Aspects Of Empire Research Articles

Africa for the Africans? Risorgimento Republicans and Cosmopolitan Nationalists in an Age of Empire

Within a few decades, the Italian people went from a partially colonized to colonizing power. A number of Italian patriots, therefore, who had espoused the ideals of self-determination, republicanism, and cosmopolitan nationalism, found themselves grappling with the rapid entry into colonization of the nation they had fought so hard to create. This article examines the thoughts and ideas of a select group of these individuals: Aurelio Saffi, Agostino Bertani, Alberto Mario, and Jessie White Mario. Focusing on their arguments in the 1880s and 1890s, it examines their reaction to the establishment of the French protectorate in Tunisia (1881), the British invasion of Egypt and defeat of Ahmad ʿUrabi's seemingly nationalist movement (1882), and the development of the Italian colony in East Africa. Throughout, the article emphasizes the shared importance of the civilizing mission in the ideology of both Italian cosmopolitan nationalism and colonialism. Though left-wing thinkers like Saffi or Bertani fervently argued for the freedom of nationalities and a brotherhood of peoples, their belief that a people needed to be sufficiently advanced for self-government, and that not all peoples were equally ready for that stage, allowed them to justify aspects of Italy's African empire. By examining their differing treatment of the people of Egypt, Tunisia, and East Africa, moreover, the article shows the extent and complexity of their classification of civilizations. While they showed a high level of sympathy for the more ‘Europeanized’ Egyptians, they viewed the people of Eritrea as ‘savages’ in need of Italian guidance and intervention. Finally, the article shows how they attempted to distinguish their version of benign and respectful colonization from the more avaricious or aggressive practices of the French or British empires.

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty ed. by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano

Reviewed by: Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty ed. by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano Nicola Martin (bio) Ireland, Early United States, American Revolution, Empire, Imperialism, Sovereignty Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty. Edited by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. 356. Cloth, $49.50.) This volume is the fruit of a conference held to examine Ireland and America as places that were both shaped by, and actively shaped, empire and revolution. Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano have done an excellent job in selecting and drawing together thirteen broadly ranging, both chronologically and geographically, contributions to achieve their aim of complicating current understandings of both places. Written by renowned experts in Atlantic history, the essays employ a wide range of sources to interrogate various aspects of empire and revolution, all engaging with the central comparative of the volume to frame their studies. The essays in Part One provide direct comparisons between Ireland and America on themes including resistance to empire, alternatives to independence, and the experiences of dominant minorities in the empire. Those in Part Two broaden out to examine a number of themes related to the revolutionary era, such as mapping, religion and ideology, and post-independence readjustments, using the comparative as a framework for their investigations. In many ways Nicholas Canny's opening essay sets up that comparative, demonstrating how Irish Catholics interacted with, and were characterized by, European empires from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Canny posits this group as one that was part of, yet also somewhat apart from, both Europe and empire. Having set the scene of Irish interactions and position in the Atlantic world, the remaining essays in Part One deal [End Page 163] with a wide range of issues that demonstrate connections and disconnects between Ireland and America. Gordon S. Wood uses revolutionary pamphlets to demonstrate how patriot polemicists used the Irish example, sometimes distorting it in the process, to set out their arguments as to why Parliament had no constitutional authority over them. Eliga Gould outlines a third way between independence and continued subordination, which Ireland achieved through its negotiated settlement of 1782 and which demonstrated a significant divergence from the American patriots, for whom such an option was no longer acceptable. Other essays in Part One are concerned with the volume's key themes of mobilization and imperial attitudes. T. H. Breen posits the British response to the Boston Tea Party and the Easter Rising, rather than the events themselves, as the spark for popular mobilization, while Matthew P. Dziennik emphasises the importance of military mobilization for reinforcing British and American attitudes toward the Irish. Trevor Burnard rounds off Part One with an examination of the development of new imperial attitudes within both the British imperial elite and the imperial populations of Jamaica and Ireland in the 1780s, demonstrating the consequences of the American Revolution throughout the British Atlantic world. In Part Two, the essays move away from direct comparison to a broader framework that draws on the earlier arguments about connections and disconnect to provide important insights to America and the wider Atlantic world before, during, and after the Revolution. Highlights include Max Edelson's study of cadastral maps to illustrate the ad hoc system the British and its imperial peoples used to allocate land throughout the empire during the seventeenth century, a system that invariably ignored Indigenous systems of land allocation. Rachel Banke's investigation of the correspondence and papers of the Earl of Bute and King George III is another important contribution. Banke examines the papers to outline the key tenets of their ideas for imperial reform, convincingly arguing that these were shaped by European influences as a result of George's "enlightened absolutism" (212) and the realities of the post-Seven Years' War context. A key theme running through several essays in Part Two is the new realities and questions of nation and statehood created by the American Revolution. Jessica Choppin Roney examines the co-opting of the Declaration of Independence by Americans who sought support for their own bids for statehood, while Annette Gordon-Reed outlines the constitutional questions arising from the revolution and...

On the Dangers of International Maritime Trade in the Tang Era (The Incidents of Genocide of the Arab-Persian Population of China in 760 and 879)

At the end of the Tang Empire (618–907), the universally recognized “golden age” of imperial China, the country entered a long period of socio-political and ethnic turmoil. The broader set of problems associated with the An Lushan uprising (755–763) is widely known — this civilizational catastrophe marked a turning point in the development of the dynasty and, by impacting all aspects of a powerful empire, caused the sun to start setting on Tang China. Still, many episodes remain relatively unexplored, among them the crises that befell Arab-Persian communities in southern China, which fell victim to the echoes of the An Lushan and Huang Chao uprisings (878–884), which also aimed to put an end to the Tang Dynasty. In layman’s Asian studies and public consciousness, the tragedies that occurred in Yangzhou and Guangzhou a little more than a century apart and took the form of largescale massacres of foreign merchants of Arab and Persian descent are often taken out of context and extrapolated to the entire system of interactions between China and foreigners — in particular, Muslims from West Asia arriving in the ports of the Tang Empire. This article seeks to place these dramatic events in a tighter historical context. Part of the difficulty here lies in the absence of Chinese sources about the Guangzhou massacre, known to researchers only from reports by Arab authors. The paper aims to consider some of the pre-requisites of these incidents, showing the role of Arab-Persian merchants not only as victims of violence by rebels and locals alike, but also by analyzing their own raid on Guangzhou at the very beginning of the events in question. The author also warns against simple projections around conflicts in China’s coastal cities because these sunset episodes of the Tang Dynasty do not extrapolate well to later history.

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled by Nicholas Allen

<i>Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled</i> by Nicholas Allen

From South Asia to World History through C. A. Bayly's Work

Using the term “legacy” for a career as productive, insightful, and pathbreaking as Chris Bayly's is doubtless an understatement. The movement in his publications from the transitional world in the Indian subcontinent leading to British imperialism, through aspects of high empire in India, to world history through both case studies and broader context for grasping the implications of a changing world, provides valuable analyses for all of us, if not a pattern many could replicate. Perhaps what ought to be noted here is the experience, common to many of us working across a very broad range of problematics and focal points, to have found Bayly there, before us.

Делопроизводство вотчинных контор помещичьих хозяйств России второй половины ХIХ – начала ХХ века: состав документации

The relevance of the study lies in the insufficient development in the domestic historiography of the problem of patrimonial bureau procedures in landlords farms, and the need to consider the features of a large market economy with the possibility of referring to the experience of the past. We analyze the composition of patrimonial documentation of landlord’s estates of the second half of the 19th – early 20th century. The characteristic of opinions of some researchers of this problem is given. The legislative aspects of the Russian Empire regulating paperwork in landowner farms are developed. We highlight the features of the Italian form of double-entry bookkeeping, features of the information documentation by industrial associations of landlords. It is established that all (without exception) entries in the documents were based on the provisions of the ordinances of income and cash flow, announcements, powers of attorney, declarations, briefs, petitions, notifications, etc. We present the order of employment (from employees’ side) and the involvement of employees in manufacturing (from employers’ side) at the owners’ farm, we also characterize the processes that affect their economic development. On the basis of the deposited materials there is a possibility of the complex analysis of trade and comparative communications of landowners, studying the main stages and results of modernization of complexes, identification of terms of depreciation of the businessmen’s expenses.

