Conservatism, Empire, and National Identity
Conservatism, Empire, and National Identity
The relationship between conservatism, empire, and national identity has been one of the most extensively studied subjects in modern political history. Scholars have examined how conservative political traditions frequently emphasized loyalty to nation, monarchy, historical continuity, constitutional order, religion, and patriotism while often viewing imperial expansion as an extension of national prestige and geopolitical strength. At the same time, researchers have explored how nationalism could both reinforce imperial projects and eventually contribute to their decline.
The collected scholarship spans historical case studies, political theory, comparative politics, colonial history, and contemporary political analysis. It includes examinations of Britain, Russia, Canada, Australia, India, Turkey, China, Europe, and other societies where conservative movements interacted with questions of empire, sovereignty, citizenship, and national identity.
Conservative Nationalism
Many works examine conservative understandings of nationalism as distinct from liberal, socialist, or revolutionary forms. Conservative nationalism is frequently associated with historical continuity, inherited institutions, constitutional government, cultural traditions, religion, patriotism, social cohesion, and national sovereignty.
The literature also explores how conservative movements have appealed to shared history, monarchy, military service, and national symbols to promote political unity while responding to modernization, globalization, immigration, and constitutional change.
Empire and Imperial Conservatism
A major portion of the literature investigates how conservative political movements supported imperial expansion or defended existing empires as sources of stability, prestige, economic opportunity, and international influence.
Researchers analyze debates surrounding the British Empire, imperial federation, Greater Britain, colonial administration, imperial defense, and the political ideas that connected empire with national greatness. Other works examine competing conservative responses to imperial decline and decolonization.
Britain, Empire, and National Identity
The largest body of scholarship focuses on Britain and the British Empire.
Topics include:
- Imperial patriotism
- Britishness and English identity
- The Conservative Party
- Imperial nostalgia
- Brexit and "Global Britain"
- One Nation Conservatism
- The monarchy
- The Commonwealth
- Constitutional continuity
- Britain's changing role after empire
Many authors explore how memories of empire continue to shape modern debates over immigration, sovereignty, multiculturalism, and Britain's place in the world.
National Identity After Empire
Numerous studies examine how former imperial powers redefine national identity following imperial decline.
The scholarship explores:
- Imperial memory
- National myths
- Historical narratives
- Public commemorations
- Education
- Museums
- Popular culture
- Political symbolism
Researchers investigate how different societies selectively remember or reinterpret imperial history when constructing modern national identities.
Comparative Perspectives
The collection includes comparative studies from many regions.
Examples include:
- Russia and post-Soviet nationalism
- Turkey and Neo-Ottoman identity
- China and historical memory
- India and Hindu nationalism
- Canada and imperial loyalty
- Australia and settler nationalism
- Scotland, Wales, and Ireland within the British Empire
- European conservative nationalism
- Central and Eastern Europe
These studies demonstrate that relationships between conservatism, empire, and nationalism vary considerably depending on historical experience and political institutions.
Race, Citizenship, and Colonialism
Another major theme concerns the relationship between empire and ideas of race, citizenship, migration, and belonging.
Scholars examine:
- Settler colonialism
- Imperial citizenship
- Racial hierarchies
- Colonial administration
- Immigration policy
- Indigenous peoples
- National myths
- Cultural identity
The literature explores how imperial systems influenced later understandings of citizenship and national membership long after formal empires disappeared.
Political Theory and Nationalism
The collection includes many classic works on nationalism and political identity.
These studies examine:
- Origins of nationalism
- Nation-building
- State formation
- National myths
- Historical memory
- Imperial governance
- Ethnicity
- Civic and ethnic nationalism
- Modernization
- Political legitimacy
Together they provide theoretical frameworks for understanding how nations emerge and how conservative political traditions interact with national identity.
Contemporary Conservative Nationalism
Recent scholarship focuses on twenty-first century developments, including:
- National conservatism
- Populism
- Sovereignty
- Immigration
- Border politics
- Globalization
- Brexit
- Russian nationalism
- Identity politics
- International order
Researchers examine how contemporary conservative movements reinterpret historical ideas about nationhood, empire, and cultural identity in response to modern political challenges.
Conclusion
The collected literature demonstrates that conservatism, empire, and national identity have remained deeply interconnected across different historical periods and regions. While conservative movements have often emphasized continuity, patriotism, inherited institutions, and national sovereignty, scholars also show considerable diversity in how these principles have been interpreted within imperial, post-imperial, colonial, and postcolonial settings. Together, these works provide a broad foundation for understanding the historical evolution of conservative political thought, nationalism, imperial governance, and the continuing influence of empire on contemporary political identities.
Britain, Brexit, and the Legacy of Empire
Dominic Cummings Thinks Brexit Can End British Nativism
| Sahil Handa | Foreign Policy | 2019
Examines the relationship between Brexit, anti-immigration nationalism, imperial nostalgia, populist conservatism, and competing visions of Britain’s global role.
The Conservative Movement and Dreams of Britain’s Postwar Future
| Kit Kowol | Historical Journal | 2019
Studies conservative groups that developed competing plans for postwar Britain based on empire, social hierarchy, national unity, constitutional authority, and economic reconstruction.
The World Is Reaping the Chaos the British Empire Sowed
| Amy Hawkins | Foreign Policy | 2019
Connects conflicts in Hong Kong and Kashmir to British imperial boundaries, constitutional arrangements, divided identities, and unfinished processes of decolonization.
History and Future of British Trade Identities
| David Edgerton | History & Policy | 2018
Shows how ideas about free trade, imperial preference, the Commonwealth, Europe, and national sovereignty have repeatedly divided British political coalitions.
Nationalism: Its Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Conceptions
| Javid A. Valiyev | Baku Research Institute | 2018
Distinguishes conservative nationalism’s emphasis on inheritance, loyalty, authority, and cultural continuity from liberal and revolutionary forms of nationalism.
The Relation Between Imperialism and Nationalism in the German Empire and Its Aftermath
| Juho Korhonen | Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism | 2018
Uses field theory to examine how German nationalism, colonial advocacy, elite competition, and imperial ambition reinforced one another before and after 1918.
Don’t Call It Brexit Radio
| Emily Tamkin | Foreign Policy | 2017
Examines how popular culture and broadcasting became vehicles for competing definitions of Britishness during the nationalist politics surrounding Brexit.
“Feelings of Alarm”: Conservative Criticism of the Principle of Nationality in Mid-Victorian Britain
| Roland Smittenaar | Modern Intellectual History | 2017
Shows how Victorian conservatives opposed nationalist self-determination when it threatened dynastic legitimacy, European order, imperial stability, and established authority.
