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"Throughout human history, empires have been far more constant and widespread, and the source of far more anguished political speculation, than nation states have ever been. But despite the long history of debate and the recent resurgence of interest in empires and imperialism, no one seems very clear as to what exactly an empire is. The Burdens of Empire strives to offer not only a definition but also a working description. This book examines how empires were conceived by those who ruled them and lived under them; it looks at the relations, real or imagined, between the imperial metropolis (when one existed) and its outlying provinces or colonies; and it asks how the laws that governed the various parts and various ethnic groups, of which all empires were made, were conceived and interpreted. Anthony Pagden argues that the evolution of the modern concept of the relationship between states, and in particular the modern conception of international law, cannot be understood apart from the long history of European empire building"--

Despite the long history of debate and the recent resurgence of interest in empires and imperialism, no one seems very clear as to what exactly an empire is. The Burdens of Empire strives to offer not only a definition but also a working description. This book examines how empires were conceived by those who ruled them and lived under them; it looks at the relations, real or imagined, between the imperial metropolis (when one existed) and its outlying provinces or colonies; and it asks how the laws that governed the various parts and various ethnic groups, of which all empires were made, were conceived and interpreted. Anthony Pagden argues that the evolution of the modern concept of the relationship between states, and in particular the modern conception of international law, cannot be understood apart from the long history of European empire building

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- General Editor's Preface -- Introduction -- Part I -- General and Theoretical -- 1 The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oneiric Horizon -- 2 The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe -- 3 Aboriginal Property and Western Theory: Recovering a Middle Ground -- 4 New Worlds and Renaissance Ethnology -- 5 The Methodising of Travel in the 16th Century: A Tale of Three Cities -- 6 The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man -- 7 Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance -- 8 Image de l'autre et image de soi-même dans le discourse ethnologique au XVIIIe siècle -- 9 La Connaissance des autres: théories et pratiques -- Asia -- 10 Asia in the Eyes of Europe: The Seventeenth Century -- 11 Christian and Chinese Visions of the World in the Seventeenth Century -- 12 Creating an Image of Europe for China: Aleni's Hsi-fang ta-wen

"The rise and fall of modern colonial empires have had a lasting impact on the development of European political theory and notions of national identity. This book is the first to compare theories of empire as they emerged in, and helped to define, the great colonial powers Spain, Britain and France." "Anthony Pagden describes how the rulers of the three countries adopted the claim of the Roman Emperor Antoninus to be 'Lord of all the World'. Examining the arguments used to legitimate the seizure of Aboriginal lands and subjugation of Aboriginal Peoples, he shows that each country came to develop identities - and the political languages in which to express them - that were sometimes radically different. Until the early eighteenth century, Spanish theories of empire stressed the importance of evangelization and military glory. These arguments were challenged by the French and British, however, who increasingly justified empire building by invoking the profit to be gained from trade and agriculture. By the late eighteenth century, the major thinkers in all three countries, and increasingly the colonies themselves, came to see their empires as disastrous experiments in human expansion, costly, over-extended, and based on demoralizing forms of brutality and servitude. Pagden concludes by looking at the ways in which this hostility to empire was transformed into a cosmopolitan ideal that sought to replace all world empires by federations of equal and independent states."--Jacket