Chapter 1 takes the long view of regional development in Mexico’s Gulf Coast lowlands, from prehistory through Veracruz’s foundation in 1519 and its refounding as Nueva Veracruz in 1599. It examines geography, environment, and how human societies mediated coastal spaces before the seventeenth century. It culminates with Veracruz’s 1599 relocation, which followed an extended battle between powerful merchants in Mexico City, Seville, and Puebla and Veracruz’s own cabildo. While metropolitan merchants and administrators wanted to locate the city closer to port facilities at San Juan de Ulúa, local officials resisted the move, arguing the coastal climate was “unfit for the sustenance of life” and proposing to relocate it further into the mainland interior. By the end of the sixteenth century, metropolitan forces had won out, moving Veracruz closer to the port and securing the primacy of coastal climates and maritime commerce and migration in its social and cultural development in the seventeenth century.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

This 1937 essay was written after Du Bois’s 1936 voyage around the world, when he visited both Japan and Japanese-occupied Manchuria, hosted in both places by Japanese officials. The essay considers Japan’s success in having “copied” European capitalist society and developed its education, industry, and technology. Just as Japan “saved the world from slavery to Europe” in the nineteenth century, it is called in the twentieth to save the world from “slavery to capital” by joining forces with the other non-European nations to resist European domination. Japan seized Manchuria knowing that if it did not European states soon would, but the British have fomented resistance to Japan in China. Shut out of other European alliances, Japan allied with fascist Germany and Japan; this alliance cements her enmity with Russia. Japan’s danger is that of simply becoming another capitalist stronghold; its hope lies in its history of leading resistance to European imperialism.

Chapter 1, “The Politics of Shang Ritual under the Zhou” explores how the early Zhou repurposed ancestral-ritual techniques of Shang provenance to support their quest for legitimacy and lend focus to their efforts at building a new, shared identity.

Chapter 6 presents data about the first members of our own species, Homo sapiens, and how they lived and shared the planet with at least five other species of Homo. It presents the cultural succession of the Upper Paleolithic and the repercussions that our species had on the planet and other life forms as members spread out into virgin territories of the world.

This chapter concerns the life-histories of lingua francas, languages adopted for communication among speakers who do not otherwise share a language. It recognizes four principal motives for developing a lingua franca: commerce, conquest, religious conversion, and cultural attraction. A lingua franca depends for its survival on the continuation in force of one or other of these motives, unless some user population adopts it as a mother-tongue, passing it on in the home, or dropping it for one purpose only to take it up afresh for another: this is Regeneration. Other paths, for decline of a lingua franca, include Ruin or Resignation, if the user community dissolves, and Relegation, if the use of the language is deliberately banned. In this framework, the careers of major languages (excluding European empires) are narrated: Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek in West Asia; Greek (again) and Latin in the Mediterranean and Europe; the sprouting and interaction of languages before European conquests in the Americas, and in Africa; Sanskrit, Persian, and later Malay in Southeast Asia, the interplay of Putonghua with other Chinese dialects across East Asia; and the rise of Hindi-Urdu in South Asia.

Chapter 2 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the crucial role of cities in building empires, defined as states that conquer and rule multiple cities and their hinterlands. It also argues that empires decisively influenced the size and shape of cities. While it acknowledges that camp- and village-dwelling peoples could conquer large empires, it argues that imperial regimes always required capital cities to administer empires over long periods. It illustrates these arguments with references to cities throughout the world: imperial capitals, administrative and monumental structures of many kinds, city walls, provincial capitals, armies and army camps, roads, canals, settler cities, and the infrastructure of imperial borders, including the Great Wall of China and the limes of the Roman Empire.

