Kipling, Elgar, Mafeking Night . . . all these conjure up an image of a British society besotted with imperial pride in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact the true picture was more ...complex than this and people reacted to their empire in different ways. Many were hardly aware of it at all. This lively book is the first study of the impact of the empire on British society and culture that looks beneath the surface to find out what people really thought, with some surprising results.
Universal Empire Bang, Peter Fibiger; Kolodziejczyk, Dariusz
08/2012
eBook
The claim by certain rulers to universal empire has a long history stretching as far back as the Assyrian and Achaemenid Empires. This book traces its various manifestations in classical antiquity, ...the Islamic world, Asia and Central America as well as considering seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European discussions of international order. As such it is an exercise in comparative world history combining a multiplicity of approaches, from ancient history, to literary and philosophical studies, to the history of art and international relations and historical sociology. The notion of universal, imperial rule is presented as an elusive and much coveted prize among monarchs in history, around which developed forms of kingship and political culture. Different facets of the phenomenon are explored under three, broadly conceived, headings: symbolism, ceremony and diplomatic relations; universal or cosmopolitan literary high-cultures; and, finally, the inclination to present universal imperial rule as an expression of cosmic order.
En esta intervención se revisan crÃticamente los conceptos de sociedad mundial y de imperialismo según son planteados por Esteban Torres en su libro La gran transformación de la sociologÃa. Se ...observa la arquitectura y las relaciones lógicas del primero y la insuficiencia económica del segundo. En ambos casos, la crÃtica es sucedida por la sugerencia de alternativas basadas en la TeorÃa de sistemas sociales.
Nationalizing Empires Stefan Berger, Alexei Miller / Stefan Berger, Alexei Miller
2015, 20150630, 2014, 2015-06-10
eBook
The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the ...imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.
Editorial Bialostocka, Olga
Africa insight,
03/2022, Letnik:
51, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
While the colonial rule in Africa formally ended in the previous century, the shadow of colonial hegemony still lies in the forms of knowing and understanding the world that are practised on the ...continent, and the imperial power holds an iron grip over the socio-economic realities of Africans. Colonial powers constructed their culture and values as universal, denigrating the ways of being, having and doing of the peoples they subdued and oppressed. The economic and political systems of the colonised societies have been reconfigured to exploit local populations and through their labour accumulate capital for the benefit of the West. African cultures, deemed useless, were mostly neglected, often negated and excluded, which eventually ‘allowed them to survive in silence, in the shadows, simultaneously scorned by their own modernised and westernised elites’.sup.1 Today, the challenges posed by economic and cultural imperialist designs, such as globalisation or the capitalist development model, further threaten African cultures, which risk erosion as a result of imbalanced cultural interactions between the local and the global, and lack of validation of African axiological categories among the people of the continent themselves, which leads to the process of acculturation. Few are the communities that, in the face of globalised culture, still carry remnants of economic and political models different from the European ‘norm’ and reveal scientific and technological innovations created in response to the real needs and experiences of the people more than the commercial desires enthroned by modernity.
