Benevolent Empire

"[T]here can be an almost indistinguishable line between humanitarian aid that is benevolent and that which is weaponized...Porter sets out this story masterfully. Alternating between bird’s-eye overviews and fascinating individual stories and details, the author shares a vivid history of the complexities of U.S. humanitarian efforts to address displaced people over the decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."—American Historical Review

"Benevolent Empire is an important book that should be widely read due to its ability to translate a multidimensional, transnational phenomenon into an engaging narrative that speaks to a variety of both contemporary and historical issues...[O]ne cannot help but be struck by the importance of this book to current debates about refugees and asylum-seekers within the context of the U.S. role in the world."—Diplomatic History

"Standing at the intersection of several historiographical fields, Benevolent Empire makes important contributions to each of them. By adding to a growing literature on the histories of U.S. humanitarian assistance and . . . human rights, the book will be essential reading for historians of immigration, American political development, and U.S. international relations."—Journal of American History

"Benevolent Empire makes key contributions to a growing body of scholarship on the 'United States in the world' and across the fields of immigrant and refugee studies, humanitarianism and human rights, and US foreign policy through its illumination of a largely understudied dimension of US globalism — namely, the role that international relief and refugee initiatives have come to play in the making of a deterritorialized American empire...Porter’s insights into the developments of decades past present potential pathways for how a truly humane and humanitarian policy in relation to the world’s dispossessed might be forged."—International Migration Review

"Benevolent Empire interweaves a vast and growing literature on humanitarian relief, the international dimensions of American civil rights reform, immigration, and American political development...[A] well-crafted study...If there is any moral in Porter’s account, it would be the imperative need to more fully awaken the humanitarian sensibility among host-nation populations to admit extensive and long-lasting responsibilities for those unfortunate peoples whose homelands have been torn asunder."—H-Diplo

"Benevolent Empire is a wonderful and important book that makes original contributions on multiple fronts. Immigration and refugee historians, of course, will have this book on their shelves but so will scholars of American political development, of human rights and humanitarianism, and of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy."—Carl Bon Tempo, State University of New York at Albany