The BBC World Service and Global Britain
| Alban Webb | History & Policy | 2016
Traces the BBC’s development from an Empire Service aimed at overseas Britons into an institution projecting British influence and identity worldwide.
Ulster Unionism and a Sense of History
| Graham Walker | History & Policy | 2016
Explains how Ulster Unionism combined Protestant identity, loyalty to Britain, imperial pride, constitutional conservatism, and resistance to Irish nationalism.
What Does It Mean to Be British? Belfast and Liverpool’s Experiences
| John Belchem | History & Policy | 2015
Uses Belfast and Liverpool to examine how migration, industrialization, imperial citizenship, religion, and class shaped competing versions of British identity.
The Conservative Right, Europe and Anti-Americanism
| Srdjan Vucetic | History & Policy | 2014
Reviews conservative organizations that opposed European integration, immigration, decolonization, and American influence while supporting white rule in southern Africa.
The Role of Government in Determining the School History Curriculum
| Robert Guyver | History & Policy | 2012
Warns against imposing a celebratory national narrative of British and imperial history through centralized control of school curricula.
British Identity and the Legacy of Empire
| Peter Oborne | openDemocracy | 2010
Discusses how imperial history continues to influence British institutions, foreign policy, immigration debates, multiculturalism, and national self-understanding.
Nationhood and Identity in Conservative Politics
| Philip Lynch | British Politics | 2009
Traces Conservative appeals to monarchy, empire, the Union, parliamentary sovereignty, national independence, and a shared British political tradition.
British National Identity and the Dilemmas of Multiculturalism
| Eva-Maria Asari, Daphne Halikiopoulou and Steven Mock | Nationalism and Ethnic Politics | 2008
Argues that a stable multicultural society requires an inclusive national identity rather than either ethnic nationalism or the abandonment of common political membership.
Empire, Nation, and National Identities
| John M. MacKenzie | Oxford Academic | 2008
Explores the profound influence of empire on English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and overarching British identities within the United Kingdom.
Empire and English Nationalism
| Krishan Kumar | Nations and Nationalism | 2006
Argues that England’s prolonged identification with Britain and its empire delayed the emergence of a separate and explicit English nationalism.
English and British National Identity
| Krishan Kumar | History Compass | 2006
Explains how England’s dominant place in the United Kingdom and British Empire complicated distinctions between English, British, and imperial identities.
The Conservative Party, Patriotism, and British Politics: The General Election of 1900
| Paul Readman | Journal of British Studies | 2001
Examines how Conservatives used patriotism, the South African War, imperial loyalty, and accusations of national disloyalty during the 1900 election.
Nation and Empire: English and British National Identity in Comparative Perspective
| Krishan Kumar | Theory and Society | 2000
Compares the development of British identity with other imperial societies and argues that English national consciousness was submerged within a larger imperial mission.
Colonialism, Nationalism, and Imperial Transformation
The Empire of the International
| Jens Bartelson | Cambridge University Press | 2023
Argues that the global system of nation-states emerged through imperial practices and may reproduce hierarchical relations associated with empire.
Anticolonial Nationalism
| Julian Go | Sociology of Race and Ethnicity | 2019
Surveys the rise of national movements that challenged imperial authority while often adopting institutions and categories created under colonial rule.
Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge
| Jeremy Adelman | Bloomsbury Academic | 2019
Examines how colonial administration shaped sociology, anthropology, economics, geography, and theories of national development.
Empires and Nation-States
| Siniša Malešević | Cambridge University Press | 2019
Challenges the assumption that nations and empires are complete opposites by identifying shared institutions, territorial ambitions, and methods of political mobilization.
Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis
| Siniša Malešević | Cambridge University Press | 2019
Explains nationalism through organizational power, ideological penetration, and everyday social practices rather than timeless ethnic attachment.
The Crisis of Empire After 1918
| Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela | Journal of Modern European History | 2015
Explores how war, revolution, minority nationalism, and self-determination destabilized European empires after the First World War.
Empire and Globalisation: From “High Imperialism” to Decolonisation
| Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson | International History Review | 2014
Examines migration, trade, warfare, communications, and international governance across the transition from European empire to postcolonial nation-states.
Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference
| Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper | Princeton University Press | 2010
Compares empires across history and shows how rulers managed diversity without requiring the cultural uniformity associated with modern nationalism.
Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
| Frederick Cooper | University of California Press | 2005
Critiques simplified oppositions between empire and nation and emphasizes the changing political possibilities within colonial societies.
After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building
| Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen | Routledge | 1997
Examines how successor states inherited ethnically mixed populations, administrative institutions, borders, and political conflicts from collapsed empires.
Conservative Imperialism and British Political Culture
Popular Conservatism and the Culture of National Government in Inter-War Britain
| Geraint Thomas | Cambridge University Press | 2020
Examines how Conservative activists used patriotism, monarchy, national unity, established institutions, and memories of Britain’s imperial status to adapt conservatism to mass democracy.
The National Government and Interwar Conservatism: The Historical Task
| Geraint Thomas | Cambridge University Press | 2020
Reassesses Conservative support for Britain’s National Government and shows how local activists connected national stability, imperial prestige, and resistance to socialism.
Make Britain Great Again: Anglo-American Thought and World Politics in the Age of Empires
| Georgios Giannakopoulos | Modern Intellectual History | 2018
Studies imperial reformers who sought to restore British power through cooperation among Britain, the United States, and the self-governing settler dominions.
The Ghost of Imperial Britain
| Helen Parr | Cambridge University Press | 2018
Shows how memories of empire influenced both Conservative support for and criticism of Britain’s military response during the Falklands War.
Imperial Britons
| John C. Mitcham | Cambridge University Press | 2016
Explains how British identity could coexist with Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African nationalism within a shared imperial political culture.
Race and Imperial Defence in the British World, 1870–1914
| John C. Mitcham | Cambridge University Press | 2016
Investigates how racial ideas, settler nationalism, military cooperation, and loyalty to Britain shaped plans for the collective defense of the empire.
Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain
| David Monger | Liverpool University Press | 2012
Analyzes how patriotic organizations mobilized British and imperial identity while defining loyalty, citizenship, and national duty during wartime.
The Empire at Play, the Empire on Display
| Daniel Gorman | Cambridge University Press | 2012
Examines how the Festival of Empire and British Empire Games used sport, ceremony, and spectacle to promote imperial unity and Commonwealth identity.
The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics
| David Seawright | Palgrave Macmillan | 2010
Traces Conservative appeals to national cohesion, paternal obligation, constitutional continuity, and social hierarchy from Disraeli to the modern party.
