Imperial Lineages and Legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean : Recording the Imprint of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Rule

The empires of Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans and later the British, all sought to develop a common territorial base in the Eastern Mediterranean and all struggled to control the political and spiritual allegiances of the indigenous groups that were brought under their rule. This volume addresses the various dimensions of these successive empires’ attempts to achieve coherence and control through paired contributions that explore each particular empire’s style of rule and the nature of the compromises each unavoidably had to develop in such key issues as regional autonomy versus central control and toleration for cultural diversity versus the unachievable desideratum of cultural homogeneity.

The comparative study of empires has traditionally been addressed in the widest possible global historical perspective with comparison of New World empires such as the Aztecs and Incas side by side with the history of imperial Rome and the empires of China and Russia in the medieval and modern periods. Surprisingly little work has been carried out focusing on the evolution of state control and imperial administration in the same territory; approached in a rigorous and historically grounded fashion over a wide extent of historical time from late antiquity to the twentieth century. The empires of Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans and the latter-day imperialists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all inherited or seized and sought to develop overlapping parts of a common territorial base in the Eastern Mediterranean and all struggled to contain, control or otherwise alter the political, cultural and spiritual allegiances of the same indigenous population groups that were brought under their rule and administration.

The task undertaken in Imperial Lineages and Legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean is to investigate the balance between continuity and change adopted at various historical conjunctures when new imperial regimes were established and to expose common features and shared approaches to the challenge of imperial rule that united otherwise divergent societies and imperial administrations. The work incorporates the contributions by twelve scholars, each leading practitioners in their respective fields and each contributing their particular insights on the shared theme of imperial identity and legacy in the Mediterranean World of the pagan, Christian and Muslim eras.