Empires, States and Sovereignty.

This paper argues that empires were the dominant political actors in the international system up until the mid-twentieth century, and that these empires differed from Westphalian states in crucial legal and practical aspects. Empires were organised as hierarchical sub-systems in an anarchical international system. They included dependent states or state-like entities which complicated the sovereignty of the imperial whole and cast doubt on prevailing theories of the sovereign state. Rejecting IR historiography that has tended to categorise and re-write the past in terms of present, case studies of the Ottoman, British and German Empires illuminate the differences that distinguish these polities from their sovereign state successors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]