Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World [Paperback]

As this excellent collection shows, imperial collapses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe (including the dissolution of the Soviet Union), Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia have often left conflict-ridden legacies. Anyone interested in the forces that have shaped much of the modern world, and in many of today's major foreign policy issues, should read this book.As the sun appears to set on empire, the authors in this valuable collection explore how imperial realms were imagined and why nation-states ultimately succeeded them. Rather than being an inevitable process, the end of empire took a variety of forms in Latin America, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union. It still persists elsewhere and may have an unpredicted future. For students of nationalism and its opponents, this book is a must-read.In a positive revisionist analysis of the formation, growth, structure, and decline of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires (Ottoman, Habsburg, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian-Soviet), the authors of this original book prove that various ethnic, religious, and political features of these empires survived in the nation states that replaced them. Empire to Nation offers new perspectives for understanding the political phenomena of empires, nation-states, and nationalism in the era of globalization.This unique collection of essays examines the transition from empire to nation-state in the Spanish, Ottoman, Habsburg, Chinese, and Russian empires. . . . Those seeking better resources for teaching world history will be highly pleased with this anthology. Recommended.This book gets at one of the most intriguing and debatable processes in modern world history, the collapse of what we now call multinational empires and their replacement by different, usually smaller and often more contentious, states. The examples are chosen with wide geographical range, and the resulting comparisons are fascinating.The fall of empires and the rise of nation-statelƒ˝