Nationalizing Empires

The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.

Table of Contents:
Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller Preface Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller Introduction: Building Nations In and With Empires – a Re-assessment Neil Evans ‘A World Empire, Sea-Girt’ The British Empire, State and Nations, 1780-1914 Michael Broers. The First Napoleonic Empire, 1799-1815 Robert Aldrich Colonialism and Nation-Building in Modern France Xosé-Manoel Núñez Nation-Building and Regional Integration: The Case of the Spanish Empire (1700-1914) Stefan Berger Building the Nation Among Visions of German Empire Alexei Miller The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation Andrea Komlosy The Habsburg Monarchy (1804 – 1918), Imperial Cohesion, Nation-Building and Regional Integration Howard Eisenstat. Modernization, Imperial Nationalism, and the Ethnicization of Confessional Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire Uffe Østergård Nation-Building and Nationalism in the Oldenburg Empire David Laven and Elsa Damien. Empire, city, nation: Venice’s imperial past and the ‘making of Italians’ from unification to fascism Comments Jean-Frédéric Schaub European Old Regime and the Imperial Question: A Modernist View at a Contemporary Question. Dominic Lieven. Empires and their Core territories on the Eve of 1914: A Comment Philipp Ther, “Imperial Nationalism” as Challenge for the Study of Nationalism Alfred J. Rieber, Nationalizing imperial armies. A comparative and transnational study of three empires Jörn Leonhard Multi-Ethnic Empires and Nation-Building: Comparative Perspectives on the late Nineteenth Century and the First World War

About the Author :
Stefan Berger is professor of social history at Ruhr University Bochum and the director of the Institute for Social Movements, RUB. Alexei Miller is recurrent visiting professor, Central European University, Budapest and senior research fellow, Institute for Scientific Information in Social Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.