Imperial Dimension Research Articles

An Islamic Late Antiquity? Problems and Perspectives

The inclusion of nascent Islam into a Late Antique framework has become largely conventional. And yet, with a few exceptions, Islamicists have been reluctant to discuss the implications of such an epistemological shift, or have had the tendency to reduce an “Islamic Late Antiquity” to its religious and imperial dimensions. My aim is to question some of the consequences of the inclusion of early Islam into a Late Antique paradigm. In particular, I focus on the reception of Late Antiquity among Islamicists; the limits of late antique Arabia; the vexing issue of historiographical categories; and the cultural significance of the first dynasty of Islam, the Umayyads.

Decentering the American Empire

It must have been eight years ago when I read Paul Kramer's article for the first time. Back then, I had just finished my PhD and was developing a new research project thematically located at the intersection of medical, imperial, and global history. One of the particularities of the German academic path when compared to the Anglo-American context is the expectation to embark on a completely different line of inquiry after defending your doctoral dissertation. Postdoctoral researchers venture into an entirely new topic, often take on a new century, and, for good measure, turn to another region of the world. At a time when I was surfacing from a thesis on German post-1945 international history, reading “Power and Connection” was tremendously helpful and instructive in guiding my first steps into the vast terrain of nineteenth-century imperial and colonial history. While its insights into the imperial dimension of U.S. history were fascinating, it was more so its framing of the American case, as a modern empire among others, that led me to the article. Ultimately, this interest evolved into my current project on the policies on epidemics in the nineteenth-century British and American empires. This framing provides the angle for my re-reading of “Power and Connection.” From an imperial historian's perspective, particularly of British imperial history and comparative empire studies, I explore here some of the links between the broader discipline and Kramer's essay up to 2011 when it was published and thereafter.

Brexit and the ‘Imperial Factor’: A longue durée Approach to British Exceptionalism

ABSTRACT To what extent can we detect echoes of the triumphant Britannia (Thomas Arne composed Rule Britannia in 1740) in contemporary Brexit debates? What were the subliminal refractions of the refrain ‘Britons never will be slaves’ in complaints about the frequently evoked ‘Brussels shackles’? Through a longue durée approach to two major elements of modern British history – Britannia and the celebration of colonial expansion as a ‘bringer of progress’, this article charts the persistence of political and cultural visions including the Empire simultaneously as an expression, a tool and a channel of British exceptionalism. Positing that the Empire was integral to the emergence of British identity and its consolidation, it also underlines, through references to John Robert Seeley’s highly influential work, the key role played by England in this process. Based upon the hypothesis that past reflections on Britain’s global role – including those championed by Cecil John Rhodes – have left an imprint on the Brexit conversation in the run-up to, and aftermath of, the vote, this article introduces the concept of ‘imperial factor’ as a way of taking into account the long-term impact that the development and possession of the world’s largest empire has left on British ways of seeing the world, and, crucially, of seeing Britain’s place in the world. Beyond the case-study of exceptionalism offered here, further research, especially of a quantitative nature, is suggested to refine our understanding of the precise extent to which the ‘imperial factor’ played a role in the Brexit vote of 2016. Conceived as an instrument to take into account the potential imperial dimension of a multi-faceted phenomenon such as Britain’s departure from the EU, the ‘imperial factor’ is, more broadly, a useful tool to gauge – in the UK but also among other formerly imperial nations – the potential and variable long-term influence that the possession of an empire left on national visions, psyche and practices.

Mobilizing Great War Literature: Rereading the English Canon through Mulk Raj Anand's Across the Black Waters

Abstract: While Great War scholars have recently recovered colonial texts, they seldom use those texts to reassess the English Great War canon. Mulk Raj Anand's depiction of Indian experience in Across the Black Waters highlights the imperial dimensions of English texts from the Great War. The novel depicts Indian soldiers first as travelers through Europe before narrating their experiences of displacement in the horrors of the trenches. This shift calls attention to the English canon's depictions of soldiers' mobility, which similarly shift from travel in initial military mobilization to displacement in the violence of warfare. Across the Black Waters rewrites this characteristic shift to reveal its imperial significance, ultimately transforming the English Great War canon's typical disillusionment with Britain into a critique of empire. Anand's novel invites us to recenter the imperial position in Great War literature: all English narratives are narratives of empire, and Britain at war is always imperial.

