Empires have long dominated the social landscape of human history; material things have helped drive these expansive political formations. Rethinking Empire: Materiality, Metaphysics, and Imperial Politics illustrates how exploring matter, materials, and mattering as a relational process enables new understandings of imperial politics. Tamara Bray’s introduction sets the stage for this collective statement on relational materialism developed via an Advanced Seminar at the School for Advanced Research. Her concise overview of New Materialist scholarship parses out recent thinking about things and people in relationship. Archaeological studies from Alice Yao, Darryl Wilkinson, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Deepthi Murali, Nawa Sugiyama, and Bryan K. Miller detail explorations of Han Dynasty China, the Andean realm of the Inka, Hittite Anatolia, Proto-Colonial South India, Teotihuacan, and the first-century BCE Xiongnu steppe. The metaphysical foundations of these vastly differing preindustrial empires undergirded local politics, circumscribing what things did and meant to people in these distinct places and times. In the concluding chapter, Lori Khatchadourian returns to the 21st century, linking the archaeology of imperial power to a history of the present. She engages with the critique of the ethics of the material turn in archaeology, carving a path for scholars to think through the effects of entanglements and the potentialities of human-nonhuman assemblages in contexts of imperial aggression and resistance.

The e-book was published in February 2026 and is available at SAR Press.

The print version will be published in October 2026 and available at University of New Mexico Press.