Abstract
It explores how "the hunt," whether "out" in nature or in controlled spaces such as paradises or hunting parks, served to legitimize political authority in the premod-ern world, to demonstrate rulers' symbolic power over animals-and, by extension, over their human subjects. Allsen takes on the formidable task of tracing the development of the royal hunt out of the protein pursuit of hunter-gatherer societies to its place among the political and cultural trappings of Eurasian rulers across thousands of years, from the ancient beginnings of "civilization" in his "core area" to a few fleeting references to its use by nineteenth-century imperialists.