Discernable across the flux of history is a persistent trend: the proclivity of human groups to establish large-scale and durable political formations that rule over subject populations of different ethnicities, religions and cultures – in short, to build empires. On this narrow point, scholars appear to have achieved consensus. But having gained power, usually through violent conquest, how did empires rule over different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? Or to recalibrate the question with the particular concerns of the present volume in mind: how did relatively small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Dane Kennedy has aptly described this as ‘one of the most persistent conundrums to arise from the study of Western Imperialism’. Indeed, we can amplify his observation: this administrative sleight of hand is a conundrum of world history. It is also a matter with an urgent contemporary resonance. The past decade has witnessed a surge of work on the subject of empire inspired by what might be termed the ‘imperial turn’ in contemporary world affairs. Much of this literature swirls around a deceptively simple question: ‘what is an empire?’ Any satisfactory answer must take account of political structures and forms of governance – of how real empires actually ran. This book represents a collaborative effort to advance our understanding of these issues by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy in historical empires across a broad canvas, from ancient Rome to the dismantling of European empires after World War II.

Such chronological and geographical scope, not to mention the range of disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical dispositions represented among our authors, is unusual in a book of this sort. It is quite deliberate. We explicitly reject the notion that an unbridgeable chasm separates historicist and generalist positions, ‘splitters’ and ‘lumpers’. Our methodological point of departure is that a diachronic approach to the history of empires is mutually enriching for all the sub-disciplines involved, and that it is possible to engage in long-range comparison while attending closely to geographical specificity, human agency and change over time.

On 30 June 1922, an explosion and fire destroyed the records treasury of the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI), situated at the western end of the Four Courts complex that lies on the north quays of the River Liffey in Dublin. Established by an act of the Westminster parliament in 1867, the PROI was a state-of-the-art archival facility for the preservation of the public records and state papers of English government in Ireland. Its holdings stretched back some seven hundred years to the early decades of the thirteenth century, when Ireland first became a dominion of the English crown. Following the signing and ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, control of the PROI was transferred to the provisional government of the southern twenty-six counties of Ireland on 1 April 1922. A fortnight later, on 14 April 1922, ‘irregular’ forces opposed to the treaty occupied the Four Courts, including the PROI buildings. After temporizing for more than two months, the Irish National Army began to bombard the Four Courts in the early morning of 28 June, employing eighteen-pounder guns borrowed from British forces. Ireland had slipped into a bitter civil war. The exact sequence of events that led to the catastrophic explosion remains contested. What is clear is that – despite the pleas of a few learned scholars with impeccable Irish nationalist credentials – neither pro- nor anti-treaty forces demonstrated much concern in practice for the safeguard of the accumulated records of English (later British) colonial rule in Ireland. The anti-treaty forces had heavily mined the records treasury. A double blast on 30 June 1922 caused a near-total archival cataclysm. The intense blaze that raged afterwards destroyed even those records stored in protective metal casings. As a report of the deputy keeper of the public records in Ireland later lamented: ‘The fire left little but tangled iron work, blocks of masonry, mason rubbish and the charred fragments and ashes of what had once been Public Records.’

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History finds its oblique beginnings in this post-colonial Irish bonfire.

J. J. Tawney's seemingly dismissive statement about administration in British Africa, which he made to a young academic in 1975, was actually quite telling. In offering this blunt advice, Tawney – a former member of the colonial civil service – acknowledged that imperial systems of rule were fundamentally different from the bureaucratic institutions of Western nation states, and he made it clear that the men who ran British Africa did not see themselves as bureaucrats. Max Weber's ideal-type bureaucracy was depersonalized, rational and ordered precisely by regulation. Social scientists often list this kind of efficient bureaucracy as a central characteristic of ‘modernity’, but the administrative systems that the architects of the ‘new’ empires of the 1880s used to govern their African territories met few of Weber's criteria. Until World War II, the primary inspiration for British systems of imperial rule in Africa were the chartered companies of the early modern era, not the Western nation state. Most significantly, the post-war Labour government's attempt to revitalize Britain's African empire by making it more rational and efficient actually accelerated its unexpectedly rapid demise a decade later.

Empire, by strict definition, was the formal, permanent and authoritarian rule of one group of people over another. In hindsight, the great empires of the past appeared omnipotent and stable because they were long lived, but they actually lacked the capacity to govern directly at the local level. This meant that conquerors needed allies from subject populations to assert authority and extract revenue. They had to share power to exert power. Contrary to Weber, bureaucratic inefficiency was thus a virtue in that it made imperial rule more stable by forcing foreign rulers to temper their demands for tribute and labour.

The system of indirect rule, which British administrators developed in India, was an inexpensive pragmatic innovation that allowed a small handful of field officers to govern colonial majorities by enlisting some of them in their own subjugation.