Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century

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Peter Crooks, Timothy H. Parsons
Cambridge University Press, Aug 3, 2016 - History
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'.
 

Contents

Empires Bureaucracy and the Paradox of Power
3
Bureaucracy and Empire
31
Conflict and Cooperation between Arab Rulers and Persian
54
Governing the Inca
81
The Bureaucratization
102
The Late Roman Empire Was before All Things
129
The Case of Byzantium
157
Charlemagne and Carolingian Military Administration
170
A E36274 fos 32 and 435 TNA late 13th cent
272
Magistrates to Administrators Composite Monarchy
291
Overwhelmingly
318
An Empire of Young Professionals
344
The Role
364
Labour and Colonial Authority
391
The Unintended Consequences of Bureaucratic Modernization
412
Means of Appropriation
437

Bureaucracy the English State and the Crisis of the Angevin
197
Texts Scribes and the Medieval
221
The First English Empire and
250

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About the author (2016)

Peter Crooks is Lecturer in Medieval History at Trinity College, Dublin. His primary research interest is in Ireland in the period 1171541 and, arising from that, in the wider 'English world' or 'Plantagenet empire' of which Ireland formed an important part. He is editor of Government, War and Society in Medieval Ireland (2008) and, with David Green and W. Mark Ormrod, The Plantagenet Empire, 1259453. He is also principal editor of 'Circle' (https://chancery.tcd.ie/), a reconstruction of the Irish chancery rolls destroyed in the 1922 fire at the Public Record Office, Dublin. His articles have appeared in Past and Present and the English Historical Review.

Timothy H. Parsons holds a joint appointment as a Professor of African History in the history department and the African and Africanmerican Studies Program at Washington University, St Louis. His publications include The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century (2014), The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (2010), Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (2004), The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (2003) and The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Service in the King's African Rifles, 1902964 (1999).

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