Abstract
This chapter strikes a bridge from current-day imaginations to pre-modern concepts of empire. It shows how, on the one hand, modern visions of empire are echoing political and religious notions of an all-encompassing rule that go back to Antiquity. On the other hand, it stresses how such modern conceptualizations tend to fall short on understanding diversity in a world where state penetration and identity articulation were dependent on various intermediaries. This paper shows how pre-modern Habsburg and Ottoman approaches to unity and diversity came into conflict with modernisation projects that tried to reduce the number of intermediaries and thus created a need for narratives of power that connected rulers to subjects in a new way. The emergence of articulate, interconnected and self-aware classes in both empires that tied hopes for political progress to narratives of nation created both challenges and possibilities for the two dynasties. This created the premise for media discourses where the empire was envisioned as a nation of many peoples.
I am indebted to various friends, colleagues and students throughout the years who have increased my interest and deepened my focus on this topic, and especially to my co-editor Johanna Chovanec who provided me with the opportunity to put my thoughts to paper in this way. I also want to thank Matthew Goldman and Iva Lučić for their valuable feedback.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Schäuble (2006) for a lecture in which the then German Christian Democratic Minister of Interior Wolfgang Schäuble developed the idea of an affinity between the Holy Roman Empire and the European Union .
- 2.
See also Münkler (2007).
- 3.
See also Latowski (2013, 59–91).
- 4.
Apart from Edward Gibbon’s tour de force The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1774–1789), this would be a recurring subject of nineteenth-century historicist paintings, some of which took more interest in the concept of decadence (cf. Thomas Couture, Les Romains dans leur décadence, 1848) and others which excelled more in visions of destruction (cf. John Martin and Thomas Cole). I am very grateful to Tonje H. Sørensen for her valuable input on these matters.
- 5.
My translation (with special thanks to Anders Piltz); the Latin original reads “Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera / credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore voltus / orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus / describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent / tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento / hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem / parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos”.
- 6.
The Bible provides influential “shadow narratives” of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian (Kings, Chronicles, Psalms), Persian (Daniel, Ezra, Nehemja, Esther), Macedonian and Seleucid (Daniel, Maccabeans) and Roman (Gospels, Apocalypse of John) empires. See Kosmin (2018) for a recent study of how and why many of them seem to go back to the Seleucid era in particular.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
On a current debate that flared up on Twitter over diversity in the Roman Empire, see Basset (2017).
- 10.
”Yıkılupdur bu cihan”; see Hanioğlu (2008, 6) for an English translation.
- 11.
Cf. Schäbler (2016, 15).
- 12.
This was very clearly understood by one of Mehmed Ali’s officials, the Armenian Joseph Hekekyan who remarked in his diary that the brutal attempts to force the Egyptian fellahin to work in the cotton factories merely showed the limits of the state: the workers burned down the factory or fled to the desert. For a translation, see Amin et al. (2006, 41).
- 13.
See also el-Rouayheb (2015) for a deepening perspective on the vitality of Muslim thought in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire.
- 14.
See also Šedivý (2013).
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Heilo, O. (2021). Making Sense in a World That Is Falling Apart: Imperial Narratives of State, Diversity and Modernity. In: Chovanec, J., Heilo, O. (eds) Narrated Empires. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5_2
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