Another Turn for Transnationalism: Empire, Nation, and Imperium in Early Modern Studies

Abstract

How might early modern studies participate in the larger conversations and transformations of postcolonial studies while attending to the specificities of the age? How might we develop and mobilize period-specific understandings of a moment when states aspire to both empire and nation? My inquiry is motivated not only by the questions posed by the cluster of essays to which it belongs but also by the generalized, and often historically imprecise, move totransnationalismas a catchall for work that complicates our traditional nation-based categories. As I will suggest here, despite the strategic advantages of transnationalism for forging trans-historical connections, for developing a critical pedagogy, and for interrogating our own academy, the approach threatens to occlude the intertwined histories of nation and empire, even as it fails to capture the liminal, transitional qualities of the early modern. Instead, I propose a focus on imperium, to highlight the mimetic rivalries occurring among emergent empires at the very time they solidify sovereignty. Imperium studies challenges the self-sufficient histories of nation and empire by arguing for their imbrication and competition: only a plural history of the intersections among them can provide the full picture. Moreover, imperium studies explicitly engages with the multiple early modern temporalities, as well as allegiances—to an imperial future, certainly, but also to a classical past that remained central as exemplar and motivator and to the imperfect, incomplete work of nation making.