Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (from the 16th century to the present)

"A lot of the things that we already talked about are present in Lieven’s book. What I really like about it is the willingness to take this global, long-term view. He actually goes back to antiquity in his first chapter. The thesis is that Russia represents the last big land empire on the planet. And he has some very illuminating analyses of the significance of European state formation, and also the competition between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire. I learned something about what happens when European colonialism emerges but also about the strength of these older, territorial empires. They were actually pretty durable. The myth is that these empires were basically moribund Leviathans that were degenerate. In 19th century paintings one will see degenerate despots living inside the hareem or the palace, spending their time in debauchery, rather than governing the empire—all this kind of thing. But these so-called degenerate empires were pretty successful actually and continued to develop for a very long time. That was something I took away from Lieven’s book, plus the ambition to see empire in the very long term, instead of just seeing it within a very narrow span of pre-configured world-historical time periods."