Empires, Nations, and Revolutions

This essay examines the ways in which the age of revolutions expanded the repertoire of political ideas and identities available to new and old political subjects. It questions the traditional narrative that replaces a model of old regimes and empires with a new one of imagined unitary nation-states. Instead, it argues that the nature of the political crisis of the Iberian empires gave rise to a reinvention of familiar categories, like monarchy and empire, and sired a wider range of new ones that did not fit the national mold.