The Imperial Nation

Comparative imperial history is resurgent. What had become a relatively marginal approach to the study of empire has vaulted forward in ambition, range and status over the last decade; new intellectual constellations have appeared around previously isolated points of light. A historiographical review which sought to trace the genealogies of this ‘new’ comparative history of empire would be timely. Such a review would have to assess what this scholarship owes to the rise of global and transnational approaches, as well as tracing its debts to allied developments in intellectual history. The review might also point to historians’ identification of a growing number of ‘hyphenated imperialisms’ (trans-imperialism, co-imperialism, sub-imperialism) as one of the conceptual engines imparting new energy to comparative work. Any putative reviewer would certainly have to discuss how the recent wave of publications has contributed to our understanding of the relationships between ‘empires’ and ‘nations’. There have been two

Ancient history · Archaeology · Economic history · Empire · Genealogy · Historiography · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · World history · Australian History and Society · Classics · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Law · Philosophy