Notion Of Empire Research Articles

Materializing Imperial Rule? Nature, Environment, and the Middle Class in Habsburg Central Europe

New imperial history has fundamentally transformed our understanding of empires and questioned established certainties with regard to paths of state building and state formation. This challenge has proved fruitful for historians of Austria-Hungary, as it has led to a new perception of the Dual Monarchy as a sometimes innovative and in certain regards even progressive polity. The observation that nature and environment became more closely entangled with imperial rule and politics in the nineteenth century and had an impact on common notions of what modern empire actually was serves as a starting point for this study. Along three representative repositories of imperial knowledge—Czoernig’s Ethnographische Karte (1857), the Hungarian Czigányösszeirás eredményei (1893), and the catalogue accompanying one part (the Austrian) of the Habsburg contribution to the 1900 exposition universelle—it shows how new spheres of the non-human became entangled with imperial polities and were transformed into resources with which to further the imperial project. These three examples, I argue, are just three minor elements against a larger discursive backdrop that slowly furthered the embodiment of a notion of modern empire, which featured the improvement of the natural environment as a constitutive aspect of its exercise of power. Consequentially, this raises the question of a cui bono, placing the focus on a considerably large body of imperial civil service, not only in charge of this operation but also functioning as the driving force behind it. I understand the middle-class officials who made up the administration as the imperial intermediaries identified by new imperial history, and I shed light on the diversity of this increasingly important social class, a diversity which resulted from the ongoing engagement and subtle participation of middle-class civil-servants in the imperial project. I also keep a close eye on the resources they could mobilize, particularly expert knowledge. I seek to further a more nuanced understanding of the social transformation that Austria-Hungary’s imperial project underwent in the long nineteenth century as this distinctive polity (Austria-Hungary) relied on the middle classes as central imperial intermediaries who furthered the modernization of the Dual Monarchy by fostering specific sets of values and furthering the use of resources the appropriation and exploitation of which have left lasting marks in Central European mentalities.

Thirty Years from the End of the USSR

The article contains a brief retrospective assessment of the reasons given by various scholars and observers for the breakdown of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership and it situates that crisis in the larger context of history and the imperial legacy of the Russian state. It particularly looks at the issue of nationality as an ethnic, cultural and linguistic concept vis-a-vis the universalistic notion of empire as a community of destiny among diverse people. The author compares the Soviet Union’s structure as a ‘non classical’ empire to those of other European states and especially to Germany’s which has also evolved from being a loose Central and East European ‘Reich’ inspired by the Roman and Carolingian heritage – to becoming a federal nation surrounded by smaller countries that share with it ancient civilisational and political legacy. Whereas Germany is gradually asserting leadership among many of its former dependencies and in the post-Brexit European Union as a whole, Russia is led by geographical and strategic compulsions to rebuild a Eurasian confederal association with erstwhile Soviet Republics and possessions of the Tsarist Empire, in conformity with its location between the ‘West’, the Islamosphere and the Chinese world. Will Russia be able to create a synthesis between the Slav Orthodox Oikoumene envisioned by Nikolay Danilevsky and the Eurasian syncretistic model promoted by Lev Gumilyov?

In the shadows of interpretation: manipulative nature of translation in colliding of sacral and marginal

Aim. Aim of the article is to provide critical examination of manipulation process as multidimensional phenomenon related to imagination, representation, translation and interpreting of original texts in light of assurance of informational safety that is our research object. Our research corresponds to theory and practice of translation, psychology, comparative religious studies, international relations, public diplomacy and national security. Methods. Research methodology is based on critical analysis of manipulations with texts; the methods have been borrowed from works of Gilbert Durand (1999), Michel Maffesoli (1996) and James Frazer (2012) on social anthropology. Results. Practical value of obtained results consists in proposed algorithm for critical analysis of translated or interpreted texts that allows to evaluate their quality according to context, meaning and semiotics of the source texts. The notion of empire as an archetype that was implemented into contemporary international relations is also revised and extended. That can help in analysis and prevention of different forms and means of outside and inside tactics of deviant influence on societies and to illuminate threats for cultural identity and spiritual diversity of the global community. Conclusions. Phenomenon of marginalization of cultural and spiritual identity (sacral sphere) under the influence of globalization by the means of soft power pressure can be evaluated today as the unspoken impact of influence agents implemented into new societal institutes in the form of alien cultural imperatives that are enforced to different communities as common for all agendas in the frameworks of postmodern stream.

