In Empires in World History, historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper begin to describe the empire through its contrast with the modern concept of the nation-state (2010, p.8). While the latter aims to represent a single, homogenous group of people proclaiming their commonality, the empire is a political unit that incorporates many peoples while maintaining the distinction and hierarchy between them (ibid.). These distinctions and hierarchies were often not natural, but intentionally worked in order to separate the colonised and coloniser populations (ibid., p.12). This creation of the “we/they” and “self/other” distinctions would resultantly justify empire-building, as the created state would utilise the resources of its possessions among other areas or people to serve a core area or people. Political scientist David B. Abernethy uses this relationship, one between a metropole that has the position of dominance, and a colony that is subordinate, as the defining feature of an empire (2000, p.19).

As the empire is a common form of state organization throughout history, there is great variation in the structures of an empire. For example, an empire may exercise a system involving layered sovereignty, where certain colonies are governed indirectly while either in some affairs or on paper maintaining their sovereign rights (2010, p.17). Examples of this include Morocco, which was under a French protectorate, and Egypt, under the British. Notably, the metropole possessed the ability to not just dictate the foreign policies of these states but also assumed certain domestic governance functions. Abernethy labels states that had forfeited their foreign policy to the metropole yet maintained their domestic policy, such as the sheikhdoms of the Gulf in the 20th Century, as quasi-colonies (2000, p.21), though he rejects the idea of informal empires, which is a disputed concept that refers to economic domination over sovereign states (ibid., p.20). This shows the ambiguity around whether some polities are empires or not, especially given how some states we label as empires did not proclaim themselves as such. For example, despite the academic label of Spain as an empire under the reign of Philip II, he did not refer to himself as an emperor (ibid., 126). On the diverse structures of empire, Burbank and Cooper contrast the Ottoman and Spanish empires, with the former possessing a patrimonial model where the state is much more centralised and reliant upon vertical relationships where power emanates from the monarch, while the Spanish had a class system structure where horizontal relationships developed between members of social groups, such as the nobility, which worked to check the monarch (ibid., p.145). These differences demonstrate the varied structure of empires which is not identical, but dependent on the existing norms, such as that of feudalism in Europe for the Spanish Empire. Both empires also had different approaches to religion, which while both claimed legitimacy through, held differing approaches. The Ottoman Empire, for example, possessed a system of religious toleration where existing religious privileges of minority groups were protected (ibid., p.140).

Empire, in concise terms, is the concept of a multinational polity which utilises the resources of peripheral nations that it claims as its lawful possessions, in order to enrich or empower a core national group.

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Bibliography:

Abernethy, D. B. (2000). The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415-1980. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Burbank, J. and Cooper, F. (2010). Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.