradition of anti-imperialist Marxist thought to push back against two of the most common misconceptions about imperialism that one often encounters in political discourse today—first, that empire is primarily a bygone historical injustice whose ‘legacies’ we need to ‘reckon with’ in the present; and second, that imperialism is a practice that individual states engage in rather than a world system of political economy and capitalist exploitation on a global scale.

The book, which I’ve been commissioned to write by the wonderful folks at Haymarket Books, follows along many of the themes that I’ve been exploring in both my writing, my podcast, and my organizing work for a while now. In particular, it builds upon the arguments that I started to lay out in the talk that I gave on “Reviving the Bandung Spirit” at the Socialism 2025 conference last July in Chicago. I previously published the text of that talk as an essay here; be sure to check it out if you’d like to get a preview of the sort of questions I’ll be wrestling with in this book!

Anyone who knows me knows that writing a book—and specifically, writing a book about imperialism—has been a dream of mine for as long as I’ve been pursuing writing in anything remotely resembling a serious or semi-professional way. I truly don’t have the words to express how grateful I am for this opportunity, and how excited I am to take on what I know will be an enormous but extremely rewarding project. It goes without saying that I am so grateful to all of you, my readers, for all of the support and encouragement that you’ve shown me over the years—I truly would not be here without you all.

Some light housekeeping—I hope you’ll continue to stick with me and bear with me as I navigate this project over the coming year, and in particular as I juggle writing a book on top of graduate school, my podcast, political organizing, and the million other things that are going on at any given moment (especially as my hometown continues to resist a fascist federal occupation that is now stretching into its third consecutive month). You may have noticed that my frequency of publishing on Substack has gone down since I started my PhD program, and I have a feeling that trend will only continue now that I have this major project to demand my energy and attention as a writer. In other words, if you were hoping for more regular essays from me on here, I’m afraid you may be in for a bit of disappointment—but I promise it will all be worth it in the end when this book is done!

I’ll keep this message relatively brief and leave things off here—after all, I’ve got a book to write!

Much love and solidarity,

Pranay