Recent historiography emphasizes the interactive process between the development of imperial ruling system and nation-building: an approach critical to traditional view on empires oppressing national societies. Based on this historiographical trend, our project understands empire as a space where various groups of populace characterized by religion, class, gender, region, language and culture etc. are negotiating, competing and conflicting each other and with imperial authority. The major contribution of the project is an concrete analysis of the dynamics of this process to make another political and cultural entities, or specifically national societies in the modern period. Especially the comparative study on this subject in Habsburg empire and the Western provinces of the Russian empire is worth mentioning. The project also analyzed construction of collective memories on empires after their destruction and total catastrophe of the 20th century in the European East.
