In 2011 two ambitious Trent-based cultural institutes sponsored a four-day conference titled “Minorities Inside Empires: Peoples between National Identities and Imperial Ideology 1870–1914.” This Italian-language book under review represents the proceedings of this conference. Bringing together seventeen scholars working in Italy, Austria, Great Britain, Germany, and Slovenia, the conference's stated goal was to “look at ‘empires’ between the second half of the nineteenth century and World War I, as they sought to put together a historical form uniting different institutional entities under the imperium of one and the same crown; also the new demands of a Machtstaat (state of power) as it constantly competed and fought with rival powers, and needed forms of legitimation implying the ‘fusion’ of various peoples in a common identity sharing the destiny of Empire.” One knows a conference is trying to do a lot when the mission statement is this complex. Participants spoke on issues related geographically to most of Europe, much of Asia, some of the Middle East, some of North Africa, Canada, South Africa, and Oceania. Chronologically, the time span of 1870 to 1914 is misleading, as participants also presented work on Roman citizenship after the third century CE, and on Napoleonic imperialism at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The bulk of contributions offer grand narratives based mostly on secondary sources, quasi “reporting” on how each empire under discussion functioned structurally and politically in multilingual, multiconfessional, and/or highly regionally diverse imperial communities. With a few notable exceptions, this methodological approach results in some very dry prose, with many dates and states and little feel of people, place, or time.

Evaluating a book and evaluating a conference are two entirely different projects. I am sure that attending this conference proved rewarding as it gave scholars an opportunity to “catch up” on the historiographies outside their field and to compare their own work with those of their co-participants. As one of the editors of the book, Paolo Pombeni, rightly emphasized in his introduction, empire studies “have come back in style” (7). But any kind of broad-based participation in this new turn requires either a research team or a backbreaking amount of linguistic training and reading time. Conferences such as this one serve as much needed bridges between fields, when the former is not on offer and the latter proves too daunting.

But conference proceedings rarely make a cohesive book. Consequently, the best thing that can be said about this volume is that it acts as a container of some interesting articles. Some of the contributions I found most engaging include: Elvira Migliario's historiographical examination of how turn-of-the-century British and German scholars looked to Ancient Rome to reformulate their own imperial models; Michael Broers’ investigation of the peripheral (non-Parisian) shift of Napoleonic imperialism; Brigitte Mazohl's analysis of how Austria and Germany reinterpreted the “Holy Roman Empire” to serve differing imperial goals; Francesco Benvenuti's argument that the “under-governed” (193) Russian Empire did not prioritize assimilating minorities; Marco Dogo's assertion that imperial culture served as a means to protect majority Muslim interests within the Ottoman Empire as much as to incorporate minorities; Rupert Klieber's reminder that the multiconfessional Habsburg Empire was not a lay world, and that religious communities and institutions were just as likely to act as handmaidens of ethnic discontent as they were to serve as bastions for imperial loyalty; and finally Rok Stergar's subtle dispute with characterizing the Habsburg military as a failed experiment in creating an imperial culture, as he argues it promoted (rather successfully) a loyalty to the state not a supranational culture per se. Pombeni's last chapter sets what he thinks the moral of all of these contributions is, stating that, with the introduction of increasingly democratic forms of representative governments, centrifugal cultural forces within empires grew in reach as anchoring imperial cultural practices and loyalties proved harder to realize than national ones (451). Pombeni's argument is founded on a belief that nation-states had an easier time at taming social, religious, ethnic, and regional tensions (468), a perplexing thesis if one looks at the histories of 1870–1914 in France, Italy, Greece, or Spain.

When all is said and done, this volume will serve as a useful historiographical resource for scholars and students in Italy, because many of the contributions were written by non-Italian speakers and capably translated, adding greatly to the treasure chest of arguments and new research not currently available to an Italian readership. For readers outside Italy, however, the book can be approached selectively.