Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World

Kumar (The Idea of Englishness), professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, argues persuasively that studying historical empires, with their diverse subject populations, far-flung networks, and complex political hierarchies, can provide insight into our globalized present. Beginning with the Roman Empire and proceeding briskly through the Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, British, and French imperial regimes, Kumar leads a whirlwind tour of imperial ideology across space and time, paying special attention to the degree to which “nationness,” or national ideology, was expressed in each imperial formation. While the book’s thumbnail sketches of these six empires are accessible and often engrossing, the complicated relationship between nation and empire is explored only superficially in the introduction and conclusion, which serve to sum up other scholars’ contributions rather than advance any original theoretical insights. Much as the regimes discussed “felt the strains of managing entities as complex and convoluted as multinational and far-flung empires,” the book struggles to make sense of similarity and difference across its vast canvas. Tropes of empire (the French “civilizing mission,” the British conquering the world in “a fit of absence of mind”) are duly dragged out and reassessed in workmanlike but uninspiring prose. Kumar’s work is a judiciously argued and useful survey for any student of empire. (May)