The Primrose League: The First Political Mass Movement in Britain
| Martin Pugh | Routledge | 1985
Examines a mass Conservative organization that popularized monarchy, empire, patriotism, social hierarchy, and opposition to socialism among British voters.
Contemporary Conservative Nationalism and Imperial Memory
Empire’s Role in the Global Diffusion of Nationalism and Nation-States
| Sinisa Malesevic | Thesis Eleven | 2025
Argues that imperial rivalry helped spread nationalism even though conservative empires frequently resisted the establishment of independent nation-states.
Global Britain Versus Little England? National Identity and the Future of the British Right
| Richard Hayton | The Political Quarterly | 2025
Explores how the idea of “Global Britain” combines imperial internationalism, national sovereignty, economic openness, and conservative patriotism after Brexit.
Race, Nation, Empire? Historicising Outward and Inward-Looking Internationalisms
| James Foley | International Relations | 2025
Investigates how race, colonial governance, national identity, and inter-imperial rivalry influenced the formation of international-relations thought.
Robert W. Seton-Watson and the Shifting Landscape of Democracy, Nationalism, and Imperial Order
| Georgios Giannakopoulos | English Historical Review | 2025
Situates Seton-Watson’s thinking within debates over democracy, nationality, imperial reform, and the survival of multinational political orders.
The Politics of Imperial Nostalgia
| Christopher Claassen and Andrew B. Hall | British Journal of Political Science | 2025
Examines how favorable memories of empire shape contemporary political attitudes, national pride, opposition to immigration, and support for conservative parties in former imperial states.
Constructing Disraeli in Twentieth-Century Conservatism
| Nathaniel Pearce | English Historical Review | 2024
Shows how conservative politicians and intellectuals reshaped Benjamin Disraeli’s reputation as a symbol of imperial patriotism and Tory national leadership.
National Conservatism Is the New Paradigm of Conservative Politics
| Edmund Fawcett | LSE British Politics and Policy | 2024
Discusses the growth of national conservatism as a movement centered on sovereignty, cultural inheritance, borders, state authority, and opposition to liberal internationalism.
Nationalism, Imperialism: Second Thoughts
| Robert W. Merry | Modern Age | 2024
Presents a conservative interpretation of nationalism and imperial power that emphasizes national interest, historical memory, and geopolitical competition.
America Is in Denial About Its British Imperialist Origins
Argues that American institutions, racial hierarchies, political traditions, and global power cannot be separated from the country’s origins within the British Empire.
How Nationalist Imperialism Became Russia’s State Ideology
| Andrei Kolesnikov | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2023
Describes how Russian nationalism became fused with imperial expansion, militarism, historical mythology, and claims about Russia’s exceptional civilizational destiny.
Russia’s Nationalist-Imperialist Ideology
| Andrei Kolesnikov | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2023
Explains how official narratives of sacrifice, sovereignty, empire, and historical destiny have been used to legitimate authoritarian rule and territorial expansion.
The World in Blocs: Leo Amery, the British Empire and Regionalist Anti-Internationalism, 1903–1947
| Leah Hewitt | Journal of Global History | 2023
Examines a conservative plan to reorganize the British Empire as a self-sufficient regional bloc rather than participate in universal liberal internationalism.
Nationalism
| Renaud-Philippe Garner | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | 2022
Provides an overview of nationalist theory and explains how nationalism has been adopted by conservative, liberal, socialist, religious, and anticolonial movements.
Religion, Nationalism, and Populism in Turkey Under the AKP
| M. Hakan Yavuz | Middle East Institute | 2022
Analyzes the AKP’s blending of conservative religion, Turkish nationalism, Ottoman memory, populist rhetoric, and centralized political authority.
The Origins, Characteristics and Trends of Neo-Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century
| Shichen Zhou | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications | 2022
Surveys contemporary forms of neo-nationalism and their connections to populism, cultural conservatism, economic protectionism, sovereignty, and identity politics.
The Nationalisation of British History: Historians, Nationalism and the Myths of 1940
| David Edgerton | English Historical Review | 2021
Challenges nation-centered histories of wartime Britain by showing that Conservatives commonly understood Britain through imperial and Commonwealth institutions.
Nationalists Claim They Want to Redefine Conservatism
| Mattia Ferraresi | Foreign Policy | 2020
Critically examines attempts to redefine conservatism around nationalism, Christian identity, border control, state power, and admiration for authoritarian governments.
Empire and the Nations of the United Kingdom
The Irish in the Empire
| Barry Crosbie | Manchester University Press | 2012
Examines how Irish soldiers, settlers, officials, missionaries, and merchants participated in empire despite Ireland’s subordinate political position.
Scotland and the British Empire
| John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine | Oxford University Press | 2011
Examines Scotland’s disproportionate role in imperial migration, commerce, administration, warfare, missions, and cultural exchange.
The Welsh and the British Overseas Empire: Interactions and Influences, 1650–1830
| H. V. Bowen | Manchester University Press | 2011
Demonstrates that Welsh regional identity developed through extensive participation in Britain’s Atlantic and Asian imperial systems.
Wales and the British Overseas Empire
| H. V. Bowen | Manchester University Press | 2011
Recovers Welsh involvement in colonial commerce, migration, missions, military service, and the cultural construction of Britishness.
Ireland, India and Nationalism in the British Empire
| Michael Silvestri | Routledge | 2009
Explores connections between Irish and Indian political movements and the ways imperial authorities compared and managed colonial nationalism.
Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s
| Matthew Kelly | Past & Present | 2009
Shows how Irish nationalists expressed both opposition to British domination and selective support for aspects of imperial expansion.
The English Question
| Robert Hazell | Manchester University Press | 2006
Considers how devolution and the decline of empire exposed unresolved questions about England’s political institutions and national identity.
The Making of English National Identity
| Krishan Kumar | Cambridge University Press | 2003
Explains why English identity was historically expressed through Britain, Protestantism, empire, and the institutions of the United Kingdom.
The Scottish Nation: A Modern History
| T. M. Devine | Penguin | 1999
Traces the interaction of Scottish nationalism, Unionism, industrialization, religion, migration, and participation in the British Empire.
Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland
| John M. MacKenzie | Transactions of the Royal Historical Society | 1998
Explains how participation in empire strengthened Scottish institutions and identities rather than simply absorbing Scotland into an English-dominated Britain.
Empire, Race, and Conservative Social Order
White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West
| Ryan Eyford | University of British Columbia Press | 2016
Examines how Canadian colonization combined European immigration, Indigenous dispossession, racial hierarchy, and the construction of settler national identity.
