Global Empires and The Roman Imperium

The volumes under review are an impressive if unequal diptych. The first, the slimmer of the two, entitled “The Imperial Experience,” comprises a series of analytical studies on the creation, management, and ideologies of empires, and forms of resistance to them. The second, “The History of Empires,” is a forbidding tome of forty-four specific studies of individual empires and imperial ventures, from Ur III and Middle Kingdom Egypt to the Mongols and the British, ending, naturally, with America’s “global imperium.” In the analytics, the usual suspects, including Michael Doyle, Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, are on display; and the conceptual approaches of Michael Mann and Ernest Gellner are favorite points d’appui. For premodern empires, the ideas of the Maghribi thinker Ibn Khaldūn provide a different focus, so it is heartening to see Bang and others applying them more consistently (e.g., 1:13, 40, 326–9; 2:162, 246–8, 253). Especially for premodern empires, these volumes can be seen as an extension of earlier handbooks devoted to the state, one devoted to the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean state and another on ancient empires.1 As an aspect of world history, the endeavor is the culmination of a decades-long project on the history of empires fronted by Peter Bang.2 He has usefully produced detailed historical introductions not only to both volumes, but also to the subsections in each of them. Perhaps not surprisingly, empire turns out to be a virile enterprise. As Ian Morris notes, “the story of empire . . . is so strongly gendered that it