Race, nation, empire? Historicising outward and inward-facing British nationalism

Brexit has continued to capture the attention of International Relations (IR) scholars, where it has been linked to the burgeoning debate on race and postcolonialism. This article adds to this scholarship by historicising the question of imperial nostalgia, which has been central to these intersecting literatures. It re-examines how influential theorists Hall and Gilroy linked the peculiarities of British national consciousness to traumas issuing from the loss of great power status. It emphasises two themes often lacking in recent accounts of Brexit nationalism: namely, the centrality of military mobilisation to national consciousness; and the unevenness between popular and elite sentiment with regards to the imperial dimension. In historicising themes of extroversion and introversion, it reconsiders the significant metamorphoses in post-Thatcherite British nationalism, which had centred on proclaiming a national renaissance founded in foreign policy successes, international moral leadership and a state-led consensus for rolling out globalisation worldwide. The research shows that revisionism about the British Empire played a significant role in foreign policy discourse across this period, as did pro-EU sentiment among the governing and ruling elite. It highlights the mechanisms which allowed UK foreign policy intellectuals to link the military roll-out of ‘postmodern’ social norms with the European project’s end goals. These findings help historically situate Brexit amid a succession of crises for the liberal global order. The research finds that, whereas Brexit appeared initially as a retreat or break from the UK’s post-Thatcherite ‘globalising’ nationalism, subsequent developments highlight significant continuities.

Imperialism and literature: An imperialism-oriented reading of modern Turkish literature

Postcolonial theory perceives the world as divided between the coloniser and the colonised, thus indirectly reproducing the centrality of the West. For this reason, in literary studies, postcolonial theory fails to cover the literatures of those nations which were not colonised in a typical sense but rather occupied by Western imperialism, as was the case with Ottoman Turkey. This necessitates a convergent theoretical framework that might help evaluate the fictionalisation of the intersecting dynamics of oppression, violence, exploitation, and resistance in relation to the hegemonic narratives of imperialism and shape a new perspective regarding the politico-cultural dimension of imperial discourse. This article, in this respect, will critically develop the theoretical foundations of imperialism-oriented literary theory and construct it as an interdisciplinary field that has a potential to contribute to contemporary postcolonial theory and to encompass the intersectional dimensions of imperialism and imperial discourse for the articulation of the fictionalisation of imperialism-related issues in the under-considered corpus of modern Turkish literature.

Remembering Thind

As United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind becomes an important site of collective memory and identity formation, the hundred-year anniversary of the decision presents itself as an occasion for critical reflection about how we make sense of this particular past, our identification within it, and its relevance to our contemporary moment. Thind has been read primarily as a case about the racial identification of Indians in the United States and their racialized exclusion from citizenship. This essay explores some of the limits of that framing, arguing that it tends to reify legal constructions of racial difference while obscuring the imperial dimensions of the case, namely Thind’s involvement with the transnational anticolonial Ghadar movement. Moreover, to remember the case as primarily one about racial injury consigns us to liberal frameworks of rights and recognition and to recapitulating nationalist narratives of racialized exclusion and earned inclusion, leaving unexamined the role that neoliberal immigration policies have played in conditioning Asian migration since the 1960s. Rather than continuously retrace the racial wounds inflicted by Thind, the memorialization of the case might focus on the continuing relevance of the anticolonial and anticapitalism movements that so excited the political imagination of Thind and his contemporaries. Such radical remembering might enable us to disrupt imposed forms of racial identity, as well as the liberal frameworks within which they are embedded, to rehearse the kinds of collaboration needed to confront ongoing crisis of colonial capitalism.

