(Dis)connecting Empires

Abstract

Chapter 1 drafts a roadmap for a critical connected history of empires in the early modern world. It asks where exactly ‘connections’ sit with regard to the global and the local. For an understanding of global connections, local contexts remain key. There, we can seek out the ‘cultural history of the political’ and examine the role played by communication and translation. The notion that unfolding European-Asia dialogues can be sliced up into rigid ‘phases’ (e.g. ‘commerce’ to ‘conquest’) is reductive. At the heart of all interactions is the possibility of violence. Violence is not a monopoly of states in the modern sense of the word, but of polities that entertain a complex relationship with space, through layered suzerainties translatable across Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. The ‘Imperial Theme’ identified by Frances Yates calls to be made to work across the globe. It could foment the formulation of a general theory of the imperial in the early modern world.