Event details

The definition of “empire” presupposes a relationship between a dominant core and peripheries. This talk turns the metropole into a conceptual and empirical puzzle, asking why, what, how and when questions about imperial and post-imperial cores (focusing mostly on the how questions). Do empires have to have a metropole? Why? How and when does a core form and a boundary emerge between it and a periphery? How is that boundary (spatial and symbolic) contested and when does it move? What are the long-term legacies of metropole boundary work? The talk will reference a range of historical cases of modern imperial overland and overseas expansion and contraction (18th-21st centuries) — including the United States, French, British, Japanese, Ottoman, Russian, and Chinese empires — in this attempt to lay the conceptual groundwork for a comparative and historical sociology of imperial metropoles.