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Nationalizing Empires . Ed. Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller . Budapest : CEU Press , 2015. viii, 691 pp. Notes. Index. Tables. Maps. $85.00, hard bound.
Book Reviews
The editors of this wide-ranging volume question--up to a certain point--the binary approach traditionally adopted by most historians of Europe who write about the categories "nation" and "empire." Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller seek to loosen or perhaps even undo the traditionally dichotomous treatment these categories have received as "two profoundly different types of political organization of society and space" (2). Their strategy in this collection is to draw historians' attention to processes of ethnic nation building that took place in imperial cores. The volume reads as the product of several workshops and conferences where, over time, the scholars involved engaged actively with each other's approaches. It includes sizable essays devoted to Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Spain, as well as five shorter essays that usefully comment on general questions of comparison.
In tackling the intimate and complex relations that bound ideas of core nationhood to practices of empire, the editors make two related and critical arguments. First, they remind us that the growing claims in the nineteenth century that particular ethnic nations constituted cores of the German, Russian, or Spanish empires (to name a few), often rested uneasily on untested presumptions of cultural homogeneity among peoples who often continued to see themselves more in terms of local and regional identifications than they did in terms of...