Empire Studies

In this book, Claudia Glatz reconsiders the concept of empire and the processes of imperial making and undoing by investigating the practices, places, and things and their evolving interconnections with people, that together produce, challenge, and, above all, continuously transform imperial networks and their constituent communities. The volume provides a new, critical account of the Hittite imperial network of Late Bronze Age Anatolia (c. 1600-1180 BCE), one of the earliest archaeologically well-attested imperialist polities of the ancient Near East, through detailed analyses of a wide range of archaeological, iconographic, and textual sources. Concerned with the analysis and communication of the complexity, messiness, and ever transforming nature of imperial relationships, the book examines the practices through which Hittite elites and administrators hoped to bind together disparate communities and achieve a measure of sovereignty in particular places and landscapes, and with the help of particular material things. It also tracks the ambiguities inherent in these practices, their messy results, their un- and under-achievements, and how they were resisted, or more subtly negotiated in different regional and cultural contexts.

Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj explores representations of animals during British rule in India—the tigers, elephants, boars, furs, and feathers that sometimes all but obscured the human beneath and behind them, and that were integral in the creation and maintenance of the hierarchies of colonialism. The book exists on two levels: one offers a sophisticated view of how power and oppression work within constellations of species, race, class, gender, and nationhood, and the other is a deeply suggestive meditation on our humanness and how we locate it within a spectrum of relations. Drawing on a range of texts including hunting narratives, stories, poetry, novels, photographs, journals, paintings, and cartoons, the argument builds with a lucid and beautifully unobtrusive feel for the telling example.

This article is devoted to the reconstruction of " Fragments of memories of my childhood and the time in the Lyceum " , the memoirs of Count Vladimir Nikolayevich Kokovtsov, the former Minister of Finance and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire. The history behind his words is analysed, as are the circumstances surrounding the transfer of Kokovtsov's memoir to the State Archive of Belgium (Archive of Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History in Brussels), and the history of its publication over many decades. " Fragments of memories " is compared with " Out of my past " , another memoir written by Count Kokovtsov. The author of the article tries to understand the peculiarities of the construction of the past by the representatives of the imperial bureaucracy, to reveal the specifics of its memorial culture and identity. Kokovtsov's memoirs are remarkable within the context of Russian emigration memoiristics. They reflect the ambitions of an old Russian bureaucrat who survived the existential tragedy of exile and who tried to find moral support in the past.

In 1806 New South Wales Governor Philip Gidley King gifted a prefabricated house to the paramount tribal chief of the Bay of Islands (Northland New Zealand), Te Pahi. The house was erected on Te Pahi's island pa (fortified village) at Wairoa Bay and was the first 'European' house to be built in New Zealand. As a gift, it embodied a nascent trade relationship between two cultures/countries and the recognition of Maori as a sovereign nation led by chiefs. Over a short time, however, it would also come to represent deepening racial and class divisions, among and between European traders and Northland Maori. Te Pahi was blamed (erroneously, many historians have argued) for the burning of the ship Boyd, which had arrived from Port Jackson to Whangaroa harbour in 1809, and the murder of most of her crew and passengers. As a consequence, his people and his house became the focus for three separate revenge attacks by ships' crews outraged by the recognition that had been accorded to Maori, symbolised by the gift of architecture, which was then undermined by the burning of the Boyd. The house was fired-on by cannon and ransacked, and a large number of the island's residents were killed or, in the case of Te Pahi, mortally-wounded. Aside from its historical context, little is known about the house, and its exact location (on either one of two islands) has not been identified. In preparation for a geophysical site survey of potential house sites, this paper discusses the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the house, its general site context and (inter-)cultural history, and the events surrounding its attacks. The 'remains' of the house are, for now at least, its history, a remnant of an unrealised promise of shared spaces, resources and mutual respect.

