Introduction

The history of empire is the history of organized violence. Almost all empires are born in violence, sustained by it, and die in it, too. Managing violence is “job number one” for empires.

The chapters of Volume 2 demonstrate that imperialists over the ages have found many ways to manage violence—so many, perhaps, that trying to boil them down into a single chapter is a fool’s errand. Consequently, instead of trying to catalog every arrangement ever attempted, I limit myself here to abstracting a few prin­ciples from the mass of data. All empires, I suggest, face much the same basic set of tasks and challenges on the military front, even if the forms these tasks take, their importance, and their relative weighting vary enormously. But despite such complications, no political organization can become an empire and survive if it fails at any of these tasks and challenges; failure at even one of them is fatal. That is why managing violence is “job number one” for empires.

Definitional discussions are rarely exciting, but I do need to begin (section 2) with a few words about the two terms in my title, “empire” and “military organiza­tion.” I go on in sections 3 and 4 to set out the major tasks that imperial military organizations need to perform and the major challenges that empires must over­come to make this happen. In section 5, I sketch the forms these solutions have taken across the five thousand years that empires have existed, and in section 6, I offer a few concluding thoughts.

2.