Some 'empires' gained the name without conquering a single acre
When Korea proclaimed itself an empire in 1897, it was not expanding; Japan was about to swallow it. The Central African Empire and the Mexican Empire likewise owed the label mainly to a ruler calling himself emperor. The word covers everything from Rome to such purely ceremonial titles.
In its core sense an empire is a set of territories ruled by a monarch or supreme central authority, with a metropole at the centre commanding peripheries whose peoples may hold different rights and be governed differently. The word comes from the Roman imperium, the right to command. Michael Doyle defines empire as effective control, formal or informal, of one society by another, and Rein Taagepera as any large sovereign entity whose parts are not sovereign. Josep Colomer contrasts empires, with shifting borders and overlapping jurisdictions, against states that seek fixed frontiers and uniform authority.
Theories have clashed. Lenin's influential account treated imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism and dated it from the 1760s, stripping away its political essence. Critics such as Kenneth Waltz objected that this made the cause younger than the effect, rather like explaining gravity by a seventeenth-century event. Most historians hold that empire predates European colonialism by millennia, and many now argue that theories remain too Eurocentric, shaped by a brief period of European dominance.
Empires grew in different ways. Edward Luttwak distinguishes territorial empires of direct conquest, which extract more tribute but tie armies down in garrisons, from hegemonic empires of indirect control, which take less but keep forces free. Land empires such as Macedonia and Byzantium spread outward from a frontier, while thalassocracies such as the Delian League and the British Empire linked scattered coasts and islands by sea power. Some came together by election, as the Holy Roman Empire did.
Durability was rare. Stephen Howe notes that apart from Rome, China and perhaps Egypt, early empires seldom outlived their founders and did little beyond collecting tribute. After the World Wars the word turned sharply negative, especially in German, where Reich evokes the Third Reich, and both postwar superpowers declared themselves enemies of empire. For the first time, states that proudly called themselves empires vanished from the map.
Source: Empire
