ABSTRACT
From Herodotus to Montesquieu and beyond, poets, historians, and philosophers have recurrently produced one of our culture's standard literary forms: the dirge for a fallen empire. Over the time that the world has known substantial states, after all, empires have been the dominant and largest state form, carnivorous dinosaurs that nothing but a terrestrial disaster, it seems, could eradicate. If empires are indeed disappearing, their demise raises questions just as knotty as the dinosaurs' sudden disappearance. Between the Roman and British juggernauts, Europe itself saw great Norman, Lithuanian-Polish, Swedish, Burgundian, and many other empires before consolidated states came to dominate the continent. An empire whose lines of communication and supply are expensively long is no doubt more vulnerable to either form of disruption. Thus recast, Alex Motyl's distinction helps identify a major dimension of imperial variation.