Education constitutes a central part of every political system, as it provides the mental basis for a next generation of citizens. The same applies for the Habsburg Monarchy; the very idea of Empire was already planted in the minds of young girls and boys who attended school in Austria, Hungary, or another part of the monarchy. This paper explores in what way the Empire was present in school reports of two Austria-Hungarian girls’ schools between 1910 and 1918. It is shown that attempts to further patriotism and patriotic activities in schools increased at the outbreak of WWI and were indeed successful in mobilizing students for the Empire's purposes. Students of the Girls' Lyceum in Znaim and the Luithlen Lyceum in Vienna contributed to the war effort by performing various tasks for the Habsburg Empire.

Postcolonial theories highlight that imperialism is a military exercise as it is a textual project. Imperial traveling agents employ texts to subjugate foreign geographical spaces, to colonize the minds of native inhabitants, and to sanitize the conscience of the colonizing nations. This paper discusses some postcolonial investigation into empires and texts; it inquires into the role of the Bible in empire-building and the foundation of its role by reading Jn 4:1-42. The paper expounds on the imperial setting, the construction of hidden interests, travelers, geographical spaces, expansion, and the Samaritan woman/people/land in Jn 4:1-42 The reading highlights that mission texts tend to befriend imperializing ideologies by authorizing the cultural subjugation of foreign lands and people. Its conclusion presents one rewriting of the story that proposes the Samaritan identity as an ideal space for contemporary post-colonial subjects and era.

This essay explores whether a meaningful separate category of maritime empires can be established by looking at the commonalities between a variety of such empires until c. 1800, as well as characteristic differences from land-based empires. It forms the introduction to an edited volume in which we asked the contributors to ask similar questions about specific maritime network ‘states’.

Psychoanalysis and pastoral theology raise serious concerns about the field termed “positive psychology” by its proponents. The field’s construction of psychoanalysis as the “negative” straw person against which it claims to have developed a strength- and virtue-based approach is refuted. Evidence is given that schools of psychoanalysis pioneered a positive focus on strengths, albeit without the dangerous splitting widespread in the field of “positive” psychology. What the field calls “positive” can have “negative” consequences for individuals and communities. The renaming of the field as “virtue psychology” is proposed. Despite its good intentions, “positive” psychology is revealed as a neocolonial psychology of empire that tends to rationalize social injustice away. Its “positive theology” is shown to be an illusory attempt to counter existential despair by playing God through an omnipotent justification-by-works mentality. Psychoanalysis could serve the field as a treasure trove for a more balanced focus on the whole spectrum of human experience.

Traditional scholarship has argued that during the fourth and fifth centuries the waning Roman Empire came to rely to a large extent on recruits of foreign, barbarian origin for its defence. Such a pro-barbarian recruitment policy resulted in the weakening and collapse of Roman military capability in the West, and in the fragmentation and disappearance of the Western Roman state. The article reexamines the " barbarization " theory, following models postulated by M. J. Nicasie and Hugh Elton, as well as the recent results of identity studies focusing on the ancient world. By using the concept of the " barbarian " in political, rather than ethnic terms, the article presents the " barbarization " process not as a prime suspect for the empire's fall, but as another way for the Roman state to maximize its resources and bolster its defences.

By delving into the complex, cross-generational exchanges that characterize any political project as rampant as empire, this thought-provoking study focuses on children and their ambivalent, intimate relationships with maps and practices of mapping at the dawn of the “American Century.” Considering children as students, map and puzzle makers, letter writers, and playmates, Mahshid Mayar interrogates the ways turn-of-the-century American children encountered, made sense of, and produced spatial narratives and cognitive maps of the United States and the world. Mayar further probes how children’s diverse patterns of consuming, relating to, and appropriating the “truths” that maps represent turned cartography into a site of personal and political contention.
To investigate where in the world the United States imagined itself at the end of the nineteenth century, this book calls for new modes of mapping the United States as it studies the nation on regional, hemispheric, and global scales. By examining the multilayered liaison between imperial pedagogy and geopolitical literacy across a wide range of archival evidence, Mayar delivers a careful microhistorical study of U.S. empire.

