Empires shape religions, whether by spreading faiths, or particular forms of belief and practice. Much of that critical work occurs in the great cities that empires usually (not always) develop. Empires generally need capitals, seats of royal authority, and hubs of military and bureaucratic power. Those cities quite rapidly become very populous, and economically critical. We think of Babylon and Baghdad, London and Paris. Often too, empires develop very sizable and powerful cities that are great regional capitals. In each... Read more

Empires draw the maps of great religions. In the case of Christianity, so much is obvious if we map the major centers of population around the world. We see the ghosts of the British world, in Canada and Australia, and across so much of Africa and the Caribbean. The French, Belgian, and Portuguese empires account for other states that during this century, will become home to tens or even hundreds of millions of Christians. The Spanish and Portuguese empires drew... Read more

Empires give particular religions a vastly greater geographical spread than they might otherwise have had, to the point of taking once-local groups and beliefs, and placing them in a transcontinental scale. That statement might be obvious, but the means by which such diffusion occurs deserve closer examination. What we might miss is just how extensively those religions were transformed in the process. The most conspicuous examples of such a spreading occur when an empire adopts a religion as official, and... Read more