This chapter investigates the ways in which writers used the rapidly expanding wired networks of electrical communications technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone to reimagine notions of community, nation, and empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of electrical communication networks was motivated by, and in turn enabled, the spread of empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, establishing models of center and periphery in stark contrast with utopian predictions of global interconnection. Worth shows how telegraph and telephone wires were conceived not only as nerves connecting the globe, but also, acting as the circulatory system of Empire, as veins or arteries – “metaphorical carrier[s] not only of information but of blood.” In addition to establishing wired networks of earthly dominion, the telephone and telegraph opened imaginary connections into the uncanny and the otherworldly, seeming to transgress the boundary between life and death.

Rather than within the UN system itself, the origins of Palestines international legal subalternity are located in British secret treaty-making and diplomacy between 1915 and 1947, particularly as institutionalized within the League of Nations system. Although the literature on the history of Palestine in this period tends to focus on political themes, this chapter examines this period through the cross-cutting theme of the Eurocentricity of international law and organization then prevailing. It is set against the backdrop of the global paradigm shift then occurring in the international system, from one based on the norms and values of the late-imperial age grounded in an international rule by law, to one based on those of an emerging liberal western rights-based discourse, ostensibly based on an international rule of law. The main systemic issue that emerges for Palestine at this time is its contingent and subaltern status in the international legal order, a status that was eventually placed before the UN in 1947.

The third chapter is divided into two sections – Frechulf of Lisieux’s Histories and Ado of Vienne’s Chronicon. Both men composed ambitious works, in which Frankish history played an ancillary role. In Frechulf, the Franks make a fleeting appearance in the final chapters of his Histories, which cut off unexpectedly in the seventh century. The motivations for this choice seemingly have more to do with Frechulf’s overarching structure of Christian history than with any judgement of the Merovingians. Frechulf was reticent on the subject of the Franks, to which he devoted less space than to other early medieval gentes. This is surprising, considering that Frechulf chose to end his Histories with the displacement of Romans and Goths by Franks and Lombards, signifying that they were important elements of his authorial program. The second section of the chapter focuses on Ado of Vienne’s Chronicon, arguing that Ado highlighted the discordant aspects of Merovingian history in the period 511–638. By doing so, Ado a presented a pessimistic appraisal of the entirety of the dynasty’s tenure, not only its so-called rois fainéants.

This chapter accounts for how animals appear in Victorian literature in connection with two overarching themes: shifting definitions of the animal and the human, especially in relationship to racialization and empire, and the incorporation of animals into the political sphere, especially as they proliferate throughout daily life. Both themes offer a productive and foundational lens to analyze the vast representations of animals across Victorian literature, and relate to a variety of other topics such as care and control, domesticity and the family, class and gender, and imperial strategies. Through examining a range of genres, from realist texts and animal autobiography to travel narratives and the literature of empire, this chapter demonstrates how relationships with animals shifted how Victorians saw themselves, their animals, and those across the empire. The chapter argues that texts by authors such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anna Sewell, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schriener, H. Rider Haggard, Mary Kingsley, and Richard Marsh, among others, illuminate the broader implications of extending political care to animals, controlling them across the empire, and using them to account for human difference through demarcating racial categories and structuring the borders of the human.

The Bible remains the book of empire. The liberal project of the “the Bible as Literature” has engaged in mostly placing the Bible on a pedestal as an important cultural artifact of the Western imagination, worthy to be read and to be studied in schools or university contexts. The contention of my analysis is the Bible needs to be understood as an ambiguous text in terms of its position vis-à-vis empires. Not only does the Bible as a text is replete with both tendencies, it has also been used both as an instrument of terror and as a tool of liberation. The question of interest in this particular essay is how can one decolonize the Bible? To answer that question, I will use the Book of Revelation as my canvas to show how a particular biblical text may offer both liberative ways for confronting empire and its economic aspects as it can also serve to recolonize. I will situate some of the decolonial impulses of the Book of Revelation in the specific social and political contexts of Haiti, a place where the Bible has been used and continues to be used mostly for colonizing effects.