German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss

Reviewed by: German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss Adam A. Blackler German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence. By Susanne Kuss. Translated by Andrew Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 1 + 386. Paper $45.00. ISBN 978-0674970632. Academic debates over alleged links between Germany's overseas empire and the Third Reich have dominated German colonial historiography since the early 2000s. Prominent historians such as Isabel Hull, Jürgen Zimmerer, and Benjamin Madley have drawn considerable interest to the field, suggesting in their respective studies that total warfare and systematic violence in the colonies acted as genocidal antecedents to the Nazis so-called "New Order" in Eastern Europe. While scholars have more recently started to turn their attention to other aspects of Germany's global empire, the "Windhoek to Auschwitz" thesis remains a powerful thematic undercurrent in the historical literature. Queries about German colonialism and its violent status relative to other contemporary colonial powers, in particular, continue to inspire curiosity, as well as direct much of the scholarly research on German imperialism. Susanne Kuss's German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence is an important example of this historiographical reality. In contrast to advocates of the "continuity thesis," Kuss argues that German imperial violence emerged in relation to the particular sociopolitical and geographic circumstances in each respective [End Page 147] Kriegsschauplatz or theater of war (8). She supports this thesis with a detailed analysis of Germany's three best-known colonial wars, specifically the Boxer War in China, the Maji Maji War in German East Africa, and the Herero and Namaqua War in German Southwest Africa. Kuss devotes a chapter to each imperial theater and assesses how the individual campaigns altered the mental and psychological disposition of soldiers toward local populations (5). In this manner, her study demonstrates that extreme violence in the colonial sphere did not follow a premeditated strategy contrived in the metropole, but was instead the result of shifting war aims, poor planning, economic concerns, and racist fantasies that failed to materialize once German settlers and soldiers arrived overseas en masse (107–108). Kuss organizes her study into three parts: "Three Wars," "The Colonial Theater of War," and "Evaluation and Memory." Part 1 offers concise overviews of the three military campaigns in question. In this section, Kuss pays careful attention to the unique regional dynamics, such as the specific intentions colonial leaders had for each colony, which she contends made it impossible for German leaders to conduct imperial policy monolithically. The quality of this study rests on Kuss's ability to combine primary source-based research of China, German East Africa, and German Southwest Africa into one analytical narrative. She writes, for instance, that German soldiers in China unquestionably participated in violent expeditions against Chinese militias, but given Germany's general "irrelevance to the outcome of the [Boxer] war" due to its late arrival in Asia, boredom motivated troops to commit selective episodes of brutality "for enrichment" and to "vary an otherwise dull routine" (36). In sharp contrast, the wars in German East Africa and German Southwest Africa were more systematic in their conduct and orientation. Part 2 sharpens the analytical comparison of the Kriegsschauplätze and how distinct conditions in each location fashioned disparate occupational strategies, as well as mixed attitudes toward the use of extreme violence against colonized populations. As an example, Kuss reminds readers that African soldiers (askari) comprised a significant number of colonial forces in German East Africa (105). She explains that the askaris' knowledge of the region and terrain allowed German authorities to deploy their forces methodically against enemy settlements, supply lines, and Maji Maji guerillas. By way of contrast, Kuss shows that this approach was not possible in China due to the Germans' lack of "reliable familiarity with the Chinese population" and the "ethnic homogeneity" of the Shandong Province (161). She argues that imperial officers in German Southwest Africa, meanwhile, decided not to classify ethnic peoples hierarchically because the military had already defeated the two most powerful groups (Herero and Namaqua) at the turn of the twentieth century (164). Kuss also rightly emphasizes the importance of biological racism in...

