La nación imperial: (1750-1918)

by Josep Maria Fradera

This essay, rigorous and documented, can be read both as the map of the world that is drawn after the great revolutions in Europe and America (1780-1830), and the history of the political and social evolution of four empires with liberal foundations and their way of addressing the rights of non-metropolitan citizens. The parliaments and ministerial offices of London, Paris, Madrid or Washington alternate with an exciting intellectual journey, which also takes the reader to Cape Town, Calcutta, Havana, Algiers or Port-au-Prince. In short, an exceptional book in contemporary historiography, capable of revealing colonialism and the relations between Europeans, European descendants and the native population on four continents; a story that illuminates and explains much of the world we have inherited and in which we now live.
 

1372 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2015

Reviews

[Jorge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best history books I have ever read. Professor Fradera analyses how the British, French, Spanish and North American empires struggled to accommodate and manipulate the demands for political representation and civil rights that their colonial subjects demanded them over the course of 150 years, from the first years of the revolutionary period to the end of the First World War. The reader can find in this two-volume edition a very detailed analysis of how each empire issued and adapted ‘imperial’ or ‘colonial’ constitutions, as Fradera distinguishes them, to their respective territories, tracing as well the emergence and evolution of the so-called ‘special laws’ that will become the cornerstone of imperial rule and colonial control for the French and Spanish empires after the Napoleonic Wars. Issues such as the concepts of race and scientific racism, nation and citizenship, or even the institution of slavery and its long road to its abolition are treated in this book with an extensive analysis offering the reader very detailed case studies for each empire and territory. The book synthesises Fradera’s long efforts of studying both shores of the Atlantic in the long 19th century and culminates his career as one of the most distinguished historians of his age. As a final thesis, the book argues for the emergence of what Fradera calls the ‘imperial nations’, which should be located between the period that goes from the collapse of the last Ancièn Regime states over the 18th century, to the formation of the first nation-states already in the 20th century.