Empire And Nationhood

In 1951 prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh seized British oil holdings in Iran. The move set in motion four years of bitter political and strategic battles between a United Kingdom desperate for an economic rebound and an increasingly anti-Western regime in Teheran. The Eisenhower administration tried to broker a settlement, but Mossadegh was overthrown by an Anglo-American operation and replaced by the Shah. In this book, Mary Ann Heiss provides a detailed account of this turning point in cold war history. Drawing on a range of British and American documents, she provides an incisive political, economic, and cultural analysis of the first British and American effort to contain communism and radical Third World nationalism; the first American effort to bolster a crumbling British Empire; and the first effort by the CIA to overthrow a popular nationalist regime. This book is the full story not only of the shift from British to American dominance in the oil economies of the Middle East but also of the rise of nationalism in the context of the cold war.

In 1951 prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh seized British oil holdings in Iran. The move set in motion four years of bitter political and strategic battles between a United Kingdom desperate for an economic rebound and an increasingly anti-Western regime in Teheran. The Eisenhower administration tried to broker a settlement, but Mossadegh was overthrown by an Anglo-American operation and replaced by the Shah. In this book, Mary Ann Heiss provides a detailed account of this turning point in cold war history. Drawing on a range of British and American documents, she provides an incisive political, economic, and cultural analysis of the first British and American effort to contain communism and radical Third World nationalism; the first American effort to bolster a crumbling British Empire; and the first effort by the CIA to overthrow a popular nationalist regime. This book is the full story not only of the shift from British to American dominance in the oil economies of the Middle East but also of the rise of nationalism in the context of the cold war.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the American revolution was atransformative moment in the history of political civilization. He hoped that hisown efforts as a founding statesman and theorist would help construct a progressiveand enlightened order for the new American nation that would be a model andinspiration for the world. Peter S. Onuf's new book traces Jefferson's vision of theAmerican future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire.Onuf's unsettling recognition that Jefferson's famed egalitarianism was elaboratedin an imperial context yields strikingly original interpretations of our nationalidentity and our ideas of race, of westward expansion and the Civil War, and ofAmerican global dominance in the twentiethcentury. Jefferson's vision of an American "empirefor liberty" was modeled on a British prototype. But as a consensual union ofself-governing republics without a metropolis, Jefferson's American empire would befree of exploitation by a corrupt imperial ruling class. It would avoid the cycle ofwar and destruction that had characterized the European balance ofpower. The Civil War cast in high relief thetragic limitations of Jefferson's political vision. After the Union victory, as thereconstructed nation-state developed into a world power, dreams of the United Statesas an ever-expanding empire of peacefully coexisting states quickly faded frommemory. Yet even as the antebellum federal union disintegrated, a Jeffersoniannationalism, proudly conscious of America's historic revolution against imperialdomination, grew up in its place. In Onuf's view, Jefferson's quest to define a new American identity also shaped his ambivalentconceptions of slavery and Native American rights. His revolutionary fervor led himto see Indians as "merciless savages" who ravaged the frontiers at the Britishking's direction, but when those frontiers were pacified, a more benevolentJefferson encouraged these same Indians to embrace republican values. AfricanAmerican slaves, by contrast, constituted an unassimilable captive nation, unjustlywrenched from its African homeland. His great panacea: colonization. Jefferson's ideas about race revealthe limitations of his conception of American nationhood. Yet, as Onuf strikinglydocuments, Jefferson's vision of a republican empire--a regime of peace, prosperity, and union without coercion--continues to define and expand the boundaries ofAmerican national identity.

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, ethnic, or status-based identities rather than national identities. Why then did the desires of a typically small number result in wave after wave of new states? The answer has customarily centered on the actions of "nationalists" against weakening empires during a time of proliferating beliefs that "peoples" should control their own destiny. This book upends conventional wisdom by demonstrating that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents. Lynn M. Tesser adds nuance to scholarship that assumes most, if not all, pre-independence unrest was nationalist and separatist, and sheds light on why the various demands for change eventually coalesced around independence in some cases but not others.

The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.

"In this extraordinary volume, Krishan Kumar provides us with a brilliant tour of some of history's most important empires, demonstrating the critical importance of imperial ideas and ideologies for understanding their modalities of rule and the conflicts that beset them. In doing so, he interrogates the contested terrain between nationalism and empire and the legacies that empires leave behind."--Mark R. Beissinger, Princeton University "This is an excellent book with original insights into the history of empires and the discourses and rhetoric of their rulers and defenders. Kumar's writing is lively and free of jargon, and his research is prodigious. He manages to bring clarity and perspective to a complex subject."--Ronald Grigor Suny, author of "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide "A masterly piece of work."--Anthony Pagden, author of The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present

This text provides a survey of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. It traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of several official national languages and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programmes.

As Britain's great power status came to be increasingly challenged in the decades before the First World War, one by-product of the resultant uncertainty was the weakening of the Victorian, middle-class consensus of what constituted ideal manhood. Britain's empire was not only the source of wealth and power, but it simultaneously provided alternative models of masculinity and nationhood. Consequently, the empire and the commonwealth played an important role in defining imperial gender relations in both Britain and in the colonies and dominions. May the Best Man Win investigates the continual re-assessment and reassertion of various masculine ideals associated with sport in the British empire between 1880 and 1935.