Visions of empire
Subtitle: how five imperial regimes shaped the world
By: Krishan Kumar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 576
ISBN-13: 9780691153636
Copyright date: 2017
Subjects: World history; World politics; Case studies; Imperialism
Description: The empires of the past were far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and have much to teach us about navigating our own increasingly globalized and interconnected world. Until now, most recent scholarship on empires has focused on their subject peoples. Visions of Empire looks at their rulers, shedding critical new light on who they were, how they justified their empires, how they viewed themselves, and the styles of rule they adopted toward their subjects. Krishan Kumar provides panoramic and multifaceted portraits of five major European empires - Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian/Soviet, British, and French - showing how each, like ancient Rome, saw itself as the carrier of universal civilization to the rest of the world. Sometimes these aims were couched in religious terms, as with Islam for the Ottomans or Catholicism for the Habsburgs. Later, the imperial missions took more secular forms, as with British political traditions or the world communism of the Soviets. Visions of Empire offers new insights into the interactions between rulers and ruled, revealing how empire was as much a shared enterprise as a clash of oppositional interests. It explores how these empires differed from nation-states, particularly in how the ruling peoples of empires were forced to downplay or suppress their own national or ethnic identities in the interests of the long-term preservation of their rule.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 477-552) and index.
Table of contents: title: The idea of empire; title: The Roman empire: parent of empire; title: The Ottoman empire; title: The Habsburg empire; title: The Russian and Soviet empires; title: The British empire; title: The French empire: "imperial nation-state"; title: Epilogue: nations after empires.