This special issue deals with the phenomenon of the emergence of radical violence in what might be called ‘shatter zones’ of empires after the end of the First World War. It argues that the emergence of violence was due to the absence of functioning state control and facilitated by the effects of experiencing mass violence during the First World War. In the multi-ethnic regions of the former em...

1. Western Misinterpretations 1.1. Max Weber's Prebendal Bureaucracy 1.2. Karl Marx's Asiatic Mode of Production 1.3. Eisenstadt's Bureaucratic Empires 2. Comparisons: India and China 3. Indian and Chinese Evolution: Critical Comparisons 4. Confucian Brahmins and Kautilyan Mandarins 5. The European Evolution 5.1. The Roman Empire 5.2. Feudalism and the Catholic Church 5.3. Societal Evolution: F...

We study the empire colouring problem (as defined by Percy Heawood in 1890) for maps whose dual planar graph is a tree, with empires formed by exactly r countries. We prove that, for each fixed r > 1, with probability approaching one as the size of the graph grows to infinity, the minimum number of colours for which a feasible solution exists takes one of seven possible values.

Depuis sa naissance officielle aux États-Unis dans les années 1970, l’histoire environnementale s’est développée en s’intéressant tout particulièrement empires, avec des historiens comme Alfred Crosby. L’histoire empires a ensuite été renouvelée sous l’impulsion pionnière chercheuses et chercheurs indiens 1980, puis britanniques 1990. Les restent, depuis, l’un objets constitutifs de environneme...

The social sciences have traditionally been quite week in terms of formulating scientific cause-and-effect theories that would be useful for making predictions. In recent years, however, a number of theories with predictive potential have come up. The article applies a number of such theories from diverse areas including economics, history, systems theory and evolutionary psychology in an attem...

Before the Industrial Revolution the greater part of the inhabitable world was occupied by small-scale societies and large territorial states were, comparatively speaking, a rarity. Nevertheless, between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were at least 60 agrarian “megaempires” that controlled at the peak an area equal to or greater than one million of squared kilometers. What were the social forces th...

We propose that the “historically relevant” comparison of Danish and Russian Empires from early eighteenth century until First World War presents a useful starting point for promising research agenda. justify by noting two empires enjoyed striking geographical, political institutional similarities. Beyond this, we also demonstrate were bound together war, royal marriage, migration. suggest some...

Th e historical era following World War II is often referred to as the era of decolonization, the time when the former European powers, as well as America and Japan, gave up their overseas empires and dozens of new sovereign countries came into being. However, it could just as easily be called the era of nationalist separatism, as the sheer number of ethnic and pan-ethnic movements seeking inde...

This special issue deals with the phenomenon of the emergence of radical violence in what might be called ‘shatter zones’ of empires after the end of the First World War. It argues that the emergence of violence was due to the absence of functioning state control and facilitated by the effects of experiencing mass violence during the First World War. In the multi-ethnic regions of the former em...