Introduction. Empires, bureaucracy and the paradox of power / Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons --
Empires and Bureaucracy in World-Historical Perspectie. China as a contrasting case: bureaucracy and empire in Song China / Patricia Ebrey --
Conflict and cooperation between Arab rulers and Persian administrators in the formative period of Islamdom, c.600-950 CE / István T. Kristó-Nagy --
Bureaucracy without alphabetic writing: governing the Inca empire, c.1438-1532 / Chris Given-Wilson --
The Ottoman empire (1299-1923): the bureaucratization of patrimonial authority / Karen Barkey --
From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. 'The late Roman empire was before all things a bureaucratic state.' / Michael Whitby --
Bureaucracies, elites and clans: the case of Byzantium, c.600-1100 / John Haldon --
Charlemagne and Carolingian military administration / Bernard S. Bachrach --
Bureaucracy, the English state and the crisis of the Angevin empire, 1199-1205 / John Gillingham --
The parchment imperialists: texts, scribes, and the medieval western Empire, c.1250-c.1440 / Len Scales --
Before Humpty Dumpty: the first English empire and the brittleness of bureaucracy, 1259-1453 / Peter Crooks --
From the Age of European Expansion to the End of Empires. Magistrates to administrators, composite monarchy to fiscal-military empire: empire and bureaucracy in the Spanish monarchy, c.1492-1825 / Christopher Storrs --
Britain's overseas empire before 1780: overwhelmingly successful and bureaucratically challenged / Jack P. Greene --
'Les enfants du siècle': an empire of young professionals and the creation of bureaucratic, imperial ethos in Napoleonic Europe / Michael Broers --
Bureaucracy, power and violence in colonial India: the role of Indian subalterns / Deana Heath --
From chief to technocrat: labour and colonial authority in post-world ward Africa / Frederick Cooper --
The unintended consequences of bureaucratic 'modernization' in post-World War II British Africa / Timothy H. Parsons --
Afterward. Empires and bureaucracy: means of appropriation and media of communication / Sam Whimster.

How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages