Governing The Empire

This book examines through the edition, translation, and study of Almohad provincial appointments the administrative, political, ideological, and religious organisation of the largest European-African Empire, renewing the study of power and authority in the medieval Islamic world.

This vividly detailed revisionist history opens a new vista on the great Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, a key period often seen as the eve of Tanzimat westernizing reforms and the beginning of three distinct histories—ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, imperial modernization from Istanbul, and European colonialism in the Middle East. Christine Philliou brilliantly shines a new light on imperial crisis and change in the 1820s and 1830s by unearthing the life of one man. Stephanos Vogorides (1780–1859) was part of a network of Christian elites known phanariots, institutionally excluded from power yet intimately bound up with Ottoman governance. By tracing the contours of the wide-ranging networks—crossing ethnic, religious, and institutional boundaries—in which the phanariots moved, Philliou provides a unique view of Ottoman power and, ultimately, of the Ottoman legacies in the Middle East and Balkans today. What emerges is a wide-angled analysis of governance as a lived experience at a moment in which there was no clear blueprint for power.

Basil's Byzantium is revealed as a state where the rhetoric of imperial authority became reality through the astute manipulation of force and persuasion."--Jacket.

How empires have used diversity to shape the world order for more than two millennia Empires—vast states of territories and peoples united by force and ambition—have dominated the political landscape for more than two millennia. Empires in World History departs from conventional European and nation-centered perspectives to take a remarkable look at how empires relied on diversity to shape the global order. Beginning with ancient Rome and China and continuing across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine empires' conquests, rivalries, and strategies of domination—with an emphasis on how empires accommodated, created, and manipulated differences among populations. Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires that sustained state power for centuries. They delve into the militant monotheism of Byzantium, the Islamic Caliphates, and the short-lived Carolingians, as well as the pragmatically tolerant rule of the Mongols and Ottomans, who combined religious protection with the politics of loyalty. Burbank and Cooper discuss the influence of empire on capitalism and popular sovereignty, the limitations and instability of Europe's colonial projects, Russia's repertoire of exploitation and differentiation, as well as the "empire of liberty"—devised by American revolutionaries and later extended across a continent and beyond. With its investigation into the relationship between diversity and imperial states, Empires in World History offers a fresh approach to understanding the impact of empires on the past and present.

The Chamberlains were the most controversial dynasty in British public life for more than sixty years. They were a close-knit family, and they treasured that solidarity throughout their lives. Bereft of a mother and with a largely absent father, the children of Joseph Chamberlain clung to each other as they grew up, and they kept in lifelong touch by letter. Based on those family letters, this book explores the accounts that the Chamberlain children told each other about the events in their lives. The two sons, Austen and Neville, followed their father into the highest echelons of British public life, and Neville eclipsed his father in fame. Their story is told through the eyes of their sisters. Hilda, the youngest of the surviving children, discovered that a pattern was repeated in the lives of all three men, a pattern that she recited in a kind of litany echoed by the family. Hilda's litany spoke of the way in which the Chamberlain men secured victory for each other over theiradversaries. Her story reached its climax when Neville met Adolf Hitler in Munich on the brink of war and managed to preserve the peace. But Hilda had reckoned without the last and greatest adversary of the Chamberlains: Winston Churchill. Churchill's achievement, first in winning the war that Neville had failed to avert, and then in writing a history of that war that damned Neville for its outbreak, forced Hilda to change her interpretation of the Chamberlains' story from a hymn ofpraise to a lament.

Stephens argues that encounters between Islam and British colonial rule in South Asia were fundamental to the evolution of modern secularism.