The Age of Empires (review)

It would be very difficult to find a more beautifully-produced book than The Age of Empires, edited by Robert Aldrich of the University of Sydney. There have been many book-length treatments of imperialism and colonialism in the literature but none that I can remember that have been crafted so finely for the eye; this is a book that you want on your coffee table, and I mean that as a compliment, not as thinly-veiled academic insult. Encapsulating over five hundred years of global history into one volume is no easy task, but Aldrich has succeeded in this in many ways, and the book does hold together as a single artifact of this age. The study is organized into thirteen chapters, each by an individual author who is a specialist on his or her particular empire, and there is an introductory essay provided by the editor that situates the narrative and provides a framework for the book as a whole. Most of the volume is well-written, and the fact that this is the case even though a fair number of the authors obviously are not native-speakers of English is all to the credit of this collaborative project. The images produced in the book are simply breath-taking: page after page of exquisitely- rendered maps, paintings, posters, lithographs and photos complement the text, and draw the reader into a number of disparate worlds. If the only thing this book accomplished was to give readers a very tactile feel for the age of empire in many of its global varieties, then we would be grateful. Yet the book does indeed do more than this. By situating the story of thirteen empires side by side, contextualized by Aldrich in his opening essay, we do get a feeling for how far-reaching and almost totalizing colonialism was for much of our modern history as human beings. This is the great service of this volume, above and beyond any other potential accomplishments, I feel.

The empires covered in the book are, in order: the Ottomans; Spain; Portugal; the Netherlands; Scandinavia; Britain; France; Russia; Austria-Hungary; Belgium; Germany; Italy, and the United States. One might interject with a few quibbles here. The "primary" empires of Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, and the United States each receive about 25 pages of coverage; the "lesser" empires usually somewhere between 15 and 20 pages. It is admirable that Aldrich wanted to include as many empires as he could for scope and vantage, but were the Scandinavian colonies really two-thirds as important, historically or historiographically, as England's, for example? One wishes, in this case and in several others, for slightly longer and more involved treatments of the more central players in this story, since Britain, France, Portugal and Spain (to name only four) really had greater legacies than a number of these other projects in a variety of ways. In this vein, China (which colonized huge swaths of central Asia, not to mention Tibet) and Japan (which colonized Manchuria, Taiwan, Korea, as well as large parts of Southeast Asia during the early 1940s) are not treated at all, which seems problematic to say the least. Empire was not a white-skinned phenomenon, but rather a human phenomenon, which a number of different cultures practiced when they found themselves able to do so. Both China and Japan should likely have been covered in this book, to keep the theme of global empire-building during the last five hundred years reasonably complete. A last quibble concerns the chapter authors themselves: we know their names but nothing else about them. A single-page list of the authors would have been very helpful, so we can know if these are professional historians, writers, or researchers who are collaborating in telling us this huge, fascinating story.

These are problems, to my mind, but it is feels more generous to concentrate on the good attributes of this book, and there are many. We get a real sense for the religious fervor that accompanied parts of the Iberian project in the...