Book review: Empires in World History

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. 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. 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.

Jane Burbank & Frederick Cooper:

Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference.
Reviewed by Doug Leonard

Burbank 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 [1988]) and Charles Tilly (Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 [1990]) (p. xi). 


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 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 [1963], Plagues and Peoples [1976], and The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 [1982]) on the rise of the West as contingent and hardly predetermined (p. 2). 

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. 12). 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.

Empires 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…..