The Golden Age of Empire

Bibliographic Data

ID23710596
AuthorsJanine Muldoon (0000-0003-3307-1318, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, corresponding author), James Muldoon
Year1999
Pages114-138
Publication date1999-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueEmpire and Order (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230512238_7
OpenAlexW2468095594
ISBN9780230512238
LanguageEN
References cited15

Although historians of political thought have generally identified the Middle Ages as the age of empire and the modern world as the age of the state, in fact, the most extensive period of imperial development was from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. 3 No medieval monarch ruled a domain as extensive as that of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, or that of the Spanish monarch Philip II (1556–98) who ruled more than twenty kingdoms, or even that of George III of England (1760–1820). What is of special interest here is that with the exception of Charles V, and then only in part of his domains, these rulers were not labelled emperors. What John Adams said of the British Empire, that there was no such institution in either the law or the constitution, was also true of the Habsburg family possessions outside the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. There was no Spanish Empire any more than there was a British Empire. What existed were several medieval personal monarchies, dynastic agglomerations of territories that had little in common except that they shared the same ruler. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ancient history · Art · Constitution · Early modern period · Emperor · Empire · Middle Ages · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Roman Empire · Ruler · State (computer science) · Throne · Classics · European Political History Analysis · History · Law · Scottish History and National Identity · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact