The Imaginal Bond of “Empire” and “Civilization” in Eurasian History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13100417 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Pamela Kyle Crossley (0000-0002-2257-7092, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 84-84 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Verge Studies in Global Asias (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2373-5058 • E-ISSN: 2373-5066 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5749/vergstudglobasia.2.2.0084 |
| OpenAlex | W2545336124 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
The ecologies of presence of what we call ancient or medieval empires were profoundly different from those of modern empires. Practical problems of distance and social penetration suggest that early hegemony was a matter of military visibility and the maintenance of economic networks that could rivet the loyalty of local elites, not of cultural emanation from imperial centers. The illusory coherence of earlier empires was largely the creation of later rulers and elites seeking legitimation and justifications for conquest. This applies to issues of the spatiality of early domains but is even more relevant to claims of modern empires to have inherited grand civilizational legacies and responsibilities of curatorship. Not until the early modern period could large-scale conquest regimes achieve direct, sustained cultural contact with civil populations—the environment in which the myth of deep imperial cultural legacies was generated and inculcated. Nationalists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries found the cultural postures of the large conquest empires indigestible in their totality but useful when tailored to nationalist agendas
Ancient history · Archaeology · Civilization · CONQUEST · Empire · Hegemony · Legitimation · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Soviet and Russian History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |