Examines the spatial dynamics, political, economic, cultural, and environmental dimensions of empire through a core–periphery model, drawing on diverse imperial histories to explain how the expansion and contraction of empires have shaped the modern world.

Empires emanate out from a central core and expand by incorporating territory and peoples in a political and economic arrangement that favors the core. Using this basic core–periphery model of Empire, this book explores spatial dynamics of borders and frontier, hubs and spokes, imperial overstretch, imperial rivalries, shatter belts, territorial management of empire and the role of collaborative elites, spatial integration and disintegration, and territorial occupancy and its ecological consequences. Individual chapters discuss the politics of Empire, the economics of Empire, the ideologies of Empire, the culture of Empire, the spatial organization of Empire, the edges of Empire, the environmental context of Empire, and the enduring legacies of Empire.
The book draws upon a vast body of scholarship to describe the numerous imperial experiences, including Assyria, British, Inca, Mongol, Persian, Portuguese, Roman, Russian/Soviet, the US, and Venetian.
The book brings together, in an accessible narrative, a wide variety of historical accounts and technical arguments, to show how the spatial expansion and contraction of empires has created the modern world.