This book covers the history of empire from Rome and Han Dynasty China down to the present day. A work of history, rather than political science, it does not attempt a tight definition of empire but instead highlights the great range and diversity of the empires that have existed in history. The main focus is on imperial strategies and systems of rule for absorbing and governing wide territories and a multitude of peoples. The book is structured as a narrative, though one which more or less revolves around a number of key themes, among them ideology and legitimation, the role of intermediaries, and systems of dynastic (and other) succession. The authors stress their desire to escape the usual approaches to empire built around the idea of an inevitable transition from imperial to national polity, which is itself often—wrongly, in their view—taken to be a necessary aspect of modernity. They also emphasize their rejection of interpretations that focus on Europe and the West as uniquely powerful agents for change, whether that change is admired or regretted.

The structure of Empires in World History, like all possible ways of approaching this subject, has its strengths and weaknesses. The narrative is very readable and is packed with interesting information and insights. It conveys contexts, interconnections, and lineages of empire much better than a more structural approach. One of imperial history's great strengths is that in a world where academic scholarship is generally very specialized, it has the sweep and the inclusiveness of universal history. The authors do indeed escape from one of the dangers of this approach, namely, the temptation to spot the movement of the Protestant English-speaking God through history. But when you lose that narrative, there is a risk that the tale becomes incoherent as it races through the centuries and across the continents.

It is not fair to accuse the book of incoherence, but there were moments when I longed for the narrative to pause and for a five-page bubble to intrude into the story, reminding the reader of a key theme and drawing comparisons. To take just one example, consider dynastic succession. This is, in a sense, the imperial equivalent to political science's concern with contemporary electoral systems. How power is transferred over time without causing the disruption or even breakdown of political systems is a fascinating and important issue. It is in the nature of politics and politicians to be obsessed by power and for this obsession to have an enormous impact on a polity's life and fate.

In monarchies, much depended on the dynasty's religion. Inevitably, Christian monogamy yielded endless succession crises when heirs failed to materialize, some of which had dramatic consequences both domestically (e.g., Henry VIII of England's divorce and the break with Rome) and internationally (e.g., a number of crucial wars in eighteenth-century Europe). By contrast, one has the Ottoman system, which over the centuries included tanistry, fratricide, marriage, and the “mature” Ottoman compromise in which a concubine who produced a son by the sultan never slept with him again, with her son no longer murdered but living a cloistered and well-guarded life that prepared him very poorly for the time when the throne might finally come to him after the death of all his elder brothers. As the Ottoman case illustrates, religion was by no means the only factor in how a dynasty transferred power between its members. The different dynastic systems had as much of an impact on politics as does first-past-the-post and the various systems of proportional representation in todays's politics. A narrative history of empire gives you a sniff of this and similar issues, but a pause for structural insights or comparisons would tell you more and allow a moment to breathe.

Inevitably, a book that spans the millennia and the continents makes judgments about which a reviewer will have his or her doubts. When debating, for example, why empire prevailed in China but not in Europe, is not the Latin split between secular and spiritual authority important and do not Chinese and European geopolitics play a role? The authors of a wide-ranging book such as this also make essential choices about which questions and which historiographical issues to raise and which to ignore. The reviewer will no doubt have different obsessions and hobbyhorses. One of my current ones concerns the historiography of the British Empire and of the Industrial Revolution. Currently, they seldom seem to overlap, as the economic historians shun political contexts and imperial historians talk of gentlemanly capitalism and the City of London. Even the shipbuilding industry vanishes. I find it a suspicious coincidence that Britain was both the world's greatest imperial power and its first industrial economy and would like to have known whether Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper share my suspicions.

The authors certainly do not ignore questions of power, but to my mind, the hard power of armies and navies and the fiscal systems that underlay them deserve a bigger share in empire's history than they got in this work. That bears on the way in which Burbank and Cooper cover the empire I know best, which is tsarist Russia.

The comparisons made with Ming and Qing China and with the Ottomans are indeed vital. The issue of intermediaries—in other words, empire's local agents—is of crucial importance, and this is one of the strongest themes in the book under review. But in many ways, the most impressive achievement of the tsars was how much more effective they were over time in mobilizing military and fiscal resources than was the case with the Ottomans and Chinese, despite the fact that the latter empires and the societies that underlay them were more sophisticated and geographically better placed than Russia. The nature and achievements of the hereditary, property-owning military nobility, which was tsarism's key intermediary, are best understood in this comparative context. But the story also makes little sense outside the story of tsarist Russia's place within European geopolitics and the manner in which this influenced the development of the Russian military-fiscal state. To that story I myself would give priority when interpreting the Romanovs' empire and its history. It is the traditional Eurocentric story, but in my view the truest one.

It would be deeply unfair to end this review on a sour note, however. The authors' perspectives and concerns are not quite the same as the reviewer's. Thank goodness. That allowed the reviewer to learn an immense amount from this work and to appreciate the level of scholarship and knowledge that went into its writing. There will never be a definitive history of empire because the subject is too rich, diverse, and fascinating. But this book is about as close as we are likely to get for some time at least. If at times it left me a little panting for breath and wanting a moment to pause and reflect, that was in large part because it was so well written that I galloped along with it, faster than perhaps my poor brain could absorb all the insights, details, and comparisons that this splendid and thought-provoking book offers.