From A Multiethnic Empire To A Nation Of Nations

This book describes the transatlantic experience of Austrian and Hungarian migrants from 1870 to 1960. Through socio-economic, demographic, and cultural analyses, the authors recount how newly arrived immigrants struggled to adapt to the new sociocultural mores of America while upholding their own traditions and language. This study breaks new ground by examining migration between the Habsburg Monarchy and North America and return migration to Central Europe, including the study of various ethnic and religious groups.

A Transatlantic Experience The book describes the transatlantic experience of migrants from Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary who arrived in the US from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of WWI. Traditional assumptions of mass migration - such as the rapid and easy Americanization of newly arriving Europeans, as well as their strong desire of retaining as much of native culture as possible - have been challenged by recent historical studies. Multiethnic Groups The socio-economic, demographic, and cultural analyses presented in this book offer a much more differentiated picture of the migrants who struggled for new living space amidst hostile industrial environments. This study breaks new ground by examining migration broadly between the Habsburg Monarchy and North America and return migration to Central Europe, including the study of a variety of ethnic and religious groups who originated in different regions. This book offers a scientific investigation of the circumstances under which Austro-Hungarians migrated to the United States in order to find new opportunities while trying to keep up their traditional values.

This collected volume looks at how the Soviet state managed to create a multiethnic empire in its early years, from the end of the Revolution to the end of WW2.

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.

This collected volume, edited by Ron Suny and Terry Martin, shows how the Soviet state managed to create a multiethnic empire in its early years, from the end of the Russian Revolution to the end of World War II. Bringing together the newest research on a wide geographic range, from Russia to Central Asia, this volume is essential reading for students and scholars of Soviet history and politics.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

The Soviet Union was hardly the first large, continuous, land-based, multinational empire to collapse in modern times. The USSR itself was, ironically, the direct result of one such demise, that of imperial Russia, which in turn was but one of several other such empires that did not survive the stresses of the times: the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire.This ambitious and important volume brings together a group of some of the most outstanding scholars in political science, history, and historical sociology to examine the causes of imperial decline and collapse. While they warn against facile comparisons, they also urge us to step back from the immediacy of current events to consider the possible significance of historical precedents.Is imperial decline inevitable, or can a kind of imperial stasis be maintained indefinitely? What role, if any, does the growth of bureaucracies needed to run large and complex political systems of this type play in economic and political stagnation? What is the balance of power" between the centre and the peripheries, between the dominant nationality and minorities? What coping mechanisms do empires tend to develop and what influence do these have? Is modernization the inexorable source of imperial decline and ultimate collapse? And what resources, including the imperial legacy, are available for political, social, and economic reconstruction in the aftermath of collapse? These are just a few of the tantalizing questions addressed by the contributors to this fascinating and timely volume.

A groundbreaking study of the foundations of nationalism, exposing its antiquity, strong links with ethnicity and roots in human nature.