ABSTRACT
When empires come crashing down, they leave hunks of institutional wreckage scattered across the landscape: pieces of bureaucracies, military units, economic networks, administrative districts, as well as demographic and cultural patterns that bear the marks of the imperial past.1 This detritus of empire constitutes the building blocks of the new political arrangements that are constructed out of the rubble. From these are formed not only new states and nations, but also a whole new system of international and transnational relations among these remnants.