Drawing the Global Colour Line
| Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds | Cambridge University Press | 2008
Shows how white settler societies exchanged policies designed to preserve racial dominance, immigration restriction, and national homogeneity.
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
| Ann Laura Stoler | University of California Press | 2002
Explores how colonial states regulated intimacy, sexuality, marriage, and childhood to maintain racial boundaries and European political authority.
Imperial Order: Daughters of the Empire
| Katie Pickles | Manchester University Press | 2002
Studies a conservative women’s organization that promoted monarchy, racial Britishness, imperial citizenship, military service, and loyalty throughout the settler colonies.
Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia
| Cole Harris | University of British Columbia Press | 2002
Explains how colonial land policy transformed Indigenous territories into a settler province while presenting dispossession as orderly national development.
The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia
| Warwick Anderson | Melbourne University Press | 2002
Examines how medicine and public policy constructed white Australian identity and justified settler rule over Indigenous peoples and immigrants.
The Racial State
| David Theo Goldberg | Wiley-Blackwell | 2002
Analyzes how modern states institutionalize racial classification and exclusion through law, bureaucracy, citizenship, and national narratives.
Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire
| Nancy L. Paxton | Cambridge University Press | 1999
Analyzes how literature connected domestic gender hierarchy with racial authority and imperial domination.
Domesticity and Empire: Gender, Race and Identity
| Karen Tranberg Hansen | Routledge | 1998
Examines how ideals of home, family, femininity, and masculinity supported racial and political hierarchies across imperial societies.
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
| Anne McClintock | Routledge | 1995
Shows how imperial power was reproduced through domesticity, commodity culture, racial ideology, gender norms, and images of national progress.
Fascist and Authoritarian Imperial Nationalism
The Fascist New–Old Order
| Reto Hofmann | Journal of Global History | 2017
Interprets German, Italian, and Japanese fascist empires as products of nationalism, capitalism, racial hierarchy, and global imperial competition.
The Nazi Empire
| Shelley Baranowski | Cambridge University Press | 2011
Places Nazi expansion within longer histories of German colonialism, racial settlement, economic exploitation, and nationalist imperial ambition.
Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1933–40
| Nir Arielli | Palgrave Macmillan | 2010
Examines Mussolini’s attempts to expand Italian influence by presenting Fascism as both a European imperial power and a supporter of Arab nationalism.
Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History
| A. Dirk Moses | Berghahn Books | 2008
Compares imperial conquest and genocide across regions while examining the ideologies that legitimated colonial settlement and racial destruction.
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
| Mark Mazower | Penguin | 2008
Describes the Nazi project to reorganize Europe through conquest, racial hierarchy, forced population movement, and German national supremacy.
Modern Italy’s African Empire
| Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller | Cambridge University Press | 2005
Surveys Italian colonial rule and the connections among national prestige, demographic expansion, racism, and authoritarian politics.
Mussolini’s Empire: Italian Colonialism and Fascism
| Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller | Cambridge University Press | 2005
Examines how Fascist ideology intensified older Italian colonial projects through racial policy, settlement, warfare, and propaganda.
Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945
| Ruth Ben-Ghiat | University of California Press | 2001
Shows how Italian Fascism presented imperial violence and authoritarian rule as expressions of national modernization and cultural renewal.
Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945
| W. G. Beasley | Oxford University Press | 1987
Explains how Japanese nationalism, military power, economic expansion, and claims of Asian leadership produced a modern colonial empire.
The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945
| Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie | Princeton University Press | 1984
Surveys Japanese colonial administration, economic policy, migration, assimilation, and the construction of an imperial national order.
Greater Britain and Imperial Federation
Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America
| Duncan Bell | Princeton University Press | 2020
Investigates fantasies of Anglo-Saxon political unity that linked British imperialism with American expansion and claims of racial world leadership.
Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire
| Duncan Bell | Princeton University Press | 2016
Explores how Victorian political thinkers connected liberty, civilization, racial hierarchy, imperial federation, and visions of an Anglo-American global order.
Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century
| Andrew Thompson | Oxford University Press | 2012
Surveys how empire affected British politics, migration, race relations, economics, culture, warfare, welfare, and changing national identities.
The Britannic Question: The History of a Very British Problem
| Andrew Blick and George Jones | Wiley-Blackwell | 2010
Explores the unstable relationship among Englishness, Britishness, empire, the Union, and constitutional reform.
The Idea of “Greater Britain”: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900
| Duncan Bell | Princeton University Press | 2007
Examines proposals to unite Britain and its settler colonies into a federation grounded in racial kinship, migration, commerce, and strategic power.
Federal Britain: The Case for Decentralisation
| J. P. D. Dunbabin | Routledge | 1997
Places proposals for British federalism within longer debates about empire, national diversity, parliamentary sovereignty, and territorial government.
The Round Table Movement and the Fall of the “Second” British Empire
| Andrea Bosco and Alex May | Cambridge University Press | 1995
Examines attempts by imperial reformers to transform Britain and the dominions into a unified political and strategic commonwealth.
The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy
Argues that monarchy preserves a conservative and imperial image of British national identity while obscuring political and social divisions.
The Break-Up of Britain
Interprets British nationalism as an archaic product of monarchy, empire, class privilege, and an incomplete bourgeois political revolution.
The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union
| John Kendle | Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies | 1975
Describes a movement of imperial federalists who sought to preserve British world power through closer constitutional cooperation with the dominions.
Imperial Conservatism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Conservative Economic Nationalism and the National Policy
| Eric Helleiner | Canadian Journal of Political Science | 2019
Shows how early Canadian protectionism combined national economic development with conservative loyalty to the British Crown and imperial political order.
Imperialism, Continentalism, and Nationalism
| J. M. Bumsted | University of Manitoba Press | 2016
Reviews Canadian arguments over loyalty to Britain, continental economic integration, imperial federation, and the creation of a distinct Canadian nationality.
Nationalism and Imperialism, c.1880–1940
| John Darwin | Oxford Academic | 2012
Explains how imperial expansion was presented as evidence of national strength, racial vitality, commercial success, and civilizational superiority.
The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900
| Duncan Bell | Cambridge University Press | 2007
Reconstructs Victorian plans for an Anglo-Saxon federation uniting Britain and the settler colonies through race, migration, commerce, and constitutional loyalty.
Public Irony, Conservatism, and the British Nation
| Yoon Sun Lee | Oxford Academic | 2004
Discusses how Burke, Scott, and Carlyle used literature and irony to reconcile Scottish and Irish particularism with loyalty to a hierarchical British nation.
