European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957

Dina Gusejnova is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. Born in Moscow, she has taught at Queen Mary University of London, University College London, the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge, where she received her Ph.D.

• Part I. Celebrity of Decline: 1. Famous deaths: subjects of imperial decline; 2. Shared horizons: the sentimental elite in the Great War; Part II. Power of Prestige: 3. Soft power: pan-Europeanism after the Habsburgs; 4. The German princes: an aristocratic fraction in the democratic age; 5. Crusaders of civility: the legal internationalism of the Baltic Barons; Part III. Phantom Empires: 6. Knights of many faces: the dream of chivalry and its dreamers; 7. Apostles of elegy: Bloomsbury's continental connections; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

'European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957 has much to say about post-World War I elite attitudes toward the downfall of continental empires and postwar identity among German-speaking European elites. Rather than retreat into lives of resentment, resignation, or quiet dissolution, these men coped with the trauma of empire's end not only by re-envisioning European 'imperial' units but also by taking steps, whatever their results, to make it happen. … [Gusejnova's] study reveals a fascinating and distinctly eastern European branch of the intellectual genealogy of European unification.' Matthew G. Stanard, H-Empire