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Due to the empire’s military prowess, sophisticated hierarchy, social stratification and culture, the Ashanti empire had one of the largest historiographies of any indigenous Sub-Saharan African political entity. The Sikh Empire — was established in the Punjab region of India. The empire collapsed when its founder, Ranjit Singh, died and its army fell to the British.
During the same period, the Maratha Empire also known as the Maratha Confederacy was a Hindu state located in present-day India.
It existed from to , and at its peak, the empire’s territories covered much of Southern Asia. The empire was founded and consolidated by Shivaji. After the death of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, it expanded greatly under the rule of the Peshwas.
In , the Maratha army lost the Third Battle of Panipat, which halted the expansion of the empire. Later, the empire was divided into a confederacy of states which, in , were lost to the British during the Anglo-Maratha wars. The French colonial empire constituted the overseas colonies, protectorates and mandate territories that came under French rule from the 16th century onward.
A distinction is generally made between the “first colonial empire,” that existed until , and the “second colonial empire”, which began with the conquest of Algiers in The second colonial empire came to an end after the decolonizations of Indochina , Algeria and French Africa.
At its apex, it was one of the largest empires in history; including metropolitan France, the total amount of land under French sovereignty reached 11,, km2 4,, sq mi , with a population of million people in The Empire of Brazil — was the only South American modern monarchy, established by the heir of the Portuguese Empire as an independent nation eventually became an emerging international power.
The new country was huge but sparsely populated and ethnically diverse. The term ” American Empire ” refers to the United States’ cultural ideologies and foreign policy strategies. The term is most commonly used to describe the U.
Despite these systematic differences, the political objectives and strategies of the United States government have been quite similar to those of previous empires.
Regardless of the supposed motivation for this constant expansion, all of these land acquisitions were carried out by imperialistic means. This was done by financial means in some cases, and by military force in others. The U. In time, an empire may change from one political entity to another. For example, the Holy Roman Empire, a German re-constitution of the Roman Empire , metamorphosed into various political structures i. The Roman Empire, perennially reborn, also lived on as the Byzantine Empire Eastern Roman Empire — temporarily splitting into the Latin Empire , the Empire of Nicaea and the Empire of Trebizond before its remaining territory and centre became part of the Ottoman Empire.
After the Empire of Japan retained its Emperor but lost its colonial possessions and became the State of Japan. An autocratic empire can become a republic e. The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after provides an example of a multi-ethnic superstate broken into constituent nation-oriented states: the republics, kingdoms, and provinces of Austria , Hungary , Transylvania , Croatia , Slovenia , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Czechoslovakia , Ruthenia , Galicia , et al.
After the Second World War — , the deconstruction of colonial empires quickened and became commonly known as decolonisation. The British Empire evolved into a loose, multinational Commonwealth of Nations , while the French colonial empire metamorphosed to a Francophone commonwealth.
The same process happened to the Portuguese Empire , which evolved into a Lusophone commonwealth , and to the former territories of the extinct Spanish Empire , which alongside the Lusophone countries of Portugal and Brazil , created an Ibero-American commowealth. The British gave Hong Kong back to China in after years of rule. The Portuguese territory of Macau reverted to China in Macau and Hong Kong did not become part of the provincial structure of China; they have autonomous systems of government as Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China.
Fourteen British Overseas Territories remain under British sovereignty. In Eliot A. Cohen summarized the contemporary transition from empire: “The Age of Empire may indeed have ended, but then an age of American hegemony has begun, regardless of what one calls it. The fall of the western half of the Roman Empire is seen as one of the most pivotal points in all of human history. This event traditionally marks the transition from classical civilization to the birth of Europe.
There is still a debate over the cause of the fall of one of the largest empires in history. Piganiol argues that the Roman Empire under its authority can be described as “a period of terror”, [76] holding its imperial system accountable for its failure.
Another theory blames the rise of Christianity as the cause, arguing that the spread of certain Christian ideals caused internal weakness of the military and state.
