Empire

Frank dependency theory argued that colonial and imperial trade relations produced the development of underdevelopment in the periphery, not merely its neglect.

Quijano coloniality of power theory argued that racial hierarchies imposed under European empire outlasted formal colonial rule and continue to structure global stratification.

Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe argued that historical categories developed to narrate European empire cannot be applied to the rest of the world without distortion.

Said Orientalism theorized the cultural and scholarly apparatus that Western empire built to represent, and thereby dominate, the societies it colonized.

Spivak postcolonial theory, notably Can the Subaltern Speak, examined how the epistemic structures of empire silence the colonized even in accounts meant to represent them.

Arrighi The Long Twentieth Century traced successive systemic cycles of capital accumulation organized around a series of hegemonic imperial powers.

Bhabha theory of colonial hybridity examined how the encounter between empire and the colonized produces ambivalent, mixed cultural forms rather than one-sided domination.

Ibn Khaldun Muqaddimah theorized the cyclical rise and decline of dynastic states and empires through asabiyyah, the group solidarity that builds and later erodes a ruling power.

Wallerstein world-systems theory modeled the modern capitalist world economy as a single hierarchical system whose core-periphery structure extends the logic of empire across the globe.

Galtung structural theory of imperialism modeled unequal exchange between center and periphery nations as a system resembling empire organized through economic rather than purely political domination.

A khanate is the polity form ruled by a khan, and several historical khanates, the Mongol successor khanates among them, functioned as or within larger imperial systems.

Chatterjee The Nation and Its Fragments examined how anticolonial nationalism reworked, rather than simply imported, the political forms empire had imposed.

Protectorates were commonly administered as a weaker-sovereignty tier within a larger empire own system of indirect rule.

Guha founded the Subaltern Studies collective, arguing that colonial and elite nationalist historiography of empire had erased the political agency of ordinary peasants and workers.

A satrapy was the standard provincial administrative unit of the Achaemenid Persian Empire and later empires that adopted the model.