K rishan K umar . Visions of Empire

In Visions of Empire, a work of prodigious scholarship, Krishan Kumar demonstrates the value of drawing comparisons across time and space. Separate chapters on six European-based empires—Roman, Ottoman, Habsburg, tsarist Russian/Soviet communist, British, and French—highlight unexpectedly common features as well as better-known differences. Kumar focuses on justifications for empire employed by rulers, leading administrators and soldiers, and prominent intellectuals associated with the imperial “center.” A secondary theme is the techniques employed and institutions devised to maintain control over racially/ethnically and religiously diverse populations. Granting that a clear, consistent conceptual line cannot be drawn between empire and nation-state, the author emphasizes the expansionist dynamic of empires, in two senses. One is territorial: empires are not restricted to protecting a specific “national” group and hence feel free to extend their borders. The other is normative: rationales for an empire’s existence stress benefits applying potentially to all humans, whether through conversion-driven, universalistic religions (Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity for the Ottomans, Habsburgs, and Romanovs respectively), a globally applicable secular ideology (Soviet communism), or shared language and cultural practices (Roman and French empires).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Christianity · Communism · Empire · Expansionism · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Theme (computing) · Vision · Anthropology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies