Nationalizing Empires
The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.
This collection of essays by outstanding scholars includes case studies of Europe-based empires, whether those of Bourbon Spain, Napoleonic France, Italy, Great Britain, Oldenburg Denmark, Germany, Habsburg Austro-Hungary, Late-Ottoman Turkey or Romanov Russia. While some of the contributions include earlier periods, the primary focus is on the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller Preface
Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller Introduction: Building Nations In and With Empires – a Re-assessment
Neil Evans ‘A World Empire, Sea-Girt’ The British Empire, State and Nations, 1780-1914
Michael Broers. The First Napoleonic Empire, 1799-1815
Robert Aldrich Colonialism and Nation-Building in Modern France
Xosé-Manoel Núñez Nation-Building and Regional Integration: The Case of the Spanish Empire (1700-1914)
Stefan Berger Building the Nation Among Visions of German Empire
Alexei Miller The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation
Andrea Komlosy The Habsburg Monarchy (1804 – 1918), Imperial Cohesion, Nation-Building and Regional Integration
Howard Eisenstat. Modernization, Imperial Nationalism, and the Ethnicization of Confessional Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire
Uffe Østergård Nation-Building and Nationalism in the Oldenburg Empire
David Laven and Elsa Damien. Empire, city, nation: Venice’s imperial past and the ‘making of Italians’ from unification to fascism
Comments
Jean-Frédéric Schaub European Old Regime and the Imperial Question: A Modernist View at a Contemporary Question.
Dominic Lieven. Empires and their Core territories on the Eve of 1914: A Comment
Philipp Ther, “Imperial Nationalism” as Challenge for the Study of Nationalism
Alfred J. Rieber, Nationalizing imperial armies. A comparative and transnational study of three empires
Jörn Leonhard Multi-Ethnic Empires and Nation-Building: Comparative Perspectives on the late Nineteenth Century and the First World War