Visions of Empire

By Krishan Kumar,

Book cover of Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World

Book description

What the rulers of empire can teach us about navigating today's increasingly interconnected world The empires of the past were far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and have much to teach us about navigating our own increasingly globalized and interconnected world. Until now, most recent scholarship on empires has focused…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Visions of Empire as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is another engaging and accessible contribution to global history and comparative work on empires.

This book is great because of its focus on a few important case studies and because Kumar makes the excellent point that if you focus exclusively on the modern contemporary territorial configuration of Russia, Britain, or the US, you will miss the long patterns of imperial expansion out of which the modern core is a consolidation. 

This raises the possibility of a revision of the epitaph above to read: empires make states, and states make empires. Of particular value is Kumar’s focus on the politics…

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