Author Meets Critics: "Rethinking the End of Empire"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Contemporary challenges to democracy occur within a world order that transitioned from rule mainly by empires to nation-states within the last century, a time of proliferating beliefs that ‘peoples’ should control their own destiny. Analysts frequently assume links between nationalism and popular sovereignty–the idea of rule by the ‘people’ associated with democracy or at least greater egalitarianism undergirding modern notions of legitimate political authority (Yack 2001, Tamir 2019, Roshwald 2022). The extended wave of democratization, after all, followed the birth of many states conceptualized as nation-states, a sequencing that likely inspired Bernard Yack’s claim that the principle of popular sovereignty assumes and/or requires and calls into being the idea of a cohesive popular identity–i.e. a national identity (Yack 2001). Scholars have long assumed the power of republican ideas from the American and French Revolutions to inspire globe-spanning rebellion.

Drawing from a vast body of recent historiography and area studies research, Rethinking the End of Empire (Stanford UP 2024) offers a fresh approach to understanding the rise of the nation-state order by emphasizing the politics of empire. Historians have rethought the long-standing narrative of outdated empires inevitably replaced by modern nation-states during the last three decades, insights that have only begun to appear in the work of social scientists attuned to innovations in historiography. Rethinking the End of Empire recovers the historical context–including the political, international, and socio-economic environment, and key actors’ intentions and self-understandings–during prominent pre-independence periods in the Americas, Balkans, Anatolia, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa–that have been lost in social science studies operating at higher levels of abstraction. Nuanced historiography shows that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents–actors who were seldom model democrats. The book also suggests a new avenue for historically-oriented democratization research by considering the nation-state based world order more as an unintended consequence of the politics of empire than genuine peoples’ project.

Sub Unit

• Division 43: International History and Politics

Chair

• Ayse Zarakol University of Cambridge

Presenters

• Jack A. Goldstone George Mason University

• Jennifer Mitzen Ohio State University

• Joshua Simon Johns Hopkins University

• Lynn Tesser Marine Corps University