Imagined Empires

Through a microhistory of a small province in Upper Egypt, this book investigates the history of five world empires that assumed hegemony in Qina province over the last five centuries. Imagined Empires charts modes of subaltern rebellion against the destructive policies of colonial intruders and collaborating local elites in the south of Egypt. Abul-Magd vividly narrates stories of sabotage, banditry, flight, and massive uprisings of peasants and laborers, to challenge myths of imperial competence. The book depicts forms of subaltern discontent against "imagined empires" that failed in achieving their professed goals and brought about environmental crises to Qina province. As the book deconstructs myths about early modern and modern world hegemons, it reveals that imperial modernity and its market economy altered existing systems of landownership, irrigation, and trade— leading to such destructive occurrences as the plague and cholera epidemics. The book also deconstructs myths in Egyptian historiography, highlighting the problems of a Cairo-centered idea of the Egyptian nation-state. The book covers the Ottoman, French, Muhammad Ali’s, and the British informal and formal empires. It alludes to the U.S. and its failed market economy in Upper Egypt, which partially resulted in Qina’s participation in the 2011 revolution. Imagined Empires is a timely addition to Middle Eastern and world history.

A 1999 study of the influence of South American culture on early American culture, in particular literature.

The Balkans offer classic examples of how empires imagine they can transform themselves into national states (Ottomanism) and how nation-states project themselves into future empires (as with the Greek “Great Idea” and the Serbian “Načertaniye”). By examining the interaction between these two aspirations this volume sheds light on the ideological prerequisites for the emergence of Balkan nationalisms. With a balance between historical and literary contributions, the focus is on the ideological hybridity of the new national identities and on the effects of “imperial nationalisms” on the emerging Balkan nationalisms. The authors of the twelve essays reveal the relation between empire and nation-state, proceeding from the observation that many of the new nation-states acquired some imperial features and behaved as empires. This original and stimulating approach reveals the imperialistic nature of so-called ethnic or cultural nationalism.

In Imaginary Empires, Maria O’Malley examines early American texts published between 1767 and 1867 whose narratives represent women’s engagement in the formation of empire. Her analysis unearths a variety of responses to contact, exchange, and cohabitation in the early United States, stressing the possibilities inherent in the literary to foster participation, resignification, and rapprochement. New readings of The Female American, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl confound the metaphors of ghosts, haunting, and amnesia that proliferate in many recent studies of early US literary history. Instead, as O’Malley shows, these writings foreground acts of foundational violence involved in the militarization of domestic spaces, the legal impediments to the transfer of property and wealth, and the geopolitical standing of the United States. Racialized and gendered figures in the texts refuse to die, leave, or stay silent. In imagining different kinds of futures, these writers reckon with the ambivalent role of women in empire-building as they negotiate between their own subordinate position in society and their exertion of sovereignty over others. By tracing a thread of virtual history found in works by women, Imaginary Empires explores how reflections of the past offer a means of shaping future sociopolitical formations.

Between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, Britain evolved from a substantial international power yet relative artistic backwater into a global superpower and a leading cultural force in Europe. In this original and wide-ranging book, Hoock illuminates the manifold ways in which the culture of power and the power of culture were interwoven in this period of dramatic change. Britons invested artistic and imaginative effort to come to terms with the loss of the American colonies; to sustain the generation-long fight against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; and to assert and legitimate their growing empire in India. Demonstrating how Britain fought international culture wars over prize antiquities from the Mediterranean and Near East, the book explores how Britons appropriated ancient cultures from the Mediterranean, the Near East, and India, and casts a fresh eye on iconic objects such as the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles.

In 1763 British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Keys, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Using maps that Britain created to control its new lands, Max Edelson pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions before the Revolution.

The origins of the United States' distinct approach to war and military power are found in the colonial experience. Long before 1776 or 1619, Englishmen understood themselves to be a part of a larger, lost "British" empire that might disappear forever in the globe-girdling shadow of the Spanish Hapsburgs and their drive to extirpate Protestantism. A combination of geopolitical ambition and fear of Philip II propelled Elizabethan expansion into North America. During the queen's five decades on the throne, the British imperial impulse jelled into a distinct and widely shared strategic culture, anchored in a deeply held faith and political ideology that legitimized Tudor rule; increasingly centralized Tudor power across England, Scotland, and Ireland; forced attention to the continental European balance of power; and drew adventurers to explore the world and claim a toehold in North America. In Empire Imagined, Giselle Frances Donnelly traces the development of these enduring habits through a series of vignettes that reveal the interaction of a maturing strategic consensus and the contingencies inevitable in international politics and offers a unique perspective for understanding the current debate about America's role in the world.

Empires of the Imagination takes the Louisiana Purchase as a point of departure for a compelling new discussion of the interaction between France and the United States. In addition to offering the first substantive synthesis of this transatlantic relationship, the essays collected here offer new interpretations on themes vital to the subject, ranging from political culture to intercultural contact to ethnic identity. They capture the cultural breadth of the territories encompassed by the Louisiana Purchase, exploring not only French and Anglo-American experiences, but also those of Native Americans and African Americans. Despite differences in concerns and methods, the pieces collected share crucial ground in how they suggest new ways for thinking about empire, identity, and memory. The authors show how France and the United States set about their competing imperial projects even as residents of the North American West effectively resisted those imperial aims, creating instead their own notions of community and connection. At the same time, these essays show how the contact among peoples created new social configurations and distinct cultural identities. Moving beyond the particulars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these essays reveal how the Louisiana Purchase subsequently entered into the public consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic in ways that continue to define imperial projects, racial identities, and ethnic communities. Delineating a unique moment in transatlantic historical conversation, Empires of the Imagination also provides important lessons in cross-disciplinary approaches to North American and Atlantic history. In addition to the multinational perspectives of the authors, individual essays deploy social science history, political culture, and ideological history, as well as social and cultural history, to create a cohesive understanding of diverse experiences. Contributors:Emily Clark, Tulane University * Laurent Dubois, Duke University * Mark Fernandez, Loyola University, New Orleans * Peter J. Kastor, Washington University in St. Louis * Paul Lachance, University of Ottawa * Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, Dalhousie University * James E. Lewis Jr., Kalamazoo College * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Jacques Portes, Université de Paris VIII * Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, Université de Paris VII–Denis Diderot * Cécile Vidal, L’ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales * François Weil, L’ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales * Richard White, Stanford University

The life story of Gary Gygax, godfather of all fantasy adventure games, has been told only in bits and pieces. Michael Witwer has written a dynamic, dramatized biography of Gygax from his childhood in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to his untimely death in 2008. Gygax's magnum opus, Dungeons & Dragons, would explode in popularity throughout the 1970s and '80s and irreversibly alter the world of gaming. D&D is the best-known, best-selling role-playing game of all time, and it boasts an elite class of alumni--Stephen Colbert, Robin Williams, and Junot Diaz all have spoken openly about their experience with the game as teenagers, and some credit it as the workshop where their nascent imaginations were fostered. Gygax's involvement in the industry lasted long after his dramatic and involuntary departure from D&D's parent company, TSR, and his footprint can be seen in the genre he is largely responsible for creating. But as Witwer shows, perhaps the most compelling facet of his life and work was his unwavering commitment to the power of creativity in the face of myriad sources of adversity, whether cultural, economic, or personal. Through his creation of the role-playing genre, Gygax gave two generations of gamers the tools to invent characters and entire worlds in their minds. Told in narrative-driven and dramatic fashion, Witwer has written an engaging chronicle of the life and legacy of this emperor of the imagination.

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.