As conquest accelerated, the French military commanders rewarded Mademba’s loyalty by appointing him to the political bureau and awarding him with appointments to the Legion of Honor, even as he continued to direct the work on telegraph construction. Mademba led African auxiliaries in military engagements to assist the French military and led auxiliaries in quashing African resistance to French conquest. With the capture of Segu in 1890, Colonel Archinard instituted his model of a revived African kingdom in the form of a protectorate through the appointment of Mari Jara as ruler of Segu. Within a few weeks, the French executed Mari Jara, which resulted in another wave of African rebellions. Archinard revised his model of indirect rule to appoint only trusted and loyal Africans to rulership positions, regardless of their legitimate claims to those positions. In 1890, he appointed Bojan as ruler of Segu and in 1891, he appointed Mademba ruler of the États of Sansanding and Dependencies, a new kingdom that had not existed before.

This chapter identifies the emergence of an Enlightenment critique of empire in Ireland. This laid the intellectual foundations for the Union of 1801 by connecting the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation. For thinkers such as Josiah Tucker and David Hume, the suppression of Irish commerce was striking evidence of how British policy carried ‘jealousy of trade’ to extremes that jeopardised the security of the empire. For Charles O’Connor, Edmund Burke, Arthur Young, and Adam Smith, meanwhile, the Penal Laws had ruined Ireland’s prospects for ‘improvement’ by alienating the Irish majority from property and the state. It was Smith who linked these two problematics together, creating a new kind of argument for a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.

This chapter seeks to provide an explanation for the earliest Insular cult of St Katherine of Alexandria, which grew in popularity despite the absence of primary relics or an Insular pilgrimage site. Knowledge of St Katherine likely arrived in England prior to 1066, but her cult achieved widespread appeal following the Norman Conquest. This chapter proposes that this appeal was rooted in the congruencies between aspects of St Katherine’s character, which can be conceived of as generally ‘civilised’, and descriptions of ‘Englishness’ that rested on a conception of a cultural, rather than biological, national community. These depictions are evident in the circulating historical chronicles written during the twelfth century, which amalgamated English and Norman identities and differentiated the ‘English’ nation from its ‘barbarous’ neighbours. These same characteristics find expression in the vita of St Katherine and were highlighted liturgically, through music and text, testifying to their valence.

The period of exploration of North America by various European nations manifested an intense moment of cultural, political, economic, and environmental change. Often marked by violence, Europeans failed to understand the gendered practices of the Indigenous population, which often liberated women from the confines of marriage and allowed for a spectrum of sexual identities and practices. European explorers, endowed with a sense of masculine dominance, given their role as captains or brave soldiers, confronted not only a vastly different gendered terrain and site of sexual fluidity but their own masculinity struggles with Indigenous men. As Europeans imposed religious mores and situated European customs as civilized and superior, explorers and settlers disrupted Native identities and power structures. This chapter asserts that the various conflicts and challenges encountered within the landscape of the New World can and should be considered through the lens of eroticization, sexuality, and gender. Often these contests of power disadvantaged women and sexualities that failed to conform to Christianity. These literal and psychological sites of struggle laid the foundation for future colonization and dramatically impacted and altered understandings of the colonial experiment.

This chapter examines the English East India Company’s (EIC’s) rise to dominance in South Asia from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The EIC followed Asian precedents by forging its empire through reliance on strategies of define and conquer and define and rule. Company officials first curated indigenous identities to mobilize a uniquely competitive multicultural conquest coalition. They then stabilized their rule through a diversity regime of ecumenical incorporation, which reified religious difference as the primary cleavage on which colonial divide and rule logics would rest. The chapter proceeds in six sections. The first charts the onset of competitive state-building in South Asia following the Mughal Empire’s decline. The second section recounts the EIC’s expansion, before critiquing existing explanations for this. The third to fifth sections advance my substantive explanation for the rise of the ‘Company Raj’. The discussion conforms to the template of emergence, institutionalization, legitimization and consolidation established earlier to explain the rise of the Mughals and the Manchus. The sixth section sums up the chapter’s findings and teases out its broader implications.

