The Oxford World History of Empire Volume One: The Imperial Experience

This is the first world history of empire, reaching from the third millennium BCE to the present. By combining synthetic surveys, thematic comparative essays, and numerous chapters on specific empires, its two volumes provide unparalleled coverage of imperialism throughout history and across continents, from Asia to Europe and from Africa to the Americas. Only a few decades ago empire was believed to be a thing of the past; now it is clear that it has been and remains one of the most enduring forms of political organization and power. We cannot understand the dynamics and resilience of empire without moving decisively beyond the study of individual cases or particular periods, such as the relatively short age of European colonialism. The history of empire, as these volumes amply demonstrate, needs to be drawn on the much broader canvas of global history.

Volume I: The Imperial Experience is dedicated to synthesis and comparison. Following a comprehensive theoretical survey and bold world history synthesis, fifteen chapters analyze and explore the multifaceted experience of empire across cultures and through the ages. The broad range of perspectives includes: scale, world systems and geopolitics, military organization, political economy and elite formation, monumental display, law, mapping and registering, religion, literature, the politics of difference, resistance, energy transfers, ecology, memories, and the decline of empires. This broad set of topics is united by the central theme of power, examined under four headings: systems of power, cultures of power, disparities of power, and memory and decline. Taken together, these chapters offer a comprehensive and unique view of the imperial experience in world history.

Peter Fibiger Bang is Associate Professor of History at the University of Copenhagen.

C. A. Bayly was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge.

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University.

Vol. I - The Imperial Experience
List of Contributors
Prolegomena
PETER FIBIGER BANG

1. Empire - a World History: Anatomy and Concept, Theory and Synthesis
PETER FIBIGER BANG
2. The Scale of Empire: Territory, Population, Distribution
WALTER SCHEIDEL
3. The Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism in Interpolity Systems
CHRISTOPHER CHASE-DUNN AND DMYTRO KHUTKYY
4. Military Organization
IAN MORRIS
5. The Political Economy of Empire: "Imperial Capital" and the Formation of Central and Regional Elites
JOHN HALDON
6. Imperial Monumentalism, Pageantry, Styles of Comportment and Forms of Consumption: The Inter-Imperial Obelisk in Istanbul
CECILY J. HILSDALE
7. Law, Bureaucracy and the Practice of Government and Rule
CAROLINE HUMFRESS
8. Mapping, Registering, and Ordering: Time, Space, and Knowledge
LAURA HOSTETLER
9. Empire and Religion
AMIRA K. BENNISON
10. Literature of Empire: Difference, Creativity, and Cosmopolitanism
JAVED MAJEED
11. Empires and the Politics of Difference: Social Hierarchies and Cultural Identities
JANE BURBANK AND FREDERICK COOPER
12. Resistance, Rebellion and the Subaltern
KIM A. WAGNER
13. Imperial Metabolism: Empire as a Process of Energy Transfers
ALF HORNBORG
14. Ecology: Environments and Empires in World History, 3000 BCE - c.1900 CE
EUGENE ANDERSON AND JAMES BEATTIE
15. Memories of Empire: Literature and Art, Nostalgia and Trauma
PHIROZE VASUNIA
16. The End of Empires
JOHN. A. HALL