The Absent-Minded Imperialists
| Bernard Porter | Oxford University Press | 2004
Challenges the belief that most Britons were intensely conscious supporters of empire and questions empire’s influence on ordinary national identity.
The British Empire and the British People
| Bernard Porter | Journal of British Studies | 2004
Questions how deeply imperial enthusiasm penetrated everyday British society and challenges assumptions about a uniformly imperial national culture.
Gender and Imperial Citizenship
| Catherine Hall | Gender & History | 2002
Shows how imperial citizenship was defined through gendered, racialized, and class-based assumptions about authority, dependency, civilization, and belonging.
The Imperial Social Formation
| Catherine Hall | History Workshop Journal | 2002
Argues that metropolitan Britain and its colonies formed an interconnected social order rather than separate domestic and imperial worlds.
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
| David Cannadine | Oxford University Press | 2001
Emphasizes the role of hierarchy, monarchy, status, ceremony, and aristocratic values in organizing British perceptions of imperial peoples and institutions.
The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain
| Andrew S. Thompson | Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History | 1999
Surveys debates over how empire influenced British politics, race relations, economic development, popular culture, and concepts of citizenship.
Empire Loyalism and Minority Nationalism in Great Britain and Imperial Russia, 1707–1914
| Stephen Velychenko | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 1997
Compares Scotland and Ukraine to explain why some minority elites embraced imperial institutions while others developed separatist national movements.
The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the British State
| John MacKenzie | History Workshop Journal | 1997
Examines connections between imperial governance overseas and political, cultural, and regional hierarchies inside the United Kingdom.
The Ideology and Factions of the Conservative Century
| Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball | Oxford Academic | 1994
Identifies imperialism, constitutionalism, religion, property, hierarchy, patriotism, and skepticism about progress as recurring themes in modern British conservatism.
Britishness and the Otherness of Empire
| Linda Colley | Journal of British Studies | 1992
Explores how Protestantism, warfare, monarchy, and contrast with foreign and colonized peoples contributed to the construction of British identity.
The Popular Culture of Empire in Britain
| John M. MacKenzie | Manchester University Press | 1992
Examines imperial themes in entertainment, juvenile literature, advertising, exhibitions, music, and consumer culture.
Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960
| John M. MacKenzie | Manchester University Press | 1984
Documents how schools, exhibitions, advertising, youth organizations, ceremonies, and mass media promoted popular identification with the British Empire.
Imperial Federation: A Study of British Imperial Thought
| Michael Burgess | International Organization | 1975
Examines proposals to transform the British Empire into a politically integrated federation capable of preserving imperial unity and great-power status.
Isaac Butt and the Home Rule Movement: A Study in Conservative Nationalism
| Lawrence J. McCaffrey | Review of Politics | 1960
Examines an Irish conservative nationalist who advocated domestic self-government while supporting monarchy, empire, property rights, and a strong imperial foreign policy.
The Imperialism of Free Trade
| John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson | Economic History Review | 1953
Argues that Britain often expanded imperial influence through informal economic and political pressure rather than direct territorial annexation.
Imperial Memory and Contemporary National Identity
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
| Caroline Elkins | Knopf | 2022
Argues that coercion and emergency law were central to British colonial rule despite national myths emphasizing liberty and gradual reform.
Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent
| Priyamvada Gopal | Verso | 2019
Shows how colonized intellectuals and activists influenced British critics of empire and challenged conservative narratives of benevolent imperial rule.
Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
| John Darwin | Bloomsbury Press | 2012
Explains how Britain’s empire developed unevenly and continues to influence borders, identities, institutions, and global inequalities.
The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970
| John Darwin | Cambridge University Press | 2009
Presents the British Empire as a flexible global system supported by settler societies, trade, finance, naval power, migration, and local collaborators.
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire
| Peter Clarke | Bloomsbury Press | 2008
Narrates Britain’s rapid transition from global empire to post-imperial state and the political tensions surrounding national decline.
One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture
| Richard Price | Journal of British Studies | 2006
Reviews debates over whether empire deeply shaped British national identity or remained peripheral to the lives of much of the population.
The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–2004
| Bernard Porter | Routledge | 2004
Surveys the political, economic, cultural, and military history of British imperialism and its contested place in national memory.
The Liquidation of the British Empire
| Roy Douglas | Palgrave Macmillan | 2002
Examines the political decisions, wars, nationalist pressures, and economic constraints that dismantled Britain’s formal empire.
The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire
| John Darwin | Cambridge University Press | 1988
Traces Britain’s efforts to preserve imperial power through military commitments, economic networks, Commonwealth ties, and changing national strategy.
Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy Between the Wars
| John Darwin | Historical Journal | 1980
Explains how British leaders sought to preserve imperial unity despite economic weakness, dominion nationalism, anticolonial movements, and geopolitical competition.
Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and National Conservatism
Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks
| Jenny White | Princeton University Press | 2013
Explores a form of Turkish identity combining Islam, nationalism, economic modernity, social conservatism, and attachment to Ottoman history.
The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity
| Taner Akçam | Princeton University Press | 2012
Examines how demographic engineering and Turkish-Muslim nationalism contributed to the destruction of Ottoman Armenian communities.
The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950
| Uğur Ümit Üngör | Oxford University Press | 2011
Shows how violence, forced migration, settlement policy, and ethnic homogenization transformed an imperial borderland into a Turkish nation-state.
The Ottoman Origins of Kemalist Nationalism
| M. Şükrü Hanioğlu | Routledge | 2011
Traces Turkish nationalism to late Ottoman debates over modernization, religion, social unity, military power, and imperial decline.
Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity
| Carter V. Findley | Yale University Press | 2010
Traces conflicts among Ottoman inheritance, secular nationalism, Islamic conservatism, Westernization, and modern Turkish identity.
The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922
| Donald Quataert | Cambridge University Press | 2005
Surveys Ottoman governance and the emergence of ethnic nationalism, religious reform, economic dependency, and modern state centralization.
The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It
| Suraiya Faroqhi | I.B. Tauris | 2004
Explores how Ottoman institutions and identities developed through trade, diplomacy, migration, warfare, and interaction with neighboring empires.
Islamic Political Identity in Turkey
| M. Hakan Yavuz | Oxford University Press | 2003
Examines how religious networks, nationalism, economic change, and Ottoman memory shaped Turkey’s modern conservative political movement.
The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire
| Selim Deringil | I.B. Tauris | 1998
Shows how Sultan Abdülhamid II used Islam, ceremony, education, welfare, and imperial symbolism to strengthen loyalty to the Ottoman state.
