Empire to Nation Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World

by Esherick, Joseph W.; Kayali, Hasan; Van Young, Eric; Barkey, Karen; Bulag, Uradyn E.; Comisso, Ellen; Esherick, Joseph W.; Forment, Carlos A.; Kaplan, Cynthia S.; Kasaba, Resat; Uribe-Uran, Victor M.; Young, Eric Van; Walker, Edward W.

• ISBN13: 9780742540309
• ISBN10: 0742540308
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-05-04
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Summary

The fall of empires and the rise of nation-states was a defining political transition in the making of the modern world. Here, ten prominent specialists discuss the empire-to-nation transition in comparative perspective. Chapters on Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and China illustrate both the common features and the diversity of the transition. While previous studies have focused on the rise and fall of empires or on nationalism and the process of nation-building, this intriguing volume concentrates on the empire-to-nation transition itself.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
1 Introduction	1	(34)
Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young
Part I: The Spanish Empire in the Americas
2 The Limits of Atlantic-World Nationalism in a Revolutionary Age: Imagined Communities and Lived Communities in Mexico, 1810-1821	35	(33)
Eric Van Young
3 The Great Transformation of Law and Legal Culture: "The Public" and "the Private" in the Transition from Empire to Nation in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, 1750-1850	68	(38)
Victor M. Uribe-Uran
4 Selfhood and Nationhood in Latin America: From Colonial Subject to Democratic Citizen	106	(32)
Carlos A. Forment
Part II: The Middle East and Eastern Europe
5 Empires as Prisons of Nations versus Empires as Political Opportunity Structures: An Exploration of the Role of Nationalism in Imperial Dissolutions in Europe	138	(29)
Ellen Comisso
6 Changing Modalities of Empire: A Comparative Study of Ottoman and Habsburg Decline	167	(31)
Karen Barkey
7 Dreams of Empire, Dreams of Nations	198	(31)
Resat Kasaba
Part III: The Chinese Empire
8 How the Qing Became China	229	(31)
Joseph W. Esherick
9 Going Imperial: Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism and Nationalisms in China and Inner Asia	260
Uradyn E. Bulag
Part IV: The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
10 The Long Road from Empire: Legacies of Nation Building in the Soviet Successor States	299	(41)
Edward W. Walker
11 Setting the Political Agenda: Cultural Discourse in the Estonian Transition	340	(33)
Cynthia S. Kaplan
12 Afterword: The Return of Empire?	373	(16)
Joseph W. Esherick
Selected Bibliography	389	(20)
Index	409	(20)
About the Contributors	429