Includes Index

1. Being an emperor
2. Cradle of empire : the Ancient Near East and the world's first emperors
3. The Persian emperors and Alexander of Macedon
4. The Roman imperial monarchy
5. Ashoka, India and the origins of Buddhism
6. The origins of Chinese emperorship
7. Nomads
8. Imperial civilization and Chinese tradition : the Tang and Song Dynasties
9. The Islamic Caliphate : the ultimate universal empire
10. Charles V and Philip II : the first global Emperors
11. Emperors, caliphs and sultans : the Ottoman Dynasty
12. The Mughals : India's greatest dynasty
13. China's last dynasties : the Ming and the Qing
14. The Romanovs : dynastic, Russian, European and Eurasian emperors
15. Europe on the eve of modernity : the Habsburgs, the French Revolution and Napoleon
16. Emperors and modernity : 1815-1945

For millennia much of the world was ruled by emperors, a handful of individuals claimed no limit to the lands they could rule over and no limit to their authority and indeed often claimed a superhuman or divine authority. In practice they ran the gamut from being some of the most remarkable men who ever lived, to being some of the worst and least remarkable. Dominic Lieven's marvellous new book, In the Shadow of the Gods, is the first to grapple seriously with this extraordinary phenomenon. Lieven compares the great emperors of antiquity, the caliphs and the warrior-emperors of the steppe before he turns to the Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, Mughal and Chinese emperors, packing the book with extraordinary stories, astute observations and a sense of both delight and horror at these individuals' antics. The entire breadth of extreme human behaviour is here, from warlords to patrons of the arts, from political genius to feeble incapacity and pathological violence. As one of the great experts both on empires and on Russian history, Lieven is brilliantly qualified to write a book that brings to life a system of rule that dominated most of human history, as well as some of history's grandest and most dismaying figures