Organizing Empire critically examines how concepts of individualism functioned to support and resist British imperialism in India. Through readings of British colonial and Indian nationalist narratives that emerged in parliamentary debates, popular colonial histories, newsletters, memoirs, biographies, and novels, Purnima Bose investigates the ramifications of reducing collective activism to individual intentions. Paying particular attention to the construction of gender, she shows that ideas of individualism rhetorically and theoretically bind colonials, feminists, nationalists, and neocolonials to one another. She demonstrates how reliance on ideas of the individual—as scapegoat or hero—enabled colonial and neocolonial powers to deny the violence that they perpetrated. At the same time, she shows how analyses of the role of the individual provide a window into the dynamics and limitations of state formations and feminist and nationalist resistance movements. From a historically grounded, feminist perspective, Bose offers four case studies, each of which illuminates a distinct individualizing rhetorical strategy. She looks at the parliamentary debates on the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which several hundred unarmed Indian protesters were killed; Margaret Cousins’s firsthand account of feminist organizing in Ireland and India; Kalpana Dutt’s memoir of the Bengali terrorist movement of the 1930s, which was modeled in part on Irish anticolonial activity; and the popular histories generated by ex-colonial officials and their wives. Bringing to the fore the constraints that colonial domination placed upon agency and activism, Organizing Empire highlights the complexity of the multiple narratives that constitute British colonial history.

Beyond Empires explores the complexity of empire building from the point of view of self-organized networks, rather than from the point of view of the central state. This focus takes readers into a world of cooperative strategies worldwide that emphasises the role played by individuals, rather than institutions, in the overseas expansion and consequent development of European empires. While unveiling the practices and mechanisms of cooperation between individuals, this volume show cases the role played by individuals for the creation, development and maintenance of self-organized networks in the Early Modern period. Applying new conceptual and theoretical inputs, this book values the contributions of different ‘worlds’, bringing to the fore the interactions of Europeans and non-Europeans, Christians and non-Christians, people living within-, on- or just outside the border of empire.

The origins of organizing are conventionally seen as emerging from the historiographical works of Western social scientists in the early 20th century. Here, the authors address a gap in current literature by exploring previously unrecognized or marginalized global origins in both modern and ancient history.

This book combines perspectives from political science, history and geography to provide a comprehensive introduction to `Europe′ or European space as we understand it today. Central to the book is the phenomenon of the sovereign state and the question of alternative ways of organizing Europe politically and economically. The book explores four different ways of organizing space: state, union, region and network. By tracing the origins of the sovereign state in Europe, the book first reviews the resilience and adaptability of the sovereign state historically, and then looks at the implications of the contradictory processes of integration and fragmentation, or globalization and regionalization, present today. A key concept developed throughout the book is that of networks, especially with respect to the European Union, and the relationship between regions, networks and cities, a relationship long traditional to Europe′s political organization. The authors review critically popular notions of a ′Europe of regions′ or ′the end of the sovereign state′ and instead serve to combine their different disciplinary conceptual tools and perspectives to provide new insights into the future organization of European space. Organizing European Space will be essential reading for all students of contemporary Europe seeking a deeper understanding of the modern state and the complexity of changing notions of identity, political organization and territoriality inherent in Europe in the past, present and future.

Patriotic organizations in prewar Britain are often blamed for the public's enthusiastic response to the outbreak of World War One. The wartime experience of these same organizations is insufficiently understood. In Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War, Matthew Hendley examines how the stresses and strains of the Great War radically reshaped popular patriotism and imperialism in Britain after 1918. Using insights from gender history and recent accounts of associational life in early twentieth-century Britain, Hendley compares the wartime and postwar histories of three major patriotic organizations founded between 1901 and 1902 - the National Service League, the League of the Empire, and the Victoria League. He shows how the National Service League, strongly masculinist and supportive of militaristic aims, floundered in wartime. Conversely, the League of the Empire and the Victoria League, with strong female memberships, goals related to education and hospitality, and a language emphasizing metaphors of family, home, and kinship prospered in wartime and beyond into the 1920s. Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War is a richly detailed study of women's roles in Britain during the height of popular imperialism, as well as a major contribution to our understanding of the continuities in Britain before and after the First World War.

Aztec society was divided into twenty clans called calpullis, where religion exerted a predominant influence, which consisted of groups of people connected by kinship, territorial divisions, the invocation of a particular god and continuation of ancient families linked by a kinship bond. biological and religious that derived from the cult of the titular god. Each clan had lands, a temple and a chief or calpullec. They were divided into three classes; Nobles, ordinary people and slaves.

In Nation and Empire as Two Trends of Political Organization in the Iron Age Levant MEI Hualong offers an analysis of national and imperial ideologies--two political principles that influenced the establishment, consolidation and expansion of trans-local/trans-tribal polities in the Iron Age Levant. By examining key terminologies, historical accounts and literary sources, MEI argues that the elites of ancient nations may attempt to reshape their political and cultural identity in imperial terms (vice versa, but to a lesser extent). The conceptual transformation from the one to the other is closely related to the political entity’s consciousness and understanding of limits and boundaries: political and cultural, real and imagined.