A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation

Abstract This article explains two unique aspects of the New World Spanish empire: its production of hundreds of thousands of royal decrees, and the unique categories that these edicts contained, such as mestizo and mulato. I outline the petition and response system, through which vassals of all social backgrounds constantly suggested new laws to the ruling Council of the Indies. Pressed for time, the council's overwhelmed ministers often transplanted petitions' vocabulary verbatim into decrees. This meant that subjects often phrased imperial laws minor and major, regional and Indies-wide. Using a four-step archival methodology, this article demonstrates how scholars can match vassals' petitions to decrees. This essay then shows how legal categories such as mestizo and mulato came about through the petitions of not only Spaniards but also Indians, mestizos, and mulatos themselves. Subjects of any social background could therefore introduce and shape Indies legal constructs, and the empire's agenda, from the ground up.

How the Past was Used: Historical Cultures, c. 750–2000 ed. by Peter Lambert and Björn Weiler

Reviewed by: How the Past was Used: Historical Cultures, c. 750–2000 ed. by Peter Lambert and Björn Weiler Sybil M. Jack Lambert, Peter, and Björn Weiler, eds, How the Past was Used: Historical Cultures, c. 750–2000, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017; hardback; pp. 330; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £90.00; ISBN 9780197266120. The pessimistic view of the manipulation of history might well be called the 1984 approach—that the story is re-written on a daily basis to create the image necessary for the moment. Editors Pater Lambert and Björn Weiler do not see changes as being as rapid as in this approach, but their introduction (p. 28) describes history as fragile, fraught, and fragmented. And this valuable volume, the result of many [End Page 218] years of discussion and conferences, brings together for comparison some of the distinctive approaches of various cultures to the formation and maintenance of their past. In many places, the concept of historical truth—as several of the contributors stress—was constructed in a way that was quite dissimilar to present-day academic belief. Dimitri Kastritsis, in analysing Ottoman narratives of the late fifteenth century, concludes that ‘historical memory was intimately intertwined with legends and apocalyptic expectations’ (p. 139). It was also, as Peter Lambert shows in his study of the way the Third Reich was used in the interwar period, a place where current debates that could not be directly treated, could be maintained as a form of historical fiction. Two chapters that consider alternative forms of establishing history in the minds of the people are critical to the collection. Matthew Phillips underlines the way in which ‘traditional’ practices—in this case Thailand’s royal barge processions that had been central from at least the sixteenth century—were revived and regenerated in the Cold War period to fulfil a present-day purpose of endorsing the legitimacy of the existing government of the state and Thai identity. This overturned the Thai past created in the interwar period. Richard Rathbone’s skilful unravelling of the significance of the yam festival in the ancient state of Ashante (now in Ghana) makes clear the historic manner in which it embodies ‘particular and partisan’ (p. 287) aspects of the former empire of Ghana, its culture and its institutions. It shows a re-statement of the past quite different from the usual employment of a literary record. Also different were many approaches in India, internally diverse with its many languages and religions. Allison Busch’s account of the neglected Hindi vernacular poetry of the early modern period—a genre that cannot be usefully classified in modern divisions as either literature or history but as the work of poet-historians—shows us the construction of a past that established normative emotions and the rules of honour, creating a community standard with real-life consequences. History was essential to that present. These distinctive pivots of memory which come from less familiar places give the chapters that re-examine forms of written presentation better known to Westerners a new viewpoint. The familiar trope that audience participation, which is central to an active performance, is absent from a narrative written and perhaps read aloud to groups of people, is examined afresh by Haki Antonsson in his chapter on the Norse sagas. Björn Weiler presents, through a careful examination of Matthew Paris’s Lives of the Two Offas, a new approach to the major type of narrative sources of medieval European history, the monastic chronicle. Not only is their purpose moral and ethical, it is also concerned with contemporary relevance to the institution promoting them. How history was legally defined and used in Spain in the beginning of the seventeenth century is revealed in a lawsuit examined by Richard Kagan. The position of the royal chronicler, Herrera, under attack for defaming the ancestor of a prominent aristocrat, uncovers exactly what was at issue, which was truth, the public good, and a guide to action. [End Page 219] Western historians have found the approach of Chinese professional historians and scholars writing since late antiquity problematic: their work was employed to shape particular ideas of cycles amongst parts...

