Empires and nation-states are generally opposed to each other, as contrasting and antithetical forms. Nationalism is widely held to have been the solvent that dissolved the historic European empires. This paper argues that there are in fact, in practice at least, significant similarities between nation-states and empires. Many nation-states are in effect empires in miniature. Similarly, many empires can be seen as nation-states “writ large.” Moreover, empires were not, as is usually held, superseded by nation-states but continued alongside them. Empires (...) and nation-states may in fact best be thought of as alternative political projects, both of which are available for elites to pursue depending on the circumstances of the moment. Ultimately empires and nation-states do point in different directions, but it is not clear that the future is a future of nation-states. Empires, as large-scale and long-lasting multiethnic and “multicultural” experiments, may have much to teach us in the current historical phase of globalization and increasingly heterogeneous societies. (shrink)

The article focuses on the overlooked volume of Henry Sumner Maine’s corpus, the posthumously published International Law and uses it to respond to the general critical difficulty in establishing Maine’s posture. Maine, of course, makes it difficult with the numerous contrapuntal moves of this book and others. For example, he strongly criticizes the predominant view of international law as an accretionary process of commentary by one theorist following another and yet he places tremendous value on Grotius, “whose works acted on (...) the spirit of belligerency like a charm,” and other early international legal theorists. He sees his contemporary environment as marked by increasing militarization, even of militarization of society during time of peace, while he describes the relative humanity of the present over the distant past.Ultimately, Maine is a realist who focuses on late nineteenth-century manuals of war rather than the idealism of the Anglo-American peace movement, and recognizes the importance of Czar Alexander II over any of nineteenth-century international legal theorists. If J.W. Burrow has identified social evolution as providing Victorians an “intellectual resting-place” between theoretical clarity and social diversity, Maine’s broad social evolution allows him to mediate between the moral amelioration in international life and the practical realities of that life. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on John Stuart Mill has illuminated his arguments about the normative legitimacy of imperial rule. However, it has tended to ignore or downplay his extensive writings on settler colonialism: the attempt to create permanent "civilized" communities, mainly in North America and the South Pacific. Mill defended colonization throughout his life, although his arguments about its character and justification shifted over time. While initially he regarded it as a solution to the "social problem" in Britain, he increasingly came to (...) argue that its legitimacy resided in the universal benefits—civilization, peace, and prosperity—it generated for humanity. In the final years of his life Mill seemed to lose faith in the project. Finally recognizing the prevalence of colonial violence and the difficulty of realizing his grand ambitions, yet refusing to give up on colonization altogether, his colonial romance gave way to a form of melancholia. (shrink)