Nationalizing Empires

Description

The relationship between empire and nation-building is ripe for rethinking. This highly original volume argues with great cogency and conviction that, far from nations simply growing out of declining and dissolving empires, these two forms of political belonging were intricately if complicatedly entwined throughout the nineteenth century. Nations—aspirant as well as actual—were conceived and forged in the crucible of those great ethno-cultural formations we call empires. Imperial conceptions of nationality and new nationalising visions of empire were symptomatic of an age when processes of nation- and empire-building ricocheted off each other in multiple ways. This volume has important implications for the historiography of nationalism and for the new imperial history. It makes a powerful case for bringing these two strands of scholarship into much closer conversation with each other. Andrew Thompson, University of Exeter The co-editors have assembled an impressive range of scholars who explore the entangled histories of empires and nationalisms, including the emergence of imperial nationalisms and their legacies in the histories of “post-imperial” nation-states. It also provides an important and rich contribution to transnational history. Mark von Hagen, Arizona State University Nationalizing Empires is an important contribution to the growing literature on the European empires. It jeopardizes the conventional approach of a fundamental opposition between empires and nation-building in focusing on their entanglements and interactions. So, the sixteen case studies and comparative chapters, written by well-known specialists from nine countries, shed a fresh new light on the history of the long nineteenth century. Andreas Kappeler, Vienna University