Author Description

Centre' and 'periphery', two notions essential in the discourse of power and domination, tend to be reificated as a static, inert relation of an active, dominating centre on one side with an acquiescent, docile periphery on the other. Far before a 'spatial turn' came into vogue, philosophers like Immanuel Kant or sociologists such as Georg Simmel pointed out that space is not an entity existing besides human perceptiveness respectively without any relation to society. In this book specialists in the history of various premodern societies are discussing manifold kinds of spatial differentiations and within that the role of a seemingly ubiquitous dichotomy between centre/core and periphery/frontier. The researches cover a vast region spanning from Central Europe in the West to Japan in the Farthest East and Egypt in the South.