Empire

Empire Assignment Part 1

Empire can be defined in many ways. An empire is a large political body, but can also be a large unit. The members of the group have to abide by certain rules, which may be direct or indirect. The central power has control over military forces and money raising powers. The rulers are referenced to deep cultural divisions. Though it is defined in many ways, an empire has one main goal, to expand and make it as vast and prestigious as they can. In the early ages an empire was simply an empire due to, the lack in complex ideas. As years passed, it started to be more of an imperialist union. The empires had started to build more strong complex systems and more strict rules to abide by. Currently globalization is more accurate because empires revolve around financial, social, ecological, and economical. Empires have clearly changed over time. Another way to look at it is that the idea of empire has changed over time from the past century of general approval to near universal distaste. The ideas of empire have changed because an empire in the past was more a positive thing because it brought cultural, ethical, and religious ideas and kept it more organized. Although sometimes empires were negative because of the wars and violence accompanied with an empire. Empires have spread and multiplied over time. Now empires can be anything from an organized powerful cooperation to large organizations like media and finance. A rival of some sort may, be a empire and in this case can be negative to people. An empire’s ideas are changed based on who and what the person is. If the person is a political leader they may think that empires are a great way for dividing. On the other hand a middle class person may feel that an empire is taking away freedom from them.

Empires have some basic components that make a empire stronger and better. The empire has to be large and able to expand (territorial expansion). Diversity is another important component of an empire. A mixture of direct and indirect rules for the empire is needed. An empire has to have a ruler or a person in charge. (president, emperor, etc.) The location or geography of an empire is an important component (geography). Conquest is an important component to an empire. Different levels of workers or members (social status). The last component would be the necessity to establish and maintain violence.

Three major empires from the classical era was China, India, and the Mediterranean (Greece and Rome). The first component was that an empire needed to be large and needed to be able to expand. The Chinese empire has shown that it was large because of various reasons. First, the Chinese empire had three continuous dynasties. All three dynasties did a great job on how to handle an empire as big as this. Although it was large China had the whole group speaking one language which showed that they were able to get the laws and messages sent. The government would have been not important to the people if they didn’t have some sort of unity which would lead to no power of the government. Also, they had a national census, which provided them with the data for tax revenues and labor service. The India’s political unit grew in size and cities had expanded. This made the government more large and made them develop a way to communicate. The development of the Sanskrit language had aided India’s communication problem. Mediterranean -Greece was based on the city-states. They didn’t have one single political unit. This showed that although they had different governments they still ran under the same concept and they had done this through language and alphabet. This made the governments more organized. Diversity is another component. China had a very diverse unit because it had different languages and different religions in it. The government had tried to base all of the rules around Confucianism and tried to make Confucianism the main religion. India had a very diverse culture, the problem was that they had no political unity. The rules in India were all based on religion. The government would punish you if your had done anything against Hinduism or Buddhism. In the Mediterranean, diversity included the different beliefs in gods or goddesses. The government had to base there rules around this since there were so many people that believed in this. All empires have a set of direct and indirect rules. The Chinese had a set of direct and indirect rules and to enforce them they had the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy was a way to keep the empire from corruption. India believed in the caste system which led to the belief in rules that revolved around the religion. The warriors acted like the bureaucracy of China. In India, the warriors had enforced the laws. The Mediterranean, had a tyranny or aristocratic council. They had decided on some rules and enforced them to everyone. The government was affected by this because it had caused not much trouble to the empire because everyone had agreed on it. Every empire had a ruler or person in charge (top rank). In China, they has an emperor who was chosen by the mandate of heaven. This kept China under one ruler, which helped