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Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History Hardcover – October 17, 2023
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An original study of empire creation and its consequences, from ancient through early modern times
The world’s first great empires established by the ancient Persians, Chinese, and Romans are well known, but not the empires that emerged on their margins in response to them over the course of 2,500 years. These counterempires or shadow empires, which changed the course of history, include the imperial nomad confederacies that arose in Mongolia and extorted resources from China rather than attempting to conquer it, as well as maritime empires such as ancient Athens that controlled trade without seeking territorial hegemony. In Shadow Empires, Thomas Barfield identifies seven kinds of counterempire and explores their rise, politics, economics, and longevity.
What all these counterempires had in common was their interactions with existing empires that created the conditions for their development. When highly successful, these counterempires left the shadows to become the world’s largest empires—for example, those of the medieval Muslim Arabs and of the Mongol heirs of Chinggis Khan. Three former shadow empires—Manchu Qing China, Tsarist Russia, and British India—made this transformation in the late eighteenth century and came to rule most of Eurasia. However, the DNA of their origins endured in their unique ruling strategies. Indeed, world powers still use these strategies today, long after their roots in shadow empires have been forgotten.
Looking afresh at the histories of important types of empires that are often ignored, Shadow Empires provides an original account of empire formation from the ancient world to the early modern period.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateOctober 17, 2023
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100691181632
- ISBN-13978-0691181639
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Editorial Reviews
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"This ambitious work . . . is clear, easy to read, illuminating, and immensely learned." ― Choice
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“Ambitious and provocative, Shadow Empires is a must-read for every scholar of empire, from every discipline. Thomas Barfield provides an entirely new way of understanding and comparing empires, moving us beyond the usual thinking about empires that is so centered on European history. This book will become an instant classic.”—Ayşe Zarakol, University of Cambridge
“Thomas Barfield’s exciting and learned book foregrounds the ‘shadow empires’ that have arisen—sometimes symbiotically, sometimes parasitically—alongside the great landed polities of Eurasia. The result is perhaps the best model to date to account for the varieties of empire throughout world history.”—Charles S. Maier, author of The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Princeton University Press (October 17, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0691181632
- ISBN-13 : 978-0691181639
- Item Weight : 1.68 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #955,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #385 in Non-US Legal Systems (Books)
- #437 in Comparative Politics
- #1,874 in Military Strategy History (Books)
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About the author
THOMAS BARFIELD is a social anthropologist who received his PhD from Harvard and is currently a professor at Boston University. His fieldwork with nomads in Afghanistan during the 1970s resulted in the publication of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981). Teaming up with the late Albert Szabo, he co-authored Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991) that was awarded an Outstanding Academic Book citation in Art and Architecture by the American Library Association in 1993. In 2006 Barfield was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that led to the publication of Afghanistan: A cultural and political history (2010, updated 2nd edition 2023) that also received an outstanding Middle East & North Africa title award from the American Library Association in 2011. He is the President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies. Barfield’s historical research on the rise and rule of nomadic empires over the course of two millennia resulted in the publication of The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989) that is also available in Korean, Russian and Chinese translations. Barfield's comparative study of empires more generally, Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History, will be published in October 2023.
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