Colonial Discourse Studies: Uncovering the Unfair Otherness

This paper critically explores the role of colonial discourse studies in exploring cultural imperialism. It discusses the relevance of this academic field to our current understanding of the ideological dimensions of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. Moreover, it outlines how related conceptualizations such as Orientalism, Said’s Orient and Occident, hegemony, and postcolonial theories are intrinsically linked to these studies. The significance of the study lies in illustrating, through reference to contemporary scholarship in this field, how the colonial discourse’s past, present, and future implications remain of enduring importance in contemporary social and political realities. Furthermore, it traces the writings of various third-world intellectuals that try to uncover the colonial discursive practices in the colonial context and shows how these practices are to create and sustain otherness. Finally, by examining how this field incorporates and synthesizes multiple disciplines, such as literature, history, linguistics, political science, anthropology, and sociology, this paper affirms the continued significance of this field in the contemporary world.

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600‐1850. By MarkKnights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. 512 pp. £35. ISBN: 978‐0‐19879‐624‐4.

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600‐1850. By MarkKnights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. 512 pp. £35. ISBN: 978‐0‐19879‐624‐4.

Absence, Agency and Empire: Desertion from the French Army During the First World War

An estimated 66,678 men deserted from the French Army between 1914 and 1918. Using conseil de guerre (military tribunal) evidence, including interviews with captured deserters, this article shifts the scholarly focus on desertion from quantitative to qualitative data. This methodological move centres the experiences and voices of individual, often marginalised soldiers and demonstrates how desertion enabled otherwise constrained combatants to exercise agency, both when deserting and during the military justice process. Focusing on colonial citizens and subjects mobilised from North Africa, the article draws empire into scholarly conversations surrounding military justice to enhance understanding of France's multi-ethnic army and the specific imperial dimensions of desertion during the First World War.

Power and Philanthropy: The Imperial Dimensions of Parsi Amelioration of the Iranian Zoroastrians

AbstractThis article brings a new perspective to Parsi philanthropy in late Qajar Iran by exploring its British imperial dimensions. It examines how Parsis leveraged British diplomatic heft in their amelioration of Iranian Zoroastrians and how imperial connections helped Parsis translate charity into political and economic power. This was a mutually beneficial process: British diplomats identified strategic value in Parsi philanthropy for Iranian Zoroastrians. It was particularly useful in Great Game rivalries against Russia, as Britain attempted to cultivate Iranian Zoroastrians to shore up its influence in southern Iran. Interactions between Parsis, Iranian Zoroastrians, and British diplomats neatly illustrate the extraordinary influence which small minorities could wield in imperial politics.

A culturalist perspective to Russian international posture in XXI century

Abstract This paper is aimed at proposing an analysis of the Russian geopolitical self-perception in the light of a “culturalist” approach. The paper uses Samuel Huntington’s “model of civilizations” as an interpretative prism, following a multidisciplinary approach which allows to epistemologically validate certain points of the Huntingtonian thesis, and to reject others. This approach does not invalidate the neo-realist theories of international relations regarding the Russian search for a relative increase of power through the use of material factors. If anything, the culturalist perspective must be placed side by side with the neo-realist one in order to better grasp some intangible elements, in particular the attention paid by Moscow to its (former) imperial dimension, the influence exercised by the autocratic tradition on Russia’s international posture, together with the role of geographic space, the ascendency of the Orthodox church, as well as Eurasianist cultural inclinations. Finally, through a critical analysis and a selective review of the academic literature on these issues (as well as of the political texts published by some of the most prominent Russian politicians and intellectuals), the paper aims to demonstrate the self-perceived originality of the Russian model and its difficulty in being placed within the Western political categories.

Canon Fodder and the Intimacy of Dialogues

Michael Burawoy’s 2021 essay, ‘Decolonizing Sociology: The Significance of W.E.B. Du Bois’, forges dialogues between the scholar denied and established theorists with the aim of reconstructing the sociological canon. My commentary situates the author’s essay and his own Du Boisian turn in a long career dedicated to reflexive science and recomposing theory. I reflect on the seemingly innocuous notion of a dialogue itself: its implications for sociological theory and practice, and how it supports decolonial efforts. Thinking with Toni Morrison, Hazel Carby, Lisa Lowe, and others, I offer a sketch of a decolonial methodology—what I call a Du Boisian shadowplay—that brings into view the intimate dimensions of imperialism. Ultimately, such a feminist methodology reconstructs dialogues that reflect on researcher standpoints and nested imperial histories; and in the face of today’s social crises, nurtures dialogues that are animated by an ethic of love.

