Nation, State and Empire: The Historiography of ‘High Imperialism’ in the British and Russian Empires

Abstract

In the age of ‘high imperialism’ during the late nineteenth century, the size of the imperial state and its population were increasingly perceived as complementary to economic and military power in asserting status in world power politics. This, however, stimulated a range of critical challenges to imperial legitimacy and cohesion for most European empires. The most pressing of these challenges was how to adapt to the spread of nationalist and democratic ideologies without dissolving their own territorial sovereignty. For a brief period during the late nineteenth century, elites in many European empires adopted similar approaches in an attempt to construct imperial states through the promotion of homogenous, though hierarchical and exclusory, national-imperial identities founded on shared racial or ethno-religious dynamics.