Ideas of Empire after the First World War: Redefining Identity and Citizenship in Colonial Empires

Synopsis

The essays in this special issue deal with the transformative power of the First World War on imperial identity. Empires, as Jürgen Osterhammel fittingly defines, are large, hierarchical structures of domination comprising multiple ethnic and religious differences, whose coherence is secured by threats of violence, unified administration, indigenous collaboration, and the universalist programme and symbols of an imperial elite. More specifically, the empires considered here are colonial empires, which, according to Charles Maier, are states which rule dependencies by authoritarian methods while governing their homelands by representative systems. The articles in this issue discuss how colonial empires reshaped their policies towards colonial subjects after the global transformation at the wake of the First World War.