This volume explores a world that thought deeply about imperial power and emperors but one that perhaps never had an "empire" of its own. These synthetic essays from experts across a wide variety of disciplines mine the intellectual world of this period and begin to demolish the myth of the so-called "Dark Ages," showing how the European Middle Ages were illuminated by vigorous debates that echo today. The story of medieval Western empires is both familiar and foreign. It is a story about politics, culture, religion, society, gender, sex, and economics, and how porous the boundaries between those categories can often be.A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Middle Ages offers a detailed and highly-illustrated account of how we got to where we are, as well as the dangers of not fully understanding why those origins matter.

A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Modern Age covers the period from 1918 to the present. Through the lens of the political and international events shaping the period, the introduction traces the gradual demise of the cultural importance of European empires and the emergence of the United States as the predominant cultural model. The following eight chapters of the volume, authored by a diverse range of experts, highlight different aspects of this cultural shift while indicating the historiographical controversies and conceptual developments that shaped the century-long evolution related to each of the specific topics. This richly-illustrated and accessible volume provides deep historical context to the rise of the US as a major cultural force in the modern era. In so doing, it gives the reader a backdrop to the shift of Western empire from the European model of 18th and 19th century imperialism, to the emergence of the US as a cultural hegemon. A feature of contemporary geopolitics that continues to play a key role in the dynamics of cultural exchange and influence playing out on the world stage today.

European overseas trade and diplomacy in some parts of the world went hand in hand with colonization and conquest in others areas. As the introduction to this third volume explains, and the eight expertly written chapters assembled here detail, these were not divergent but intricately connected activities. Through detailed attention to Renaissance literature, travel books, political, scientific and commercial writing, they show how European contact with Asia, the Americas and Africa spurred innovations in warfare, seafaring, and accounting. Demanding the creation of international law, and new labour practices at home and abroad, this contact overhauled previous conceptions of nature, race and sexuality and shaped debates on religion, politics, and power. Renaissance culture, in all its diversity and dynamism, was both the midwife of empire and its progeny.A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance offers a new understanding of Renaissance culture, commonly understood as a blooming of arts, literature, philosophy, politics, commerce and science that together marked a high point of Western civilization and laid the foundation stone of modernity. It shows that this "rebirth" is organically connected to the processes by which Spain, the Italian states, France, England, and the Netherlands tried to establish their first overseas empires.

Between 1800 and 1920, the territory and influence claimed by Western empires came to cover a larger portion of the globe than at any time before or since. Why and how did this happen? What were the consequences of this unprecedented scramble for dominion? What methods have historians used to understand the increasingly large and structurally complex Western empires that emerged across the long 19th century? In this fifth volume, A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Age of Empire, we trace these questions across a period bookended by two devastating global wars. The forces that enabled unparalleled Western expansion were likewise violent. Often no less traumatically, the phenomenon was also one of cultural exchange and negotiated identities in which both colonized and colonizer were repeatedly made and remade. As cultural historians, we locate the power struggles of empire as much in identity and ways of life as in the movement of armies or the signing of treaties. New technologies of communication, transport and warfare brought an 'Age of Empire' into existence for the West. But it was equally grounded in new ways of thinking about human difference and new beliefs about the state's power to intervene in the most intimate domains of human behavior.

This three volume set is a comprehensive account of the development of European aesthetics from the time of the ancient Greeks to the 1700s. This second volume focuses on eastern and western aesthetics in the Middle Ages.