I take the authors point about empires being necessarily cosmopolitan, but it’s not as though it’s a new phenomenon that people have a myopic view about what empire is or how they should operate. (Eg, Russification) Its always been true that empires use various means of social engineering to reduce differences in populations to engender a more uniform polity over various time scales (because it’s beneficial to the entity to do so, eg: Spanish and Italian are both just bad latin) It’s also often true that ethnic cleansing does take place. (If empire was just about getting the already existing social structures to work for you, america would look very different). It’s not true that empires are purely extractive on the periphery, otherwise they would only ever be loose confederations with a tax system and a hegemonic central power. Which is sometimes true, but is not what most empires do. Even saying that empire is just about reifying one polity over another doesn’t hold together all that well on closer inspection. It doesn’t explain why, for example, the Roman Empire shifted from being culturally italic and centered in Rome to being centered in Constantinople and culturally Greek. How could the periphery take over the center if it’s a purely extractive enterprise by one group over its periphery?
I guess the point I’m making, is that empires are very complicated, and trying to reduce them to being solely a thing imposed by one group onto a periphery in order to extract resources is almost as reductive as to say they only exist through colonization and genocide.
While it’s reasonable to say that people get their view of the world through media, I think it’s fine that media can contain simplifications of reality. Otherwise I would have to play Europa Universalis, which is boring.