ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a type of agency of huge interest to students of IR, that of the category of ‘empire’, one that is often used in an ahistoric, and certainly casual, way. Those who do not like empires use it as a epithet of disapproval, an insult even, as in ‘imperialist’, akin to that other epithet of dismissal, ‘fascist’. Others are determinedly nostalgic for a period when imperial ‘order’ seemed to reduce anarchy to a necessary minimum. There is a need to be more precise about what different schools of historical thought mean by the term and what is encompassed by it in different contexts, theoretical and historical, and these two needs are
at the core of the thinking that underlies this chapter. Inevitably some topics will be given undue weight in the eyes of some, and not enough in the eyes of others. We have tried to pick out some of the most written about by the generality of historians and students of IR, while also looking at a few (such as the Mongol Empire) that are not much examined. Again, the overall concern is to be suggestive and not comprehensive.
