Peter Crooks & Timothy H. Parsons (eds.), Empires and Bureaucracy in World History. From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century,
Cambridge University Press 2016
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| CONTENTS |
How did empires rule different peoples across vast
expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats
govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World
History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by
exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in
bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages with scholars of
post-medieval European empires, while a genuinely world-historical perspective
is provided by chapters on China, the Incas and the Ottomans. The editors
identify a paradox in how bureaucracy operated on the scale of empires and so
help explain why some empires endured for centuries while, in the contemporary
world, empires fail almost before they begin. By adopting a cross-chronological
and world-historical approach, the book challenges the abiding association of
bureaucratic rationality with 'modernity' and the so-called 'Rise of the West'.
