SUMMARY:

Jeremy Adelman, who coined the concept and the model of “imperial revolution,” reflects on Ilya Gerasimov’s rendering of the 1917 Russian Revolution as an imperial revolution. He draws important parallels between the revolutionary events in Russia and the crisis of the overseas Iberian empires a century earlier. Adelman suggests that seeing empire as a type of social imagery sustaining a particular mode of legitimacy, rather than a rigid structure, allows us to transcend the structuralist dichotomy between nation and empire. He also proposes approaching the phenomenon of global revolutions as part of the wider system of the interimperial regime.