In 2007 the editors of Ab Imperio suggested to the authors and readers of the journal an exploration of the functioning of knowledge in the culturally and politically heterogeneous space of empire. This focus emerged as a logical outcome of the annual themes centered on investigating the very possibility of an analytical language to describe an “imperial situation,” and empire as a structure and a system of relations outside of the normative models of “imperiology” or “national state.” These annual foci also explored the potential of anthropological approaches in order to overcome the limitations of normative models. As articles published in Ab Imperio tended to demonstrate, different forms of groupness were and still can be described before and after the arrival of nation-centered narratives. Any study of social solidarity and political loyalty, thus, should take into account the gap between the ideal types of “empire” and “nation,” and the plurality of particular and practical social and political identifications of historical actors. This, however, raises the question of how this knowledge is utilized by the professional community of scholars in the social sciences.
Several key problems elicited in the first issue of AI in 2007 are discussed in the methodological section in the dialog between the Polish historian Andrzej Nowak, his American colleague Roman Szporluk, and the Ukrainian historian Andriy Portnov who joins the discussion post-factum. These researchers discuss a scholarly language that would allow writing Polish history from the point of view of multiform subjectivity and the heterogeneous context of the historical process. The authors explore why, despite numerous scholarly works by historians from different countries, Polish history remains largely unknown and misunderstood; they explain the ideological nature of those categories that permit describing Poland as an empire, as an ideal national state, or as a forerunner of supranational modernity, or even a post-national ideal of united Europe.
Brief citations from the responses of the Harvard historian Roman Szporluk show the acute problem of the contemporary historian’s dependence on the imperial or national logic of scholarly analysis, as well as demonstrate how difficult it might be to overcome these logics:

“…in the world of nationalism people cannot imagine a pre-national world. They become caught within either imperial or anti-imperial logic…. Our terminology is so saturated with national ideas that we tend to nationalize social, political and cultural phenomena of pre-national epochs even when there is no much of historical sense in it.
…One cannot be just a human being in general, humans are always defined by certain characteristics, and these characteristics will doubtless keep their national traits for a long time.”

Together with the authors of the methodological section, the editors of AI pose the question of the possibility of “extra-national” research optics. Moreover, together with Andrei Portnov, who raises this problem in his commentary, we try to understand why it is so difficult to consistently translate our abstract knowledge about the specifics of pre-national and extra-national phenomena in our concrete research projects, and why our research categories seem to inevitably ontologize the “nation.” The discussion of the nature of our “knowledge” of Rzecz Pospolita and of the further history of territories and groups this polity was composed of lead the authors of the methodological section to the problem of epistemological limitations of the self-evident applicability of the term “empire” to any composite society. The participants in this discussion remind us of those limitations that any identification with empire impose, be it in a real political context or an imagined object of research. “Imperial punishment” is both the complexity of being under the power of empire and the tragedy of existence in the quality of empire. In the latter case, it is important to remember that practically any historical experience can be thought of as “imperial,” that is, one in which a system of unequal relationship is imposed upon a subject group (e.g., an ethno-confessional minority or a socio-culturally defined group of population). In this sense, “imperial punishment” is deeply ingrained in the modern epistemological situation.
As Alain Blum’s article demonstrates, “imperial punishment” also reveals itself in the permanent re-articulation of the value-laden oppositions between “empire and nation,” and “incomplete imperial citizenship” versus “complete republican” – oppositions that appear as important political factors exerting influence upon today’s scholarly discussions. The collision of the modern category of “ethnicity” in France’s political language is perceived by scholars as a continuation of this old historical debate. Experts who defend one or another position with regard to the inclusion of “ethnicity” into official French statistics possess “knowledge” that is not just a summary of current sociological observations, but is also an outcome of a long political tradition of the republican stand against empire.
