Memories of Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 497-522
Author(s):  
Phiroze Vasunia

Numerous studies attest to the pride, melancholia, nostalgia, guilt, and shame felt by the French or the British after the loss of their colonies in the twentieth century: such feelings were prompted, in part, by recollections of empires that once existed. National traditions, ceremonies, and archives are frequently built around such memories of the imperial past. But construe the genitive in a subjective rather than an objective sense and you grasp a different implication of the term “memories of empire,” and in this meaning, empire itself is said to have memories. What memories does empire have? Empire has a memory of empire. Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the French and British empires all looked back to older empires and recalled them in distinctive ways. These traces and recollections are worth exploring in order to understand how empires affect the lives of those who lived through them or came after.

Philosophy ◽  
1936 ◽  
Vol 11 (44) ◽  
pp. 387-402
Author(s):  
Ernest Barker

One of the marks of our times is a new eruption of the personal. Systems and institutions of politics are clouded over. The impersonal principles on which these systems and institutions depend are still more deeply obscured. Men turn for their inspiration to the living flow of personality. Some leader who has burst from hidden and elemental depths commands a passion of personal loyalty. Leadership has always been a great factor in the history of human communities. The deification of the ruler was the cement of the Hellenistic monarchies and of the Roman Empire which inherited their tradition. It may seem a strange atavism that we should now be apparently recurring, in the twentieth century, to a similar practice. But there are exigencies of contemporary life which explain the new vogue of leadership, and there is a tide of contemporary thought which leads on to the current doctrine of the emergent leader.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Campbell Orchard

<p>Revitalised by Mussolini in the early twentieth century as a symbol of the ‘New Roman Empire’, Roma has endured a long history of national representation. Traditionally the figure of Roma is on the one side associated by historians with the Roman imperial cult and Augustus, and on the other by Numismatists as the helmeted female figure on the coinage of the Roman Republic. However, these figures are not presently considered one and the same. When describing this figure, Roma is considered a Greek innovation travelling west, which naturally discounts well over two centuries of Roman issued coinage. Roma inaugurated by Hadrian and previously manipulated by Augustus was not simply a Greek import, but a complex Roman idea, which, true to Roman form, incorporated native and foreign elements in shaping an outward looking signifier of Roman identity.</p>


Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr

The Persian historian Idris Bitlisi (d. 1520), composed a massive chronicle of the House of Osman for the Ottoman emperor Bayezid II (d. 1512). Idris was writing his text at the time of the rise of the Safavids in the east and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. By relying on a chronicle written after the conquest of Constantinople attributed to Ruhi, Idris downplayed the Turkestani origins of the Ottomans and projected onto their “Eastern” origin undesirable traits associated with Turkic ancestry. Instead, Idris recast his masters as the true inheritors of Roman Empire and the true followers of Alexander the Great. To accomplish all this, Idris drew on biblical, Koranic, and other myths to create a myth for the state separate from a dynastic origin myth.


Author(s):  
Averil Cameron

The last generation has seen an ‘explosion’ in the study of late antiquity. Whether people call it ‘the later Roman empire’ or ‘late antiquity’, the term now in much more common use in English. Handbooks are rapidly appearing to help their teachers meet this demand and they too express the current understanding of what is to be included. This chapter argues that a particular model for the study of this period has come to have a strong influence on students and scholars alike, and it asks how and why this is so, and what implications there are for the future study of the subject. Andrea Giardina has called this a particularly Anglo-centric phenomenon.


Gnomon ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 83 (8) ◽  
pp. 748-768

M. Weißenberger: Gunther Martin: Divine Talk. Religious Argumentation in Demosthenes Ch. Schulze: Liliane Bodson, L’interprétation des noms grecs et latins d’animaux illustrée par le cas du zoonyme sêps-seps T. Gazzarri: La Clemenza, Apocolocyntosis, Epigrammi, Frammenti di Lucio Anneo Seneca. A cura di Luciano de Biasi, Anna Maria Fer-rero, Ermanno Malaspina e Dionigi Vottero. T. Döring: Emily Greenwood, Afro-Greeks. Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century M. Heil: Emmanuel Lyasse, Le Principat et son fondateur. L’utilisation de la référence à Auguste de Tibère à Trajan K. Ruffing: Dennis P. Kehoe, Law and Rural Economy in the Roman Empire H.-J. Beste: Alexander Sokolicek, Diateichismata. Zu dem Phänomen innerer Befestigungsmauern im griechischen Städtebau L. Mrozewicz: Lyudmil F. Vagalinski, Kryv i zrelišta. Sportni i gladiatorski igri w elinističeska i rimska Trakija. Blood and entertainments. Sports and gladiatorial games in Hellenistic and Roman Thrace D. Nörr: Giuliano Crifò † Personalien


1994 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 21-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Preston

BOTH during his lifetime, and after his death, General Franco was reviled by his enemies on the left and subjected to the most absurd adulation by his admirers on the right. As the victor in a bloody civil war which inflamed passions throughout the world, that is hardly surprising. Leaving aside his personal political success in remaining in power for nearly four decades, his victory in the Spanish Civil War was his greatest and most glorious achievement, something reflected in the judgements of detractors and hagiographers alike. For the left, Franco the general was a slow-witted mediocrity whose battlefield triumphs were owed entirely to the unstinting military assistance of Hitler and Mussolini. For the right, Franco the general was the twentieth-century incarnation of Alexander the Great, of Napoleon and of the great warrior hero of Spanish legend, El Cid.


Author(s):  
Krishan Kumar

Imperialism relates to the theory and practice of the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were European empires before that, many of which had a continuous history from those earlier times well into the twentieth century. These include some of the best known: the Ottoman; Portuguese; Spanish; Austrian; Russian; Dutch; British; and French empires, all of which had their origins in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Running alongside these was the even longer-lasting though sometimes ineffectual Holy Roman Empire, whose important role in keeping the imperial idea alive in the Middle Ages and beyond has unfairly been slighted owing to the popularity of Voltaire's quip that it was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” For some students of empire, empire represents an ever-present possibility, because imperialism is a drive that is inherent in the very nature of human society and politics. The most influential theory of modern imperialism was penned not by a Marxist or even a socialist but by a self-professed English liberal, J. A. Hobson.


Author(s):  
Bonnie G. Smith ◽  
Donald R. Kelley

This article discusses ancient Europa; national states; Renaissance innovations; imperial Europe; twentieth-century global warfare; the downfall of empires; and global migration and communication. Europa is associated with the territories north of the Bosporus starting with the Balkans, set off from Africa and Asia. The subsequent ‘Holy Roman empire’ survived for a millennium as a form of ‘Europe’, especially under the Habsburgs, until it was dissolved by Napoleon in 1806 and succeeded by the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918. Other expansive institutions in the modern period included the overseas empires of individual European nations, the Soviet empire after 1917, and the growing European Union of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.


Author(s):  
Pierre Briant

This article argues that the centrality of Alexander the Great to the study of imperialism and cultural transfer can scarcely be in doubt. Indeed, the subject of Alexander is so heavily studied that people might well demand a justification for any new discussions of the Macedonian conqueror. Historiography proves to be one element in the scholarship that has been relatively neglected, a situation which is exemplified by the lack of any systematic account of Alexander studies from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. A long-term view of the historiography would show that Droysen's picture of Alexander was less original than previously believed, and that it was prefigured in some significant respects by Montesquieu. The discussion also argues that progress in the field is likely to come when historians better account for the Achaemenid and Near Eastern milieux in which Alexander flourished and ruled.


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