After Tamerlane (73 page)

But it might be argued that these ‘imperial' assets have been overvalued, will gradually shrink, and are easily wasted. American military power, suggests a shrewd observer, can easily dominate the common spaces of the globe. But it is poorly adapted to irregular warfare in
densely occupied lands, in great urban complexes or in terrain unsuited to using mechanized firepower. Here sheer weight of numbers may count for much more, and also the willingness to take heavy losses.
¹⁰¹
Shoring up friendly regimes or coercing resistance might prove no easier in the future than it had been in Vietnam. Military failure would sap prestige and morale, and encourage further recalcitrance. American economic power might face a similar attrition as East and Southern Asia become the world's most productive regions. The dollar's value already depends upon the inflowof savings from Japan and China, and would suffer badly if these savings changed direction. With the worldwide diffusion of American business practices, the competitive advantage that they once conferred is now widely shared with other advanced economies.
¹⁰²
There is a powerful argument that, for all the weight that America carries, it can no longer resist (or not without heavy cost) the mass of rules, regulations, customs and conventions that govern global affairs, and which depend on consensus. Nor should a tame acquiescence in American popular culture be taken for granted. Cultural resistance, most vividly seen in Islamic fundamentalism, might spread more quickly as the guardian elites of vernacular cultures come to fear for their influence. And as the costs of greatness rise, and its benefits fall, the American taxpayer might come to resent the burden of empire and lose heart in the effort to preserve American power in its lonely pre-eminence. The cycle of change would start once again.

All these in theory could correct the imbalance of a unipolar world. They may actually do so. But it is hard to be sure. American military power may lack the means to win wars in the ‘contested zone' where the fighting is ‘lowtech' and casualties are high. But it may find allies willing (for a price) to bear the cost of fighting such ‘dirty wars'. American industry may become uncompetitive, and America's balance of trade even more unfavourable. But America's role as the monetary pivot of the global economy, and the complex link between the value of the dollar and American military power, may command a large ‘rent' that others will pay until the distant day when a substitute is found. Thirdly, it is far from clear that cultural resistance – except in very localized forms – will set effective limits to the spread of America's ‘Anglo' culture, with its massive arsenal of media output,
educational provision and research activity. In the early twenty-first century, most of the evidence points in the opposite direction. Fourthly, although the collaboration of political elites in different parts of the world will certainly fluctuate, resisting American influence may prove increasingly difficult. The borders of states (especially weak states) will become more and more porous, and the leverage within them of transnational enterprise (whether commercial companies or non-governmental organizations) looks certain to grow. Rallying ‘nationalism' against the external oppressor may become even less easy. Other forms of resistance are as likely to be directed against America's client states and allies as against America itself. And, without another great ‘sponsor' promising international support, the cost of more than local resistance may be unreasonably high. Fifthly, for all the prognoses that newrivals will appear (China is the usual suspect), it is at least as likely that the internal stresses of socio-political change will abort their advance towards superpower status. Lastly, the chances of a domestic revolt against America's imperial burden will depend very heavily on the costs it imposes. For all the reasons above, these are very hard to predict.

This is not to say that no limits exist to America's power. But, on almost any criterion, this nowtranscends the limits of empire that we have observed in force since the early fifteenth century. Those writers who have likened America's ‘hegemonic' status to that of Victorian Britain betray a staggering ignorance of the history of both. Whether this power will be used to make the world safer, or to sharpen its conflicts by ill-managed interventions, is a different question entirely. No prediction is safe. Like all previous generations, we face the future with little more than guesswork on which to build our plans. Were the frantic pace of economic integration (what we call ‘globalization') to slow down sharply, or go into reverse, the previous paragraph would lose much of its force. And our view of the past, as well as the future, would be altered once more.

9. Tiananmen Square: the empire continues

At the start of this book it was argued that the shape of today's world cannot be explained away as the product of a global economy and its political and cultural side effects. Behind the variations of wealth and power, the divergence of institutions and values, and the differences in cultural and religious attachment that are still so visible in the twenty-first century world lies a much more complex history of competitive empire-, state- and culture-building. But this is not a history that is easy to trace. It remains deeply controversial. It is sometimes portrayed as the brutal saga of predatory imperialism, the West's invasion of the hapless non-West. The opposite viewis just as stark: the history of the world becomes the long march to modernity, with the West as a guide, and using its template. Since neither version can win more than partisan support, it is easy to see the attractions of retreat into geographical determinism. But even if it is true that a larger supply of plants and animals for domestication explains why Eurasia conquered the ‘Outer World' and not the other way round,
¹
that cannot unravel the problem with which this book is concerned: the shifting balance of power and wealth within Eurasia itself in the last half-millennium.

For all the passions that they arouse, the evidence of this book is that histories founded on the rival grand narratives of ‘exploitation' and ‘modernization' have limited value as a guide to the Eurasian past. That is not because we cannot find plentiful evidence of both phenomena in action. But neither had a free rein. Each became entangled in the politics and culture of the states and regions where its influence was felt. Each was forced into compromise to win over the local allies and agents without which it was (usually) hamstrung. Both were dependent on the fluctuating conditions that favoured or deterred imperial ambition, commercial expansion and cultural assertion in different parts of the world. Both were ‘projects' that could be hollowed out, taken over or paralysed by sophisticated forms of resistance and adaptation. There is no neat chronology of imperial rise and fall; no neat geography of European mastery over the rest of Eurasia. Nor indeed did the ‘empire' of the West come to an end in the bonfire of colonial vanities that we call decolonization.

