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SUMMARY:Shadow Empire: Imperial state formation in cross-cultural perspect
 ive - Thomas Barfield (Boston University)
DTSTART:20220617T130000Z
DTEND:20220617T140000Z
UID:TALK175466@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Katie Campbell
DESCRIPTION:Empires can be differentiated into two ideal types: endogenous
  and exogenous. Endogenous empires such as China\, Rome and Persia emerged
  through a process of internal development\, outward expansion from a core
  territory\, and extracted the fiscal resources they required internally t
 hrough systems of direct taxation or tribute payments. Exogenous (shadow) 
 empires\, by contrast\, came into existence as products of their interacti
 ons (direct and indirect) with established endogenous empires and their pe
 rsistence depended on such relationships\, a form of secondary imperial st
 ate formation. Their political and military structures were designed to ex
 tract the economic resources on which they depended from external sources 
 rather than internal ones. These included direct appropriation (raiding an
 d piracy)\, favorable terms of trade\, extortion of subsidies in exchange 
 for peace\, payments received for services rendered\, or scavenging the ru
 ins of collapsed endogenous empires. Although endogenous empires often dea
 lt with exogenous empires as peer polities\, the latter invariably lacked 
 one or more of an endogenous empire’s characteristics such as population
  size and administrative complexity in steppe nomadic empires or amount of
  territory over which it exercised direct sovereignty in maritime empires.
  China’s relationship with a series of steppe nomadic empires is one of 
 the best examples of an interaction between the two types that produced st
 able (if not always peaceful) relationships. If\, however\, an exogenous e
 mpire found itself the conquering territories that it had to rule directly
  it could transform itself into an endogenous empire. Such transformations
  produced supersized empires twice of three times the size of largest endo
 genous empires (Mongol Empire\, Manchu Qing Empire\, British Empire\, Russ
 ian Empire)\n\n \n\nThomas Barfield is a social anthropologist who conduct
 ed extensive ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in northern Afgh
 anistan in the mid-1970s and shorter periods of research in Xinjiang\, Chi
 na\, and post-Soviet Central Asia. He is the author of The Central Asian A
 rabs of Afghanistan (1981)\, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and Ch
 ina (1989)\, and Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture
  (1991). After 2001 his research returned to Afghanistan\, focusing on law
 \, government organization\, and economic development issues on which he h
 as written extensively. In 2006 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship led
  to the publication of Afghanistan: A cultural and political history (2010
 )\, a book that received an outstanding title award for American Library A
 ssociation in 2011.  He has served as President of the American Institute 
 for Afghanistan Studies since 2005.  His forthcoming book\, Shadow Empires
 \, explores how distinctly different types of empires arose and sustained 
 themselves as the dominant polities of Eurasia and North Africa for 2500 y
 ears before disappearing in the 20th century.
LOCATION:https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkcuqhrzsoGNOJFK2zxhxu
 9p48SBSazYz-
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