Gehler, Michael, Robert Rollinger & Philipp Strobl (eds.). The End of Empires. Wiesbaden: Springer.
The articles of this comprehensive edited volume offer a multidisciplinary, global and comparative approach to the history of empires. They analyze their ends over a long spectrum of humankind’s history, ranging from Ancient History through Modern Times. As the main guiding question, every author of this volume scrutinizes the reasons for the decline, the erosion, and the implosion of individual empires.
All contributions locate and highlight different factors that triggered or at least supported the ending or the implosion of empires. This overall question makes all the contributions to this volume comparable and allows to detect similarities, differences as well as inconsistencies of historical processes.
Several contributions tackle with the problems of the end of ancient Iranian empires:
- Julian Degen, Robert Rollinger: The “End” of the Achaemenid-Persian Empire: Caesura and Transformation in Dialogue
- M. Rahim Shayegan: The End of the Parthian Arsacid Empire
- Touraj Daryaee: The End of the Ērānšahar: The Decline of the Sasanian Empire
- Josef Wiesehöfer, Kai Ruffing: The End of the Kushan Empire