MOĞOL İSTİLÂSINA DAİR İKİ FARKLI AKTARIM BİÇİMİ: TARİHÎ KAYNAKLAR VE MENAKIPNAMELER

Undoubtedly, the Mongolian invasions rank first among the chain of events that shaped the fate of the states and left indisputable effects on the societies in their path during the Middle Ages. The invasions began during the reign of great Chinghis Khan who had the ideal of world domination. With the invasions, on one hand, the political equilibrium in several regions was changed dramatically; on the other hand, the religious and intellectual (including those of ṣūfī structures) patterns of the societieswere also deeply influenced by depending on the changing political balance. Conventionally, the way the religious and ṣūfī structures in this period were affected has usually been studied by referencing the historical sources. However, such evaluations neglecting the menākıbnāmes in which the stories of the sheikhs and dervishes of these religious and ṣūfī structures were told fall short in variety of aspects. As the menākıbnāmes were regarded as the sacred literary texts that were formed in the context of the semantic worlds of the sheikhs and dervishes, they can serve as complimentary sources for the period that can shed light on the neglected spots of the historical studies. Nonetheless,the menākıbnāmes not only convey the words and actions of wisdom by the ṣūfīs but also reflectthe traces of the social and religious structures these ṣūfīs lived in. In this study, therefore, themenākıbnāmes, which have invaluable significance in terms of cultural history, were used accordinglywith the historical sources. Using menākıbnāmes as a source led us to the conclusion that there weretwo different narratives regarding the Mongolian invasions. When historical sources and modernstudies are surveyed, it can be implied that the Mongols’ own belief in their status as selected nationand their notion of a universal empire were among the most important factors in their quest forconquests. Equally important, the richness of the Islamic world and the welcoming attitudes of someMuslim states further motivated the Mongols for conquests. When the historical progress of theconquests is followed from the menākıbnāmes, however, a different kind of narrative appears. Thisdifferent narrative was especially elaborated in the narratives of Nafahāt al-Uns, Menāḳıb al-ʿĀrifīn,Sipehsālār Risalesi and Vilāyet-Nāme. The records of these menākıbnāmes help us comprehend themental and intellectual world of some sheikhs and dervishes, and allow for how they interpreted theMongolian invasions. Keywords: The Mongol Invasions, Historical Sources, Menākıbnāmes, Sheikhs and Dervishes,Prophecies.

Genre and Politics: The Concept of Empire in Joseph Brodsky's Work

The article analyses ideological and genre aspects of Joseph Brodsky's work, associated with the imperial theme in Russian literature. By drawing on methods from comparative literature, historical poetics, and empire studies I claim that a concern with space is not only central to Brodsky's work but also consistent with his imperial thinking. Brodsky's verse maintains a direct dialogue with Classicist poetry and Acmeist poetry (particularly Osip Mandelstam), both of which dealt with the notion of empire through adoption of the "high" literary style. The Imperial theme in Brodsky's oeuvre also overlaps with the dismantlement of the Russian imperial subject at the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, I argue that he was, above all, the last Russian imperial poet.

Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire by Malachi Haim Hacohen (review)

