Abstract
In 1848 the liberal firebrand Lajos Kossuth toured the Hungarian countryside, rallying nationalists to fight for a liberal Hungarian state. Beginning with a modest crowd in Cegléd, Kossuth was soon addressing crowds of up to 10,000, encouraging Hungarians to enlist in a people’s uprising against the Habsburg Empire.1 This nascent liberal Hungarian state, however, was not only home to Hungarians, but also incorporated a number of other communities who considered themselves Romanian, Serbian, or Croatian. Amidst the throes of revolution, Kossuth’s liberals had seized the opportunity to try and create a Central European liberal empire where Hungary, in the words of Kossuth’s ally László Teleki, would be “accepted as a center and a queen of the future Danubian Confederation, whose power will forever break the monster of absolutism and will extend from the Baltic States to the Black Sea.”2 Claiming that Hungary was one of the few European nations capable of “state creation,” Kossuth considered other nationalities in the region as satellites lacking the capacity to form viable states able to fend off the competing pan-Slavic Russian Empire, or a still notional großdeutsch empire.3 When asked to which state the other Balkan nationalities would belong, the liberal Kossuth simply answered, “the sword shall decide.”4
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Notes
Alice Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Baltimore, 2000, pp. 76–77.
László Teleki, May 14, 1849 as cited in György Szabad, “Lajos Kossuth’s Role in the Conceptualisation of a Danubian Federation,” in Ignács Romsics and Béla Király (eds.), Geopolitics in the Danube Regions: Hungarian Reconciliation Efforts, 1848–1998. Central European University Press, Budapest, 1999, p. 70. See also
Samuel J. Wilson, “Lost Opportunities: Lajos Kossuth, the Balkan Nationalities and the Danubian Confederation,” Hungarian Studies 8(2), 1993, 171–193.
Peter E Sugar, “The More it Changes, the More Hungarian Nationalism Remains the Same,” Austrian History Yearbook, 31, 2000, 135. On rival geopolitical plans for the region, see Ignác Romsics’ (occasionally overly schematic) “Plans and Projects for Integration in East Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Towards a Typology,” in Ignács Romsics and Béla Király (eds.), Geopolitics in the Danube Regions, pp. 1–17.
George Barany, “Hungary: The Uncompromising Compromise,” Austrian History Yearbook 3(1), 1967, 241; Alice Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, pp. 64–66, 78–81. For a brief overview of the Transylvanian issue from the Hungarian perspective, see
Istvan Deak, “István Széchenyi, Miklós Wesselényi, Lajos Kossuth and the Problem of Romanian Nationalism,” Austrian History Yearbook, 12(1), 1976, 69–77. For similar sentiments in the German Frankfurt National Assembly regarding the Poles and Czechs, see
Lewis Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals. Oxford University Press, London, 1962.
Joseph Schumpeter, “Zur Soziologie der Imperialismen,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 46, 1919, 1–39, 275–310;
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. International Publishers, New York, 1977. Exceptional here is the flurry of scholarship sparked by Robinson and Gallagher’s informal empire thesis, discussed below. See
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review, Second series, 6(1), 1953, 1–15,
Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Afica and the Victorians. The Official Mind of Imperialism (2nd ed.) London, Macmillan, 1981;
Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy and the Empire of Free Trade. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970.
See for example the milestone works Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, London 1994;
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Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. Routledge, London, 2002;
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999;
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Robert JC Young. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. Routledge, Oxford, 1990;
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, New York, 1995. The postcolonial challenge has not been accepted without comment from many critics. See most recently
Neil Lazarus, “What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say,” Race and Class 53(3), 2011, 3–27.
The history of European imperialism in the nineteenth century has spawned a vast recent literature. For concise overviews of current research trajectories, see Jennifer Pitts, “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism,” Annual Review of Political Science 13, 2010, 211–235;
Stephen Howe, The New Imperial Histories Reader. Routledge, New York, 2009;
Martin Hall & John M. Hobson, “Liberal International Theory: Eurocentric but not Always Imperialist?” International Theory, 2(2), 2010, 210–245;
Tony Ballantyne, “The Changing Shape of the Modern British Empire and its Historiography,” The Historical Journal 53(2), 2010, 429–452. Indicative recent works include,
George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa and Southwest Africa. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007;
Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism 1848–1884. Berghahn Books, New York, 2008;
Susie Protschky, Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia. KITLV Press, Leiden, 2011;
Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: A Reader. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000;
Matthew G. Stanard, Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism. Nebraska University Press, Lincoln, 2012;
Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth Century Visions of a Greater Britain. Cambrdige University Press, Cambridge, 2011;
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Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexulaity and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press, Durham, 1995;
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Makings of the Third World. Verso, London, 2001;
John M. Mackenzie, European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2011.
