ABSTRACT
This chapter contends that the British imperial imaginary was shaped in important and fundamental ways by the great Asian empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Qing, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires all feature regularly in eighteenth-century British literature and writing more generally. Thus, to fully grasp certain aspects of British imperialism, we must further study the Asian empires of the period before British (or even European) hegemony.
