Empires

Imperial Hierarchies

Empires, especially those encompassing large territories, tend to display a clearly recognizable, internal political feature: The higher a constituent unit is in the imperial hierarchy, the more powerful and the more clearly defined it is in political and administrative terms. Conversely, the lower a unit is in the hierarchy, the less consequential its political and administrative definition becomes. A corollary to this tendency to have a centralized power structure is that empires typically have relatively fluid and volatile borders. For instance, large and strikingly prominent empires, for example, the Mongolian or the Chinese empires at various important points in their histories, have had external borders that were either completely indeterminate or demarcated only in rather vague terms. This feature clearly sets empires aside from modern states, at least in theory.

Once in place, empires enact formal, often highly scripted, symbolic expressions of submission by representatives of the subordinate units and equally formal, emblematic acts of acceptance of this submission by the ruler of the empire. Empires tend to perpetuate political ideologies that depict imperial hierarchies as natural, and ultimately unchangeable. Such imperial ideologies may survive well beyond the collapse of the empire that had initially produced them.

A two-directional system of flows operates along the imperial administrative hierarchy. Top-down flows channel commands, decrees, verdicts, and rulings by the empire's ruler, military and other forms of direct coercion, as well as a modicum of redistribution of imperial resources, financing of military operations, and fiscal-regulatory measures. Bottom-up flows might involve transfers of economic value in the form of taxes, levies, tribute, terms of trade and gifts to the ruler, participation in military endeavors and other public service projects, information collection from officials, as well as internal intelligence gathering. Although there has been a great deal of variation in the intensity with which such vertical flows determine important political, economic, social, or cultural outcomes, maintenance of the integrity of at least some of these two-directional flows has been a requirement essential to the survival of all empires.

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