What the rulers of empire can train us approximately navigating trendy more and more interconnected world

The empires of the prior have been far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and feature a lot to coach us approximately navigating our personal more and more globalized and interconnected global. in the past, newest scholarship on empires has considering their topic peoples. Visions of Empire appears at their rulers, laying off serious new gentle on who they have been, how they justified their empires, how they seen themselves, and the varieties of rule they followed towards their subjects.

Krishan Kumar presents panoramic and multifaceted pix of 5 significant ecu empires—Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian/Soviet, British, and French—showing how each one, like old Rome, observed itself because the provider of common civilization to the remainder of the area. occasionally those goals have been couched in non secular phrases, as with Islam for the Ottomans or Catholicism for the Habsburgs. Later, the imperial missions took extra secular varieties, as with British political traditions or the area communism of the Soviets.

Visions of Empire bargains new insights into the interactions among rulers and governed, revealing how empire used to be as a lot a shared firm as a conflict of oppositional pursuits. It explores how those empires differed from realms, rather in how the ruling peoples of empires have been pressured to downplay or suppress their very own nationwide or ethnic identities within the pursuits of the long term protection in their rule. This compelling and in-depth publication demonstrates how the rulers of empire, of their quest for a common international order, left in the back of a legacy of multiculturalism and variety that's uniquely correct for us today.