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

R. Strootman, ‘Eunuchs, renegades and concubines: The “paradox of power” and the promotion of favorites in the Hellenistic empires’, in: A. Erskine, L. Llewellyn-Jones, and S. Wallace eds., The Hellenistic Court: Monarchic Power and Elite Society From Alexander to Cleopatra (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2017) 121–142.

The creation of new capital cities are watershed moments in the lives of ancient empires. Assyria, arguably the most successful imperial state of the ancient Near East, repeatedly engaged in capital creation. Capital creation denotes the development of a monumental capital, either in a new location or through the profound transformation of a pre-existing settlement. This volume focusses on the rationale, construction, and function of the imperial capitals of Assyria: Kār-Tukultī-Ninurta, Kalḫu, Dur-Šarrukēn, and Nineveh.
By exploring three key questions – why was a capital created, how was a capital created, and what were the functions of the capital – this study presents a comparative analysis of these four urban centers and presents a new perspective on their creation, as well as an innovative framework for the study of capital creation from antiquity to today.
Aris Politopoulos is an archaeologist whose research focuses on ancient Near Eastern empires, the development of cities, and the study of play in the past. He is a lecturer of Near Eastern Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology (Leiden University) and a post-doctoral researcher for the Past-at-Play Lab in the Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society.

In the mid-1920s, Canton (present-day Guangzhou) attracted Asian revolutionaries, nationalists, communists, and some of the region's formidable anarchists, who in Vietnamese nationalist Phan Bội Châu's words, were "suffering from the same sickness." It became a training ground for boycotts, strikes, and protests against Western presence in an Asian territory in the modern world. Canton, however, was only a tiny piece of a network of "back-alley" systems. Tim Harper's new book traces the activities of these revolutionaries in an "underground network" stretching from Europe to Asia. From different viewpoints, Harper narrates the survival of lesserknown yet important figures during the period of protracted rebellions and revolutions against imperial powers at the dawn of the 20th century.

Illyria in Shakespeare’s England is the first extended study of the eastern Adriatic region, often referred to in the Renaissance by its Graeco-Roman name “Illyria,” in early modern English writing and political thought. At first glance the absence of earlier studies may not be surprising: that area may seem significant only to critics pursuing certain specialized questions about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which is set in Illyria. But in fact, it is not only often misrepresented in the discussions of that play but also typically ignored in the critical conversation on English prose romances, poems, and other plays that feature Illyria or its peoples, some rarely read, others well-known, including Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, 2 Henry VI, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline. Lea Puljcan Juric explores the reasons for such views by engaging with larger questions of interest to many critics who focus on subjects other than geographic regions, such as “othering,” religion, race, and the development of national identity, among other issues. She also broadens the conversation on these familiar problems in the field to include the impact of post-Renaissance notions of the Balkans on the erasure of Illyria from Shakespeare studies.

Puljcan Juric studies the encounters of the English with the ancient and early modern Illyrians through their Greek and Roman heritage; geographies, histories, and travelogues, written in a variety of European polities including Illyria itself; religious conflict after the Reformation and the threat of Islam; and international politics and commerce. These considerations show how Illyria’s geopolitical position among the Ottoman Empire, Habsburg Empire and Venice, its “national” struggles as well as its cultural heterogeneity figured in English interests in the eastern Mediterranean, and informed English ideas about ethnicity, nationhood, and religion. In Shakespeare studies, however, critics have consistently cast Twelfth Night’s Illyria as a utopia, an enigma, or a substitute for England, Italy, or Greece. Arguing that twentieth-century politics and negative conceptions of the eastern Adriatic as part of “the Balkans” have underwritten this erasure of Illyria from our perspective on the field, Puljcan Juric shows how entrenched cultural hierarchies tied to elitism and colonial politics still inform our analyses of literature. She invites scholars to recognize that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Illyria is the site of important socio-political and cultural struggles during the period, some shared with neighboring areas, others geographically specific, that invite dynamic historical and literary scrutiny.


Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Illyria then and now
Chapter One: Reborn and reconfigured: Illyria in Renaissance cosmographies, 1570-1620
Chapter Two: Venturing in-between: Renaissance English travelers and merchants in the Eastern Adriatic
Chapter Three: Adriatic romance
Chapter Four: Forms of otherness in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Chapter Five: Rebellious Shakespeare: Illyrian unrest and the English ‘nation’
Coda
Appendix: Illustrations with commentary
Bibliography
About the Author

Reflecting both internationalist and nationalist inspirations, a peculiar feature of communist imperial policies was that the core elites selected the nominally sovereign state as the basic unit of their ‘outer empires’, rather than simply annexing the occupied countries or creating various semi-sovereign structures. In practice, this principle by no means prevented the imposition of modes of control over peripheral states that were highly intrusive even in comparison with ‘classical’ and fascist empires, but it still distinguished the communist states from the latter regimes. In particular, it seems to have precluded such techniques of domination as demographic expansion, external repression that was more severe than domestic repression, and the institutionalized privileging of one client state at the expense of another. These distinctive features of communist imperial policies contradict definitions of totalitarianism such as those of Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski that consider communist and fascist regimes to be fundamentally alike and similarly expansionist. At the same time, the considerable differences between Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China indicate that there may not have been a generic communist imperial policy, either. In the policies of the communist states, internationalism and nationalism did not appear as mutually exclusive forces. On the contrary, peripheral communist states oft en showed ‘internationalist’ loyalty towards the core state and nationalist hostility towards another peripheral state, whereas the Kremlin simultaneously encouraged nationalism in the Western camp and suppressed it in its own empire. In the light of this ‘ideological schizophrenia’, many observers doubted if the peripheral communist leaders were motivated by genuine nationalist feelings. Still, the fact that even such outwardly subservient leaderships like the Mongolian one could harbor a strong ethnic and economic nationalism indicates that such emotions were partly channeled but not extinguished by internationalism.

Constructing its cultural other has been a dominant practice in Western discourse since the time of the great classical writers. Edward Said’s highly insightful work Orientalism has persuasively attempted to locate the inception of European interest in the Orient in the works of Aeschylus and Euripides and, how by an act of their magnificent imagination they ventured to construct it as the Other. By using some of these insights this paper argues as to how Othello has been remarkably textualized in the same fashion by a genuine creator, Shakespeare, whose life-giving power of imagination (and adaptation) "represents, animates and constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond (the) familiar boundaries" of his race and culture  (Orientalism, pp. 57). In the end the paper attempts to establish that despite the play's obvious
racial/cultural politics considered by the postmodern and postcolonial critical studies, very few attempts have been made to unfold the problematics of receiving the text and its creator in the colonial / post-colonial Indian context.

During the War of Resistance to Japan (1937-45), the cultural scene in Japanese-occupied Shanghai took on a "feminine" quality, as female leads dominated stage performance and film screens. This essay seeks to engage this gendered phenomenon through examples of Ouyang Yuqian's wartime play Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan) and the film Mulan Joins the Army (Mulan congjun). Borrowing affect theory in conjunction with the gendered perception of modernity, the author argues that these representations of female characters, on the one hand, highlight the subjective projection of male intellectuals motivated by intense feelings of shame and anger, which constitutes a feminized national imagination encountering the colonial Other. On the other hand, such representations continue the May Fourth project of enlightening and liberating woman from the conventional family while reintroducing the concept of the nation in the family setting and proposing the foundational family as the basic unit of the new nation.

