Visions of Empire

Krishan Kumar’s sprawling new volume introduces itself as a study of the ideas and ideologies of imperial ruling elites. But really it is nothing of the sort. It is, in fact, a massive, discursive, discipline-agnostic essay on the essential character of empire and imperialism, of a kind which used to be more common but which has fallen out of fashion in the last thirty years. At its core lie a series of reflections on the relationships between modern empires, nationality and nationalism: synthesising a daunting amount of work by historians, sociologists and political theorists, the author builds a persuasive case that we need to re-examine the way we think about these problems. This is, then, a much more serious book than its title implies. It is also one that demands considerable patience from its readers. Comparative imperial history has returned in force in the last ten years or so, but most scholars working in the field would be wary of taking on as many as five empires at once. Even less would they presume to deal with all the most significant modern empires (by Kumar’s reckoning) over the whole of their centuries-long lifespans. But this is precisely what the book attempts, covering the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian, British and French empires, with a chapter on their Roman inspiration thrown in for good measure. Potential issues with mastery of sources and languages are sidestepped via an all but exclusive focus on secondary literature (and plenty of it, the bibliography running to forty-five closely printed pages) and on work written in English. One wonders, as a consequence, how up to date the interpretations of the non-Anglophone empires are: some of the book’s claims for novelty, even in its discussion of the British empire, are questionable. But the synthetic focus works to the book’s advantage, allowing Kumar to offer a series of outstandingly good dissections of conceptual problems and historiographical debates. The first chapter, on ‘The idea of empire’, offers a brilliantly concise summary of recent work on the history of imperial terminology; the discussion of the debate over the domestic impact of the British empire brings something fresh to an exhaustively worked-over problem; and the literatures on Ottoman ‘decline’ and French ‘assimilation’ are interrogated with a particularly sure hand

Ancient history · Empire · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · World Systems and Global Transformations