Reviewed by: Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire by Malachi Haim Hacohen Michael Brenner Malachi Haim Hacohen. Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 752 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000306 This book is special in many ways, not the least of it being that readers get two books for the price of one. The first book is a learned and detailed longue-durée historical exegesis of the Jacob and Esau story. The second book is, on its surface, an outline of the relationship between nation and empire in modern Europe, but more concretely a modern reading of Jewish existence in the Habsburg Empire and twentieth-century Austria. To be sure, both themes overlap at times, but often they take their own course, and might have better fit between two different book covers. Let us begin with the first thread of his complex narrative. It is a quite original reading of the Jacob and Esau story from Roman times until the twenty-first century. Hacohen argues "that the Roman Empire and not Christianity was crucial to rabbinic Edom" and "that European Christendom's formation in confrontation with Islam first fixed the Jewish gaze on the Roman Empire's religious character [End Page 448] and triggered the Christianization of Edom and Esau" (79). In this equation of Esau (a.k.a. Edom) with the notion of empire we see the connection between the two threads of the book. Hacohen continues to weave this intricate net for most of his medieval topics. Esau, he argues, "became Christian when Jews recognized, belatedly, that what they dismissed as another minut became the driving force of empire" (92). As we proceed to the later periods, this intriguing connection between the Esau and Jacob story on the one hand and the nation/empire narrative is not always present. When Hacohen discusses modern Jacob and Esau interpretations, his account is based mainly on rabbinic sermons of a very broad spectrum: the traditionalist Ḥatam Sofer likening Esau with Reform Jews and placing them outside the community; the Hamburg Reform preacher Eduard Kley using Jacob to promote "a Jewish-inflected liberal Protestantism as authentic Judaism"; the Vienna preacher Isaac Noah Mannheimer calling on German Jews to acculturate before being granted emancipation; the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy Samson Raphael Hirsch turning Jacob's struggle with the angel into the saga of Jewish exile and emancipation. Hacohen's sympathies clearly lie with the more traditional rabbis and their efforts to preserve tradition within modernity, as opposed to Reform rabbis who, like Hamburg preacher Eduard Kley, were offering, in Hacohen's words, "a Jewishinflected liberal Protestantism as authentic Judaism, and preaching misogyny and intolerance under the guise of enlightened liberalism" (232). These chapters of the book may not be tied strongly into the discourse on nation and empire, but they are the real core of the book, a true treasure for historians. Hacohen uses original material to read modern Jewish history against the grain. It is not the usual intellectuals or the political spokespeople of nineteenth-century central European Jewry he is interested in, but rather their often-overlooked religious leaders. By analyzing their sermons through the perspective of Jacob and Esau, Hacohen delivers an innovative view of modern German and Austrian Jewish history. This alone would be sufficient reason to read the book. But then there is still the other book. Much of its second half provides an account of Austrian Jewish intellectuals in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century. We read about Jewish imperial politics and socialist federalism; Adolf Fischhof's and Nathan Birnbaum's Diaspora politics; Karl Popper's Open Society; Red Vienna of the 1920s; concepts of Jewish cosmopolitanism; Erich Auerbach and concepts of Judeo-Christian Europe; and, in the final chapter, about postwar remigrés to Austria, such as the writer Friedrich Torberg, a brilliant intellectual and a Cold War warrior. It is not always clear what all this material, plus much more, has to do with the Jacob and Esau narrative, but we find here undoubtedly the most interesting account to date on modern intellectual Austrian Jewish history, which makes the book worth...

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic WorldFrom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic WorldFrom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Empire in Jewish Literature from Egypt

Abstract This article studies the use of τὰ πράγματα in Jewish literature written in Ptolemaic and early Imperial Egypt. While there was no Greek term for “empire” that aligns with the modern sense of an empire as a territorial polity, τὰ πράγματα most closely resembles our modern notion of empire. First, we analyze the range of meanings of πράγματα in Ptolemaic documents and literature. Next, we examine the uses of this concept in Jewish sources from Ptolemaic Egypt. Then, we investigate the shifting understandings of πράγματα in the Jewish sources from Roman Egypt. We conclude that Jewish texts have much more complex views of empire than the descriptors pro- or anti-empire allow. This approach redirects our attention from empire as a static and tangible entity to a dynamic suite of practices through which power is exercised and derived.

El concepto de ‘imperio’ en el pensamiento político griego clásico

In this article we shall study the notion of ‘empire’ in classical Greek political thought. Our aim is arguing that such a concept establishes a notion of empire in which live together the ideas of legitimate authority and of despotic domination. This is important because we seek to register that notion within the Greek worldview, avoiding comparison with the Modern conception. Finally, we assert that both ways of conceptualizing the notion of empire emerge from the extant tension within the State between the egalitarian volition of the polis and its expansionist targets.

