Abstract
Neither “empire” nor “nation-state” is an easily defined concept.2 The first often is loosely conceived as any political formation that answers to no earthly authority and is neither a city-state nor a nation state; the second is rather sloppily imagined as a state and society that boasts a citizenry that is homogeneous in language and identity.3 The terms come together because many believe that the nation-state is a successor to, and consequently implicitly superior to, the empire as a way of organizing society. The place where this transformation is said to have occurred is Western Europe; the time was the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
It is far from clear whether separate religious identity, however powerful, is, taken by itself, similar to nationalism. The modern tendency is to assimilate the two, since we are no longer familiar with the model of the multi-corporate state, in which various religious communities coexist under a supreme authority as in some senses autonomous and self-administering entities; [sic] as under the Ottoman Empire.
—Eric J. Hobsbawm , Nations and Nationalism (1990)1
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Notes
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 70.
On which see the collection of essays, David Armitage, ed., Theories of Empire, 1450–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
On these terms and their slipperiness, see Daniel Power, “Frontiers: Terms, Concepts, and the Historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700 , eds. Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 1–12.
A recent example, that seems persuasive in the North American context, but does not travel particularly well, is Jeremy Adelman and Stephan Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 814–41.
Victor S. Mamatey, The Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1815 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), iii-iv.
Georg Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reiches: Staat und Nation in der Friihen Neuzeit, 1495–1806 (Munich: Beck, 1999), 191–92.
Armitage, Theories of Empire. The very title of the series in which this book appears, “An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450–1800,” is problematic.
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33.
Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time , ed. William C. Hickman, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 417–18.
Walter G. Moss, A History of Russia: Volume I, to 1917 (Boston: McGraw-Hill 1997), 100–01.
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 137–64.
On which see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1660–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 23–134.
Three examples are in Daniel J. Vitkus, ed., Three Turk Playsfrom Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, The Renegado (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). The first, which concerns the Ottoman heartland, is more about the Ottomans than are the last two, which focus on a peripheral North Africa that was both more familiar to early-seventeenth-century England than was the eastern Mediterranean, and far less representative of the Ottoman world.
On whom, see Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), chap. 1.
On which, see Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters, eds., The Ottoman City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Gulru Necipoglu, “Suleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry,” Art Bulletin 71.3 (1989): 401–27.
J. H. Elliott, “Understanding the Past,” www.balzan.it/english/pb1999/elliott/paper.htm; J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992): 48–71.
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Goffman, D., Stroop, C. (2004). Empire as Composite: The Ottoman Polity and the Typology of Dominion. In: Rajan, B., Sauer, E. (eds) Imperialisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980465_8
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