Review of Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; and London, Oxford University Press, 1960)

Abstract

Abstract Wight wrote, “The core of the book is a discussion, first of nationalism; secondly of the relation between nationalism and democracy; thirdly of self-determination. All the nineteenth-century doctrines on these matters were already undermined by the experience of Eastern Europe; have they any relevance to Asia and Africa? … The only induction Emerson allows himself is that nationalism is a phase of ‘the expanding Western revolution’, an imprecise term comprising the disruption of traditional communities and the appearance of a money economy, industrialism, urbanization, social mobilization, and mass politics. … He concludes by pointing out that, if historical experience is worth anything, the economic development of these nations will make them more unstable internally and more warlike. Nevertheless, ‘the chances that development will move in acceptable directions are far better if the West is actively engaged in the process than if it either grudgingly holds back or lays its emphasis too heavily on military goals’ (p. 417). The field is prodigiously wide and its edges are left conveniently indistinct. He includes Cyprus, the West Indies, and British Guiana, and uses Eastern Europe and Latin America illustratively. … Emerson does not ask whether new nations which (for the first time in history) have been given independence by a peaceable transfer of sovereignty will survive so well as the great majority which have won independence by blood and struggle—what is a nationalism without its Joan of Arc or Armada victory, its Lexington, Calatafimi, or Easter Rebellion?”