The ‘Guinea Pigs’ of Tristan da Cunha and the Ethics of Medical Research in Britain and the Empire, 1961–1973

Summary This article relates the history and explores the ethical issues that gathered around the decade of studies that researchers collaborating with the Medical Research Council (MRC) undertook on the islanders from Tristan da Cunha. In 1961, the volcanic island in the southern Atlantic erupted and the community took refuge in Britain. Believing that the islanders held the secret to good health, the MRC coordinated a research programme through a specially formed Working Party. But as the investigations grew more numerous, so too did the ethical questions. Some doctors, administrators, reporters and the public wondered about the propriety of exposing this community to medical scrutiny. In 1963, the islanders returned home. Investigators, along with ethical issues, followed. Long hidden, these persistent discussions made visible the ethics of medical research on a colonial population. The Working Party’s story thus inserts an imperial dimension into the historiography of post-war British medical ethics.

Gender, Race, and Fortunes in the East India Company's 'Familial Proto-State': The Evidence of Scottish Wills and Testaments, c.1740-c.1820

The family unit has become an important lens for investigating the social, gendered, and racial dimensions of early British imperialism in Asia. Using evidence derived from wills and testaments registered by Scots at the English East India Company’s settlements between 1740 and 1820, this article explores how colonial wealth was redistributed. In doing so it reconsiders how families and kinship acted as both a transhemispheric connection between Europe and the Indian Ocean World and a disruptor of social, gendered, and racial dynamics.
 It queries arguments that family boundaries could be porous enough to incorporate mixed-race children resulting from relationships between Europeans and local women. Analysis of overall patterns of wealth allocation, rather than individual family case studies, reveals a clear tendency to separate or ‘silo’ such children. Offspring born to local women received far less than family back in Scotland and were usually left in the place of their birth. Families in Scotland stressed a political economy of profit remittance and discouraged the creation of new obligations to children and local women. Considerable sums were instead allocated to female relatives. One result of the policing of extended family boundaries was a heightening in pre-1820s Scottish society of colour consciousness and racialised notions of identity. In this way, the Indian Ocean World, just as surely as better-known processes such as the Atlantic slave trade, contributed a practical and immediate set of imperatives driving new concepts of race and racialisation in Enlightenment era Scotland.

Globalizing the History of the First World War: Economic Approaches

AbstractThis historiographical review offers an overview of new approaches to the global history of the First World War. It first considers how, over the last decade, there has been a move to emphasize the war's imperial dimensions: in reconsiderations of the war in Africa, the experience of soldiers and workers from across Europe's colonial empires, and the German ‘global strategy’ of fomenting unrest within the Allied empires. It then suggests that new global histories of the First World War give further attention to its economic aspects, particularly in two ways: first, by recovering understudied global financial aspects of the war, including the effects of the 1914 financial crisis and wartime inflation on economies and societies far outside of Europe; and second, by investigating wartime histories of primary production, both in colonial territories and sovereign states in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It argues that these approaches can offer an important corrective to common assumptions that the First World War led to a dramatic break with pre-war globalizing trends.

Bringing the imperial back in: Reconsidering governance in the late Ottoman Empire, 1839–1923 (Part I)

AbstractThis is the first of two connected articles that survey recent trends in the historical scholarship of Ottoman imperial governance from the beginning of the Tanzimat state building efforts in the 1830s to the end of empire in the early 1920s. In both articles, I examine how historians have answered the question of what was imperial about the ways in which the Ottoman Empire was governed during this period. Throughout this two‐part series I argue that an approach that pays attention to the capacity to govern, as Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper put it, “different people differently” through a broad repertoire of rule, balancing this politics of difference with the politics of incorporation, is more conducive to bringing out the complexities of late Ottoman governance than teleological assumptions that consider the empire during this period on a linear path toward the nation state. Part I begins with a brief discussion of different ways in which historians have conceptualized imperial governance in the Ottoman context. I will then demonstrate that scholarship on the empire's peripheries in Transjordan, Mount Lebanon, Yemen, and Albania was instrumental in reframing the study of late Ottoman governance by taking its imperial dimensions seriously.