We need, in short, a more realistic viewof this contentious past to make sense of our times – and to begin to see them not as an everlasting ‘present', but as a historical ‘period', condemned like all others to change and decay. In earlier parts of this book, much stress has been laid on the tortuous route by which the contemporary world came into existence. The account that they give has little in common with those road maps of history on which ideologues (of every persuasion) drawtheir straight lines. It suggests, nonetheless, that a number of grand themes form the heart of the story – and offer a glimmer of insight into the fate of Eurasia, and thus of the world. To these we nowturn.

The history of the world, it is tempting to say, is an imperial history, a history of empires. It would be easy to think from much historical writing that empires are abnormal: unwelcome intrusions in a non-imperial world. Their rise is credited to exceptional circumstances, or the manic energy of a unique personality. Their fall is predictable, because the exceptional circumstances that permitted their rise have a limited life. This viewis appealing, but has little else to commend it. A glance at world history suggests on the contrary that, for most of the time, the default position so far as politics went was imperial power. Empires were systems of influence or rule in which ethnic, cultural or ecological boundaries were overlapped or ignored. Their ubiquitous presence arose from the fact that, on a regional scale, as well as a global, the endowments needed to build strong states were very unequally distributed. This was a question not just of cultivable plains or navigable rivers, but of social and cultural solidarity and the relative ease with which both manpower and goods could be mobilized by the state. It was this kind of ‘modernity' that allowed the creation of a huge Chinese empire by
200 BC
. Against the cultural attraction, or physical force, of an imperial state, resistance was hard, unless reinforced by geographical remoteness or unusual cohesion. Even those states that escaped subjugation had to manoeuvre their way between imperial powers to avoid being trampled beneath their elephants' feet.

If empires were common, they were also diverse. Most empires in history would strike us today as modest affairs, with small populations and limited reach. Even if we confine our attention to the grander empires discussed in this book, we find wide variations. What are sometimes called the ‘classical' empires were great agrarian bureaucracies. Their essential feature was control of the land and the surplus it yielded. A more or less centralized officialdom, organized and recruited to enforce the power of the emperor against localized interests or landholding aristocrats, collected the revenue and dispensed imperial justice. The prestige of the emperor was a vital resource, to be carefully guarded by seclusion, ritual and ceremony. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, China was the best model of how such an advanced empire should work. Elsewhere, conditions were usually less favourable: religion, ecology or the geopolitical setting precluded imperial rule along Chinese lines. In Middle Eurasia, rulers turned instead to the device of military slaves, the Mamluks, recruited from the margins of empire. As aliens dependent on the amir's favour, or as converts to Islam, they had no local connections, no clan or kin to taint their allegiance. They formed the counterpoise to the local solidarity of towns, tribes and entrenched rural elites. Both these kinds of empire were very different indeed from the overseas empires that Europeans began to construct in the late fifteenth century.

Of course, these ‘colonial' empires came in multiple versions. They were usually carved out not by government action, but by private adventurers enjoying a licence or charter from the government at home. Some depended on seizing the labour of those whom they conquered; some on the purchase of slave labour from Africa. Some tried to replicate (or even improve on) the kind of society left behind in Europe. These were the true settler societies, from which both slaves and indigenous peoples were largely excluded. Needless to say, these colonial forms made little headway in Asia. For almost two hundred years, Europe's invasion of Asia was limited to bases and depots, footholds and outposts that faced out to sea, not towards the interior: Bombay, Goa, Pondicherry, Madras, Calcutta, Batavia and Macao. They were part of mercantile, maritime empires that skirted the rim of Asia's great states. Their power was felt, where it was felt at all, on the uninhabited wastes of the sea. When Europeans began to
amass territorial dominions from the late eighteenth century (and mainly in South Asia), they preferred to fill the shoes of previous Asian rulers rather than fashion a neworder on ‘European' lines. It was the Mughals' revenue system, tightened up and screwed down, that gave the British East India Company the financial means to build a subcontinental
raj
in the century after the Battle of Plassey (1757).

It would be a mistake to draw too sharp a distinction between ‘European' methods and ‘Asian'. But in the long nineteenth century (1815–1914) the scene was transformed by industrial power. Industrial technique allowed Europeans to colonize far faster and on a far larger scale than was previously possible. It gave them the means to penetrate newmarkets and crush old competition. It enlarged their ability to collect information and exploit it efficiently. Above all, it enhanced their capacity to project their physical power over far greater distances and at much lower cost. In the age of the steamship and later the railway, strategic remoteness lost much of its meaning. When a European army could advance on Nanking (as the British were to do in the First Opium War of 1839–42), no part of Asia seemed safe. One result was to permit many more ‘little Indias': the colonies of rule that began to spread across Asia and between which Africa was divided after 1880. The other was to forge a third kind of empire, of ‘invisible sway':
²
the systematic accumulation of predominant influence over regions and states whose rulers were left with a purely technical sovereignty. Where European bankers, diplomats, merchants and missionaries enjoyed privileged status, managed the bulk of overseas trade, had their hands on the tap of foreign investment, and could threaten blockade or bombardment if their interests were challenged, the labour of ruling could seem redundant or futile. ‘Informal empire' – if costs and benefits were to be the criterion – was imperialism at its highest stage.