The Emergence of Modern Turkey
| Bernard Lewis | Oxford University Press | 1961
Provides a classic account of Ottoman decline, modernization, secular reform, and the development of Turkish national consciousness.
Race, Citizenship, and Settler National Identity
Settler Colonialism as a Structure
| Lorenzo Veracini | Settler Colonial Studies | 2015
Explains how settler societies construct national identities that normalize territorial possession while obscuring the continuing presence and sovereignty of Indigenous nations.
The Settler Complex: An Introduction
| Patrick Wolfe | Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies | 2014
Discusses how settler political identities are sustained through racial classification, land possession, immigration policy, and narratives of national innocence.
Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native
| Patrick Wolfe | Journal of Genocide Research | 2006
Argues that settler colonialism is an enduring structure organized around the acquisition of Indigenous land and the elimination or absorption of Indigenous peoples.
Ethnicity Without Groups
| Rogers Brubaker | Harvard University Press | 2004
Warns against treating ethnic nations as fixed entities and instead studies nationalism as a political process of classification, mobilization, and institutional practice.
The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State
| David Harvey | Socialist Register | 2004
Connects imperial expansion to capitalist accumulation, territorial strategy, nationalism, and the restructuring of states in the global political economy.
The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Cleavages
| Daniel N. Posner | World Politics | 2003
Examines how colonial administrative boundaries and institutions influenced which cultural differences became politically important after independence.
The History Wars
| Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark | Melbourne University Press | 2003
Examines conservative efforts to defend celebratory accounts of Australian settlement, empire, warfare, and national progress against revisionist history.
The New Imperialism
| David Harvey | Oxford University Press | 2003
Analyzes the interaction between capitalist power and territorial state power in contemporary imperialism, especially under American global leadership.
White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society
| Ghassan Hage | Routledge | 2000
Analyzes how both openly racist and apparently tolerant Australians imagine themselves as managers of a national territory inherited from settler colonialism.
Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology
| Patrick Wolfe | Current Anthropology | 1999
Examines how knowledge about Indigenous peoples was shaped by settler institutions and the political requirements of colonial occupation.
Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World
| Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler | University of California Press | 1997
Examines contradictions between universal claims of European civilization and the racial, political, and economic inequalities required by colonial rule.
Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge
| Bernard S. Cohn | Princeton University Press | 1996
Shows how censuses, maps, surveys, law, ethnography, and classification enabled colonial rule and transformed identities in British India.
Race and the Education of Desire
| Ann Laura Stoler | Duke University Press | 1995
Shows how European racial and sexual identities were formed through colonial governance, bourgeois morality, and anxieties about maintaining imperial boundaries.
Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
| Rogers Brubaker | Harvard University Press | 1992
Contrasts territorial and ethnocultural traditions of citizenship while tracing their roots in state formation, empire, migration, and national consolidation.
Census, Map, Museum
| Benedict Anderson | Verso | 1991
Explains how colonial censuses, maps, and museums classified populations and territories in ways later adopted by postcolonial national movements.
Nationalism and the Colonial World
| Partha Chatterjee | University of Minnesota Press | 1986
Critiques theories that treat anticolonial nationalism as merely derivative and examines how colonial subjects created distinctive cultural and political identities.
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
| Benedict Anderson | Verso | 1983
Explains nations as imagined political communities produced through print capitalism, administration, language, historical memory, and the decline of dynastic empires.
The Invention of Tradition
| Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger | Cambridge University Press | 1983
Shows how states and empires created ceremonies, symbols, customs, and historical narratives that appeared ancient but served modern political purposes.
The Cult of Forgetfulness in Australian Historical Writing
| W. E. H. Stanner | Australian Humanities Research Council | 1968
Describes the “great Australian silence” through which dispossession and Indigenous history were excluded from dominant narratives of national development.
Russia and Conservative Eurasian Empire
Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe–Russia Relationship
| Marlene Laruelle | Lexington Books | 2015
Examines ideological ties between Russian Eurasianists and European national conservatives who oppose liberalism, Atlanticism, and multiculturalism.
Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire
| Marlene Laruelle | Woodrow Wilson Center Press | 2008
Explains how Eurasianist thinkers portray Russia as a distinctive civilization entitled to political leadership across the former imperial space.
Russia Between East and West: Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism
| Dmitry Shlapentokh | Brill | 2007
Surveys arguments that Russia’s national identity derives from a unique mixture of European, Slavic, Orthodox, Turkic, and imperial traditions.
Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy
| Richard S. Wortman | Princeton University Press | 2006
Shows how Russian rulers used ceremony, Orthodoxy, conquest, and historical mythology to present imperial monarchy as the embodiment of national destiny.
Nationalizing the Russian Empire
| Eric Lohr | Harvard University Press | 2003
Shows how wartime policies of citizenship, property confiscation, deportation, and enemy classification strengthened ethnic definitions of Russian nationhood.
The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History
| Andreas Kappeler | Routledge | 2001
Presents the Russian Empire as a multinational political system shaped by Orthodoxy, monarchy, colonization, ethnic hierarchy, and regional negotiation.
Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917
| Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini | Indiana University Press | 1997
Examines Russian expansion into Muslim and Asian territories and the resulting debates over civilization, nationality, religion, and imperial administration.
The Crisis of Russian Populism
| Richard Wortman | Cambridge University Press | 1967
Places Russian populist politics within struggles involving monarchy, peasant identity, nationalism, and the future of the imperial state.
The Russian Right: A Study in Political Thought
| Philip Pomper | University of California Press | 1967
Explores conservative and nationalist defenses of autocracy, Orthodoxy, social hierarchy, and imperial unity in late imperial Russia.
The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians
| Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu | G. P. Putnam’s Sons | 1893
Offers a contemporary study of Russian autocracy, nationality policy, religion, territorial expansion, and the difficulties of governing a diverse empire.
Russia, Eurasia, and Post-Imperial Nationalism
Russia’s Changing Identity: In Search of a Role in the Twenty-First Century
| Dmitri Trenin | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2019
Explores Russian exceptionalism, Orthodox identity, sovereignty, imperial memory, security concerns, and the search for a post-Soviet geopolitical role.
Putin’s Regime and the Ideological Market
| Marlene Laruelle | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2017
Shows how the Kremlin alternately mobilizes and restrains nationalist groups while maintaining a flexible mixture of conservatism, imperial symbolism, and personal rule.
The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism, 2000–2015
| Pål Kolstø and Helge Blakkisrud | Edinburgh University Press | 2016
Examines how ethnic Russian nationalism, state patriotism, imperial ambitions, and authoritarian governance interacted during Vladimir Putin’s rule.