ІМПЕРІЯ ЯК ІСТОРИКО-ГЕОПОЛІТИЧНИЙ ФЕНОМЕН

There have been few researches recently in Ukraine investigating empires as a political phenomenon. The beginning of the XX century showed that empires were in the past, yet in the previous century, for the following empires collapsed: British, French, Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, Japanese. However, the issue of empires is not closed, has not been taken off the political agenda.The notion of empire was not yet investigated in the XIX century, and in the XX the scientists introduced such terms as imperial thinking, imperial ambitions, and imperial traditions. However, the content of the notion "empire" was not investigated or had a demonized meaning with a destructive sense.The research and analysis of empires had a serious theoretical significance for the objective perception of history, modernity, and development perspectives of international relations system.Although it must be emphasized that European countries actually claim to form their own organizational type of state. So, recently, quite often, researchers and politicians have expressed different assessments regarding the prospect of the development of forms of state-territorial organization of European countries. What is the future of the European Union? In decentralization and separation of states in the further integration of cultural and economic space? Is it possible for the united Europe to coexist within the confederacy or federal structure? Price issue concerns not only the EU, but also its territorial organization and, most importantly, the future format of the state. In this regard, the question arises: the prospects of the European alliance - the consolidation of the federation, the confederation of countries, and perhaps the future version of the renewed type of "soft" empire?We examined the separate principles and aspects of the imperial system. Empires existed in different ages, in different political and cultural environments. All empires were characterized by different models of colonization and space exploration. Different empires perceived their regions with their autochthonous population. However, in many respects the imperial dominant remained similar. This allows us to assume that the ethnic groups can perceive the imperial order at least if it is adapted to its ethno-social and ethnosciological peculiarities, and therefore, in our opinion, it will be incorrect to recall the empire-state only in the past.

The Border between War and Peace. Power and Propaganda in Neo-Assyrian and Achaemenid Art

This contribution aims to explore the concept of universal rule in Assyrian and Persian imperial art. The notion of world empire began in the Ancient Near East; the Neo-Assyrian and Achaemenid empires can be considered as the first real political powers which laid claims to universal hegemony through complex systems of political propaganda, based on writings, and monumental art and architecture. Assyrian political propaganda was a deliberate broadcast of violence displayed by a combination of visual art and royal inscriptions. The core idea was the invulnerability of the Assyrian king, his army and their will to overcome both natural and human obstacles. Emphasis was on the strong relationship between Assyria and its gods as opposed to the futile resistance of its enemies. Persian state propaganda, on the contrary, reflects the idea of a large multi-cultural empire based on voluntary submission and integration. Although its artistic perspective was mainly based on a typical Mesopotamian background, Persian royal art mostly did not employ narrative schemes, either in texts or images. Violence was not represented, and wars avoided. Achaemenid art shows a universal peaceful order based on the king’s tutelage.

The Accra Confession as a response to empire

The Accra Confession was formulated and adopted by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Accra, Ghana, in 2004. This article traces the historical development of the Accra Confession and its continued impact on the present. It aims to show the confession as a Reformed response to ‘empire’. The article explores the content, debates and challenges the Accra Confession offers to the notion of empire.

The dip pen as a source of social distinction in Victorian Britain

ABSTRACTIn the nineteenth century, Britain was the epicentre of pen-making, with around 75% of the world’s dip pens being manufactured in Birmingham. While the ownership of dip pens was initially restricted to upper-class Victorians due to their expensive cost, the introduction of mass-production techniques and the 1870 Education Act led to their adoption by the lower classes. The democratisation of the dip pen offered manufacturers an attractive new opportunity to capitalise on Britain’s deeply rooted class structure and use the pen as a strategy of distinction. This paper explores how dip pens, inkwells and blotters became marketed by manufacturers in ways that tapped into collective consciousness on social status, power and one’s sense of limitations, thus reinforcing class divisions. In doing so, it uses Bourdieu’s notion that personal possessions are the ‘practical affirmation of an inevitable difference’ and become the coordinating frame within which social life is grouped. This paper also investigates how Englishness, the notion of Empire and nationalism were used to sell pens abroad. It determines that pen manufacturers were able to build a highly lucrative trade through the exploitation of the ‘social conditioning’ of consumers on class and national identity.

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE EUROPEAN UNION AND RUSSIA IN THE LIGHT OF THE NOTION OF EMPIRE

This article has the object to analyse the relationship between the European Union and Russia in the light of the Empire notion. Research focuses not what is happening today but in their interpretation, taking into account Empire notion, in the European Union and Russia. The core idea is that the Empire notion continuous to have relevance in the State system; the evidence is the international practice and the history of International relations. The notion of Empire has not been taking into account sufficiently in the analysis of International law. Furthemore we have analysed the situation in the globalisation and the deterritorialization of power. The conflicts and the practice of International law have been analysed.

Managing the world: conceptions of imperial rule between republicanism and technocracy

SUMMARYThe article examines a technocratic vision of empire arising in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its implications for the theorization of empires, the legitimation of large-scale political orders, and their spatial imagination. The role of the Roman model for the British in the decades after 1870 as a resource of policy advice, legitimation, and identity-building serves as a case study for analyzing the role of historical precedence for imperial elites. This analysis opens the perspective onto a notion of empire that significantly differs from the one discussed in recent debates on liberalism and empire: British political actors and observers delineate a concept of empire that is not universalist, but heterogeneous, hierarchical, and technocratic.

