ABSTRACT
Human social interactions constitute the social world, formal institutions
order these relationships and the familiar habit of reification presents such
institutions as fixed, solid and thing-like; the exchange of social relation-
ships and institutions is inverted as the latter are taken to determine the
former. But the truth of the matter is that social relations are primary;
human social life is thoroughgoingly social; this is true on the micro and
macro scales. The empires of the modern world have been read in this rei-
fied fashion; empire has been presented as an institutional apparatus ordering a defined geographical territory; thereafter scholarly, political and
popular discourses of empire would unfold, producing Orientalist scholar-
ship,1 informal stereotypes, memoirs,2 collections3 and daydreams.4 But this
inverts reality: empire was accumulated piecemeal; it was acquired by war,
manoeuvre and elite-level accommodations; it was untidy;5 it was accumu-
lated around key cities; and the extent of territorial holdings was always in
flux and the reach of any formal colonial apparatus within the peoples
nominally controlled was always contested.6
