SUMMARY:

In his response to Alexander Semyonov’s “How Five Empires Shaped the World and How This Process Shaped Those Empires,” Krishan Kumar reveals the original design of his book Imperial Visions. Kumar also ponders the research problems he has been pursuing since the book was completed, which he only touched on in the book. He does not believe that in historiography it has been widely accepted that empires were not anachronisms in the modern period and thus he contends that the debate on the balance between empire and nationalism in the history of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century should continue. Kumar suggests ways of broadening the scope of analysis of empire to include non-European imperial formations and their imperial conceptions and argues against the rigid definition of empire from the vantage point of political theory or the western intellectual tradition. He acknowledges that the main impetus for the book was the identity of the people who lost their empires (the Russians, the English). In other words, the logic of the book looked retrospectively from the problem of the collapse of empire and uncertain identity of the “ruling people.” Kumar accepts that the leap between the imperial vision and imperial center and the people should not be made easily and suggests ways of deconstructing and contextualizing the notion of “imperial people.”