Onus Orbis Terrarum: About a Possible Shift in the Definition of Sovereignty

Starting with an insight from Peter Sloterdijk about the enduring notion of Empire in the European idea of sovereignty, this article explores a problem common to the discipline of International Relations, and more generally, geopolitics as well as social theory: the very origin of the notion of an entity endowed with some sort of autonomy over a territory. It is argued that the notion of a bounded entity triggers many artifacts that explains, in part, the failure and denial of world politics, especially over the question of climate change.

Scottish Tobacco and Rhubarb: The Natural Order of Civil Cameralism in the Scottish Enlightenment

At the end of the Enlightenment, Scottish landowners and agricultural improvers pioneered a series of experiments in import substitution, including large-scale trials in tobacco and rhubarb cultivation. They rejected the notion of empire as a natural division of labor between colonies and metropole. Through information networks and voluntary associations, they promoted a host of projects that upset the conventional order of the expanding fiscalmilitary state and its interest groups. These schemes of import substitution undercut both colonial and foreign trade in favor of an economic strategy of national autarky and civil cameralism within the British Isles.

Imperial Practice and the Making of Modern Japan's Territory: Towards a Reconsideration of Empire’s Boundaries

A renewed focus on the notion of empire has prompted an interest in questions of modern Japanese imperialism after the Meiji Restoration, both in Japan and abroad. It has also focused attention on the issue of comparing empires across Eurasia during the early modern period, under the rubric of ‘global history’. Japan has not really been incorporated into this latter discussion. This article begins by examining the reasons for this lack of incorporation, before moving on to discuss the value of considering early modern Japan as an imperial formation. The lens it adopts is one of cartography, that quintessentially imperial practice that has featured heavily in discussions of a Eurasian early modernity. The article examines the cartographic incorporation of Japan’s northern region of the Yezo into Japan itself, culminating in the area being newly designated as Hokkaido in the early Meiji period, the newest circuit within Imperial Japan’s administrative map. This political outcome was the result of varied practices that found reflection across the Tokugawa–Meiji divide. Yet this intense variety of practices, constantly shifting in response to contingency, served to form the state-effect, through which the land of Yezo was granted its unity and represented on the map. The territory on the map provided the visual, graphic representation of the demarcation of authority of the state that authorized the practice of its own mapping. In this manner, the state mapped itself into Hokkaido and from this perspective, the division between the early modern and modern eras is far less significant than is frequently assumed.

Empire and Nation

In this article, I suggest that the idea of the South African empire may need further conceptual elaboration if it is to support and sustain the project of keeping alive a desire for a post-apartheid future as a possible horizon in Southern African historiography. A notion of the South African empire bound to the desire for a post-apartheid future will depend on our ability to distinguish between ideological racism and biopolitics. The biopolitics of apartheid was not merely a reaction to the setting sun of the British Empire, or the dissolution of liberal reason. It was, as I will show, a response to the very question of political subjectivity in liberal discourse. Biopolitics, in contrast to ideological racism, demands a reading of empire that advances and elaborates a concept of the post-apartheid. To this end, earlier critical models that were applied to readings of empire specifically locate empire's force in imperial war or the ravages of imperialism. Perhaps such critiques may be productively enlivened by a demand to keep the desire for the post-apartheid in sight. To the extent that empire always also reveals itself as the story of the postcolonial nation, might the intended critique of the South African empire afford us an opportunity to think our way out of the tragic scripts of the 19th and 20th centuries?

The British Empire in India

In her response to Julian Go’s book Patterns of Empire, Mukherjee contends that the harder Go seeks to critique American exceptionalism, the more he has to insist on the liberal nature of the British Empire in India. By “liberal British rule,” Mukherjee writes, Go refers to certain imperial policies that seemed to offer the subject populations more representation, and therefore more participation in governance. He is not concerned with liberalism as a school of political philosophy. The notion of “liberal empire,” however, is untenable as a characterization of the British Empire in India, both discursively and historically. Even on the face of it, the notion of liberal empire is a contradiction in terms: the idea of liberty and the idea and institution of empire are mutually incompatible. After all, the very fact of empire as an exercise in political power over an alien population is predicated on the loss of political sovereignty of the subject population. Can an empire deprive a society and culture of its political sovereignty and independence and yet claim to be liberal?