Napoleon Bonaparte was never going to be an easy character to put onstage, from the initial fears under the Directory about staging a living general to the Restoration’s horror at divisive memories of the Empire. Yet theatrical versions of Bonaparte or allusions to him were no stranger to the boards and tell us much about the construction of Napoleon’s image, indeed, the Napoleonic legend itself. Although there were certainly productions we would qualify as ‘propaganda’ promoting Napoleon, not all theatrical appearances or allusions were positive, and the bureaucratic censorship system often lagged behind audience interpretations, leaving room for derision via lateral censorship at any theatre, from the Opéra and the Variétés in Paris to Lyon’s Théâtre des Célestins. In this sense, censorship offered contemporaries a space for political subversion to advance another model of France, even at the height of imperial rule or under the restored monarchy.

Chapter 5 layers in investigation of notions of empire and longevity, examined here through the lens of more mundane and pervasive structures—its streets and public highways—to reckon with the attenuated and amalgamated temporalities that these infrastructures construct through the accumulation of large- and small-scale acts of maintenance and repair and the referencing of those interventions by milestone monuments in the extra-urban landscape.

This chapter analyses the relationship between religion, state-formation, and nationalism. The focus is on the transformation of collective subjectivities in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds. By zooming in on case studies of the Ottoman empire and Turkey, the chapter analyses what role religious and state institutions play in the development of distinct nationalist projects. Since both religion and nationhood were key sources of political legitimacy, the chapter explores how these are two distinct types of collective subjectivities reconciled in the social and political spheres. The chapter investigates the inherent tensions between the universalist doctrines of Sunni Islam and the unambiguous particularism of modern nationalist projects in Turkey.

This chapter explores the role of golden age narratives in nationalism. By focusing on case studies of late nineteenth- and early twenty-first-century south-eastern European societies, the author explains how and why images of the mythical past are articulated differently in the two historical periods. The chapter argues that in the nineteenth century, golden age rhetoric was mostly a top-down phenomenon centred on transforming the Balkan peasantry into loyal members of their new nation-states. By the early twenty-first century this process had reached its institutional limits and the golden age narratives had become a bottom-up phenomenon: the key agents of their creation and dissemination are members of civil society, social movements, and ordinary people. The chapter focuses on the structural processes that underpin this change to explain the historical dynamics of nationalisms.

This chapter explores the relationship between imperial and national subjectivities. Empires have dominated the planet for thousands of years, but in a relatively short period of time they have been completely delegitimised by national projects. Hence, this chapter aims to explain how and why this has happened. Using historical examples of Japanese and Hungarian nation-formation, the chapter traces the transformation of local and religiously based subjectivities into nation-centric subjectivities.

The years between about 1780 and 1850 can be understood as a meaningful period in the making of a romantic Ireland. Nestled within the cradle of that century, though, lie folds and divisions that lend a distinctive texture to the underlying political formations described. The introduction traces some of these textures while setting out the main phases and patterns through which Irish romantic culture can be analysed and understood.

In this chapter the role of (nationalist) agency in the collapse of imperial order is questioned. Drawing on the primary archival research, the chapter zooms in on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian rule (1878–1918). The chapter contests the view that the imperial state was severely undermined by the presence of strong nationalisms. It also challenges the notion that most of the Bosnian population remained ‘nationally indifferent’ during this period. Instead, the chapter argues that understanding the character of Austro-Hungarian rule is a much better predictor of social change that took place in this period. Rather than stifling supposedly vibrant nationalisms or operating amidst widespread national indifference, the imperial state played a decisive role in forging the nation-centric world through its inadvertent homogenisation of discontent.

When the atrocities of the French Revolution led Romantic authors to test the viability of anti-imperial imaginaries in their poetry, many of them relocated revolution from Europe to so-called Oriental geographies. The cultural and aesthetic distance of exoticized topographies generated a spectacle of revolutionary violence that could be consumed safely in Britain. In the poetic works of Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh), Felicia Hemans (The Abencerrage), Lord Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Giaour), Percy Shelley (Laon and Cythna), Robert Southey (Thalaba the Destroyer), and Thomas Love Peacock (Ahrimanes), revolutionary struggle is envisaged as an enterprise marked by a cyclical logic that anticipates the return of empire: It is redefined as an inevitable failure to undo oppressive power structures. An ethnoracially demarcated space of fantasy, the Orient allows these poets to experiment with revolutionary narratives in a way that affectively neutralizes the lived trauma of revolution by reducing it to a dehistoricized and yet universalizable configuration. In the Orientalist poetry of Romantics, then, revolution becomes imaginable as an anti-imperial event with the caveat that its present unrealizability is affirmed in its consumption as a culturally and ethnoracially distanced spectacle.