There was also the looming presence of the Persians which, at any time, took a large percentage of the fighting force’s attention. At the same time the Huns, a nomadic warrior people from the steppes of Asia, are also putting extreme pressure on the German tribes outside of the Roman frontier, which gave the German tribes no other choice, geographically, but to move into Roman territory.
At this point, without increased funding, the Roman army could no longer effectively defend its borders against major waves of Germanic tribes. This inability is illustrated by the crushing defeat at Adrianople in C. Contemporaneously, the concept of empire is politically valid, yet is not always used in the traditional sense.
Despite the semantic reference to imperial power, Japan is a de jure constitutional monarchy , with a homogeneous population of million people that is In his book review of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri , Mehmet Akif Okur posits that since the September 11 attacks in the United States, the international relations determining the world’s balance of power political, economic, military have been altered.
These alterations include the intellectual political science trends that perceive the contemporary world’s order via the re-territorialization of political space , the re-emergence of classical imperialist practices the “inside” vs.
These changes constitute the “Age of Nation Empires”; as imperial usage, nation-empire denotes the return of geopolitical power from global power blocs to regional power blocs i. Nation-empire regionalism claims sovereignty over their respective regional political social, economic, ideologic , cultural, and military spheres. Since the European Union was formed as a polity in , it has established its own currency, its own citizenship , established discrete military forces , and exercises its limited hegemony in the Mediterranean, eastern parts of Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.
The big size and high development index of the EU economy often has the ability to influence global trade regulations in its favor. The political scientist Jan Zielonka suggests that this behavior is imperial because it coerces its neighbouring countries into adopting its European economic, legal, and political structures.
Characterizing some aspects of the United States in regards to its territorial expansion , foreign policy, and its international behavior as ” American Empire ” is controversial but not uncommon. The controversy stems in part from the fact the US itself was at one point a colony in the British Empire. This active rejection of imperialist status is not limited to high-ranking government officials, as it has been ingrained in American society throughout its entire history.
As David Ludden explains, “journalists, scholars, teachers, students, analysts, and politicians prefer to depict the U. Ludden explains this phenomenon with the concept of “ideological blinders”, which he says prevent American citizens from realizing the true nature of America’s current systems and strategies. These “ideological blinders” that people wear have resulted in an “invisible” American empire of which most American citizens are unaware.
Stuart Creighton Miller posits that the public’s sense of innocence about Realpolitik cf. American exceptionalism impairs popular recognition of US imperial conduct since it governed other countries via surrogates. These surrogates were domestically-weak, right-wing governments that would collapse without US support. We’re not imperialistic; we never have been.
The chart below shows a timeline of polities that have been called empires. Dynastic changes are marked with a white line. Empires have been the dominant international organization in world history :. The fact that tribes, peoples, and nations have made empires points to a fundamental political dynamic, one that helps explain why empires cannot be confined to a particular place or era but emerged and reemerged over thousands of years and on all continents.
It is the nation-state—an essentially 19th-century ideal—that is the historical novelty and that may yet prove to be the more ephemeral entity. In fact, it is a very distorted view of even the Westphalian era not to recognize that it was always at least as much about empires as it was states.
Almost all of the emerging European states no sooner began to consolidate than they were off on campaigns of conquest and commerce to the farthest reaches of the globe… Ironically, it was the European empires that carried the idea of the sovereign territorial state to the rest of the world Empire has been the historically predominant form of order in world politics.
Looking at a time frame of several millennia, there was no global anarchic system until the European explorations and subsequent imperial and colonial ventures connected disparate regional systems, doing so approximately years ago. Prior to this emergence of a global-scope system, the pattern of world politics was characterized by regional systems. These regional systems were initially anarchic and marked by high levels of military competition.
But almost universally, they tended to consolidate into regional empires Thus it was empires—not anarchic state systems—that typically dominated the regional systems in all parts of the world Within this global pattern of regional empires, European political order was distinctly anomalous because it persisted so long as an anarchy. Similarly, Anthony Pagden , Eliot A. Cohen , Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper estimate that “empires have always been more frequent, more extensive political and social forms than tribal territories or nations have ever been.
