After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (review)

Nations have forged empires. But what of the boomerang effect? To what extent have those far flung empires, previously thought to be subsidiary and separate, actually shaped the metropolitan nation that incorporated them? Very often the dominant member in any relationship is loath to admit the reciprocal nature of the relationship, for such an admission may seem to chip away at the treasured dominance. And for a long time, colonial apologists who called themselves Historians frequently cited (often as justification) the metropole’s influence on empire while refusing to acknowledge the inverse; distant colonies were conquered, but not vanquished, and they had a profound effect on the dominant nations that forcibly drew them into the relationship.

In “On the Inadequacy and Indispensability of the Nation,” the introduction to After the Imperial Turn, editor Antoinette Burton considers these issues and the recent trend in the literature to rectify the previous oversight. But what does it all mean? Are fading imperial sunsets like Great Britain “in danger of being no longer recognizable as a nation because of the legacies of empire?” (7). Or will the very process of identifying and analyzing the inherent instability of the national model in history “end up letting the nation in through the back door?” (8). The answers will not come easily. While Burton acknowledges that the paradigm of nation is “indispensable,” she rightly points out that “it is also woefully inadequate to the task of representation for which it is apparently historically determined.” (8).

What follows her introduction is a series of scholarly commentaries on these and related issues. The text is delineated into three categories. The first, entitled “Nations, Empires, Disciplines: Thinking Beyond Boundaries,” offers six chapters that approach the larger paradigmatic issues of the meaning of nation. Next is “Fortress and Frontiers: Beyond and Within.” This second grouping of a half-dozen articles introduces a cross-national perspective. France, Germany, Spain, and the United States are subject, as are Asian American Studies specifically, as well as the national artifice known as the passport. “Reorienting the Nation: Logics of Empire, Colony and Globe” is the final section and reflects the editor’s expertise in British issues, as these eight chapters are dedicated largely to that area.

It is the nature of an edited compilation to be somewhat uneven. The quality of writing and research must vary from chapter to chapter, at least minimally, when more than twenty authors are involved. With that in mind, coupled with the fact that After the Imperial Turn is a generally strong compilation of slim essays in a thick volume, this review will now focus on some of its highlights.

Stuart Ward offers a thoughtful commentary on the trend of replacing the national model and British imperial history with an emphasis on globilization in “Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History?” While astutely observing that each model spoke/speaks to the concerns of its day, Ward nonetheless points out that the roots of current globilization thought in the work of historians dates back at least a half-century if not longer.

Lora Wildenthal poses a penetrating discussion of the relationship between skin color and national identity in post-colonial, post-Nazi Germany. Germany’s imperial stage (Kaiserreich) was quite brief compared to Great Britain, the Netherlands and other European rivals, while its preoccupation with skin color was quite extreme during the Nazi era. While Germany was not devoid of imperialism, nor clearly did it have an monopoly on racism, its history with regards to these (and related) matters does not line up as neatly as many of its European counterparts do with each other. Thus, while Germany shares, in its own way, important historical processes with other European nations right up to the present day, Germans of color find themselves dealing with similar yet peculiarly different challenges compared to other Europeans of color. Among those challenges, as Wildenthal observes, (one all too familiar for people of color in all European nations), is that national identity in...