The Process of Empire: Frontiers and Borderlands

Abstract

How historians think about empire is important, because the study of empire in all disciplines depends upon historical reconstruction. Historians typically stress particularity, making each empire appear unique, anchored in its time and place, with its own distinct ideas, conditions, institutions and personalities. Yet historians also deploy standard frames of structural analysis which describe each empire as an exemplar of a type of political system, operating coercively, top-down, expanding outward from its central core to dominate subordinate peripheries, running through a lifecycle of birth, growth, decline and death, turning points to identify and explain. These standard features of empire histories facilitate comparison and generalisation about empire as a political form.¹