History
Land Based Empires
Land-based empires refer to large territories controlled by a single ruler or government, which are primarily based on land rather than sea power. These empires were often characterized by a centralized government, a strong military, and a diverse population. Examples of land-based empires include the Ottoman Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the Roman Empire.
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4 Key excerpts on "Land Based Empires"
eBook - ePub- Richard Lachmann(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
4 Empires For most of human history some peoples have been able to dominate others, either in formal empires or through indirect means. An empire, in Julian Go's (2011, p. 7) definition, is “a sociopolitical formation wherein a central political authority … exercises unequal influence and power over the political (and in effect sociopolitical) processes of a subordinate society, peoples, or space.” This chapter does not offer a critical review of the myriad definitions of empire. Those definitions all agree that empires differ from non-imperial polities in that they exert power over territories and peoples beyond their core polity, and that the essential dynamic of an empire is produced by the interaction between the core's efforts to sustain or expand and deepen its rule over peripheries and the peripheries’ efforts to weaken or end the core's rule over them. The imperial dynamic is a temporal dynamic, which means that both imperiums and subordinate territories can be understood only as changing products of past sequences of conquest, incorporation, and resistance. A failure to see empires as dynamic and contingent social systems mars S. N. Eisenstadt's The Political Systems of Empires, a massive comparative study of ancient empires whose publication in 1963 helped revive interest in comparative historical sociology. Eisenstadt mined a vast array of historical cases to find what he saw as commonalities in the political organization of empires. His main finding is that imperial power in all empires depended on the creation of what he labels “free-floating resources” – i.e., resources not tied to local institutions, such as profits from long-distance trade or mining. The expansion or decline of such free-floating resources then becomes the main dynamic in Eisenstadt's history, although he mainly asserts rather than explains their ebb and flow
eBook - PDF- Hui Wang, Wang Hui, Michael Gibbs Hill(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
15 According to his classic account, the main characteristic of an empire is that the paramount ruler uses military force to monopolize the power to distribute property, thereby wiping out any aristocratic systems that might balance out autocratic rule and suppressing the emergence of separate nation-states. This narrative not only lacks any discussion of in-dividual characteristics of such “Asian empires” as the Ottoman Empire, Mughal Empire, Russian Empire, or Qing dynasty, but also admits no possibility for societies to be produced by interaction or by hybrid rela-tionships. As imagined by Montesquieu, none of the wars, conquests, or many interactions between societies that took place in Chinese history could change the fact that the society was an empire. In his words: “Con-quest does not make China lose its laws. As manners, mores, laws, and religion are but the same thing there.” 16 This view was very similar to opinions about China held by the early missionaries such as Jean Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743), who argued that China’s politics, laws, language, clothing, morality, and customs had maintained their unity over the pre-vious four millennia without undergoing any essential changes. According to this “culturalist” outlook, which omitted historical changes or historical interactions, Asia has no history and lacks the historical conditions and forces needed to produce modernity—the core of modernity is “the state” and its laws, as well as urban and trade-oriented ways of life. In a series of foundational narratives from the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries, the concept of “Asia” is closely linked with despotic im- The Empire/Nation-State Binary and European “World History” 43 perial systems that covered broad swaths of territory and multiple ethnic groups.
eBook - PDF- Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
116 Tributary Empires in Global History 7. Hence in African political organisations termed empire, the imperial fea- tures following from the definitions adopted in theoretical research either occurred in an incompletely developed form, or only part of those features had developed, and the others were absent. In the light of the collected material, among the features of African empires, the most important ones seem to be the incomplete centralisation of power and the rather short durability of their legitimisation, together with a coun- terbalance to the phenomena of political centralisation and legitimisation of power provided by the continued existence of local centres of tribal and early state authorities and their separate legitimisations. This type of organisation emerged not only in Africa, but also on other con- tinents. The analogies concern both the processes of their development and their structures. With regard to the history of India, Romila Thapar 26 proposes the terms ‘ancient empires’ and ‘early empires’ and claims: ‘In the typology of early empires the nature of the relationship between the metropolitan and the peripheral areas is crucial’, adding: ‘The ancient empires may therefore be examined more usefully in terms of a metropolitan state in juxtaposition with other territories in varying stages of state formation’. On this basis, R. Thapar distinguishes two types of early (ancient) empires. She defines the first of them as follows: ‘The earliest empires were those which permitted a wide range of politicoeconomic systems to subsist within their boundaries, and the metro- politan peripheral relationships varied with each system’. The second type ‘is distinguished by a smaller range of differentiated systems or alternatively ... the more primitive systems of gathering and hunting, pastoralism, barter and primitive agriculture, are marginal to a larger component of complex agrarian structures and commercial networks.’ The second type pointed out by R.
eBook - PDFThe Making of Empire in Bronze Age Anatolia
Hittite Sovereign Practice, Resistance, and Negotiation
- Claudia Glatz(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
PART I EMPIRE AT HOME [T]he land was small. But on whatever campaign he [Labarna] went, he held the lands of the enemy in subjection by his might. He kept devastating the lands, and he deprived the lands of power; and he made them boundaries of the sea. But when he returned from the field, each of his sons went to the various lands (to govern them). Hupisna, Tuwanuwa, Nenassa, Landa, Zallara, Parsuhanta, Lusna – these (were the) lands they governed. Proclamation of Telipinu 1 The study of imperial networks has focused for the most part on the expansion of one society, or rather some of its governmental institutions, beyond a central heartland, on the ways and means by which new territories and their inhabit- ants are coerced and persuaded into an expanded political community, and on the economic and cultural practices that sustained it. Referred to as cores, central regions, heartlands, or power areas, 2 imperial centres are widely acknowledged as critical to the imperial project. There is also a broad consen- sus in empire studies that such heartlands too had to be conquered and united. 3 This process and its outcomes, however, are generally imagined as state- formation: the creation, prior to imperial expansion, of a culturally coherent and ideologically consenting public that is qualitatively distinct from other imperial zones. Drawing on comparisons between Inka, Aztec, and Roman expansions, Alan Covey, for instance, suggested that ‘rapid [imperial] growth is 1 Translation by Hoffmann (1984, §§1-4, i 2-12). 2 Münkler (2007, 23). 3 Adams (1979). 45 most successful in cases where a centralized state government had already coalesced in the heartland of the emerging empire’. 4 Imperial heartlands ought then to be easily recognisable and distinguishable such as in the case of, for instance, the nineteenth and twentieth century CE nation states from which emanated European overseas colonial ventures.
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