Why Empires Fall
Dan Snow's History Hit
00:00
The Importance of Periphery in the Empire
The history of migration runs through the history of empires, all empires. And it is migrants who really bring about the imperial transformation. It's migrants who are engineering this exploitation initially. But in the process, these migrants then inadvertently bring about the transformation of the peripheries. Is that something that you see in other imperial systems? Certainly you do. I think cartographers are to blame for this because we become so obsessed with maps and the bit that's red and the part that's not red. The British certainly, the Chinese under the Ming, for example, and the American system, it's not about Red or Blue - it's a shipping lane. It's about influence over peoples and clients
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