“Bringing the State Back In” to the Empire Turn: Piracy and the Layered Sovereignty of the Eighteenth Century Atlantic

Shirk, Mark

doi:10.1093/isr/viw029

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…The second is to define empire through hard distinction between empire and state based on the difference in territorial boundaries (fixed for states and unfixed for empires) and differential approaches to populations (integrated and equal for states, differentiating for empires). 87 The third is to taxonomize by type: maritime non-contiguous, land-based contiguous, modern, ancient, world, and great empires, as is done by Herfried Munkler. 88 The interpretivist approach by contrast recognises that empire, like the state, is a socially constitutive concept, by definition a carrier of signification with multiple meanings that does political work.…”

Section: Definition Versus Conceptualisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling the Truth About Empire? A Word on Methodology

Biccum

2023

Aus J of Politics History

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Empire/imperialism are terms that re‐emerge with patterned frequency. Claims that the Australia United Kingdom and United States agreement is imperial, that an Australian empire exists, or that coloniality continues after the end of formal colonialism are all made without connecting colonialism, settler‐colonialism, coloniality, or sub‐imperialism to the larger whole of which it is a part — empire. At the same time, political science has begun to make claims about empire as a particular type of politics and comparative historical literature has also emerged. This paper argues that empire should a site of inquiry for any decolonial project and elaborates what would be involved methodologically. It engages the question of methodology by comparing different approaches to the study of empire. My argument is that the interpretivist approach is the more methodologically robust principally because it raises a series of unresolvable methodological problems. I argue that study of empire, as a particular form of politics, is not just a social scientific question, it is an ethical normative question. I argue that it is politically necessary for the decolonisation of knowledge to broach the question of empire and its methodological problems. Only when we know the truth about empire, can we confidently contribute to a politics that would be post‐imperial.

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Section: Definition Versus Conceptualisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling the Truth About Empire? A Word on Methodology

Biccum

2023

Aus J of Politics History

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“…While concurring with network perspectives in the study of hierarchy in world politics, TRF casts light into the “black box” of regions, enabling a comparative institutional analysis of their connectivity attributes across space and time. Drawing from comparative regional studies, TRF fills an important gap within the “empire turn” debate in IR (Shirk 2017). It identifies the imperial roots of regional politics predating the state system.…”

Section: The Imperial Lens For Contemporary Regionalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional Fracture and Its Intractability in World Politics: The Case of the Late Ottoman Empire

Ohanyan

2021

Nationalities Papers

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Scholars have long grappled with the puzzle as to why some regions become peaceful and resilient while others crumble into perpetual insecurity. Much of the scholarship that they produced viewed regional formations as extensions of the state system. This work argues that state-centric tools to study regionalism have precluded us from uncovering regional forms of engagement under hierarchical relations of empires. They have privileged great power politics, at the expense of the political agency of non-state actors, such as minority communities, constitutional assemblies, and political parties, among others. This work highlights the lack of conceptual tools to capture historical continuity in the regional fabric of world politics. The bulk of the article engages in the methodology of concept development for regional fracture, in an effort to advance comparative regional studies historically and systematically. The concept development is then applied in the context of the Eastern Anatolian region of the late Ottoman Empire.

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“…19th century states likewise sought to delegitimize and eliminate traditional threats to long-distance traders (principally pirates) with unprecedented resolve (e.g. Thomson, 1994;Shirk, 2017). This expansion in sovereign states' will and capacity to suppress transnational predators removed the need for private merchants to follow the company-states' expensive example in trying to internalize their protection costs through maintenance of their own armed forces.…”

Section: Explaining the Decline Of Company-statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Company-states and the creation of the global international system

Phillips

Sharman

2020

European Journal of International Relations

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We investigate the nature and significance of the vital but neglected “company-states” in helping to facilitate the move from contained regional international systems to the first genuinely global international system. Historically, actors like the Dutch and English East India Companies were crucial in spearheading the first wave of European expansion in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Conceptually, company-states broaden our understanding of international actors. At a time when intra-European politics favored gradual institutional convergence on the sovereign state, the demands of extra-European expansion meanwhile gave rise to diverse competing institutions. Company-states succeeded in an era of weak sovereign states because of their relative efficiency in managing the transaction costs and principal-agent challenges of intercontinental trade and rule. Conversely, company-states later declined as they succumbed to the effects of sharpening worldwide geopolitical competition, and were displaced by increasingly powerful new European empire-building projects. This argument advances earlier work on the creation of the international system by eschewing Eurocentrism and state-centrism, and foregrounding diversity and hybridization.

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“Bringing the State Back In” to the Empire Turn: Piracy and the Layered Sovereignty of the Eighteenth Century Atlantic

Cited by 4 publications

References 76 publications

Telling the Truth About Empire? A Word on Methodology

Telling the Truth About Empire? A Word on Methodology

Regional Fracture and Its Intractability in World Politics: The Case of the Late Ottoman Empire

Company-states and the creation of the global international system

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