Empires have played a long and critical part in human history Rome was evoked as a model of splendor and order into the Twentieth century and beyond… By comparison, the nation-state appears as a blip on the historical horizon, a state form that emerged recently from under imperial skies and whose hold on the world’s political imagination may well prove partial or transitory… The endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary, and inevitable Political scientist Hedley Bull wrote that “in the broad sweep of human history The history of interstate relations was largely that of successive great empires.
The pattern of international political change during the millennia of the pre-modern era has been described as an imperial cycle World politics was characterized by the rise and decline of powerful empires, each of which in turn unified and ordered its respective international system. The recurrent pattern in every civilization of which we have knowledge was for one state to unify the system under its imperial domination. The propensity toward universal empire was the principal feature of pre-modern politics.
Historian Michael Doyle who undertook an extensive research on empires extended the observation into the modern era:. Empires have been the key actors in world politics for millennia. They helped create the interdependent civilizations of all the continents Imperial control stretches through history, many say, to the present day. Empires are as old as history itself They have held the leading role ever since.
Expert on warfare Quincy Wright generalized on what he called “universal empire”—empire unifying all the contemporary system:. Balance of power systems have in the past tended, through the process of conquest of lesser states by greater states, towards reduction in the number of states involved, and towards less frequent but more devastating wars, until eventually a universal empire has been established through the conquest by one of all those remaining.
German Sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck finds that the macro-historic process of imperial expansion gave rise to global history in which the formations of universal empires were most significant stages.
The overall conclusion was that the balance of power was inherently unstable order and usually soon broke in favor of imperial order. When this [imperial] pattern of political history is found in the New World as well as in the Old World, it looks as if the pattern must be intrinsic to the political history of societies of the species we call civilizations, in whatever part of the world the specimens of this species occur. If this conclusion is warranted, it illuminates our understanding of civilization itself.
Most states systems have ended in universal empire, which has swallowed all the states of the system. The examples are so abundant that we must ask two questions: Is there any states system which has not led fairly directly to the establishment of a world empire? Does the evidence rather suggest that we should expect any states system to culminate in this way?
It might be argued that every state system can only maintain its existence on the balance of power , that the latter is inherently unstable, and that sooner or later its tensions and conflicts will be resolved into a monopoly of power. The earliest thinker to approach the phenomenon of universal empire from a theoretical point of view was Polybius :. In previous times events in the world occurred without impinging on one another Johann Gottlieb Fichte , having witnessed the battle at Jena in when Napoleon overwhelmed Prussia, described what he perceived as a deep historical trend:.
There is necessary tendency in every cultivated State to extend itself generally Such is the case in Ancient History As the States become stronger in themselves and cast off that [Papal] foreign power, the tendency towards a Universal Monarchy over the whole Christian World necessarily comes to light This tendency Whether clearly or not—it may be obscurely—yet has this tendency lain at the root of the undertakings of many States in Modern Times Although no individual Epoch may have contemplated this purpose, yet is this the spirit which runs through all these individual Epochs, and invisibly urges them onward.
Fichte’s later compatriot, Geographer Alexander von Humboldt , in the mid-Nineteenth century observed a macro-historic trend of imperial growth in both Hemispheres: “Men of great and strong minds, as well as whole nations, acted under influence of one idea, the purity of which was utterly unknown to them.
Friedrich Ratzel , writing at the same time, observed that the “drive toward the building of continually larger states continues throughout the entirety of history” and is active in the present.
His seventh law stated: “The general trend toward amalgamation transmits the tendency of territorial growth from state to state and increases the tendency in the process of transmission. Two other contemporaries— Kang Yu-wei and George Vacher de Lapouge —stressed that imperial expansion cannot indefinitely proceed on the definite surface of the globe and therefore world empire is imminent. Kang Yu-wei in believed that the imperial trend will culminate in the contest between Washington and Berlin [] and Vacher de Lapouge in estimated that the final contest will be between Russia and America in which America is likely to triumph.
