Военная история / Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World

Название: Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World
Автор(ы): Krishan Kumar
Издательство: Princeton University Press
Год: 2017
ISBN: 978-0691153636
Страниц: 598
Язык: English
Формат: True PDF
Размер: 55 MB

The empires of the past were far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and have much to teach us about navigating our own increasingly globalized and interconnected world. Until now, most recent scholarship on empires has focused on their subject peoples. Visions of Empire looks at their rulers, shedding critical new light on who they were, how they justified their empires, how they viewed themselves, and the styles of rule they adopted toward their subjects.
Krishan Kumar provides panoramic and multifaceted portraits of five major European empires—Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian/Soviet, British, and French—showing how each, like ancient Rome, saw itself as the carrier of universal civilization to the rest of the world. Sometimes these aims were couched in religious terms, as with Islam for the Ottomans or Catholicism for the Habsburgs. Later, the imperial missions took more secular forms, as with British political traditions or the world communism of the Soviets.