The present book is the result of the conference ‘Renovatio, inventio, absentia imperii. From the Roman Empire to Contemporary Imperialism’, held in Brussels at the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Academia Belgica in Rome (September 11-13, 2014). At the heart of the conference was the ‘reception’, ‘Nachleben’ or ‘permanence’ of the Roman Empire, of an idea and a historical paradigm which since classical Antiquity has supported the most widespread claims to obtain and consolidate power. The volume’s focus is on culture in a broad sense, i.e. including besides the arts, philosophy, religion and, most importantly, discourse. As such, a wide array of themes are subjected to academic scrutiny. Whereas the main focus is on Europe and North America, some contributors also reach out towards non-Western contexts, whether or not directly related to the Roman example. A theoretical and sociological dimension is also added thanks to the discussion on methodological issues. More specifically, the following question(s) receive particular attention: what is our position as researchers, embedded in a contemporary, often Western, democratic and capitalist context; what about the notion of empire itself, its constituent elements and the kind of ideological prerogatives to which it is generally subjected; in other words, apart from the many historical variants and instances of reception of empire, through which filters can, and inevitably do, we approach this topic? A question that has become ever more pregnant since the beginning of the twenty-first century, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the events of September 11, which have revivified what could be called American ‘imperialism’, and at a time when an essentially economic variant, driven by ‘emerging’ powers such as China, has increasingly contested existing power structures. In light of such meta-historical awareness, this book touches as much on the nature of the Roman Empire as it does on its historical legacy and, more importantly so, on who claims the latter inheritance throughout the most diverse epochs. By discussing some highly contrasting views upon this topic, participants explore issues that are of fundamental importance to the writing, not only of cultural history, but also of history itself.

The paper conceptualizes five basic developmental paths the post-Soviet republics followed. The conceptual framework of this paper is expanded theory of real socialism in non-Marxian historical materialism, namely proposed the model of secession from socialist empire. The first developmental path was followed by societies in which an independent civil revolution took place. This path of development bifurcates into two furhter sub-variants. Namely civil revolutions in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) resulted in the independence and stable democracies. Civil revolution in Caucasus republics (Armenia, Gergia) were partially succesfull because civil movement in these societies were unable to build stable democracies. Countries such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine followed next developmental path. Its characteristic feauture is active participation of republican communist nomenclatures in seceding from the Soviet Union and gaining state independence. In this variant of development, democratization - characteristic for the first period of independence was counterbalanced by the growing autocratization of political system. This path of development was divided into two developmental variants: in one group of countries (Ukraine) the growth of autocratization caused civil resistance (Ukraine), in the rest societies of this group (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova) - not. Finally the countries of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) followed the fith developmental path. In these societies, independence permitted to preserve dictatorship of local communist nomenclatures.

This study is aimed at making a contribution to the current debate on economic justice in the post-apartheid democratic dispensation in South Africa from a Matthean perspective. The study investigates the theme of economic justice from the lens of the first-century Greco-Roman context from which the gospel of Matthew was both written and read. It attempts at reconstructing the economic ethics of the Matthean community
as it tried to live-out the teaching of Jesus Christ in a colonial context characterized by the tyranny of Roman imperial rule. The results are then applied to the post-apartheid democratic South Africa in a quest to address some of the socio-economic ills with the hope of contributing to the theme of economic justice in the country.

Статья посвящена исследованию феномена имперского сознания в России. Реконструируя особенности домодерновой политической культуры русского крестьянства, автор показывает несостоятельность заявлений о том, что русский народ является имперским на протяжении многих столетий. В действительности крестьянское политическое сознание (а крестьяне составляли до 1930-х гг. подавляющее большинство населения России) имело сугубо локальный характер, не выходя за пределы общины. Народные массы имели самое смутное представление об имперских институтах, никогда не идентифицировали себя с ними, не рассматривали задачи имперской политики в качестве мотива своих собственных действий, им абсолютно чужда была идея русского мессианства (потому, что они не ощущали
себя русскими) или мессианства православного (потому, что народное православие в основном сводилось к обрядоверию).
Комплекс идей и ценностей, связанных с понятием империи, великой державы входит в массовое сознание русских лишь в советскую эпоху. Это было связано с разрушением традиционного крестьянского уклада в ходе коллективизации и индустриализации. В модернизированном обществе идея государства стала доступной и понятной для широких слоев населения. При этом советская элита, отойдя от лозунгов мировой революции, стала с начала 1930-х гг. создавать импероподобное государственное образование, в котором русские по факту заняли место имперского народа, впервые
действительно ощущая себя таковым. Именно в эпохе «советской империи» и следует искать корни постимперского синдрома, наблюдаемого в современной России.

