The Empire of Augustus had much in common

[samiaseo75]

For that matter, the latest state to date to call itself an Empire, the Central African Empire of Jean Bedel Bokassa, was an impoverished former French colonial province in the depths of Africa, an ex-province ruled by a cannibal despot who kept the arms and legs of political opponents in the Imperial Fridge for regular consumption. The said pleasant fellow was kept in office, until it ceased to suit the Quai d'Orsay, by a battalion of French paratroops stationed in his shack and shanty-town "Imperial Capital".

But that does not mean the term "Empire" is phone number list meaningless. Clearly, with that of Napoleon, and Alexander, and Basil II the Bulgar-slayer, and Czar Nicholas II, and Wu Ti, and Victoria, and Stalin, and Rameses II, and perhaps even the domain of the powers which Bill Clinton personifies, which it did not share with the "Empires" of Constantine IX or M. Bokassa or, say, modern Norway. That common factor would seem to lie partly in being a state of many nations,or ethnic identities howsoever termed, held together from a common centre and not, or not really, a voluntary confederation thereof, partly in some more impalpable sense of its own identity as coterminous, in fact or in aspiration, with what it regarded as "civilization".

Such Empires, whether they call themselves that or no, seem to me to fall into three main types: those that centre on a person, those that centre on a nation or a people, and those that centre on an idea. They may, and indeed usually do, evolve from one to the next category. Empires based simply on one individual without any firmer foundation, such as that of Tamerlane.