CHAPTER 11
Ethnicity in Empire
Assyrians and Others
Geoff Emberling
Empire and Ethnicity
Both “empire” and “ethnicity” have been the subject of extensive discussion in recent
scholarship, and it is possible to provide brief definitions that do not stray far from con-
sensus views. Empires are coercive forms of political organization that aim to control
extensive areas through conquest, influence, and direct and indirect rule (Doyle 1986;
Alcock et al. 2001). The most overt violence in empires is the conquest, destruction,
torture, and killing of perceived enemies. Yet, empires have also sought to alter identi-
ties of the survivors, to impress upon their bodies and minds a new political order. To
consider ethnicity in empire is to see political strategy and ideology in one of its most
intrusive forms.
Empires have employed a range of strategies for balancing the costs and benefits of
expansion and control, ranging from territorial expansion, to establishment of colonies
and commercial outposts, to imposition of tribute obligations. Many of the benefits of
empire accrue to elites at the center, while peripheries are usually sustained in extractive
relationships that enhance productive capacity but impoverish those living there (Waller-
stein 2004; see Chapter 4 in this volume, by Thomas Hall). Some subjects might argue for
the benefits of being even a peripheral part of empires, because of improved infrastructure
or access to technology and goods, but the experience of conquest and underdevelop-
ment is more usual.
Ethnicity in anthropological terms has often been defined as a group identity based on
a notion of kinship, however constructed or imagined, whose boundaries are established
and maintained both from within the group and from outside (Barth 1969; Eriksen
1993; Hall 2002; Brubaker 2004). The differences that mark ethnic groups can be
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.