The “Russian World”: Russia’s Soft Power and Geopolitical Imagination
| Marlene Laruelle | Center for Strategic and International Studies | 2015
Explains how language, Orthodox Christianity, history, and cultural kinship are used to imagine a Russian civilizational space extending beyond state borders.
Imperial Nationalism in Russia
| Emil Pain | Nationalities Papers | 2014
Analyzes the fusion of ethnic nationalism with nostalgia for empire and the political difficulty of defining Russia as either a nation-state or multinational empire.
Nationalism and the Russian Political Spectrum
| Marlene Laruelle | Russian Review | 2010
Maps nationalist ideas across official, conservative, liberal, communist, and far-right political movements in post-Soviet Russia.
Empire, Nationalities, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
| Mark R. Beissinger | Comparative Politics | 1996
Explains how national mobilization, institutionalized territorial identities, political crisis, and declining state authority contributed to Soviet disintegration.
The Soviet Union as an Imperial Formation
| Ronald Grigor Suny | Slavic Review | 1995
Assesses similarities and differences between Soviet rule and earlier empires, emphasizing territorial hierarchy, nationality policy, modernization, and political coercion.
The USSR as a Communal Apartment
| Yuri Slezkine | Slavic Review | 1994
Describes the Soviet Union as a state that simultaneously promoted national cultures and subordinated them within a centralized imperial political structure.
The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
| Ronald Grigor Suny | Stanford University Press | 1993
Traces how imperial institutions and national territorial structures fostered the movements that eventually broke apart the Soviet state.
Settler Conservatism and Imperial Nationalism
A British Subject I Was Born—A British Subject I Will Die
| Phillip Buckner | University of British Columbia Press | 2006
Discusses the persistence of British imperial identity among Canadians even as the country developed independent political institutions.
Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity
| Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis | University of British Columbia Press | 2006
Explores how imperial loyalty and British cultural identity persisted in Canada alongside the development of Canadian nationalism.
Canada and the End of Empire
| Phillip Buckner | University of British Columbia Press | 2005
Examines Canada’s gradual transition from British dominion to autonomous nation and the continuing influence of imperial institutions and symbols.
Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders
| James Belich | Penguin | 2001
Explores New Zealand’s shift from dependent British colony to distinctive nation while retaining many imperial cultural and political inheritances.
The Long White Cloud: The Making of New Zealand
| Claudia Orange | Bridget Williams Books | 2001
Surveys New Zealand nation-building through Māori relations, British settlement, imperial loyalty, warfare, and political development.
The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth
| John Hirst | Oxford University Press | 2000
Explains how emotional attachment to Britain coexisted with Australian nationalism during the movement for federation.
National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History
| Daniel Francis | Arsenal Pulp Press | 1997
Analyzes national myths involving the railway, the North, the frontier, imperial warfare, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia, 1788–1996
| Mark McKenna | Cambridge University Press | 1996
Traces conflicts between Australian republican nationalism and conservative loyalty to the Crown, Britain, and imperial institutions.
The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914
| Carl Berger | University of Toronto Press | 1970
Shows how Canadian imperialists linked loyalty to Britain with national development, military strength, racial identity, and international influence.
The Australian Legend
| Russel Ward | Melbourne University Press | 1958
Examines the development of an Australian national character associated with the bush, egalitarianism, masculinity, and independence from British authority.
Theories and Critiques of Empire, Nation, and Identity
The Habsburg Empire: A New History
| Pieter M. Judson | Harvard University Press | 2016
Challenges nationalist accounts of inevitable imperial collapse and shows how many citizens used Habsburg institutions to negotiate local and national identities.
Nationalism and Imperialism
| John Breuilly | Cambridge University Press | 2013
Examines the historical relationship between nationalist ideology and imperial expansion rather than treating nationalism and empire as simple opposites.
Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World
| Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf | Johns Hopkins University Press | 2005
Reinterprets the American Revolution as both a revolt against empire and an effort to establish a new continental nation capable of imperial expansion.
Postcolonial Melancholia
| Paul Gilroy | Columbia University Press | 2005
Examines how refusal to confront colonial violence contributes to defensive nationalism, racial resentment, xenophobia, and idealized memories of imperial greatness.
The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing
| Michael Mann | Cambridge University Press | 2005
Explains how efforts to make state and nation coincide can generate forced assimilation, population transfer, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?
| Paul Gilroy | Routledge | 2004
Argues that unresolved imperial nostalgia and racial melancholy continue to shape British nationalism, immigration politics, and resistance to multicultural society.
Demon in the Cellar
| Anatol Lieven | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2004
Warns that chauvinistic American nationalism can distort foreign policy and deepen conflict with Europe and the Muslim world.
In the Mirror of Europe: The Perils of American Nationalism
| Anatol Lieven | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2004
Argues that American exceptionalism, militarism, religious nationalism, and denial of imperial power can undermine both democracy and international leadership.
The Sorrows of Empire
| Chalmers Johnson | Metropolitan Books | 2004
Examines the global system of American military bases and warns that militarized empire threatens democratic institutions, fiscal stability, and republican identity.
American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy
| Andrew J. Bacevich | Harvard University Press | 2002
Argues that the United States operates an informal empire supported by military power, economic expansion, political ideology, and national assumptions of exceptionalism.
Think Again: Nation Building
| Karin von Hippel | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2002
Reviews the history of nationalism, state formation, imperial collapse, and international efforts to construct political order in divided societies.
Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain
| Peter van der Veer | Princeton University Press | 2001
Shows how British and Indian national identities developed through interconnected debates over religion, secularism, civilization, reform, and imperial authority.
Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union
| Aviel Roshwald | Cambridge University Press | 2001
Compares multinational empires to explain how centralized authority, ethnic institutions, cultural autonomy, and nationalist movements interacted.
Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon
| Elizabeth Thompson | Columbia University Press | 2000
Examines how French colonial paternalism, religious communities, gender hierarchy, and republican rhetoric shaped citizenship in Syria and Lebanon.
Empire
| Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri | Harvard University Press | 2000
Proposes that modern sovereignty is being reorganized into a decentralized global system of power that differs from traditional territorially bounded empires.
Nationalism and Modernism
| Anthony D. Smith | Routledge | 1998
Surveys competing theories of nationalism and debates whether nations are modern constructions or continuations of older cultural communities.
Culture and Imperialism
| Edward W. Said | Vintage | 1993
Demonstrates how European literature and culture normalized empire while anticolonial writers challenged imperial narratives and reclaimed national histories.
