TCAS Lecture: Uradyn E. Bulag

Spectres of Empire: Irish and Mongol "Marginal Imperialists" and the Afterlives of Imperial Nations

Speaker: Uradyn E. Bulag
Date and time: Thursday, 19 March 2026, 6.30pm-7.40pm
Venue: Joly Lecture Theatre, Hamilton Building, TCD

The Benedict Anderson Lecture invites us to reflect on his enduring legacy, particularly his method of drawing unexpected parallels to unravel the fabric of nationalism and empire. This lecture takes up his concept of the ‘spectre of comparison’ but argues that its most potent form is as much in the colonial subject’s mirroring of a metropolis as in the phantom parallels between the internal fissures of empires themselves.

Through a comparative study of Irish soldiers in the British Empire and Mongol bannermen in the Qing Empire, this lecture develops the concept of the ‘marginal imperialist’. These were non-ruling peoples who were simultaneously agents of and hostages to imperial projects, their loyalties perpetually suspect. The 1859 Qing victory at Taku, rumoured in Britain to be the work of a rebellious Irish officer but actually led by the Mongol Prince Senggerinchin, perfectly crystallises this fraught dynamic.

Building on yet departing from Anderson, the lecture traces a dual process: how these marginal imperialists became disillusioned, leading their struggles for independence (Ireland in 1922, Mongolia in 1911), and yet how their imperial entanglements made complete territorial sovereignty an impossible ideal. The enduring divisions of Northern Ireland and Inner Mongolia stand as testament to this ‘imperial hangover’.

In honouring Benedict Anderson, we must do more than simply use his tools; we must sharpen them and forge new ones. If his 'spectre of comparison' explains how nations are imagined through a vertical gaze across empires, then the 'phantom parallel' of the Irish and Mongol experiences reveals a lateral haunting within them. This forces us to recognise that the end of empire did not bring pure national sovereignty, but what we might call 'spectral sovereignty'—a condition where the nation-state remains haunted by the ghostly, unresolved borders of its imperial past. It is this haunting, from Belfast to Hohhot, that continues to challenge the imperial nationalism of both London and Beijing, and it is this phantom that our comparative gaze makes visible.

Uradyn E. Bulag is a leading scholar of China and Inner Asia whose work examines how Mongols have sought to shape their identity and assert sovereignty amid communist and nationalist revolutions, ideological and cultural transformation, and episodes of state-orchestrated violence. Drawing on Mongols’ complex history of both imperial expansion and colonial subjugation, his research engages broad theoretical and empirical questions relating to nation-building, sovereignty, settler colonialism, genocide, minority governance in multinational states, diplomacy, and international relations. A historical and political anthropologist, Bulag combines deep local and regional scholarship with national and global perspectives, bringing anthropological insight to urgent contemporary political issues.

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