This chapter examines this deeply ingrained historical way of thinking— the imperial-time-order—and discusses its interaction with other modern dis- courses, in particular, Marxism and liberalism. The ways that Marxism has been adopted in China suggest a moralistic and unifying tendency that con- tinued the imperial-time-order, which stands at odds with Marxist historical materialism. Moreover, the continued downplaying of individual function in historical development implies a consciousness of time that limits individual agency.

How do present forms of colonialisms persist in what is presumed to be the ‘post’ colonial era? One-way colonialism persists in the current era is through the state’s ‘modification’ of its identity according to Indigenous studies scholar Glen Coulthard (2014). Scholars of Empire studies have long stressed how the colonial state constructs its own identity in the process of constructing the identities of its colony and subjects (Cooper and Stoler 1997, Stoler 2010). In this article, I consider this question through the framework of Tibet and China and ask, how is China’s current relationship to Tibet understood as state and subject, rather than colonizer and colonized? In the following, I suggest this in part has to do with how Tibetans are understood to be ‘Chinese’ in the present moment. Through a careful examination of China’s different and successive government’s discursive and rhetorical mechanisms, I explore how Tibetan identity is reinvented and state identity modified to construct Tibet in China’s national imagination as part of China. Such reconfiguration of identities, which centers the history of Tibet’s development through Chinese frameworks rather than Tibetan ones, function to counter and erase past and ongoing histories of Tibetan nationalism that continually challenge China’s sovereign claims over Tibet. The discursive ramification of such state-produced historical erasures and identity reconfigurations is that it allows modern nation states such as China to operationalize systematic colonialisms in its colonies while distancing itself from its colonial identity. This is how present forms of colonialisms under new modern orders continue to function anew in what is presumed to be the ‘post’ colonial era.

This chapter offers a reappraisal of the relationship between the imperial idea, civilising missions, and “national culture” in the Habsburg Monarchy between the 1770s and the 1850s: In does so by focusing on the underpinnings, reputation, and consequences of the cultural politics of eighteenth-century “enlightened absolutism”. The chapter fleshes out how protagonists of the “national revivals” in the first half of the nineteenth century constructed a potent phantom menace in order to stir their envisaged audiences into action: They painted a gloomy image of the purposeful suppression of “national cultures” in the Habsburg lands and thereby made culture the main arena of political contestation. They “culturalised” imperial rule, suggesting that Habsburg governance drastically curbed the potential of their respective national culture. In doing so, the discourse controllers of the “revivals” gave short shrift to rival aspects of citizenship, to the rule of law and to the economic liberties enshrined under Joseph II, Leopold II, and Francis I. “Culture” became the shibboleth of the revivalists. They skillfully made the Enlightenment part of their own venerable ancestry, belittling the claims of collateral heirs to this legacy. The appeal to “culture” was a potent device for the unification of the envisaged nation from within in a time of increasingly blurry hierarchies between the estates: “Culture” enhanced the abridged status of a nationally conscious nobility as patrons of cultural rejuvenation and refinement. Imagining culture as the panacea for the nation and for the Monarchy writ large, the revivalists structured their concerns around the resistance to a key threat: Josephinian “Germanisation”. The chapter shows that this was a cultural cliché co-designed by the revivalists themselves: They ascribed a “germanizing” proclivity to imperial governance and retroprojected it in time. By the same token national revivalists whittled away the prestige of Habsburg statecraft as an engine of improvement and transposed it to their own fieldwork as restorers and enunciators of national culture.

