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"The world's first great empires established by the ancient Persians, Chinese, and Romans are well known, but not the empires that emerged on their margins in response to them over the course of 2,500 years. These counterempires or shadow empires, which changed the course of history, include the imperial nomad confederacies that arose in Mongolia and extorted resources from China rather than attempting to conquer it, as well as maritime empires such as ancient Athens that controlled trade without seeking territorial hegemony. In Shadow Empires, Thomas Barfield identifies seven kinds of counterempire and explores their rise, politics, economics, and longevity. What all these counterempires had in common was their interactions with existing empires that created the conditions for their development. When highly successful, these counterempires left the shadows to become the world's largest empires--for example, those of the medieval Muslim Arabs and of the Mongol heirs of Chinggis Khan. Three former shadow empires-Manchu Qing China, Tsarist Russia, and British India-made this transformation in the late eighteenth century and came to rule most of Eurasia. However, the DNA of their origins endured in their unique ruling strategies. Indeed, world powers still use these strategies today, long after their roots in shadow empires have been forgotten." "For over two millennia, empires were the dominant political organizations in Eurasia. The premodern empires with which we are most familiar arose through a process of internal development and military conquest. Self-generating and self-supporting-in author Thomas Barfield's term, "endogenous"- empires such as those of ancient Persia, China, and Rome imposed sophisticated central administration over territories spanning millions of square kilometers and inhabited by tens of millions of people. But there were other imperial formations in the ancient world that have attracted much less attention: those that arose adjacent to ancient imperial states and that did not practice centralized forms of rule. Thomas Barfield calls them "shadow" or "exogenous" empires. This book provides the reader with the analytical tools to better understand these premodern political formations that arose on the periphery of betterknown, centralized empires. In sum, Barfield provides a new schematic account of premodern empires, one that adopts a broadly comparative perspective and that invites scholars and students of empire to push their investigations beyond received categories and established templates. When successful, shadow empires became centers of power in their own right. Some, such as the nomadic empires that emerged in Mongolia, used their powerful horse cavalry to extort China rather than conquer it. The Mongols and the Xiongnu started out seeking wealth through extortion and ended up creating formidable empires. Similarly, maritime polities such as ancient Athens sought indirect paths to power, using their naval forces to control the profits of trade without taking on the responsibility of ruling the people who produced the wealth. No matter how large or powerful they became, argues Barfield, shadow empires always retained aspects of their earlier incarnations, particularly in the ways they approached governance and foreign relations. Like their endogenous counterparts, shadow empires established organizational templates employed by later empires-including the colonial empires of the modern era-whose modes of administration, emphasis on trade and resource extraction, and governing strategies recalled those of the shadow empires of earlier times. By considering the diverse array of exogenous empires together as a class (or as an ideal type, in Max Weber's understanding of that term), and comparing them to their endogenous counterparts, scholars in empire studies can decenter Western imperial history in the discipline and better understand the significant role played by these shadow states in shaping global history"

World history --- Imperialism --- Impérialisme --- POLITICAL SCIENCE / Imperialism. --- History. --- Histoire.

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Imperiale Situationen werden in den Kulturwissenschaften zunehmend auch als kulturell komplexe Möglichkeitsräume betrachtet. Wenig Aufmerksamkeit wurde bisher dem Verhältnis von subjektiv-individuellen und ,kollektiven' Zugehörigkeitskonzepten gewidmet, wie auch der Frage, wie in imperialen Kontexten Selbst- und Fremdentwürfe verhandelt werden. Scheinbar homogene Größen wie Nation oder Region können dabei höchstens von teilweiser Bedeutung sein. Kulturelle Identitäten sind im Kontext imperialer Erfahrungen historisch und lebensweltlich "geschichteter", sie zeigen Merkmale der Gleichzeitigkeit unterschiedlicher Zeit- und Erfahrungsräume - und sie konstituieren und reflektieren sich nicht zuletzt in Erzählungen. Solchen Konstellationen und Erzählungen aus verschiedenen Zeiträumen geht das vorliegende Buch nach, wobei die Regionen Ost- und Südosteuropas im Fokus stehen, die besonders reiche und vielfältige Erfahrungen europäischer Identitätsbildung in imperialen Kontexten aufweisen. .

Political Science / Imperialism --- Political science --- Administration --- Civil government --- Commonwealth, The --- Government --- Political theory --- Political thought --- Politics --- Science, Political --- Social sciences --- State, The