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005.
Duncan SA Bell, “Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought,” Historical Journal 49(1), 2006, 281–298. The question of the extent of liberal ambivalence towards empire also structures the recent discussion between Greg Grandin, Jennifer Pitts, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Anthony Pagden. See Greg Grandin, “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism” Jennifer Pitts, “Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century” Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Liberalism and Empire in Nineteenth-Century International Law” and Anthony Pagden, “Comment: Empire and its Anxieties” — all in American Historical Review, 117(1), 2012.
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999; Karuna Mantena, “The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism,” histoire@politique n. 11, Revue électronique du Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, 2010, www.histoire-politique.fr,
Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter History (trans. Gregory Elliott). Verso, New York, 2011.
Dipesh Chakrabarty points out that the philosophical and political vocabulary of Europe was one of Europe’s primary long term political exports, one that was decanted through and superimposed upon local politico-philosophical arrangements in the global south. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008, pp. 3–11.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Imperialism, 1875–1914. Abacus Books, London, 1989.
As per Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (trans. Sorcha O’Hagan). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010;
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Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000;
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See for example Christopher Coyne, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008;
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Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2006. See too the debate surrounding
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John Darwin, After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000. Penguin, London, 2008, p. 491.
This is not to say that there were no empires in the pre-Columbian Americas. See for example Arlen F Chase, Diane Z Chase & Michael E Smith, “States and Empires in Ancient Mesoamerica” Ancient Mesoamerica 20, 2009, 175–182, Michael E Smith & Lisa Montiel, “The Archaeological Study of Empires and Imperialism in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico” Journal of Archaeological Anthropology, 20, 2001, 245–284.
On how the drive for cultural and material exchange animated the nascent dynamics of empire, thereby initiating the fusion of the Afro-Eurasian world system during the Iron Age, see recently Phillipe Beaujard, “From Three Possible World Systems to a Single Afro-Eurasian World System,” Journal of World History 21(1), 2010, 1–43. For earlier “long wave” approaches, see most famously
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JL Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony—The World System AD 1250–1350. Oxford University Press, New York, 1989.
contra Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2010, p. 8. It is generically the case, however, as they argue that empires are polities designed to house and organise difference hierarchically.
Which of course does not exhaust the literary possibilities of the trans-historical conceit, as is made clear in Margaret Malamud’s Ancient Rome and Modern America. Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, 2009. See too my “Carneades and the Conceit of Rome: Transhistorical Approaches to Imperialism,” Greece & Rome (second series), 57(1), April 2010, 1–20.
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Iván Zoltán Dénes (ed.), Liberty and the Search for Identity: Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires. Central European University Press, Budapest, 2006;
Ivana Pantelić, “John Stuart Mill in Nineteenth Century Serbia: Influence on Political Thought and Gender Issues,” Balkanica 40, 2009, 85–93;
Traian Stoianovich, “The Pattern of Serbian Intellectual Evolution, 1830–1880,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1(3), 1959, 242–272.
Robert S. Peckham, “Map Mania: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece, 1870–1922,” Political Geography, 19, 2000, 85,
Edislav Maretovic, “Ilija Garasanin: Nacertanije and Nationalism,” Historical Review 3, 2006, pp. 137–173. For the text of this “Draft Plan,” as well as that of Ioannis Kolettis’ “Great Idea” and Lajos Kossuth’s “Proposal,” see
Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček, Discourses of collective identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945), Texts and Commentaries, Volume Two, National Romanticism—The Formation of National Movements. Central European University Press, Budapest, 2007, pp. 238–277.
Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “On the Intellectual Content of Greek Nationalism: Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium and the Great Idea,” in David Ricks and Paul Magdalino (eds.), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity. Ashgate, Surrey, 1998, pp. 26–27.
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Frederick F. Anscombe, “Islam and the Age of Ottoman Reform,” Past and Present 208(1), 2010, 159–189.
