Empires

Framsida
Cornell University Press, 1986 - 407 sidor

Although empires have shaped the political development of virtually all the states of the modern world, "imperialism" has not figured largely in the mainstream of scholarly literature. This book seeks to account for the imperial phenomenon and to establish its importance as a subject in the study of the theory of world politics. Michael Doyle believes that empires can best be defined as relationships of effective political control imposed by some political societies--those called metropoles--on other political societies--called peripheries. To build an explanation of the birth, life, and death of empires, he starts with an overview and critique of the leading theories of imperialism. Supplementing theoretical analysis with historical description, he considers episodes from the life cycles of empires from the classical and modern world, concentrating on the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa. He describes in detail the slow entanglement of the peripheral societies on the Nile and the Niger with metropolitan power, the survival of independent Ethiopia, Bismarck's manipulation of imperial diplomacy for European ends, the race for imperial possession in the 1880s, and the rapid setting of the imperial sun. Combining a sensitivity to historical detail with a judicious search for general patterns, Empires will engage the attention of social scientists in many disciplines.

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Innehåll

Preface
11
Imperialism and Empire
19
HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF EMPIRES
49
Rome
82
Hypotheses
123
Tribal Peripheries and Formal Empire
162
Patrimonial Society
198
The International System and NineteenthCentury
232
Greater Britain
257
France Germany and Spain
306
The Politics of NineteenthCentury Imperialism
339
The End of Empire?
353
Bibliography
373
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Om författaren (1986)

Michael W. Doyle is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University.

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