The fall of empires and the rise of nation-states was a defining political transition in the making of the modern world. Here, ten prominent specialists discuss the empire-to-nation transition in comparative perspective. Chapters on Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and China illustrate both the common features and the diversity of the transition. While previous studies have focused on the rise and fall of empires or on nationalism and the process of nation-building, this intriguing volume concentrates on the empire-to-nation transition itself.

Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Part I: The Spanish Empire in the Americas Chapter 3 The Limits of Atlantic-World Nationalism in a Revolutionary Age: Imagined Communities and Lived Communities in Mexico, 1810-1821 Chapter 4 The Great Transformation of Law and Legal Culture: "The Public" and "the Private" in the Transition from Empire to Nation in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, 1750-1850 Chapter 5 Selfhood and Nationhood in Latin America: From Colonial Subject to Democratic Citizen Part 6 Part II: The Middle East and Eastern Europe Chapter 7 Empires as Prisons of Nations versus Empires as Political Opportunity Structures: An Exploration of the Role of Nationalism in Imperial Dissolutions in Europe Chapter 8 Changing Modalities of Empire: A Comparative Study of the Ottoman and Habsburg Decline Chapter 9 Dreams of Empire, Dreams of Nations Part 10 Part III: The Chinese Empire Chapter 11 How the Qing Became China Chapter 12 Going Imperial: Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism and Nationalisms in China and Inner Asia Part 13 Part IV: The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union Chapter 14 The Long Road from Empire: Legacies of Nation-Building in the Soviet Successor States Chapter 15 Setting the Political Agenda:Cultural Discourse in the Estonian Transition Part 16 Afterword: The Return of Empire?