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up to the recent “war on terror” (insidiously perpetuated by the Obama administration), are analyzed from a transnational perspective through a focus on the exchange of ideologies, the practice of nation building, as well as the concepts of state power, democracy, and antidemocracy—so as to expose the roots of empire formation and trace the continuum of empire building in the twentieth and even the twenty-first century. The latter spectrum and coverage illustrate the undeniable fact that there might be an empire à la Hardt and Negri out there, but more plausible is the existence of earthly empires, which seek rise to power again (albeit in diverse forms and with punctual justifications) and are truly perennial. They are clones of former Leviathans.
This collection of fourteen articles falls into four parts, outlining the twentieth-century processes of empire building, even in subterraneous forms, from the end of the First World War to the onset of the twenty-first century. Speaking on 18 May 1924 to a group called the Heretics, Virginia Woolf proposed that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.… All human relations have shifted… those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” (Woolf 1:320–321). The present volume bears evidence to the continuity of such changes.
Post-War Representations of Empire
Traditional empire and nation building provide the context for the scrutiny, in this study’s first part, of national identities and imageries, thereby deconstructing the modernist and post–World War I idea of the “nation,” often gendered as male and portrayed as ethnically homogeneous—as in the work of, among others, W. G. Sebald, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Barry Unsworth, and Peter Rushforth. Metropolitan centers of erstwhile imperial powers bear indelible traces of the histories of imperialism. Britain’s colonial legacy is thus everywhere evident in London, from the British Museum to the Indian restaurants that—according to some—have come to the rescue of the less palatable British cuisine. Urban landscapes