Shadow Empire: Imperial state formation in cross-cultural perspective

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• Thomas Barfield (Boston University)
• Friday 17 June 2022, 14:00-15:00
• https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkcuqhrzsoGNOJFK2zxhxu9p48SBSazYz-.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Katie Campbell.

Empires can be differentiated into two ideal types: endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous empires such as China, Rome and Persia emerged through a process of internal development, outward expansion from a core territory, and extracted the fiscal resources they required internally through systems of direct taxation or tribute payments. Exogenous (shadow) empires, by contrast, came into existence as products of their interactions (direct and indirect) with established endogenous empires and their persistence depended on such relationships, a form of secondary imperial state formation. Their political and military structures were designed to extract the economic resources on which they depended from external sources rather than internal ones. These included direct appropriation (raiding and piracy), favorable terms of trade, extortion of subsidies in exchange for peace, payments received for services rendered, or scavenging the ruins of collapsed endogenous empires. Although endogenous empires often dealt with exogenous empires as peer polities, the latter invariably lacked one or more of an endogenous empire’s characteristics such as population size and administrative complexity in steppe nomadic empires or amount of territory over which it exercised direct sovereignty in maritime empires. China’s relationship with a series of steppe nomadic empires is one of the best examples of an interaction between the two types that produced stable (if not always peaceful) relationships. If, however, an exogenous empire found itself the conquering territories that it had to rule directly it could transform itself into an endogenous empire. Such transformations produced supersized empires twice of three times the size of largest endogenous empires (Mongol Empire, Manchu Qing Empire, British Empire, Russian Empire)

Thomas Barfield is a social anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in northern Afghanistan in the mid-1970s and shorter periods of research in Xinjiang, China, and post-Soviet Central Asia. He is the author of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981), The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989), and Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991). After 2001 his research returned to Afghanistan, focusing on law, government organization, and economic development issues on which he has written extensively. In 2006 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship led to the publication of Afghanistan: A cultural and political history (2010), a book that received an outstanding title award for American Library Association in 2011. He has served as President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies since 2005. His forthcoming book, Shadow Empires, explores how distinctly different types of empires arose and sustained themselves as the dominant polities of Eurasia and North Africa for 2500 years before disappearing in the 20th century.

This talk is part of the King's Silk Roads series.

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• King's Silk Roads
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