Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper
Cool comparisons between Rome-China; Ottomans and Spanish Empire; US and Russia, etc.
- "Why was the Chinese empire repeatedly put back together in roughly the same area, while Rome – as a state – never revived?" (p. 54).
- Russia's eastward expansion was not genocidal vs. USA's westward expansion. Why? Russia's pragmatic Eurasian model of rewarding elites and accommodating religious diversity, inherited from ‘their mixed Mongol, Byzantine, and European past’ (p. 251)
- monotheistic religion as both a powerful cultural homogenizing force and a granter of universal power, as well as a potential agent for internal dispute and imperial fracture
- Ottoman c.f. Spanish empires
- Europeans as "Mongols of the sea"
- There was nothing particularly new about 19C European imperialism. Growth in wealth and technology gave European powers an advantage, but these empires still had to respond to the age-old demands of governance and administration. Also, they didn't do as well or endure as long as earlier empires.
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