By the fifteenth century, Darwin reckons, that homogenized East “stagnated” and fell behind. For instance, in After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (2007), John Darwin depicts the post-Tamerlane imperial experience as marked by a powerful East that served as both example and foil for Europe still recovering from the fall of Rome. Burbank and Cooper have thus delivered a valuable and important single-volume political history of empire, useful for both undergraduates and early graduate students engaged in imperial or colonial history.Įmpires in World History offers a broader chronological and geographic scope than any comparable work, particularly in light of the focus on the European overseas/colonial experience found in most comparative studies of empire. Ultimately, Burbank and Cooper’s study is a superb example of the analytical potential of world and transnational history, as it manages to trace the great sweep of world political development while emphasizing the role of intermediaries and borders in shaping empires based on “contingent accommodation” (p. 1000 ) on the rise of the West as contingent and hardly predetermined (p. The emphasis on “connections and contacts” of empires as critical to their formation hearkens back to the sweeping work of William McNeill ( The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, Plagues and Peoples, and The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. While they agree that conflict has been central to the course of European history, Burbank and Cooper argue that much of world history has been shaped more decisively by transcendent, but still locally produced, devices of imperial control that included, most importantly, the management of difference. The authors seek not only to describe the rise and fall of often immense territorial polities over the last 2,500 years, but also to correct the prevailing view that ties the development of the “modern” world to the arrival of the nation-state in Europe in the seventeenth century.īurbank and Cooper propose that imperial constructions, influences, and intersections have been vastly undervalued by scholars studying the history of “political economy.” They set out to “widen perspectives on the political history of the world” by working against the teleology of European nation-state development and the rise of the West set forth powerfully in the histories of, for example, Geoffrey Parker ( The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 ) and Charles Tilly ( Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 ) (p. Instead, they posit that empires have taken many different shapes and have been the most influential form of political rule over the last two millennia. Alternately, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper hold that while “empires” are often seen now as haunting specters of tyranny and oppression, it has not always been so. Their work served, perhaps unintentionally, as a call to arms for the antiglobalization movement that gained in strength in the early part of that decade. Most famously, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri described the pernicious influence of a Gramsci-style, intrusive, hegemonic state-based power in their landmark book, Empire (2000). Reviewed by Doug Leonard (Duke University)Įmpire, it seems, is everywhere, an important topic of historical scholarship since the late 1990s. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference.
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