The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (3 page)

imperial domination demonstrated that any defeated people, no matter how “advanced,” could be transformed into subjects. Just as some

Kenyans worked with the British to further personal and communal interests, a surprisingly large number of Frenchmen supported

Marshal Philippe Pétain’s attempt to reach an accord with the Nazi

occupiers. In contrast to ancient Rome, Hitler’s imperial project failed

because it was too effi cient. The Nazis’ nakedly exploitive rule turned

all of Europe against them.

Taken as a whole, these historical examples show that no one

became an imperial subject voluntarily. Empires were viable only

when conquerors could recruit local allies, and the common people overlooked by conventional accounts of empire had the capacity to render imperial institutions unworkable. This remains true

today. Stable imperial rule is an impossibility in an era when self determination has become a basic human right and transnational

fl ows of wealth, people, ideas, and weapons mean that no community is truly isolated.

Yet many still look for lessons and models in empires and imperial methods. In part, this is because of the fuzziness in defi nitions

of
citizen
and
subject
, or
citizenship
and the slightly awkward if

Introduction 9

unavoidable
subjecthood
. There is also a popular tendency to label

any form of dictatorial rule
imperial
. Defi nitions matter; hazy meanings facilitate misunderstandings, both honest and intentional.

In its purest and most basic form,
empire
entails the formal, direct,

and authoritarian rule of one group of people over another. It is

born of the attempt to leverage military advantage for profi t. Global

dominance, economic coercion, and the unbridled use of hard power

may be unjust, but they are not necessarily imperial actions. Some

empires did engage in such behavior, but the now common practice

of using empire as a metaphor for any unequal power relationship

has blurred its meaning. Autocratic institutions may have imperial

qualities, but the equation of slavery with empire or the characterization of the modern European Union as an “empire by invitation” is

misleading.10

The word
empire
itself comes from the Latin
imperare
, “to command.” An
imperium
was the territory where an
imperator
(general)

could and did command. In time, Roman kings, republican consuls,

military tribunes, and dictators all came to hold and exercise this

power. By the fi rst century a.d., the
imperium Romanum
meant the

vast territory ruled by Rome.11 When the western self-described heirs

of Rome traveled to Asia in the early modern era, they called khans,

sultans, shoguns, and other potentates “emperors,” and versions of

the term gradually entered into common usage in most of the world’s

major languages.

The Romans actually had no expression that corresponded to

the modern meaning of
imperialism
, and the word came into common usage only in the mid-nineteenth century. Initially it was a

pejorative expression that British commentators coined to accuse

Napoleon III of despotism. During the Cold War, communist propagandists used
imperialism
to describe a new kind of exploitation

linked to the global spread of capitalism.12 These doctrinal implications of the word mean that it is better to speak of the process of

conquering and ruling as
empire building
rather than
imperialism.

Imperial methods
is an even more imprecise term, but in this book

the phrase means an attempt to use hard power to reorder and transform a conquered society.

The terms
colonization
and
colonialism
create further confusion

because they are often used interchangeably with
imperialism
. Like

10 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

empire
, the word
colony
had Roman origins. From the Latin
colonia
,

referring to an outpost or village in a conquered territory, it came to

mean a settlement of one group of people on the lands of another. In

most cases, these settlers at fi rst retained citizenship in their original

societies, but in time colonies often became fully sovereign states.

While empire building entailed the permanent control of one people

or nation by another, colonization was the permanent settlement of

the lands of a conquered people. In most cases, the original inhabitants

were either wiped out or segregated and reduced to second-class status, which explains why
imperialism
and
colonialism
have become

synonymous. But a conquest resulted in an empire only when the

victors attempted to rule and exploit a defeated foe permanently.

There were also instances where colonies of settlement existed

within empires. This was the case in Kenya, where a privileged class

of British settlers exploited the labor of subject local communities

in addition to seizing their land. In this instance, Kenya’s status as a

colony was a by-product of empire building because the British government did not explicitly sanction the conquest of East Africa to

seize new land for its citizens. Imperial enthusiasts often promised

to relieve population pressure in the metropole (from the Greek for

“mother city”) by founding settlement colonies, but in reality the

primary motive was the extraction of wealth and labor from subject peoples. It is therefore more accurate to speak of this process as

empire building or imperialism rather than colonialism.

Historians and theorists have also made distinctions between
for-

mal
and
informal
empire. The former meant the direct rule of subject

peoples, while the latter implied the exercise of infl uence and privilege over a particular state or population without direct conquest.

This infl uence might rest on the threat of military action, but it could

also take the form of example, persuasion, and assistance. As such,

these informal imperial methods could be termed
soft power
. Some

scholars alternatively describe this kind of infl uence as
hegemony
.

Based on the Greek
hegemon
(preeminence, leadership), hegemony

meant the exercise of power through status, affl uence, and cultural

preeminence.

