Beginning with a standard typology of imperial systems, moving from the agrarian, tributary, and land-based empires of antiquity to the commercial, maritime empires of the early modern and modern periods, the paper suggests that the former, much like the latter, functioned as networked systems of power. Drawing on evidence from the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the Han Chinese Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Inka Empire, it argues, first, that these large, “landed” empires shared many features with one another, and second, that they should all be seen not as territorially contiguous, monolithic states, but rather as far-flung networks of “hot spots” – cities, military installations, resource clusters, transport hubs, and so on – all linked up together in the interests of a widely scattered sociopolitical elite. Comparison with the European colonial empires will highlight some long-term commonalities in imperial statecraft, militating against the “ancient empires” vs. “modern empires” typological divide.
The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how a related form of networked power defines many of the current “rivals” to the modern “project state,” to employ Charles Maier’s terminology, including NGOs, financial circuits, and global webs of capital. If the underlying logics of these global systems of power and sociopolitical control can be traced back to the ancient empires, as the paper argues, then we can gain a better understanding of their current (and, perhaps, future) iterations through an investigation into their deep and enduring histories.