Kemal H. Karpat, “Kossuth in Turkey: The Impact of Hungarian Refugees in the Ottoman Empire, 1849–1851,” in K. H. Karpat (ed.), Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: Selected Articles and Essays. Brill, Leiden, 2002, pp. 169–184.
This difficulty has obvious parallels to the crisis of imperial legitimacy in Britain described by Karuna Mantena in Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2010.
Wiktor Heltman et al., “1836 Manifesto of the Democratic Society,” in Wladyslaw Malinowski (ed.), For Your Freedom and Ours: Polish Progressive Spirit through the Ages. Fredrick Ungar, New York, 1943, p. 82.
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John Milfull, “The Zionist Paradox,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 54(1), 2008, 130.
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Bo Strâth, “Mitteleuropa: From List to Naumann.” Interestingly, the title of the German translation of Oswald Henderson’s biographical study of Friedrich List calls him “the first visionary of a united Europe.” Oswald Henderson, Friedrich List: der erste Visionär eines vereinten Europas; eine historische Biographie. Oertel & Spöring, Reutlingen, 1989.
Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, pp. 425–435. On the rationale behind List’s global empire, see Bradley D. Naranch, Beyond the Fatherland: Colonial Visions, Overseas Expansion, and German Nationalism, 1848–1885, Unpublished dissertation, John Hopkins University, 2006, 95–100.
Harald Hagemann and Matthias Rösch, “German Economist in Parliament (1848–1918),” in Massimo M. Augello and Marco E. L. Guidi (eds.), Economists in Parliament in the Liberal Age (1848–1920). Ashgate, Hampshire, 2005, p. 171;
Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “A Fall from Grace?: National Unity and the Search for Naval Power and Colonial Possessions, 1848–1884,” German History 25(2), 2007, 135–161.
On Lajos Kossuth’s detailed commentaries on Friedrich List in the Pesti Hirlap in 1842, see Gottfried Fittbogen, Friedrich List in Ungarn. Gruyter, Berlin, 1942, pp. 13–16.
Oswald Henderson, Friedrich List: Economist and Visionary 1789–1846. Frank Cass, London, 1983, pp. 215–217.
Witte to Nicholas II, “Report of the Minster of Finance to His Majesty on the Necessity of Formulating and Thereafter Steadfastly Adhering to a Definite Program of a Commercial and Industrial Policy of the Empire” March 22, 1899, reproduced in Theodore H. von Laue, “A Secret Memorandum of Sergei Witte on the Industrialization of Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 26(1), 1954, 66.
Sidney Harcave, Count Sergei Witte and the Twilight of Imperial Russia: A Biography. ME Sharpe, New York, 2004, pp. 33, 49–51.
Michalis M. Psalidopoulos and Nicholas J. Theocarakis, “The Dissemination of Economic Thought in South-Eastern Europe in the 19th Century,” in H. Kurz, K. Trike, and T. Nishizawa (eds.), The Disemination of Economic Ideas. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 2011, pp. 164–165.
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For List’s biographical details, see Oswald Henderson, Friedrich List; Margaret Hirst, Life of Friedrich List and Selections from his Writings. August M. Kelley, New York, 1965. See too
Ivo N. Lambi, Free Trade and Protectionism in Germany 1868–1879. Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1963, pp. 1–22,
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John M. Pullen, “Malthus on Colonization and Economic Development: A Comparison with Adam Smith,” Utilitas 6(2), 1994, 244; contra Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire, pp. 52–57.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. II, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976, pp. 607–608 (IV.vii.c.47).
It is often noted that Hegel drew upon this same notion in his philosophy of history, and it is worth speculating that Hegel’s notion of non-historic peoples might owe something to his reading of the Wealth of Nations in Jena between 1802 and 1804. On the influence of Smith on Hegel, see György Lukács, The Young Hegel. Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, II: 5. On Hegel and imperialism, see Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History. Columbia University Press, New York, 2002.
Neil A. Martin, “Marxism, Nationalism and Russia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29(2), 1968, 239–242;
Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey. Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 52–56. Kevin Anderson’s recent defence of Marx against the charge of Eurocentrism, cannot explain away that it was the Communist Manifesto and not Marx’s private marginalia after Capital that crystallised the Marxist position on imperialism until Lenin’s Hobsonbased (i.e. similarly liberal) critique.
Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010.
K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967, pp. 83–84.
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Fitzpatrick, M.P. (2012). Introduction. In: Fitzpatrick, M.P. (eds) Liberal Imperialism in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137019974_1
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