Expériences impériales. Les cultures politiques dans la péninsule Ibérique et au Maghreb VIIIe-XVe siècles 3

From the mid-twentieth century, the concept of empire was used by historians as an instrument of analysis of the political formations that were formed in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb in the Middle Ages. In a nationalist perspective, the «imperial idea» was then conceived as a coherent and unitary project, emanating from the shared consciousness of the peoples to form a “Hispanic” or “Maghrebian” unity. After it had been marginalized by studies on the genesis of the modern State, imperial history is now making a strong comeback, based on a significant theoretical and methodological renewal. While deconstructing imperial narratives, researchers now consider empires as unstable, hybrid and eminently pragmatic political entities. In this book, based on a multidisciplinary approach, they are considered as political experiments, questioning what makes an empire and highlighting imperial cultures, both diverse and connected, irreducible to a single model.