showing 3 related works from this author
Conclusion: Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation’
2017
The Conclusion summarily analyses the ‘Royal Nation’ as an autonomous historical category. It draws on arguments presented in different chapters of the book, and brings out commonalities between the viewpoints of the authors of these chapters, to demonstrate as to why the interdependence between monarchies and nation-state formation gathered momentous practical significance as well as conceptual plausibility in different parts of the modern world, from the nineteenth century onwards. The Conclusion emphasizes the intellectual, aesthetic and performative, juridical, social, and political underpinnings of this interdependency; it suggests that this mutual imbrication of the royal and the nati…
The Royal Nation in Global Perspective
2017
Adopting transnational and global history methodologies, this book suggests that the relationship between monarchies and nation-state formation has often been a symbiotic one, and that this can only be adequately explained through a global perspective, going beyond the local histories of particular state systems. While the nation-state has been the most influential concept of political community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, royal dynasties have, however, often provided a centralized administrative-juridical-cultural locus around which a national community has crystallized itself. Monarchic rulerships have played a central role in the emergence of modern nation-states, which fo…
Losing Monarchs: The Legacy of German and English National Historiography
2017
During the nineteenth century, Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Alfred von Arneth, and other German-speaking historians established an alleged ‘scientific’ approach to history, based on the so-called historiographic method. They interpreted history as determined by ‘great’ ideas, such as nation, state, and religion. Similarly, the British Whig interpretation of history—represented, for example, by Henry Hallam and Thomas Macaulay—conceptualized history as a continuously ascending process, in which Great Britain established a civilised modern empire spanning territories on all continents. This chapter shows how monarchs became lost—that is, not considered noteworthy—when their rule …