The Imperial Origins of 20th-Century National Identities

FAIN: FB-55568-11

Pamela Crossley
Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH 03755-1808)

The late nineteenth-century histories of the Qing, Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires suggest that nationalism was not an independent, opposing force to the empires themselves but was constructed from imperially-imposed identity criteria, mostly focused on language, religion, homeland and ostensible shared ancestry. Careful studies of these empires between about 1880 and 1920 reveals that the process by which communities, whether in the central territories or on the peripheries, accepted or rejected imperial identity criteria related to the longer histories by which communities had lived in conformity with or in opposition to imperial ascription, and foreshadows twentieth-century dynamics of "nationalism" (in the case of accepting communities) and "ethnicity" (in the case of rejecting communities).