Introduction
摘要
Some readers may be surprised to learn that the present volume aims to contribute to historiographical debates on how nineteenth-century political cultures shaped Euro-American contemporaneity. Why focus on a form of state and political imagination, the monarchical, which only survives in full vigour in Europe? The more sceptical might argue that monarchical rule survived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a mere ruin, a museum relic, a shiny but empty shell, useless following the collapse of the ancient regime political systems.