The Nation and Its Fragments
| Partha Chatterjee | Princeton University Press | 1993
Shows how anticolonial nationalists created an inner cultural domain while adapting Western political institutions in the external domain of state power.
Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
| Liah Greenfeld | Harvard University Press | 1992
Compares English, French, Russian, German, and American nationalisms and connects their different forms to class relations, political institutions, and imperial ambitions.
National Identity
| Anthony D. Smith | University of Nevada | 1991
Defines national identity through territory, historical memory, mass culture, legal rights, economic life, myths of ancestry, and shared political institutions.
On Nationalism
| Conor Cruise O’Brien | The New Yorker | 1987
Reflects on nationalism’s power to resist empire while also producing authoritarianism, ethnic exclusion, foreign-policy miscalculation, and international conflict.
The Nation-State and Violence
| Anthony Giddens | University of California Press | 1987
Connects modern nationalism to centralized administration, surveillance, industrial warfare, territorial borders, and the consolidation of state authority.
The Ethnic Origins of Nations
| Anthony D. Smith | Wiley-Blackwell | 1986
Argues that modern national identities draw heavily on older myths, symbols, memories, sacred territories, and ethnic communities.
Nations and Nationalism
| Ernest Gellner | Cornell University Press | 1983
Argues that nationalism arises from the cultural and educational requirements of industrial society rather than from timeless ethnic communities.
Empire as a Way of Life
| William Appleman Williams | Ig Publishing | 1980
Contends that territorial and economic expansion became embedded in American political culture and national identity from the early republic onward.
The Imperial Presidency
| Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. | Houghton Mifflin | 1973
Analyzes the growth of executive power in American foreign policy and the tension between republican constitutionalism and imperial presidential authority.
The Wretched of the Earth
| Frantz Fanon | Grove Press | 1961
Examines colonial violence, national liberation, cultural identity, the psychology of domination, and the dangers of postcolonial nationalist elites.
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
| William Appleman Williams | W. W. Norton | 1959
Interprets American foreign policy as an expansionist search for overseas markets supported by moral idealism and exceptionalist national narratives.
The Origins of Totalitarianism: Imperialism
| Hannah Arendt | Harcourt | 1951
Connects overseas imperialism, racial ideology, statelessness, bureaucratic rule, and continental expansion to the emergence of twentieth-century totalitarian movements.
Discourse on Colonialism
| Aimé Césaire | Monthly Review Press | 1950
Condemns colonialism as a system that brutalizes both colonized peoples and imperial societies while exposing the racial foundations of European civilization.
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
| Vladimir Lenin | Progress Publishers | 1917
Presents imperialism as a stage of monopoly capitalism characterized by financial concentration, export of capital, colonial partition, and rivalry among great powers.
The Accumulation of Capital
| Rosa Luxemburg | Routledge | 1913
Argues that capitalist economies depend on expansion into noncapitalist societies, making colonialism and imperial competition central to capitalist development.
Imperialism: A Study
| J. A. Hobson | James Pott and Company | 1902
Attributes modern imperialism to economic inequality, underconsumption, financial interests, nationalism, militarism, and manipulation of popular patriotism.
Turkey, China, India, and Other Imperial Successor States
EU–Georgia Relations: A Local Show of the Global Theater
| Thomas de Waal | Carnegie Europe | 2023
Examines Georgia’s conservative nationalism, geopolitical balancing, Orthodox identity, anti-Western rhetoric, and uncertain relationship with European integration.
Imaginary Muslims: How Poland’s Populists Frame Islam
| Katarzyna Górak-Sosnowska | Brookings Institution | 2019
Shows how conservative politicians use an imagined Muslim threat to define Polish identity as Christian, European, culturally homogeneous, and historically besieged.
Kazakhstan: Tested by Transition—Identity Politics
| Dossym Satpayev | Chatham House | 2019
Explores tensions among civic nationhood, ethnic Kazakh identity, Russian cultural influence, Soviet legacies, religious revival, and authoritarian state-building.
The BJP in Power: Indian Democracy and Religious Nationalism
| Milan Vaishnav | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2019
Examines how Hindu nationalism is reshaping Indian secularism, citizenship, democratic institutions, social relations, economics, and foreign policy.
Turkey’s “New Nationalism” Amid Shifting Politics
| Max Hoffman | Center for American Progress | 2018
Uses polling and political analysis to explain the rise of defensive, security-oriented nationalism within Turkey’s conservative political order.
Contentious Borders in the Middle East and North Africa
| Raffaella A. Del Sarto | International Affairs | 2017
Examines how colonial borders, pan-Arabism, territorial nationalism, regime legitimacy, and regional intervention shape political conflict in the Middle East.
States, Boundaries and Sovereignty in the Middle East
| I. William Zartman | International Affairs | 2017
Discusses the persistence of colonial state boundaries despite challenges from tribal identity, pan-Arabism, political Islam, separatism, and state collapse.
Ottomania
| Elif Batuman | The New Yorker | 2014
Examines the popular revival of Ottoman history and its role in debates between secularists, Islamists, cultural conservatives, and supporters of Erdoğan.
The Politics of Cultural Conservatism in Republican China
| Edmund S. K. Fung | Modern Asian Studies | 2009
Shows how modern Chinese cultural conservatism developed as a nationalist response to imperial decline, Western influence, revolution, and rapid modernization.
National Humiliation, History Education, and the Politics of Historical Memory
| Zheng Wang | International Studies Quarterly | 2008
Explains how education about China’s “century of humiliation” helps construct national identity and reinforce the legitimacy of the contemporary state.
China’s New Nationalism
| Peter Hays Gries | University of California Press | 2004
Examines how memories of imperial humiliation, war, revolution, and foreign intervention influence popular Chinese identity and foreign-policy attitudes.
The Political Dynamics of Chinese Nationalism
| Suisheng Zhao and Minxin Pei | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 2004
Discusses how Chinese elites have used nationalism to manage historical humiliation, territorial claims, regime legitimacy, modernization, and relations with foreign powers.
Neo-Ottomanism: The Emergence and Utility of a New Narrative on Politics
| M. Hakan Yavuz | Turkish Studies | 1998
Explores how Ottoman memory became a framework for conservative identity, regional influence, religious pluralism, and Turkish foreign policy.
Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics
| Christophe Jaffrelot | Princeton University Press | 1996
Traces the development of Hindu nationalist organizations and their attempts to redefine India as a culturally unified Hindu nation.
Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?
| Vinayak Damodar Savarkar | Veer Savarkar Prakashan | 1923
Defines Indian nationhood through common territory, ancestry, culture, and sacred geography, providing a foundational statement of Hindu nationalist ideology.
