SUMMARY:

The article is the Russian translation of introduction in the forthcoming book “Empire and the Politics of Difference in World History” (the first synthetic account of the long-lasting imperial history in a textbook format) by two leading modern scholars of empires and colonialism, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. Their analysis does not follow the conventional narrative that inexorably leads from empire to nation-state. They focus instead on the multiple, intertwined, and uncertain historical pathways of how empires have emerged, interacted, and shaped political imagination and structures over a long sweep of time – from ancient Rome and China to the present. The introduction explains their reasons for selecting certain imperial settings for a close analysis, and the methodological approach which focuses not upon distinctions between maritime and continental empires, among empires based on colonies of settlers, commerce, or on plantation agriculture, but on the different repertoires of power imagined and produced by imperial rulers and subjects, on both land and sea, and in shifting circumstances. The chronological and geographical perspective of this synthetic account of imperial history extends back past the last two hundred years and prior to conceptions of “the West.”
The article is followed by the list of selected suggested readings. The list contains works that the authors found particularly helpful in writing the book. It is not an exhaustive bibliography, but a set of selected readings listed under the chapter headings.