The revision of the approaches to the concept of empire coupling with the obvious new quality of the European integration process in 2000s are provoking the attempts to interpret the logic of the European
Union evolution in the terms of imperial transition. This article is dedicated to the verification of such a hypothesis through the particularization of the imperial design and, then, its comparison with the reality of the integration process. The imperial pattern of the polity is determined using some basic parameters – systemic, structural, institutional, economic, narrative, genetic. The analysis allows to conclude that there is no sufficiently solid soil under the “imperial” hypothesis of the European integration process now. Thus,
there are some traces indicating the option for the EU to be developed in such a direction. Besides the hypothesis of J. Zielonka on the EU as a neo-medieval imperial project is examined. We are admitting
some resemblance of Holy Roman Empire and nowadays EU phenomena. Nevertheless, the disputable “imperial” nature of the former doesn’t allow to consider such a resemblance as an argument in favor of
the “imperial” nature of the latter. Meanwhile this resemblance can be interpreted as one of the signs of the nowadays transit of the global world order to his “neo-medieval” design which is based on the decline
of the Nation-State territorial sovereignty, the rise of the non-Westphalian IR actors and tools as well as the reincarnation of the civilizational/confessional motivation of the foreign policy.

The shortest trans-regional empire centered in the ancient heartland of Mesopotamia was the Neo-Babylonian Empire. It is also essential for our understanding of the following Persian and Hellenistic periods of the ANE, but unfortunately suffers from a lack of availability of published syntheses. Consequently, it has been subject to much scholarly speculation. The so-called foreign element in the empire's population is often mentioned, but systematic substantiation has often been limited to attestations of NW Semitic/Yahwistic groups. I plan to investigate the multiplicity of 'ethnicities' within the empire during the late Neo-Babylonian period through prosopography of historical / economic documents, examination of the archaeological record, and its relation to known anthropological theories and models. To do so, the period will be expanded to include the majority of the late Neo-Babylonian Empire and into the beginning of the Persian period, or about 100 years before and after.1 As an empire, the " Neo-Babylonian Empire " is known to have repatriated the peoples of various locations in Mesopotamia, Syria, and the Levant, as well as from Egypt, Eastern Anatolia, and the northern Arabian Desert. However, no one has employed a site-based approach when interpreting the data, which is the first step in investigating the composition and attributes of larger regional phenomena. The city of Nippur and its satellite settlements provide a microcosm of the larger empire, as we have several thousand administrative and economic texts that were written there that record multiple ethnicities in the onomastica. From these data, the organization of the 'empire' of the Neo-Babylonian period as attested at this central site will be examined. The project seeks to provide information concerning the NB period and the transition into the Persian period so as to support further investigation of related topics, such as the processes that were fundamental to the creation of the Hebrew Bible, the advent of the greater Persian Empire, and much more. 1 This is a common occurrence in Neo-Babylonian scholarship, for the historical divisions into periods is an anachronous, artificial division that primarily signifies the dominant empire in Mesopotamia at a given period. The artificiality of these divisions is especially felt in the transition between the NB and the Persian periods, because the majority of the NB period lasts only from the fall of the Neo-Assyrian empire in 612 until the advent of Persian rule in 539 BCE. Since this period is less than a century in length, it is common for NB scholars to " extend " their scope of interest forward into the Persian period, and this period is then often termed the " long sixth century. "

This paper revisits Tagore during the turbulent period of India’s struggle for freedom since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how he demonstrated discursive strategies of decolonization while living under an offshore dominion. It is a brief attempt to underline the interface between Tagore’s obvious emergence as a prolific writer and his active participation in the nationalist politics of India since the late 1880s. By renterpreting Tagore’s overtly political writings, public lectures replete with distinct nationalist themes, and by emphatically recognizing his idea of self-empowerment through indigenous economic enterprises, this study seeks to establish Tagore not just as an important nationalist figure of the time, but also a radical decolonizer, who was consciously producing a great body of literature to compliment his political vision and the contemporary nationalist movements.
Keywords: history, politics, colonialism, decolonizaton, hegemony, discourse, imperialism, nationalism, swadeshi,self-empowement.

