The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (4 page)

and enemies to their new masters. Alternatively, British chieftains

and Visigothic nobles allied with the Romans to preserve their rank.

Modern nationalism rendered this kind of pragmatism indefensible.

Therefore, the regimes that returned to power in Europe after the

Second World War redefi ned cooperation as the prosecutable crime of

“collaboration.” In premodern times, however, when identities were

primarily local and cooperation was not yet treason, it was much easier to recruit intermediaries.

Contemporary critics often link imperial ambition with capitalism.

Actually, the most stable and long-lived empires belonged to the premodern era, when local communities were more isolated from imperial demands for tribute and labor after the initial phases of conquest

and plunder. This also meant that they had less cause to resist because

14 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

the weight of their subjecthood was comparatively lighter. One of

the primary reasons that empires in modern Europe became unsustainable was that the combination of imperial avarice and racialized

nationalism made them unbearable.

The new imperialism of the late nineteenth century appeared

viable because it targeted peoples with precapitalist economies who

had not yet begun to think collectively. Most African subjects were

actually relatively self-suffi cient peasants or pastoralists who proved

strikingly successful in resisting efforts to force them to participate

in the imperial economy. There were very few prospects for profi table

capitalist enterprise in the new territories, which meant that regimes

had to court investors and entrepreneurs with the promise of cheap

labor. It took an array of illiberal measures, ranging from thinly disguised slavery to excessive taxation, to drive subject Africans into the

labor market. The French justifi ed the
code de l’indigénat
, which gave

them the summary authority to brutalize their subjects into working on state and private projects, on the grounds that it was a form of

social education.

Modern conquerors endeavored to make their empires profi table

and morally defensible by identifying subject peoples as inherently

exploitable. Put more bluntly, their victims had to become less than

human. Rulers consequently portrayed their subjects as culturally or

racially inferior. The fi rst category left open the possibility of jumping the boundary between subject and citizen through assimilation

into the dominant imperial order. Racial inferiority implied that subjecthood was permanent and inescapable. In both cases, a vocabulary

for subjecthood evolved. Subjects were not fully formed individuals;

their primary identities were communal and collective. If they had

rights to land, property, or protection, it was as members of a clan,

caste, or tribe. They were “traditional” peoples who made no progress

and indeed were barely aware of the passage of time.

The distinction between subject and citizen was less important in

premodern eras when rulers unapologetically exploited their own

domestic populations, and as late as the eighteenth century only a

small percentage of the global population could even be classifi ed as

“free.” Sovereigns and nobles generated surplus wealth by exploiting tenants, peasants, serfs, and laborers. In return, these marginal

peoples received some measure of protection. In sharing even the

Introduction 15

most minimal bonds of kinship with their rulers, they qualifi ed as

nominally human. The European nationalist regimes that transformed their lower orders into citizens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also resorted to harsh tactics that might appear, at

fi rst glance, imperial in character. But ultimately these peasants and

townsmen emerged as full and equal members of a nation-state. Real

assimilation, forced or otherwise, was part of the process of nation

building, not empire building. Empires needed permanently exploitable subjects, not rights-holding citizens, to remain viable. Lucrative

extraction was possible on a long-term basis only so long as subject

peoples remained alien and inassimilable. The question of identity,

what determined who was a subject and who was a citizen, is essential

to understanding the true nature of empires, and to their history.

Yet the nation was not the end of history. Indeed, the accelerated

expansion of global networks of culture, commerce, investment, and

migration in the second half of the twentieth century provided a powerful counterweight to the nation-state. Some scholars have gone so

far as to argue that global capital now constitutes a new, more powerful form of sovereignty that has eclipsed the national variety.14 Transnational forces have also created new forms of pan-national identity

that give like-minded groups of people additional means to challenge,

if not thwart, the agendas of national governments, multinational

corporations, and would-be empire builders.

Although the era of formal empire is conclusively over, policy

debates, particularly after the terrorist attacks of 2001, frequently

revolved around imperial themes. Critics on the left indicted the

United States for behaving imperially in adopting an aggressive foreign policy, while right-wing revisionists and neoconservatives sought

to rehabilitate empire to demonstrate that military force was the most

effective way to impose order and stability on a global scale. No one in

the Bush administration seriously aspired to acquire an empire when

they invaded Iraq in 2003; even the most ardent imperial apologists

knew that this was simply no longer possible or politically defensible.

Rather, the architects of the Iraqi occupation believed that they could

use authoritarian methods to replace an enemy regime with a liberal

prowestern government. Like earlier generations of conquerors, they

continued to believe that hard power could be used creatively to persuade, inspire, and reeducate a defeated “inferior” people.

16 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Critics on the American and European left were equally ignorant of the historical precedents they invoked in their attacks

on the “Bush doctrine.” Even some of the harshest opponents of

the war in Iraq failed to recognize that imperial rule was no longer feasible in an era that accepts national self-determination as

a basic human right. Castigating the Bush administration for its

unrestrained use of hard power, they produced a raft of books and

editorials warning ominously that the United States risked emulating ancient Rome in shifting from an egalitarian republic to an

authoritarian empire.15 Rather than rebutting the neoconservative

hawks with the far more effective argument that imperial methods

are no longer possible or feasible, these critics allowed themselves

to be sidetracked into a moralistic debate over whether America

had become an empire.

