A history of three transnational political projects designed to overcome the inequities of imperialism After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally, and economically? In Post-Imperial Possibilities , historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental projects aimed at bringing together peoples of different regions to mitigate imperial legacies of inequality.
Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia—in theory if not in practice—offered alternative routes out of empire. The theory of Eurasianism was developed after the collapse of imperial Russia by exiled intellectuals alienated by both Western imperialism and communism. The Afroasian movement wanted to replace the vertical relationship of colonizer and colonized with a horizontal relationship among former colonial territories that could challenge both the communist and capitalist worlds.
Both Eurafrica and Afroasia floundered, victims of old and new vested interests. Jane Burbank is professor emerita of history and Russian and Slavic studies at New York University.
She is the author of Intelligentsia and Revolution and Russian Peasants Go to Court. Frederick Cooper is professor emeritus of history at New York University. He is the author of Citizenship between Empire and Nation , Africa since , and Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference. Burbank and Cooper are coauthors of Empires in World History Princeton. Yet these ambitious schemes foundered on the existing inequities of power and wealth between the former colonizers and the emancipated colonies and the ambitions of elites within existing political units.
This is an important resource for specialists and nonspecialists alike that will shape syllabi and future research agendas. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper expose possibilities of social and political imagination beyond the national and uncover various scales and modes of thinking about diversity and affinity from places and situations we rarely consider. Placing Eurasianism in this comparative context in particular has a revelatory effect.
