This colloquium brings together a stellar cast of historians and theorists of empire who will explore the role of bureaucracy in European empires from late antiquity to the modern world.

Bureaucracies provided empires with a means of articulating power and marshalling resources in regions remote from the imperial core. But while the growth of bureaucracy underpinned much of Europe’s expansionist dynamic, it also served in certain cases as a drag on imperial power, creating tensions that led ineluctably to fragmentation and colonial independence.

The colloquium seeks to move investigation of the concept of ‘bureaucracy’ beyond its narrow institutional sense (an aspect of the subject closely investigated by an older school of imperial historians). Instead it sets out to explore how bureaucracy operated as an aspect of the social systems and political cultures of empires.

Imperial bureaucracies varied enormously in terms of complexity and ‘rationality’ across the millennium and a half to be explored by the speakers. The colloquium will stimulate cross-chronological comparisons while simultaneously throwing up instructive contrasts and evidence of change over time. In particular it offers a unique opportunity to challenge the abiding association of bureaucratic rationality with modernity and the so-called ‘rise of the West’. To frame that debate, the speakers include sociologists and political scientists, while responses by historians of non-Western and non-literate empires will place the case studies from European history in world-historical perspective. Collectively the papers will make a major contribution to the diachronic study of European empires.

Among the subjects to be addressed by the participants are the following:

- The utility of Max Weber’s concept of bureaucracy for historians of empire from Late Antiquity to the twentieth century.
- How the growth of bureaucracy served to knit empires together and/or break them apart.
- The tension in empires between centralized and devolved rule.
- The success of certain empires despite (or because of) their limited bureaucratic apparatus.
- The equation made between bureaucracy and civility in the literature and apologetics of empires.
- The role of bureaucrats in disseminating metropolitan political culture throughout empires and in encouraging the growth of ‘colonial nationalism’.
- The assimilation of native bureaucratic practices and the imposition of central models (including systems of law) on the peripheries.