Bringing the imperial back in: Reconsidering governance in the late Ottoman Empire, 1839–1923 (Part II)

AbstractThis is the second of two connected articles that survey recent trends in the historical scholarship of Ottoman imperial governance from the beginning of the Tanzimat state building efforts in the 1830s to the end of empire in the early 1920s. In both articles, I examine how historians have answered the question of what was imperial about the ways in which the Ottoman Empire was governed during this period. Throughout this two‐part series, I argue that an approach that pays attention to the capacity to govern, as Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper put it, “different people differently” through a broad repertoire of rule balancing this politics of difference with the politics of incorporation, is more conducive to bringing out the complexities of late Ottoman governance than teleological assumptions that consider the empire during this period on a linear path towards the nation state. Part I demonstrated that starting from the 1990s, scholarship on the empire's peripheries in Transjordan, Mount Lebanon, Yemen, and Albania was instrumental in reframing the study of late Ottoman governance by taking its imperial dimensions seriously. In Part II, I will continue this line of inquiry by reviewing pioneering studies that located the politics of difference and incorporation across the empire and not just in its peripheral regions. Here, I will also discuss a body of innovative scholarship that uses the analytical lenses of governmentality, techno‐politics, and International Law to shed light on the novel material, logistical, and legal capacities developed by the Ottoman state especially during the Hamidian period. In the final section, I will turn to studies that suggest that practices of Ottoman imperial governance remained relevant for the running of some of the empire's successor states.

Imperial Citizenship and Political Representation in the Russian Empire, 1905–1906

The introduction to the archival documents published in this issue of Ab Imperio frames the broad context of the political reform of 1905–1906 in the Russian Empire and highlights the imperial dimension in the elaboration of the first electoral law (the Bulygin Duma law). The authors explore the multisided and layered nature of political conflicts as well as divergent political imaginaries with regard to the institution of political representation in the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. In particular, the text explicates the nationalizing and colonializing imaginary of social engineering that guided the work of Sergey Kryzhanovskii on electoral principles and mechanisms. That imaginary stood in contradiction to the vision and practice of imperial citizenship that was shared by more senior officials in the central government of the empire such as Count Dmitry Sol'skii and Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov. The concept of imperial citizenship can be traced to the Great Reforms of the 1860s, which created the universalizing framework of norms and institutions for diverse space and groups of population in the empire. At the same time, the political logic of the Great Reforms allowed the incorporation of imperial particularisms into universalizing norms and institutions. Analyzing responses to ministerial proposals of the electoral law by high-ranking officials of various imperial peripheries, the authors demonstrate how the institutions of imperial citizenship framed the campaign of information-gathering marshaled by the imperial center and how the language of imperial citizenship conditioned the approach of local officials to the phenomenon of political representation.

Sicily in a Mediterranean context: imperiality, Mediterranean polycentrism and internal diversity (6th-10th century)

The article offers a re-reading of the role played by Sicily in the Imperial rivalry opposing the Byzantine and Islamic empires in the Central Mediterranean, stressing the island’s specific Imperial dimension. With Justinian’s “Reconquista”, Sicily underwent a thorough ideological, social, economic, and strategic integration into the Byzantine empire, ultimately becoming a uniquely “Imperial” province, a status preserved under Islamic rule. The concept of Imperiality and its evolution between the 7th and the 10th century offers a useful heuristic tool to analyse the ideological, political, and economic importance of Sicily for Constantinople and the role of the island as a source of legitimacy for the Islamic polities in the Central Mediterranean. The reassessment of the archaeological data sheds light on the concrete consequences of this Imperial struggle on the settlement patterns over the same period, with the creation of a specific frontier zone, paving the way to new research into the process of internal territorial diversification of the island.