Nailing One’s Colours: Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire

ABSTRACTTaking the view that national art museums should represent the multifarious populations they serve, this article explores racial material in Tate Britain’s high-profile exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (2015). The exhibition gave extensive coverage to two aspects of empire: hybrid fusions and the myth of white heroism, but gave limited attention to colonization as a maximally coercive system built on racist imaginings and abuse. Through cross-examination of the exhibition’s content and absences, I explore whether Tate Britain is setting out the ‘building blocks’ for more diverse practice.

La investigación geológica en la comisión científica de México

During Maximilian’s Empire, Mexican science experimented changes both in its general perspectives and its methodological outlook, due to scientific interaction among the local scientific community and foreign scientists. Maximilian encouraged local scientists to continue working in their ongoing projects, and invited others to participate in new scientific endeavors. Simultaneously, Napoleon III instructed the French Institute to organize a scientific expedition in order to study different aspects of the new Empire. Geological research stood out among the goals of the French expedition, and it was initiated taking into consideration several geological studies made by European travelers during the first half of the century. This paper will describe the main features of such investigations and will analyze the expedition’s goals and accomplishments during its brief sojourn in Mexico.

Геополитические аспекты военного продвижения Российской империи в северный регион Казахстана во второй половине XVIII-первой трети XIX в.

Геополитические аспекты военного продвижения Российской империи в северный регион Казахстана во второй половине XVIII-первой трети XIX в.

The Political and Institutional History of Colonial Spanish America

AbstractThis essay argues for a need to develop a new political history of colonial Spanish America in order to bring up to date the old institutional history of the Spanish empire. In recent decades, historians of colonial Spanish America have not shown much interest in the study of political and institutional history. Originally, this constituted a welcome reaction against the previous emphasis on the institutional and legal aspects of the Spanish empire. But one effect of this historiographical development has been that, while our knowledge of the social history of colonial Spanish America has progressed in an impressive way, our knowledge of the mechanisms of imperial rule has made very little progress in the last 50 years. As a result, colonial historians have to rely on antiquated or inadequate notions regarding the political and institutional nature of Spanish colonialism. However, the new political history of colonial Spanish America should not focus on the study of the colonial state, but rather on the political culture of the Spanish empire.

What Is Asia to Us?: Scholarship on the Tsarist “East” since the 1990s

It was 1997, and editors of a collection on of Russian Orient were excited. For years they had been forced to make do with published sources or whatever materials their archival handlers would allow them to see in Moscow and Leningrad, but now USSR had collapsed and it had suddenly become possible to venture out to erstwhile and experience what only being there can provide. The famished, as they described themselves in their introduction, were finally sitting down to smorgasbord. Imperial Russia was being revisioned. Scholars were being reborn. (1) Oh, yes, those were days. As a graduate student at time, I remember feeling some of headiness myself. The Party was over, world was young. Of course, looking back now, one cannot help but feel a little naive. Important changes were indeed taking place in field, but it is not clear how much of this was related to access to archives or even to seemingly magical shift of end of USSR. A interest in tsarist Russia as a multinational had appeared somewhat earlier, along with funding to support it. (2) Yet, regardless of exactly when or how it happened, Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini were right that a era was dawning. Even then, there was a sense that a boom had begun, which, for better or for worse, still continues today. As Stephen Kotkin put it not long ago, only half tongue in cheek, Apply for a grant on 'borderlands,' and you get grant even before you hit send button. (3) The study of eastern regions and peoples of Russian Empire has been central to this ongoing turn. In this essay, I survey literature on East and offer some reflections on what we have gained as well as what still seems to be missing in field. On one hand, situation is clear--research on tsarist and on eastern borderlands in particular has grown exponentially over last 20 years, both in volume and in terms of depth and sophistication. Yet it is also true, much as with most rapid expansions, that growth in field has been uneven, with enormous concentration on some periods and questions--perhaps too much--and not enough on others. Indeed, it's worth asking how exactly our knowledge has changed since 1991 and especially over last decade or so as boom has intensified. Despite sense that we have somehow ended up with a new imperial history, there is no single school or normative interpretation of to speak of; nor is it entirely clear what new imperial history actually amounts to. (4) Is it simply a focus on that draws on more sources and perspectives, in particular a wider range of non-Russian, nonmetropolitan views? Is it work that prioritizes methodology of the cultural history over more traditional political and social historical approaches? Or is it a way of approaching that reaches beyond the limits of national paradigm to examine political, social, and cultural actors and spaces of their activity, while offering an archeology of empire as a construct and acknowledging unique blend of modern and premodern identities that defined course of modernization in Eurasia? (5) We know more about tsarist Russia's eastern than we did 20 years ago, but do we understand it any better? What more do we need to know? Background to a Boom Though historians in West studied aspects of empire's past prior to 1990s, there was no field of Russian imperial studies to speak of, much less a special concentration of interest in empire's eastern borderlands and peoples. Instead, focus was on what could loosely be called nationalities studies, which generally meant study of national groups other than Russians. According to wisdom of day, Russians were norm and presumption was that we knew a lot about them already. …

