Describe the rise of one of the 17-19th century empires. Here is a famous model for Empire, by two scholars, that has been used for years: THE CONRAD-DEMAREST MODEL OF EMPIRE 1. Necessary preconditions for the rise of empire are: high agricultural potential of the environment: if a society doesn’t have good land, it probably won’t have the resources to support the first conquests necessary to begin empire-building an environmental mosaic of different environmental zones with distinctive resources and potentials: a society that controls all these zones doesn’t need to trade and can become self sufficient state-level government and economic motivation (i.e. tribute or loot) several small states with no clearly dominant state (a “power vacuum”) mutual antagonism among those states adequate military resources The primary reason a state succeeds in empire building is an ideology supporting personal identification with the state, empire, conquest, and militarism. This can include religion but can also be secularly based, as in communism. The major results of empire are: economic rewards, especially in the early years and redistributed to the elite and often to all of the citizens population increase, often supported by the government and its ideology 4. Empires fall because: the ideology of expansion and conquest encourages people to go beyond what is practical in terms of conquest (i.e. Alexander’s Greek empire) failure to continue conquest indefinitely and to continue to bring its economic fruits home erodes faith in the ideology that supports the empire rebellions topple the empire So in your case, pick a country that became an empire during those centuries mentioned above, and describe how it fit into the Conrad-Demarest model of empire. Your empire doesn’t need to meet all of the criteria, just the majority. For instance, in the case of England, there was a great deal of arable land,many different environmental areas, a strong state level government, and the best navy in the world. Nationalism was strong, they were mostly Church of England, and they had a strong military as well. Choose your empire, create a map that shows their expansion, and then write a 3 page paper discussing how they met the criteria above while becoming an empire. 🙂
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