The left’s failure to make this case effectively allowed the neoimperial lobby to win over the American public by resurrecting the

myth of the liberal progressive empire. In doing so, they conveniently

forgot how these empires came apart under the pressure of nationalism in the 1960s. What mattered was that the notion of empire still

retained a seductive hold on the popular imagination. Western civilization courses teaching that modern nation-states are the heirs of a

culturally advanced and nearly omnipotent imperial Rome promote

an inherent respect for empire. Moreover, the media’s tendency to

still depict nonwesterners as tribal, traditional, and backward meant

that the civilizing propaganda that legitimized the new imperialism

continued to carry weight with the general public in the United States

and its partners in the “coalition of the willing.”

Striving to legitimize the Iraqi occupation, the revisionists gave

the failed imperial enterprises of the last century credit for introducing free trade around the world, imposing the rule of law on

anarchic regions, protecting private property, installing responsible

government, safeguarding speculative capitalist investment, and

sowing the seeds of democracy in modern nonwestern nations such

as India. The neoimperial lobby’s case rested on the balance sheet

approach used by 1960s imperial apologists such as L. H. Gann and

Peter Duignan to claim that the collective good of hospitals, schools,

railways, roads, and industries far outweighed the sacrifi ces they

required of individual subjects.16 This is how Niall Ferguson could

Introduction 17

argue that the evils of indentured servitude, which was a brutal but

highly effective means of compelling subject peoples to work, was

necessary to achieve the greater good of increasing the global output of rubber and gold.17

To some degree, the attempt to rehabilitate the British and French

empires represented an attempt by conservative Britons and Frenchmen to put a positive spin on their nations’ imperial record and legacy. The French politicians who managed to temporarily pass a law in

2005 directing schools to teach the “positive role of the French overseas presence” clearly had this agenda. In this sense modern imperial

romanticism is reminiscent of nostalgia in the American South for

a lost and overly idealized antebellum slaveholding society. It also

explains how most Americans conveniently overlook their nation’s

mistreatment of subject Amerindians, Filipinos, and other marginalized peoples.

The most serious fl aw of the unbalanced balance sheet defense was

that it ignored, either accidentally or willfully, subject perspectives.

At best, the common Africans and Asians who lived under these supposedly benevolent empires were simply missing from the equation.

At worst, the apologists fell back on the dehumanizing, if not outright racist, ideologies that legitimized imperial ambitions in the fi rst

place. Conversely, looking at empire from the bottom up exposes the

mendacity of imperial balance sheets. As the anthropologist Nicholas

Dirks aptly charged: “When imperial history loses any sense of what

empire meant to those who were colonized, it becomes complicit in

the history of empire itself.”18 Without question, subject peoples

must be the central focus of any true assessment of an empire or the

feasibility of imperial adventures.

This is more than just an issue of morality. Defeated populations

did not automatically become saintly when they became subjects, and

many of the subject peoples featured in this book were once autocratic imperial powers themselves. Sad to say, history also abounds

with nonimperial rulers who brutally exploited their own people.

Nonetheless, the implication that imperial methods remain viable

because nonwestern peoples are still backward has allowed the naive,

the venal, and the corrupt to continue to promise that imperial hard

power can enhance national defense, improve international security,

serve humanitarian causes, and fi ght the “war on terror.”

18 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

This top-down view of empire disguises the fundamental reality that imperial subjecthood was and remains intolerable. Even the

liberal British and French empires of the last century were born of

blood and conquest. Ferguson may have excused the initial violence

of empire building as “imperial overkill,” but there is no escaping the

almost genocidal viciousness in the satisfaction the British deputy

commissioner of Bechuanaland took in the slaughter of Ndebele soldiers during the conquest of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). “I must confess

that it would offer me sincere and lasting satisfaction if I could see the

Matabele Matjaha cut down by our own rifl es and machine guns like

a cornfi eld by a reaping machine and I would not spare a single one if

I could have my way.”19

The establishment of more formal rule ended the overt violence

of these Orwellian “pacifi cation campaigns,” but Africans continued

to die for imperial masters while working in the fi elds and mines.

As in earlier eras, the labor of common people remained the only

signifi cant source of profi t in the new empires. The supposedly modernizing imperial states of the last century relied on unfree labor,

privileged foreign commercial interest, and discouraged the diversifi cation of commodity production. They were hardly free and liberal.

Eloquently rebutting the imperial apologists’ balance sheets, the poet

Aimé Césaire declared: “They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks. I am talking about thousands

of men sacrifi ced to the Congo-Ocean [railway]. I am talking about

those who . . . are digging the harbor of Abidjan by hand.”20 Césaire

was not exaggerating the lethality of imperial labor. The Belgian,

French, and British authorities expended the lives of roughly eighteen hundred coerced African workers in the construction of a single

railway line from Matadi to Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo.21

Like the schools and hospitals enumerated by Gann and Duignan,

the Matadi-Léopoldville line served western empire builders. If the

new imperialists left independent African nations with a rudimentary capitalist infrastructure, it was by chance, not design.

The common experience of imperial rule throughout history has

been oppression. In their scorn for these supposedly “liberal” French