Review: Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons

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Book Review| May 01 2018 Review: Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons, eds., Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 474 pp, $120.00, (hardback); £22.99/$34.99 (paperback). ISBN 9781107166035 Christopher Kelly Christopher Kelly Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Studies in Late Antiquity (2018) 2 (2): 242–249. https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2018.2.2.242 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christopher Kelly; Review: Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons. Studies in Late Antiquity 1 May 2018; 2 (2): 242–249. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2018.2.2.242 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentStudies in Late Antiquity Search From the very beginning, bureaucracy was a dirty word. The eighteenth-century economist, merchant, and official, Jacques-Claude Marie Vincent, Marquis de Gournay (also credited with coining the term laissez faire), complained that free trade in grain was being impeded by over-regulation. This “illness” of French government, he was later reported to have wittily remarked, was a kind of bureaumanie—the inevitable result of bureaucratie.1 Despite the efforts of sociologists and historians, “bureaucracy” as an analytical—or even descriptive—term has never quite escaped its polemical origins. (Late antique scholars might think here of “paganism” or “barbarians.”) A feeling of unease—and a sense that bureaucracy needs defending both as a useful category and as a positive institution—frames the best contributions to the excellent new collection, Empires and Bureaucracy in World History, edited and thoughtfully introduced by Peter Crooks and Timothy Parsons. The immediate interest for readers of Studies in Late... You do not currently have access to this content.