In this sense, less powerful actors or communities might voluntarily subordinate themselves to an informal empire or hegemon to

acquire status and protection. More signifi cantly, soft power often

Introduction 11

paid greater dividends than formal imperial conquest. Britain, for

example, used its economic and military dominance in the mid-nineteenth century to build a global fi nancial and commercial network of

infl uence without incurring the expense of formal and direct imperial

rule. This was in fact the “liberal empire” that captured the imagination of the modern imperial lobby. Similarly, the United States

pegged out Central America and the Caribbean as its own sphere of

infl uence. Contemporary imperial apologists depict the hegemony of

the liberal international fi nancial and commercial order underwritten

by the western capitalist powers as a force for good.13 This is open to

debate, but it is clear that these systems of persuasion and infl uence

are not imperial in the formal sense of the term.

Direct imperial rule, by defi nition, produces subjects. In common

western usage, a subject is a person under the domination of a sovereign, but in the imperial context a subject refers to an outsider open

to exploitation. Barbarians, outlanders, tribesmen, and other categories of peoples allegedly on the lower rungs of the ladder of civilization and human development were by their very nature ineligible for

citizenship in metropolitan society. Conversely, a citizen (from the

Latin
civitas
) was a person possessing the rights and privileges of full

membership in a city or state. Citizens were autonomous individuals, free people, and, ultimately, fully realized human beings. Imperial subjects, by comparison, lived on the periphery in territories,

both geographically and ideologically removed from the “civilized”

metropole. They were, by defi nition, primitive and exploitable. In

most cases, the prospect of assimilation into the supposedly superior

metropolitan society was a chimera. To be profi table and sustainable,

empires by their very nature had to codify and enshrine inequality.

There is of course no universalistic or timelessly “pure” model of

empire, and comparing historical experiences of imperial rule is not a

quest for natural laws or universal qualities of the human condition.

This is simply a history that compares the experience of imperial

rule in the ancient (Rome), medieval (Muslim Spain), early modern

(the Spanish Americas; British rule in India), and modern (Napoleonic Europe; British Kenya; Nazi Europe) imperial eras. What stands

out in each case is the resolve of subject majorities to throw off the

yoke of an alien power that treated them as perpetual strangers and

exploitable primitives.

12 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Most empires shared certain central features and characteristics

resulting from their attempts to subjugate a conquered people permanently. The fi rst is that, far from confi rming some sort of hierarchical ranking of advanced and primitive human societies, empires

were simply the products of a temporary advantage in military technology, wealth, and political will. They were the result of the uneven

integration of diverse populations into an emerging world economy

and culture. These processes of “globalization” were quite old and

probably began with the development of long-distance Eurasian

commercial networks in the ancient era. It was therefore relatively

rare for one state to maintain an economic or technological advantage

over another for a signifi cant length of time.

Successful empires exploited these temporary imbalances. In the

sixteenth century, for example, New World peoples had never been

exposed to highly contagious Old World diseases, lacked horses for

civil and military transport, and had no knowledge of the advanced

metallurgical technologies needed to produce iron-based armor,

edged weapons, and fi rearms. Consequently, small bands of Spaniards won cheap but decisive victories over much larger Inkan and

Aztec armies.

But it took more than a short-term economic, technological, and

epidemiological imbalance to create an empire. In the ancient and

medieval worlds, it was rare for one society or state to be signifi cantly

more advanced than another. In such cases, personal greed and cultural aggression were the decisive factors. Ancient Rome was rarely

at peace with its neighbors, and both missionary zeal and an appetite for plunder motivated the Arab Muslims who built the Umayyad

Caliphate. The British East India Company also had no signifi cant

military advantage over rival Indian princes, but the endemic warfare

of early modern Europe taught its employees to be ruthless in expanding the company’s infl uence in South Asia. Even the Nazi armies that

won decisive victories in 1939 and 1940 were not substantially better

equipped than their European rivals. Instead, their advantage lay in

their tactics and willingness to discard the conventional rules of warfare by violating the rights of neutrals and attacking civilians.

These realities meant that imperial subjecthood was initially

nothing more than an indication that a particular people had lost the

ability to defend themselves. Over the long term these structural

Introduction 13

imbalances evened out. The most vulnerable societies were those

divided sharply along the lines of class, religion, ethnicity, or some

other form of identity. These divisions led to military weakness, hindered organized resistance, and made it easier for conquering powers

to recruit local allies.

Ironically, imperial states were themselves vulnerable in this

regard. The Umayyads took Iberia from the Visigothic kings with

relative ease, the Spanish conquistadors toppled a highly unpopular

and oppressive Inkan regime, and the British East India Company had

little diffi culty stepping into the shoes of Mughal imperial offi cials.

Successful conquerors exploited parochialism. In Italy Napoleon’s

men faced little initial opposition from insular rural communities.

The British adventurers fi lled out armies in East Africa by exploiting

local rivalries to recruit “native auxiliaries.” One might have expected

France to be immune to these sorts of divide-and-rule tactics. But virtual civil war between political factions in the 1930s left the country

unprepared for war. The rise of the left-wing Popular Front embittered the French right to the point where Pétain was willing to seek

an accommodation with the Nazi occupiers.

The poor, the angry, and the blatantly opportunistic often had reason to cooperate with a new political order. The initial anarchy of

imperial rule offered at least some people an opportunity to preserve

or even improve their status by making themselves useful to the new

regime. In both Napoleonic Italy and Nazi-occupied France, common people settled grievances large and small by denouncing rivals