Conclusion

Draw together the book’s key themes, the conclusion highlights how, by the end of the seventeenth century, England’s overseas companies had adapted various models of religious governance to stamp their authority over peoples and faiths across the globe, thereby securing their governmental autonomy. However, as a new century approached, domestic religious and political authorities in England took steps to centralise the role of religion, evangelism and the overseas governance. Consequently, this changed the character of English imperial expansion and the relationship between English corporate governance and religion forever.

Yau̯nā and Sakā: Identity Constructions at the Margins of the Achaemenid Empire

The Achaemenid Empire can be reasonably considered an “empire of peoples” from both an ideological and structural perspective. It included all the lands of the peoples of the world and all people helped to maintain imperial order and prosperity. In reality, the empire had boundaries and there were peoples who lived near and beyond them. Under King Darius I, groups of people were annexed at the northeastern and northwestern margins of the imperial territory, thus entering the imperial space and consequently also the Achaemenid documents. The border peoples of the Yau̯nā and Sakā were the only peoples of the empire to be differentiated through epithets, which were added to their collective names in the texts. This shows a unique process of group identity constructions by the authorities on the edges of the imperial space. The analysis of the system of epithets used to indicate the Yau̯nā and Sakā conducted in this paper allows us to draw some conclusions on the mechanisms and reasons behind these specific forms of identity constructions at the margins. Moreover, it shows how this process reflected the main directions of imperial expansion under the first Achaemenids.

Introduction

The introduction offers an overview of the book’s themes, written in a way that is accessible to historians and readers from outside the discipline. The chapter suggests that ‘corruption’ and ‘office’ were both evolving terms over the period covered by the book. ‘Corruption’ was initially a term most frequently used in a religious context, applied to sin and Catholicism, but increasingly took on a more important political, legal, and economic definition. ‘Office’ also shifted, from something considered as a piece of private property with extensive personal privileges and responsible primarily to the monarch to something that was much more publicly accountable with restricted and defined forms of enrichment. Neither ‘corruption’ nor ‘office’ were unchanging universals and their disputed definition and ambiguous meaning over time and place lie at the heart of this study. The introduction sets this process in the context of state formation, imperial expansion, and corporate governance.

Empire, nationalism and christianity

This paper studies in parallel the history of empire and the development of universals. It uses as its preliminary orientation the work of Eric Voegelin who argued that universals develop in history alongside and through universalising empires. We find this basic contention highly credible as it is empires that force us to develop cognitive approaches that encompass both colonised and coloniser in any subsequent social structure. So conceived, the paper then argues that empires are synonymous with human history as such and that even those entities (such a Greek city states) which are eulogised for escaping this logic are on examination no less imperial than the empires they oppose. The paper then argues that the development of universals is not a byproduct of empire but rather that it drives imperial expansion in the first place. It seeks to argue that ideation is the casual factor in human history, social structures and behaviour. It argues contra thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, there is no biological foundation for the qualitative distinctions of civilisation, rather the paper contends that the origin of civilisation lies in human conceptuality not human biology, locality or indeed any other material force impinging on life. So configured, the paper then concludes that the primary political question lies in bringing together the question of the good with empire – a process most advanced in human history by Christianity.

MATERIAL TURNS IN BRITISH HISTORY: IV. EMPIRE IN INDIA, CANCEL CULTURES AND THE COUNTRY HOUSE

ABSTRACTThis lecture seeks to historicise the so-called cancel culture associated with the ‘culture wars’ waged in Britain in c. 2020. Focusing on empire and on the domestic, British impacts of Georgian-era imperial material cultures, it argues that dominant proponents of these ‘culture wars’ in the public sphere fundamentally distort the British pasts they vociferously claim to preserve and defend. By failing to acknowledge the extent to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British men and women themselves contested imperial expansion under the aegis of the East India Company – and decried its impact on British material culture, including iconic stately homes – twenty-first-century exponents of culture wars who rail against the present-day rise of histories of race and empire in the heritage sector themselves erase key layers of British experience. In so doing, they impoverish public understanding of the past.

Guns in the Hills: Firearms Circulation along the North-East Frontier of British India, 1860s–1910s

This article seeks to examine the significance of firearms in the making of the frontier and the ways in which societies on the North-East Frontier of British India encountered and adapted firearms between the 1860s and 1910s. It will study the complex ways in which the entry of firearms was mediated and galvanised by a range of processes such as imperial expansion, the intrusion of capital, access to resources, the role of violence, and the drawing of new borders. In turn, the circulation and diffusion of firearms also engendered a range of other practices and experiences among the societies on the frontier. Moving along various land and river routes, a range of individuals and traders were involved in circulating arms and ammunition into the imperial margins. They, in turn, linked the frontier geographies to markets, ports, and other larger oceanic networks. A focus on the flow of firearms as such illustrates a web of interconnections that straddled multiple scales and relations. As firearms circulated and gradually made their way into the periphery, various measures were initiated by the colonial state, such as enforcing prohibitive laws and instituting surveillance structures to control and block the flow of firearms along the North-East Frontier. This article examines some of these complex processes, dynamics, and experiences that ensued through the circulation and diffusion of firearms on the North-East Frontier of British India.

Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires: The Ottoman Empire, Ming Dynasty, and Global Age of Explorations

This article studies two sixteenth-century Asian texts: Khitay namah, a Persian travelogue about the Ming dynasty written by the Muslim merchant Ali Akbar and presented to the Ottoman sultan, and Xiyu, an illustrated Chinese geographical treatise with detailed travel itinerary from China to Istanbul by the Ming scholar-official Ma Li. In addition to demonstrating the breadth of Ottoman and Chinese knowledge about each other in the global Age of Exploration, these two books, written respectively for the monarchs of the self-proclaimed Islamic and Chinese universal empires, reflect the Ottoman and Chinese imperial ideologies in an era when major world powers aggressively vied for larger territories and broader international influence. Both the Ottoman and Chinese authors recast the foreign Other as the familiar Self – Ali Akbar constructed an Islamized China while Ma Li depicted a Sinicized Ottoman world – to justify their countries’ claims to universal sovereignty and plans for imperial expansion. Like many contemporary European colonial writers, Ali Akbar’s and Ma Li’s exploration of foreign societies, their literary glorification of their own culture’s supremacy, and their imposition of their own cultural thinking on foreign lands all served their countries’ colonial enterprise in the global Age of Exploration.

Islands of Settlement

North Atlantic islands played a key role in early English imperial expansion as critical sites of precedent and experimentation. From John Cabot’s first landing in 1497, Newfoundland gave England both a claim to America and a base for an enormously profitable fishery. Further south, and following its initial accidental English occupation in 1609, Bermuda became England’s first fully settled overseas colony. Furthermore, and crucially, it provided a template for colonial success that was widely copied throughout the Caribbean. New England’s Nantucket Island offers a third maritime-oriented imperial site of innovation as a uniquely successful seventeenth-century whaling base. This chapter highlights the contributions these different North Atlantic islands made in British imperial expansion and their changing roles across time, especially in the wake of the American Revolution.