This undoubtedly is the logical final stage in the geopolitical theory of evolution. The world is no longer large enough to harbor several self-contained powers The trend toward world domination or hegemony of a single power is but the ultimate consummation of a power-system engrafted upon an otherwise integrated world.
And the onrush of this trend may not come to rest until it has asserted itself throughout our planet The global order still seems to be going through its birth pangs With the last tempest barely over, a new one is gathering. The year after the War and in the first year of the nuclear age, Albert Einstein and British Philosopher Bertrand Russell , known as prominent pacifists, outlined for the near future a perspective of world empire world government established by force.
Einstein believed that, unless world government is established by agreement, an imperial world government would come by war or wars. Russian colleague of Russell and Neighbour, Georgy Fedotov , wrote in All empires are but stages on the way to the sole Empire which must swallow all others.
The only question is who will build it and on which foundations. Universal unity is the only alternative to annihilation. Unity by conference is utopian but unity by conquest by the strongest Power is not and probably the uncompleted in this War will be completed in the next.
Originally drafted as a secret study for the Office of Strategic Services the precursor of the CIA in [] and published as a book three years later, The Struggle for the World The historical stage for a world empire had already been set prior to and independently of the discovery of atomic weapons but these weapons make a world empire inevitable and imminent.
A world empire “is in fact the objective of the Third World War which, in its preliminary stages, has already began”. The issue of a world empire “will be decided, and in our day. In the course of the decision, both of the present antagonists may, it is true, be destroyed, but one of them must be. Today war has become an instrument of universal destruction, an instrument that destroys the victor and the vanquished At worst, victor and loser would be undistinguishable under the leveling impact of such a catastrophe At best, the destruction on one side would not be quite as great as on the other; the victor would be somewhat better off than the loser and would establish, with the aid of modern technology, his domination over the world.
The outcome of the Third World War This denouement was foreshadowed, not only by present facts, but by historical precedents, since, in the histories of other civilizations, the time of troubles had been apt to culminate in the delivery of a knock-out blow resulting in the establishment of a universal state The year this volume of A Study of History was published, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced ” a knock-out blow ” as an official doctrine, a detailed Plan was elaborated and Fortune magazine mapped the design.
Another term applied by the strategists was “Sunday punch”. A pupil of Toynbee, William McNeill , associated on the case of ancient China, which “put a quietus upon the disorders of the warring states by erecting an imperial bureaucratic structure The warring states of the Twentieth century seem headed for a similar resolution of their conflicts.
Chinese classic Sima Qian d. He did not use the term bacchanal but he coined on the occasion an associating word: “Gentlemen, you do not have a war plan. You have a wargasm! According to the circumscription theory of Robert Carneiro , “the more sharply circumscribed area, the more rapidly it will become politically unified. Correspondingly, these are the three most circumscribed civilizations in human history. The Empires of Egypt established by Narmer c.
German Sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck, criticizing the Western idea of progress, emphasized that China and Egypt remained at one particular stage of development for millennia. This stage was universal empire. The development of Egypt and China came to a halt once their empires “reached the limits of their natural habitat”.
Carneiro explored the Bronze Age civilizations. Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little and William Wohlforth researched the next three millennia, comparing eight civilizations. They conclude: The “rigidity of the borders” contributed importantly to hegemony in every concerned case.
The circumscription theory was stressed in the comparative studies of the Roman and Chinese Empires. The circumscribed Chinese Empire recovered from all falls, while the fall of Rome, by contrast, was fatal. The ancient Chinese system was relatively enclosed, whereas the European system began to expand its reach to the rest of the world from the onset of system formation… In addition, overseas provided outlet for territorial competition, thereby allowing international competition on the European continent to In the book, The Precarious Balance , on four centuries of the European power struggle, Ludwig Dehio explained the durability of the European states system by its overseas expansion: “Overseas expansion and the system of states were born at the same time; the vitality that burst the bounds of the Western world also destroyed its unity.
