How Five Empires Shaped The World And How this Process Shaped Those Empires

Abstract

Alexander Semyonov discusses the recently published book Imperial Visions: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World, by Krishan Kumar, within the broader context of ongoing historiographic debates on global and imperial history, empires as regimes for managing diversity, ruptures and transformations in histories of empire, comparisons between and entanglement of imperial histories, methodological nationalism, and nationalism and collapse of empires. Semyonov contends that Imperial Visions relates to recent developments in the field of global history, provides an important corrective to the view of global historians that empires are primarily political formations, and strengthens the argument of constructivists in the field of global history, such as that of Sebastian Conrad on global history as an approach and the processes of "world making." The most innovative contribution by Imperial Visions to the growing literature on empires is its systematic development of a constructivist approach to empire through ideas and ideologies of imperial mission and entanglement of imperial and national power claims. The article engages the findings by Kumar with what Semyonov calls the growing consensus on "imperial pragmatism" (which stresses governing and practices in the experience of empire) and tests Kumar's conclusions against the existing historical studies of subjectivity and functioning of universalist visions in the context of imperial diversity and hybridity. Semyonov also finds a serious tension in the book between the constructivist approach to empire through imperial ideologies and visions and the structuralist and essentialist view of the "imperial people."