"Gladstone bags, shooting boots, and Bryant &amp; May's matches": Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in the Graphic's Serialization of H. Rider Haggard's She

By 1980s, critical consensus cast Haggard's fiction, and romance revival more generally, uncomplicated expression of a crudely jingoist, racist, and misogynist imperialism (see Bristow 127-46, Gilbert and Gubar 5-46, Katz, and Showalter 78-89). According to this consensus, Haggard and other late-Victorian imperialists also disavowed commercial aspects of empire, its material reality (Katz 108). The of romance, scholars suggested, uncritically absorbed genre's prejudices: for Wendy Katz, Haggard's were the passive watchers of their (130). A more sophisticated has developed since early 1990s, critics have explored tensions underlying late-Victorian romance and imperial discourse more broadly. Haggard's work has enjoyed at least a partial rehabilitation, attention has turned to his novels' complex and ambivalent representation of imperialism (see Arata, Chrisman, and Gold). However, critical discussions of Haggard's representation of imperial commerce have not yet challenged contention that his novels fraudulently idealized British Empire and effaced its material, money-making aspects. Anne McClintock, for example, reads King Solomon's Mines (1885) enacting a disavowal or repression of black productive power (232-57). There has been little of representation of imperial capitalism in Haggard's other novels, including She--a work that, although less obviously engaged in debate about commercial nature of empire, interrogates imperial commerce in interestingly self-reflexive ways. Moreover, recent emphasis on formal fissures of imperialist discourse, in Haggard's work and in romance genre, is sometimes problematic. As Robert Young has noted, such locates ambivalence of imperial discourse not at time of its original articulation and reception but with present day historian or interpreter (152). The original publication and reception of She is strikingly absent, for example, in Barri Gold's recent reading, which announces desire to read against grain and urges that as readers we should create space for our own counterintuitive and potentially subversive interpretations (324-25). The present essay rehistoricizes She and argues that novel's original serial publication illuminates uneasy relationship between romance, commerce, and empire at fin de siecle. At heart of this relationship was a paradox: champions of romance revival offered imperial adventure an antidote to effete world of high capitalism, yet romance form itself was complicit in commodifying empire. For Haggard and his cheerleader, classical scholar, critic, and folklorist Andrew Lang, romance offered a primitive, rejuvenating release from sterility of civilized life: Haggard polemically claimed that romance appeal[ed], not to a class, or a nation, or even to an age, but to all time and humanity at large (About Fiction 180). Lang also championed romance's appeal to a universal, primitive human nature, and he derided reader of realist fiction bald, toothless, highly 'cultured', and addicted to tales of introspective analysis (Realism and Romance 689). Haggard's protagonists are manly heroes, for whom empire represents a revitalizing escape from a commercial, effeminate home life. In Allan Quatermain (1887), Curtis articulates squirearchy's sense of dispossession in industrial Britain and its hankering after a conservative feudal past. Traveling into Central Africa, Curtis and his fellow heroes find this past incarnated in Zu-Vendi, whom he vows to protect from corrupting knowledge of telegraphs, steam, newspapers, [and] universal suffrage (282). Haggard's novels are an attempt to retreat from world of daily newspapers and offer a different kind of literary pabulum: what a fellow-romancer, Robert Louis Stevenson, hailed the real art . …

THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF EMPIRES

ABSTRACTContemporary histories and theories of empire generally remain within boundaries inspired by varieties of liberalism, and by Marxian theory and its hybrids, in which changing modes of production determine the forms of power, including empire. Liberal theorists and historians of empire generally trace a complex process in which expanding imperial power systems led ultimately to nation‐states, democracy, and market economies. For Marxists and postmodern theorists, the formal aspects of empire remain unimportant compared to the broader workings of modes of production and particularly, the global power of capitalism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri use the word “empire” to describe the workings of contemporary capitalism and its myriad forms of power.Whether they rely upon the formal definitions of empire or the Marxian‐postmodern one, theories of empire often descend from modern utopian visions: perhaps the Kantian variety emphasizing a peaceful union of states and collective learning, or the Marxian one, although now taking into account changes in the mode of production and victims unattended to by Marx and Engels. New technologies and communications networks impress all contemporary theorists. Some proclaim the end of modern power systems and empire; others find empire in a new, postmodern form. Nonetheless, there are stubborn continuities with the modern in the very persistence of modern utopias, the dominance of nation‐states, the pursuit of democracy, and the durability of capitalism. Theorists of power and empire have to explain these and other continuities, alongside the disappearance of the more than 400‐year‐old balance‐of‐power system in which imperial powers in the European core finally delivered vast power to the United States and the Soviet Union, and created new technologies that strengthen human connection as well as threaten vast destruction. The question of the power of the United States and its imperial status commands the center of attention.

The Magnificent Mughals

This beautifully illustrated anthology explores the religious, cultural, economic, political, and military aspects of the Mughal empire. Written by a host of top contributors, it will serve as an authoritative history on the Mughals for a long time to come.

Capital and Empire: Geographies of Imperial London

The notion of empire has often been regarded in Europe as a matter of diffusion and expansion; something which happened ‘over there’ rather than close to home. Yet the form, use and representation of modern European cities have been shaped by the global history of imperialism in ways that continue to matter even in an apparently post-imperial age. The signs of empire were prominently displayed within the built environments of all the major cities of late-nineteenth century Europe, as they came (in different ways) to play the role of regional, national and imperial capitals. In what was evidently a pan-European discourse on the imperial city between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, national models were defined in relation to other national models, in a spirit of competition as much as emulation. This paper examines the case of London. British architects and planners frequently complained that London lagged behind its rivals in the struggle for imperial primacy, given the absence of state-sponsored projects to parallel Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris or Leopold's grand plans for Brussels. At the intra-urban scale, the imperial city had a geography which mattered: in the case of London, different parts of the city were associated with different aspects of empire. More generally, it is clear that national debates over imperial urbanism were conditioned not simply by understandings of the global reach of European empires, but also by attitudes towards social, cultural and political change within Europe itself.

The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as Imperial Polities

trate on the external aspects of empire, investigating the roots of expansionism, for instance, or the military and economic sinews of power.2 Others have looked at the domestic constitutions of empires, analysing, for example, the management of multi-ethnicity.3 One major problem is that 'empire' in the contemporary world is a word with very strong negative connotations. A century ago, European countries and their rulers welcomed the term. It implied not only that a country was powerful but also, probably, that it was in the forefront of progress, one of that very small group of great powers entrusted, in Hegelian terms, with leading mankind towards higher levels of culture, wealth and freedom. Flattering comparisons were made with the great civilizations of the past, almost all of them embodied in political terms in empires. In the late twentieth century, however, empire implies exploitation of weak communities by stronger ones, as well, particularly, as the suppression of the Third World by Western power and culture. Empire is seen, moreover, not merely as wicked but also as anachronistic and doomed to disappear. In the post-1945 global economy, autarchy and physical control of territory are viewed as largely irrelevant: peaceful access to food, raw materials and markets seems assured, and the skills, unity and motivation of a country's workforce are regarded as the keys to prosperity and even power. Countries are unwilling to take upon themselves