Communications in an Ancient Empire: An Innisian Reading of the Book of Esther

Harold Innis famously found that the empires of antiquity were based on models of communications that sustained centralized, hierarchical systems of politics, social structure, and culture. We find that the Book of Esther can serve as a corrective to Innis’s top-bottom perspective by revealing latent processes of counter-flow. Alongside the imperial network the book describes communication networks sustaining the peripheral perspective of minorities such as Jews and women scattered over the empire. Mildly subverting Innis we apply his notions of time bias and space bias to describe these two systems of communication densely inhabiting the Book of Esther.