In the nineteenth century, he wrote during the Second World War, imperialist wars were waged against “primitive” peoples. Since , however, this has no longer been possible: “the situation has radically changed”. Now wars are between “imperial powers. For example, the more attention Russia, France and the United States paid to expanding into far-flung territories in imperial fashion, the less attention they paid to one another, and the more peaceful, in a sense, the world was.
But by the late nineteenth century, the consolidation of the great nation-states and empires of the West was consummated, and territorial gains could only be made at the expense of one another. Herz outlined one “chief function” of the overseas expansion and the impact of its end:.
Thus the openness of the world contributed to the consolidation of the territorial system. The end of the ‘world frontier’ and the resulting closedness of an interdependent world inevitably affected the system’s effectiveness. Some later commentators [ who? For some commentators, the passing of the Nineteenth century seemed destined to mark the end of this long era of European empire building. The unexplored and unclaimed “blank” spaces on the world map were rapidly diminishing The “closure” of the global imperial system implied The opportunity for any system to expand in size seems almost a necessary condition for it to remain balanced, at least over the long haul.
Far from being impossible or exceedingly improbable, systemic hegemony is likely under two conditions: “when the boundaries of the international system remain stable and no new major powers emerge from outside the system.
The geopolitical condition of “global closure” [] will remain to the end of history. Since “the contemporary international system is global, we can rule out the possibility that geographic expansion of the system will contribute to the emergence of a new balance of power, as it did so many times in the past. One of leading experts on world-system theory , Christopher Chase-Dunn , noted that the circumscription theory is applicable for the global system, since the global system is circumscribed.
Given “constant spatial parameters” of the global system, its unipolar structure is neither historically unusual nor theoretically surprising. Randall Schweller theorized that a “closed international system”, such as the global became a century ago, would reach ” entropy ” in a kind of thermodynamic law.
Once the state of entropy is reached, there is no going back. The initial conditions are lost forever. Stressing the curiosity of the fact, Schweller writes that since the moment the modern world became a closed system, the process has worked in only one direction: from many poles to two poles to one pole. Thus unipolarity might represent the entropy—stable and permanent loss of variation—in the global system. Chalmers Johnson argues that the US globe-girding network of hundreds of military bases already represents a global empire in its initial form:.
For a major power, prosecution of any war that is not a defense of the homeland usually requires overseas military bases for strategic reasons. After the war is over, it is tempting for the victor to retain such bases and easy to find reasons to do so.
Commonly, preparedness for a possible resumption of hostilities will be invoked. Simon Dalby associates the network of bases with the Roman imperial system:. That [military] presence literally builds the cultural logic of the garrison troops into the landscape, a permanent reminder of imperial control.
Kenneth Pomeranz and Harvard Historian Niall Ferguson share the above-cited views: “With American military bases in over countries, we have hardly seen the end of empire. Conventional maps of US military deployments understate the extent of America’s military reach.
A Defense Department map of the world, which shows the areas of responsibility of the five major regional commands , suggests that America’s sphere of military influence is now literally global … The regional combatant commanders— the ‘pro-consuls’ of this imperium —have responsibility for swaths of territory beyond the wildest imaginings of their Roman predecessors. Another Harvard Historian Charles S. Compared with which, the foundation of the Macedonian, the Roman and the British, sink into insignificance.
Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. The Roman Empire stretched further afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is … no comparison. Times Atlas of Empires numbers 70 empires in the world history.
Niall Ferguson lists numerous parallels between them and the United States. All dominant empires thought they were special. In , Historian Ludwig Dehio predicted global unification due to the circumscription of the global system, although he did not use this term. Being global, the system can neither expand nor be subject to external intrusion as the European states system had been for centuries:.
In all previous struggles for supremacy, attempts to unite the European peninsula in a single state have been condemned to failure primarily through the intrusion of new forces from outside the old Occident. The Occident was an open area.
