THURSDAY 16 JUNE 2011
9.30 REGISTRATION AND COFFEE
10.45 WELCOME AND OPENING REMARKS
11.15-12.45 SESSION 1: MODELLING EMPIRES AND BUREAUCRACY
Max Weber: the bureaucratic analysis of imperial structures
Sam Whimster
Colonial states, imperial bureaucracies, and social science: rethinking Bourdieu’s Field Theory on an imperial scale
George Steinmetz
12.45-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.45 SESSION 2: LATE ANTIQUITY
‘The Late Roman Empire was before all things a bureaucratic state’. Discuss
Michael Whitby
Bureaucracies, elites and clans: the case of Byzantium, c. 500–1100
John Haldon
15.45-16.15 Tea & coffee
16.15-17.45 SESSION 3: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
Ibn al-Muqaffac, the wise jackal: conflict and cooperation between Arab rulers and Persian bureaucrats at the formation of the Islamic empire
István Kristó-Nagy
Charlemagne and Carolingian Military Administration
Bernard Bachrach
Ottonian Fiscal Administration in Myth and Reality, 919–1024
David S. Bachrach
FRIDAY 17 JUNE 2011
9.15-10.45 SESSION 4: LATER MIDDLE AGES
The Angevin Empire: ‘In some ways like the recent empire in India’
John Gillingham
The parchment empire-builders: bureaucracy and the imperial idea in Western Europe, c.1250–c.1440
Len Scales
10.45-11.15 Tea & coffee
11.15-12.45 SESSION 5: EARLY MODERN EXPANSION
Empire and bureaucracy in the Spanish monarchy, c. 1492–1825
Chris Storrs
Britons’s overseas empire before 1780: overwhelmingly successful and bureaucratically challenged
Jack P. Greene
12.45-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.45 SESSION 6: THE HIGH AGE OF EMPIRE
‘Les enfants du siècle’: an empire of the young professionals and the creation of a professional, imperial ethos in Napoleonic Europe
Michael Broers
Bureaucrats, oligarchs or ‘kings of the bush’? The administrative ideologies of British imperialism
John Darwin
15.45-16.15 Tea & coffee
16.15-17.45 SESSION 7: THE END OF EMPIRE? THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
From chief to technocrat: redefining colonial authority in post-World War II Africa
Frederick Cooper
The unintended consequences of bureaucratic modernization in post-World War II British Africa
Timothy Parsons
SATURDAY 18 JUNE 2011
9.15-10.45 SESSION 8: IMPERIAL PERSPECTIVES FROM BEYOND EUROPE
Creating and re-creating a huge empire: reflections on the connections between imperial China’s bureaucracy and its size
Patricia Ebrey
Bureaucracy without writing: governing the Inca empire, c. 1440–1533
Chris Given-Wilson
15.45-16.15 Tea & coffee
11.15-12.45 SESSION 9: RESPONSE AND ROUNDTABLE
Respondent: Nicholas Canny