Studying various eras of Russian history, the authors of the collection "Invention of the Empire. Languages ​ ​ and practices" are trying to answer the same questions: how, with the help of which analytical language, the space of the empire was described by its contemporaries? Where is the empire when no one "sees" it? What is the use of an "objective" reconstruction of the structural relations of domination and subordination or the policy of territorial expansion, if the same structures and the same kind of policy can be found in any other form of political structure and in all eras?