But the globe was not, and, for that very reason, ultimately destined to be unified And this very process [of unification] was clearly reflected in both World Wars. Palmer had been sleeping occasionally on the roof of Mekas’s Film Maker’s Cooperative , which had an impressive view of the tower, only a few blocks away. He told Mekas that he thought an image of the floodlit building would make a good Warhol film, and Mekas passed the idea to Warhol.
In April , the upper 30 floors of the Empire State Building were floodlighted for the first time in connection with the opening of the New York World’s Fair in Queens.
As the only floodlit skyscraper in New York City, [6] the impact of the lighting was dramatic, with one person calling the tower’s illuminated crown “a chandelier suspended in the sky”. For a shooting venue, Warhol made arrangements to use an office belonging to the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building at 51st Street and 6th Avenue.
In contrast to Warhol’s earlier films, which had been shot with a Bolex camera limited to three minutes of shooting time, Empire was filmed on an Auricon camera that allowed for takes of around 33 minutes. Mekas’ article about the shooting printed in the Village Voice the next week described a lighthearted night of filmmaking, with Warhol discoursing on the Empire State Building as the most prominent site in New York, visited by celebrities and tourists alike, and various people in the room imploring Warhol to pan the camera.
After the film had been developed and printed, Warhol did not have funds to pay the processor, and Palmer arranged with his mother to make the payment.
In recognition of his role in conceiving, assisting with and paying for the film, Warhol listed Palmer as co-director. Reporting on the premiere in his Village Voice column, Mekas did not state how many people were in the seat theater, [16] but claimed that after the film had been running for ten minutes, 30 or 40 people surrounded him and another staff member demanding their money back, “threatening to solve the question of the new vision and the new cinema by breaking chairs on our heads”.
Apart from Mekas’ articles, the only other extended discussion of the film around the time of its release is in two articles in Film Culture , a journal of experimental cinema that Mekas and his brother published.
Gregory Battcock, a critic who was part of Warhol’s circle and appears in several of his films, [18] connected the film with other works by Warhol in terms of its focus on a subject that the viewer already generally knows. He argued this left space to emphasize other issues, particularly the physical medium of film, and the artistic use of long duration as a way of concentrating attention on these qualities. Battcock also observed that Empire had quickly become a classic of the avant garde and promised to have great if unpredictable influence on the development of film.
In , Warhol and his colleagues began producing events featuring rock band the Velvet Underground ; these went by several names, ultimately becoming best known as the ” Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Advertisements for the events held in the spring of in New York’s East Village mention Empire among other Warhol films to be screened. Warhol withdrew most of his film catalog including Empire from circulation in Film historian Callie Angell observed that the inaccessibility of the film until some years after Warhol’s death in , along with the assumption that a film such as Empire must be unwatchable, gave Empire a life mainly as an idea about a film that expressed Warhol’s outrageousness as an artist, with some accounts lengthening it to 10 or 24 hours.
Mechanical projectors capable of showing the film at 16 frames per second have become rarer since the s, with most current machines capable of a minimum speed of 18 frames per second; when projected at this rate, the film is about seven hours and 10 minutes long. Definition of empress. Recent Examples on the Web The empress —who was pregnant again soon after giving birth—struggled to see her own child. First Known Use of empress 12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1.
Learn More About empress. Time Traveler for empress The first known use of empress was in the 12th century See more words from the same century. Style: MLA. Kids Definition of empress. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Firefighter Judge Surgeon Acrobat. Test your visual vocabulary with our question challenge!
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Jun 08, · Harvest of Empire Summary. I n Harvest of Empire, Juan Gonzalez tells a sweeping history of Latinos in the United States, from the early colonial era to the present day. . 1: the wife or widow of an emperor. 2: a woman who is the sovereign or supreme monarch of an empire. Aug 19, · Empire, The geographical area represented by different states and nations ruled by an empire is referred to as an empire. The word has been derived from a Latin word .