This chapter examines the rise of the Mughal and Qing empires, which together forged a template for rule that would define Asian and Western approaches to empire in the Old World down to the twentieth century. Mughal and Manchu conquest elites succeeded in establishing and maintaining rule over vastly more prosperous, populous and culturally sophisticated subject populations during the early modern era. They did so through strategies of define and conquer and define and rule, entailing the extensive customization and repurposing of indigenous normative and institutional resources for imperial ends. Imperial elites creatively remixed these resources, both to create local constituencies in favour of ‘barbarian’ rule, and also to generate the coercive reserves of hard power needed to defend their empires from internal and external hard challenges. Finally, rulers in both empires then stabilized their power through the establishment of distinct diversity regimes, which institutionalized existing practices of define and rule, while blocking the potential rise of anti-imperial coalitions.

This chapter presents the book’s research design and central argument. I begin by considering accounts of the ‘rise of the West’ that explain Western expansion through reference to European exceptionalism, global logics of uneven and combined development, or the facilitating role of local networks and patterns of collective identity in enabling colonial conquest. Having critiqued these accounts, I then advocate an alternative Eurasia-centric approach that stresses the vital parallels and interconnections between ‘barbarian’ Mughal, British and Manchu conquests in early modern South and East Asia. A combination of military, economic, cultural and administrative developments across Eurasia made it easier for ‘barbarians’ to conquer and preserve empires on a subcontinental scale. After 1500, formerly stigmatized outsiders from Eurasia’s steppe, sea and forest frontiers capitalized on these opportunities to carve out the empires that eventually crystallized into the modern post-imperial states of India and China. These empires emerged from ‘barbarian’ efforts to overcome similar challenges, and yielded strikingly similar incorporative ideologies and models of imperial governance.

This chapter explains the Mughal and Qing empires’ diverging fates over the eighteenth century, owing to variations in their ability to accommodate cultural diversity over the course of territorial expansion. The Mughal Empire failed to extend its regime of syncretic incorporation as it expanded into the Deccan, prefiguring imperial overstretch, a legitimation crisis and subsequent decline. Conversely, the Manchus extended their diversity regime of segregated incorporation as they conquered vast new territories on the Eurasian steppe. The resulting divergence opened up opportunities for the East India Company’s later rise in India, even while continued Manchu dynamism limited Western expansion in mainland East Asia. The chapter proceeds as follows. The first section sketches the Mughal Empire’s fall, canvassing existing explanations for its decline, before advancing an alternative account in the second section. The third and fourth sections then respectively narrate and explain the Manchu Empire’s further expansion during the eighteenth century. The fifth section reviews the legacies of these empires’ divergent trajectories in shaping their respective regions’ subsequent evolution.

This chapter examines the Eurasian Transformation as a catalyst for the rise of the Asian and Western empires that together reshaped Asia during the early modern period. Specifically, I aim to understand how the Eurasian Transformation made it possible for ‘barbarians’ to establish primacy over pre-existing international systems in South and East Asia, despite their limited numbers and stigmatised status. I begin by offering a synoptic overview of Eurasia at c. 1500. I next introduce the Eurasian Transformation, a unique conjunction of military, economic, cultural and administrative macro-processes that together made new forms of empire-building possible from this time on. I conclude by considering the Eurasian Transformation’s diverse impacts on Eurasia’s sedentary power centres, and on the liminal ‘barbarian’ actors populating Eurasia’s land and sea frontiers.

The chapter traces the rise from the distant pre-contact past of the modified lake environment through the Post-Classic Period when the Native American peoples founded their altepetl, or city-states, until their conquest first by the Aztec Triple Alliance and then by Spaniards. The chapter covers the Spanish--Mexica War and demonstrates that it had vital a hydraulic dimension. While the siege of Tenochtitlan has long been understood as a naval battle, the analysis presented here follows the precedent of the New Conquest History in underscoring the contributions of Nahuas to the outcome of the conflict, particularly when it came to specialist knowledge of the Basin of Mexico’s hydrology and strategic efforts to defeat the enemies by turning the engineering works against them. The chapter concludes by tracing continuities into the mid-sixteenth century, especially with the survival of the altepetl and its foundation for colonial-era jurisdictions, including that of the cabildo, or town council, which Nahuas readily adopted and made their own. In so doing, they preserved control over the water management system even as they adapted to new colonial realities.