LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE/CHARLES UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE

the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century synthesis of Chinese and Inner Asian

imperial traditions is now often called). Specific features of such processes reflect

the cultural and institutional contexts, but some fundamental cross-cultural

mechanisms remain central to all inquiry in this field. Apart from the elementary

structures of statehood most memorably analyzed by Norbert Elias, the twin

monopolies of taxation and violence, other ways of concentrating power

resources have to be taken into account.

Both economic and political formations acquire new historical dimensions

when they expand beyond civilizational boundaries. The economic worlds

that crystallized around Chinese, Islamic and early modern European centres,

were shaped by their civilizational contexts, central as well as peripheral, but they

also constitute intercivilizational spaces and structures with their specific temporal

pattern as well as mechanisms of reproduction and accumulation. The idea of

economic worlds has proved applicable to various periods and regions, even if its

implicit use is sometimes masked by the less fortunate terminology of ‘world

systems’. However, from a broad comparative historical perspective, the problematic

of empires seems even more important. Forms of imperial rule and organization

reflect the cultural patterns that are at the centre of more complex civilizational constellations, but imperial boundaries are hardly ever coextensive with civilizational ones, and at the same time, at least in the more significant cases, empires expand beyond their original civilizational settings and develop their own modes of integration.

Modern transformations enhance the internal dynamics of the economic as

well as the political sphere. Interconnected processes of state formation and capitalist

development unfold at new levels of complexity and innovative capacity.

At the same time, the long-term global growth of capitalism is accompanied by

imperial expansion of a new type, beginning with the early modern invention of

transoceanic empires. But these developments belong to an epoch which raises

further questions about the aims and limits of civilizational analysis, and are

therefore beyond the scope of the present article.

Alexander, Jeffrey C., with Philip Smith (2003) ‘The Strong Program in Cultural

pp. 11–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

University Press.