In Part I of this book, I explored the organization of empire. I asked about imperial longevity, and focused on the structural features of empire that contribute to its flexible and pragmatic persistence. Empires are negotiated enterprises in which the basic pattern of relationships between imperial authorities and peripheries is different for each periphery, creating a patchwork pattern of relations with structural holes between peripheries. I argued that to maintain this structure and remain dominant and flexible, an empire needed to maintain legitimacy, diversity, and the flow of resources and manpower through a stable relationship with the intermediary elites. To present my argument, in Part I, I followed a temporal narrative of empire in which I analyzed the emergence, development, and maintenance of the Ottoman Empire in the context of other imperial cases.

The Ottoman Empire was formed within the existing ideological and organizational world of the frontier in the post-Seljuk and late-Byzantine era using loose and fluid integration as components of a deliberate strategy in which brokerage across networks of region and religion succeeded in giving rise to a new polity. Brokerage was key to the establishment of the incipient state, whereas its development into an empire was constructed as a hub-and-spoke structure, maintaining vertical integration and horizontal segmentation at the same time. The institutionalization into empire can be compared to that of the Roman world, especially as Augustus transformed the republic into an empire.