The Tempest has interested contemporary scholars—both at home and abroad—more than any other Shakespearean text. The debate over whether it encapsulates the ideological underpinnings of the early phase of English colonialism seems to be an unending one. Contests have always been there to safeguard the text from any such political reading provided largely by the New Historicist school of literary criticism. One such attempt can be found in Jerry Brotton's reading of The Tempest, where it has been argued that The Tempest is "a play that ultimately reflects the belatedness and subsequent subordination of English forays into the Mediterranean, and not the rise of English colonialism," and that the play is precisely located at "the geopolitical bifurcation" between the Old and the New World, the juncture where the English found the possibility of pursuing a "significantly different commercial and maritime initiative" in the Americas (37, emphasis added). What is more fascinating in this reading is its desperate attempt to highlight the plays Italian context and thus deny completely any Englishness in the tacit power game embedded in the text. Given the fairly large amount of scholarship on The Tempest and its colonial overtones, one way of looking at the neo-conservative critics like Brotton would be to show how elated they are with their carefully structured endeavour to justify what the British civilisation had done to the rest of the world for hundreds of years. This article by highlighting two diagonally opposite readings of the play by two eminent writers of colonial India, Bankimchandra and Tagore, demonstrates that The Tempest is carries a very unique political/cultural significance in both colonial and post-colonial countries like India.

Offers a new perspective on the relationship between religion and the creation of the first Chinese empires.

Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome’s empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141–87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili re interprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of “religion” before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the “sacred” to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities.

“Heaven Is Empty is a tour de force. It reveals Marsili’s bold vision of early Chinese religion and his deft use of critical theory. The book will inspire scholars of early China for generations to come.” — Miranda Brown, author of The Politics of Mourning in Early China and The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Author’s Note

Introduction: An Empire without a “Religion”

1. Readings of the “Sacred”: Chinese Religion, Chinese Religions, and Religions in China

2. Writing the Empire: Ex Pluribus Plurima

3. Narrating the Empire: Metaphysics without God, “Religions” without Identity

4. Time, Myth, and Memory: Of Water, Metal, and Cinnabar

5. Place and Ritual: From Templum to Text

Conclusions: The Importance of Getting Lost

Notes
Bibliography
Index

This is a review of Bonnie Smith's anthology Modern Empires that will appear as a roundtable on the volume in H-Net Empire in summer 2018.

For a peek into the volume, see https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/modern-empires-9780199375929?cc=de&lang=en.

Supervising Professor: Kenyon Zimmer This dissertation examines the arguments that Syrians in diaspora at the turn of the twentieth century used in constructing their group identity. It traces the transnational and transimperial discourses that centered on the pack-peddler mythology, or rather, it traces the diaspora intelligentsia's narrative for the business diaspora. Their narrative framed the business elites as the quintessence of upward mobility in the modern world. The historiography of this subfield has been separated into two camps: one that takes for granted the assimilation of the business class into Western societies, and the other that offers a more critical rendering of Syrian migrant entrepreneurship. This dissertation bridges the gap between the two by offering a cultural study of the meaning of wealth and mobility. This study takes into account a broad array of analytical lenses through which to view the Syrian diaspora: migration studies, business history, the history of science and technology, medicine, disability studies, race and whiteness studies, while maintaining a critical eye toward cultural symbolism and meaning across time and space. It takes into account how the transnational movement of peoples, goods, and ideas, clashed with the emergence of nations-states and the

This paper analyzes three films on the attempted assassination of the first emperor Qin Shihuang--Zhou Xiaowen's The Emperor's Shadow (1996), Chen Kaige's The Emperor and the Assassin (1998), and Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002), to discuss the significance of such an intensive attention to the first emperor and articulation of Tianxia at turn of the century.