The First World War was a fundamental watershed in the history of Europe and the world, causing deep and long-lasting shifts in politics, society, the economy, and the cultural sphere. The human costs were enormous. More than 70 million soldiers were mobilized between 1914 and 1918, of whom up to 9.3 million died. Many more were hurt and often had to live with their injuries and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. The civilian casualties were unprecedented, too: almost 8 million non-combatants fell victim to the direct and indirect consequences of the war, including displacement, captivity, and forced labor, but also starvation and epidemics. The experience of loss and destruction, of economic decline and social deprivation, traumatized whole generations for many years to come.

Empire, in the Western tradition, was a unitary and universal thing. There was and could be only one empire at any one time, and it was, in principle at least, a world empire. In this case, all roads led to and from Rome. Herodotus had introduced the idea, if not the term, of translatio imperii, the transfer of empire from one ruler to another. In his account the succession was from the Assyrians to the Medes, to the Persians. Later writers saw the Macedonians, in the person of Alexander the Great, as successor to the Persians, and later still it was relatively easy to see the Romans, with their admiration for Greek culture, as heirs to the Hellenistic empire of Alexander.

The introduction to The Jewish Imperial Imagination provides an overview of Baeck’s life, and of the book’s ventral argument. It shows how the Jewish Question – the discussion about emancipation and the place of Jews in modern society – was intertwined with other questions throughout the nineteenth century, including the questions of colonialism and imperial expansion. Instead of focusing on the nation-state, it shows the need to look at the imperial context. This is valid for Baeck’s thought, and German-Jewish thought more broadly. Finally, the introduction offers a theoretical framework for such analysis by developing the concept of “Jewish imperial imagination” as a way of moving beyond a simple dichotomy of ascribing to or resisting hegemonic narratives.

Empires and nations pull in different directions. Empires are founded on principles of institutionalized differences and distinctions, both laterally between peoples or geographies and vertically between those on top whose superiority grants them the right to rule over others and those below whose inferiority condemns them to be ruled by others. Nations, in contrast, are imagined and affective communities that promote, at least rhetorically if not always in practice, the commonality, horizontal equivalency, and homogeneity of the population that constitutes the nation. A nation at its inception is a political claim that a shared culture, ethnic, political, or religious, gives a people the right to self-rule, and possibly to sovereignty and statehood. At one end of the political spectrum, empires operate through hierarchy and difference between subjects and rulers, while at the other end, nations function on the basis of equality and shared nature, whether ethnic, religious, or political, of their citizens.

The Dutch Empire lasted from 1600 to 1975 and beyond; even now there are some Caribbean island dependencies left. The size, shape, and nature of the empire has evolved and altered, but over those centuries the Dutch colonies have been an important, if fluctuating, component of the national consciousness. Economic advantages were very considerable, but arguably the Dutch gained just as much in terms of self-confidence and status for their small nation: in the nineteenth century the empire was seen as absolutely essential in terms of both economics and prestige. Even in the twenty-first century, a centrist prime minister could call for a return to “the mentality of the VOC” (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, United East Indies Company), a remark that was not universally well received.

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, rapid demographic and economic growth among the settler colonial population of British America drew the attention of competing European empires to the potential wealth of the continent. By the 1750s, large-scale imperial warfare had broken out, a contest for control of these future riches. Over the next six decades, this conflict would evolve into a multi-sided civil war, drawing the continent’s indigenous peoples and settler colonists into the struggle. At the revolution’s beginning, circa 1754, the resources of North America lay mainly in the hands of indigenous people, distributed across hundreds of polities, while three European empires held footholds of varying size and strength, mainly on the continent’s edges. At its end, circa 1814, a single confederated nation, created out of wars fought to control America’s resources, and led by the children of empire, was positioned to take the whole for itself. The transformation included a new form of government and political economy which concentrated power in the hands of American citizens under a constitution designed to promote endless economic growth. The revolution’s outcome set a path for the continent’s future and projected an implicit vision of a new form of global empire.

Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

This chapter looks at the impact of the American Revolution and its war on both Britain and Ireland. Its central concern is to explore whether Britain and Ireland can be incorporated in the Atlantic Revolution thesis, first advanced by Robert Palmer, which suggests the migration of revolutionary impulses eastwards. The argument developed here lays less emphasis on the inspiration provided by the democratic ideas associated with the American Revolution than on the importance of British military setbacks and ultimate defeat in the War of American Independence. It also highlights domestic and wider imperial influences on reform within Britain and Ireland, which also seem to have played a more significant role than the democratic tendencies of the American Revolution. By no means all the different reform programs and proposals in Britain and Ireland envisaged movement in a democratic direction. Indeed, the chapter makes the case for our considering most of the calls for reform in this period as attempts to turn the clock back, and recover lost or declining safeguards against misrule, or remedy long-standing grievances, rather than as forward-looking attempts to embrace democracy.

Ascertaining whether or not nations existed in the ancient Near East is not merely for the sake of determining historically when these territorial relations of social kinship appear.1 If the evidence, however complicated, suggests the existence of nations in the ancient Near East, a more accurate understanding of not only antiquity but also “modern times” should emerge, as the classification of the self and others on the basis of birth and residence in a territory would not have originated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and certainly would not be novel to the so-called “Age of Nationalism” of the nineteenth century.

In 1954, the great African-American painter Jacob Lawrence conceived of a remarkable series of paintings that would, in his words, “depict the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.” Initially, he had in mind a grand narrative beginning with the “causes and events leading into the American Revolutionary War” and ending in the early years of the twentieth century. As finally executed, Lawrence’s Struggle series of panels (1954–1956) extended chronologically from the 1770 Boston Massacre to the aftermath of the battle of New Orleans in 1815. Lawrence thereby placed the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 at the center of the path to American nationhood.

This essay challenges the historiographical myth of salutary neglect on many levels, beginning by exploring how it came to its current, dominant interpretive status. I argue that it grows out of a desire to see the colonies as relatively democratic and independent, but that such a perception is deeply problematic. The levers of imperial control were powerful throughout the colonial period; colonial political systems did not develop “in a state of nature”; the tendrils of legal control were invidious and far-reaching; and force–the power of empire–was never far away. British navies, in particular, supplemented by occasional armies and colonial militias under the command of the Governor, along with all the mechanisms of legal control–sheriffs and executions, heads on stakes at the public crossroads–lurked always on the horizon, ready to intervene if necessary, sometimes only in the public imagination, but often in fact. This chapter is a call to think deeply about the power of empire during the colonial period. Doing so will lead to a richer understanding of what broke down between 1763 and 1776, but also of what came before. Salutary neglect it was not.

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of nationalism associated with decolonization throughout Asia and Africa. Indochina inspired nationalist movements around the world as communist-led movements there scored major victories against French colonialism and American intervention. The phenomenon was complex not only because Indochinese nationalisms were entangled with communism, but also because of their apparently ancient roots.

This chapter aims to explore the origins and nature of nationalisms in Indochina. It examines the processes that gave birth to national consciousness among the people in the Indochinese peninsula. Indochina, a modern name for this region born out of French imperial conquests, consisted of diverse communities of different religions, cultures, and histories. These communities had existed and interacted with each other for centuries prior to their contact with European powers.

Over recent years the traditionally Eurocentric field of nationalism studies has changed, so as to include Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Although there have long been prominent exceptions to these regions’ previous neglect in studies of nationalism,1 such accounts have had a limited impact on the field’s theory building. This earlier marginality was all the more lamentable considering that these regions’ histories are central to the historical question of why and how the nation-state became something like a global gold standard of political organization during the past 250 years – and with reinvigorated speed in the two decades following the Second World War, during which many European colonies in Asia and Africa gained independent statehood.