The historical section is fully dedicated to the thematic forum “Anthropological Knowledge and Politics of Difference in Empire and Nation.” It was exactly physical anthropology as the most modern “science of human diversity” that opposed its “objective,” “precise,” and “universal” analytical language to “subjective” approaches of history and philology, the old branches of humanities dedicated to humans and their culture. Articles in this forum focus on the attempts by the anthropologists of the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century to describe the diversity of populations of the three European empires – the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian – with the help of the new analytical tools of liberal physical anthropology. Concluding this forum, the Austrian anthropologist Andre Gingrich leans towards discerning in the liberal anthropological paradigm an original language of enlightened imperialism deeply interested in maintaining political stability and accord within the empire’s borders. This language, as “modern” as the language of nationalism, pretended to be more universal, and insisted on the empirical and verifiable nature of its own categories. It defended the unity of humankind’s origin (monogenism was a mandatory principle of the liberal anthropological paradigm), and allowed the emergence of a pluralistic conception of racial and cultural coexistence within common state borders. Although construed as a universal language of imperial self-modernization, liberal physical anthropology nevertheless adapted itself to the particular cultural and political contexts, and to the interests of those groups who requested its service. If we accept the liberal anthropological discourse of late imperial Germany reconstructed by Andrew Evans as a norm, then deviations from this “norm” – demonstrated here by Marius Turda in Hungary and Romania, Austro-Hungary by Christian Marchetti, and Russia by Marina Mogilner – are highly informative in terms of limits of adaptation and ideological appropriation of scientific categories that fixate human diversity. They also demonstrate the limits of the possibility of transferring these categories from one context to another.
This problem of transferring knowledge and experience is at the center of attention of another author, Alla Zeide, who introduces this issue’s archival publication. Reconstructing the scholarly biography of the de facto founder of contemporary American Slavic Studies, Mikhail Karpovich, on the basis of previously unpublished sources, Zeide explores Karpovich’s conception of “negative continuity” between the Russian empire and the Soviet Union in an attempt to find an extra-ideological language of scholarly representation of the tragic personal experiences of Russian йmigrйs who witnessed the collapse of the empire and of the very “constitutional experiment” of the early twentieth century, with which Karpovich and his generation had associated their hopes for a western-style, liberal future for Russia. In the introductory article Zeide analyzes the influence of two contexts – the academic (inheritance of the Russian historiographic tradition and activity in the American academy) and non-academic (йmigrй intellectual debates and politics, and individual history and memory) – upon the work of Karpovich and the school of history that he was shaping.
Recognition of the heterogeneity and plurality of the sources of our “knowledge” of social reality today and in the past is characteristic of all materials in this issue. The section “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” features a collection of articles that focus on one of the most fundamental factors of that heterogeneity, which only in the past decades became the object of full-fledged scholarly analysis. Gender as an attribute of social personality is gradually being recognized in historiography as one of the basic elements of “national,” “imperial,” or any other narrative of groupness. Feminist scholars have convincingly demonstrated how gender determines the analytical languages of the social sciences and humanities. Yet, the questions about the extent to which nationalizing analytical canons are “gender sensitive,” and about treating representations of gender as an aspect of the general problem of overcoming the limitations of nationalizing narratives (which teleologically straighten historical heterogeneity) remain on scholarly agendas. The editors of AI are very grateful to the guest-editor of this issue, the sociologist Elena Gapova, for her willingness to discuss this problem. Elena Gapova gathered a wonderful assembly of very different authors, who work in different national and academic contexts. The American philosopher Mary Howkesworth explores the history of constructing one of the key elements of the modern nation state, “the public sphere,” as a male space; and the Armenian anthropologist Nona Shakhnazarian reconstructs living practices of gender reproduction of the nation analyzing the narratives of the conflict in Karabakh. Tatiana Zhurzhenko’s view of the “colored revolutions” as the collision of post-Soviet versions of femininity and masculinity departs from the straight-forward interpretations of these phenomena as national-democratic uprisings against anti-national regimes imposed from the outside. Two other participants in the forum, Alicja Kusiak-Brownstein and Olga Zubkovskaia, offer critiques of simplistic, nationalizing canons, including the appropriation and reapplication of language created in opposition to a common teleology, namely, the language of post-colonial criticism.
This issue concludes with articles that return the reader to the problems raised in the methodological section. Stephan Velychenko, whose article is a historiographic review essay on two recent books by the Canadian historian Serhii Plokhy, focuses on the problem of the deconstruction of the imperial “grand-narrative” and on the “de-nationalization” of the vision of history. Ilya Gerasimov analyzes recent historical works by a well-known economist and politician, Egor Gaidar, in order to understand how the persistent “anti-imperialism” of these books, the unexpected interest of Gaidar to history, and Gaider’s political and economic views are interrelated.
As the latter text suggests, “imperial punishment” may have another dimension yet: the negligence with respect to professional conventions of the historical discipline, namely the desire to “overcome” the burden of imperial economic diversity and complexity of social and political regimes, pushes some researchers to declare these complexities “wrong,” and therefore unessential (or even “non-existing”). Such a position on “producers of knowledge” of the past leads to a deep social and political crisis today. “The legacy of empire” is heavy, but the consequences of abrupt attempts to efface it can be equally tragic, both in theory and in practice.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov