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Empire and Political Thought
Empire means many different things and has been used in a number of ways in the long history of the term since the time of Roman imperium. In this entry, empire is used with the meaning it acquired as of the eighteenth century, to denote the conquest and rule of foreign lands, encompassing noncontiguous territories often far away from the imperial metropolis. The focus here will be on diverse responses to imperial expansion and rule by political thinkers from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. An earlier literature that had dealt with commenting on, justifying, or criticising imperial expansion in previous centuries, starting from that of Spain in the New World, cannot be discussed here (see Pagden 1995). Because, during the period focused ...
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