Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 600 pp. $39.50 (hardback), ISBN: 9780691153636

• Published date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13061
• Date: 01 May 2019

452 Public Administration Review • May | J une 2 019

course and my more specialized management

innovation seminar and would encourage other

professors of management and public administration

to consider using the books as well. For practitioners

hoping to make their cities a better place, both books

are a must read.

References

Barzelay, Michael. 2001. The New Public Management. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Cohen, Steven. 2018. The Sustainable City. New York: Columbia

University Press.

Goldsmith, Stephen, and William D. Eggers. 2004. Governing by

Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector. Washington DC:

The Brookings Institution.

Goldsmith, Stephen, and Susan Crawford. 2014. The Responsive

City: Engaging Communities through Data-Smart Governance.

San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Osborne, David, and Ted Gaebler. 1993. Reinventing Government:

How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector.

New York: Plume.

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 3, pp. 452–454. © 2019 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13061.

Reviewed by: Alasdair Roberts

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial

Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2017). 600 pp. $39.50 (hardback),

ISBN: 9780691153636

Krishan Kumar has written a lively and

insightful study of the way in which five great

empires—those of the Ottomans, Habsburgs,

Russians, British, and French—were governed. He

describes how institutions were designed to hold

empires together and the mentality of imperial elites.

A little more than a century ago, the usefulness of this

study would have been obvious. At that time, most

people were subjects of empire. Even the United States

experimented with empire: leading American universities

set up programs to prepare young men for colonial

administration. However, that world collapsed long

ago. Most European nations gave up their colonies after

World War II, and the last empire, the Soviet Union,

expired in 1991. A study of empires might have interest

for historians. But what relevance could it have for the

practice of public administration today?

Kumar offers a compelling answer. These five empires

faced a common challenge—governing large populations

of extraordinary diversity. Empires might have

disappeared, but the problem of “managing diversity and

differences” (p. 476) has not. The leaders of modern-day

states wrestle with polarization, populist uprisings, and

secessionism. They have more in common with the rulers

of empires than they may realize.

Indeed, the age of empires may not be entirely behind

us. Kumar observes that some modern countries

are really “empires in disguise” (p. 235). We treat

modern-day China as a conventional state, but

until 1912, it was known as an empire. India and

China have populations three times larger than the

British Empire at its peak, while the United States

and the European Union match the British Empire

in population. Jefferson called the United States an

“empire of liberty,” and observers have described the

European Union as “a kind of neo-medieval empire”

(Wood 2009; Zielonka 2006).

Kumar says that we sometimes have a misconception

about the durability of empires. Empires, Charles

Maier has suggested, “are epics of entropy” (Maier

2006, p. 76). Kumar does not deny that all the

empires he examines have collapsed. No empire, he

acknowledges, has a “remit to exist forever” (p. 212).

But we could say the same about any political form

of political order. The question is how long the day of

reckoning can be deferred—and all of these political

orders had impressive lifespans. The Habsburg

Empire, mocked as a “ramshackle realm” (May 1951,

p. vii), survived for almost 600 years, the British

Empire also for centuries.

Kumar finds a remarkable commonality in the way

that these empires were governed—both in the

mentality of rulers and in forms of rule. The most

important common feature is the sense of a broader

mission. Empires were not concerned merely with

Alasdair Roberts is director of the

School of Public Policy, University of

Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent

book is

Can Government Do Anything

Right?

(Polity Books, 2018).

E-mail: asroberts@umass.edu