While much has been written about race, colonization, and anticolonialism in fin-de-siècle Irish gothic works such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), this chapter focuses particular attention on Romantic-era Irish gothic fiction’s engagements with empire and the imperialized world. Written in the context of an increasingly expansive, globalized literary marketplace, the works assessed here – including Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Catherine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees (1803), the anonymous Amasina; or the American Foundling (1804), and Henrietta Rouvière Mosse’s Arrivals from India (1812) – provide an instructive example of Irish writers’ deft manipulation of systems of global economy to debate and contest questions of empire, relative civilization/barbarity, and ethnographies of race. They also point to the formal evolution of Irish gothic encouraged and enabled by writers’ responses to the economic and material realities of empire. Keenly aware of their global readership and their novels’ status as commodities, these writers invoke and reshape the gothic to think about the nature of authorship itself. Their works thus invite a reconsideration of the accepted makeup and characteristics of Romantic gothic, at the same time as they insist on an expansion of traditional canons of gothic and Irish gothic literature.

The chapter provides an overview situating the literatures produced or circulated in Britain and the racialized, classed, and gendered imaginaries of empire. English literature was informed by imperial concerns and anti-capitalist critique alike since the sixteenth century, even as England was a minor player among European imperial powers. Contemporary scholarship, while attending to marginalized authors, such as women, immigrants, minorities, and the working class, demonstrates that diverse literature, prose especially, but also drama and verse, were shaped by expanding trade, global markets, territorial appropriations, military conquests, human emigration, and cultural contact. A mix of ideologies spawned in the nineteenth century to rationalize British presence as not only inevitable but beneficial for the colonized; for colonized intellectuals, on the other hand, literature fostered alternative visions of resistance. Diasporic writers in twentieth-century Britain introduced readers to the vocabulary and memory of colonized lands. The chapter contends that many themes of contemporary culture are not unique to the present but variations of older, far-flung contests. Literature, in its ability to articulate shifts in perception, sensibilities, and relations before such changes are actualized, is an indispensable site of analysis and study.

This chapter looks at the connection between travel and narrative fiction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It shows how writers of novels borrowed from, expanded on, and reimagined accounts of actual voyages and descriptions of faraway places. Authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift took details and ideas from travelers such as William Dampier, Woodes Rogers, and James Cooke. Well-known novels, including Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), reflected on and reconsidered England’s relationship to the wider world beyond Europe and the creation of the British Empire – at times critically, at times enthusiastically. The purpose of travelers, for the most part, was to say what they saw and did. It was the prerogative of writers of fiction to digest these facts and reflect on what they meant.

While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past variously in the wake of the new, depending on one’s circumstances in global modernity. This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition, the passages of Elizabeth Bowen, Pauline Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys into and out of British imperial metropole London in the “Mother Country” (England), reveal their self-conscious adaptations of modernist technologies, undoing some imperial trappings and redoing prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership. Each woman conveys the effects of empire–democracy, while struggling to retain belief in the liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the “New Woman.” “Technology” refers to both the material infrastructure of modernity (mass reproduction, invention, and innovation) as well as “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experiences of being in empire. The chapter unpacks the different implications of the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses of modernity in the nation-state – mastering, producing, doing – for these writers, who were positioned unequally to each other and who interpreted socialist, feminist, and anticolonialist movements differentially.

This chapter is an overview and introduction to this book. This second volume of the project builds on the first, and we invite readers to consider them in tandem. With no self-evident historical cut points, we concluded East Asian in the World I around 1900. This second volume picks up from that point here and extends our analysis into the first fifteen years or so of the Cold War era. Part I extends the discussion of imperialism, the breakdown of the Sinitic order and the roles that two newcomers – Japan and the United States – played in the emerging regional order. Part II takes up the interwar period. We focus primary attention on Japan–China relations over a somewhat longer time frame. The US Open Door Notes and its fleeting liberal project in the wake of World War I held out the promise of a new order “after imperialism.” Yet this liberal project proved unable to forestall Soviet intervention in Chinese politics and the more fateful imperial ambitions of Japan. In Part III, we contribute to the literature – now vast – on the emergence of the Cold War order in Asia.

In an era steeped in national stereotypes that bled into slanders and hatred, the English were notorious in later medieval Europe for three things: drunkenness, bearing a tail and killing their kings. But it is with the implications of another alleged propensity – for waging wars of conquest that sought to turn neighbours into subjects – that this chapter is largely concerned. By the later Middle Ages, the bellicose reputation of England’s kings reverberated across Christendom. Jean Froissart (d. c. 1405), the chronicler of chivalry who visited the court of Edward III, noted that, because of their great conquests, the English were ‘always more inclined to war than peace’.

This chapter emphasizes the importance of studying race and empire as dynamic, interactive processes, where race and empire are formed in relation to each other. Through a relational history approach, scholars historicize the complex nature of racialization within various imperial and colonial contexts. The chapter further explores how scholars engage with relational histories by examining intellectual and disciplinary genealogies, engaging in deep contextualization through critical archival research, and incorporating diverse sources like oral histories and local colonial records into their historical narrative. Additionally, the chapter discusses the ethical considerations and historiographical challenges inherent in researching race and empire, encouraging scholars to acknowledge their positionality and the implications of their findings. By employing relational history, the chapter concludes that scholars can offer deeper insights into how race and empire have co-constituted each other in the past and augment our contemporary understandings of power and resistance.