The Oxford World History Of Empire Volume One: The Imperial Experience [1, 1st Edition] 0199772363, 9780199772360, 0197532748, 9780197532744, 0199773114, 9780199773114

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The Oxford World History of Empire

In Two Volumes

The Oxford World History of Empire Volume 1: The Imperial Experience Edited by P E T E R F I B IG E R BA N G C . A . BAY LY † WA LT E R S C H E I D E L

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​977236–​0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

All histories, then, even histories of the “fragment” are implicitly universal histories. —​C. A. Bayly (Birth of the Modern World, 2004, 8)

Contents Volume 1 The Imperial Experience List of Contributors

ix

List of Figures, Tables and Maps

xiii

Prolegomena Peter Fibiger Bang

xix

1. Empire—​A World History: Anatomy and Concept, Theory and Synthesis Peter Fibiger Bang

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SYS T E M S O F P OW E R :  M I L I TA RY, E C O N OM Y, E L I T E S 2. The Scale of Empire: Territory, Population, Distribution Walter Scheidel

91

3. The Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism in Interpolity Systems Christopher Chase-​Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy

111

4. Empire and Military Organization Ian Morris

155

5. The Political Economy of Empire: “Imperial Capital” and the Formation of Central and Regional Elites John Haldon

179

C U LT U R E S O F P OW E R :  SYM B O L IC D I SP L AY, K N OW L E D G E , B E L I E F, D I S C O U R SE 6. Imperial Monumentalism, Ceremony, and Forms of Pageantry: The Inter-​Imperial Obelisk in Istanbul Cecily J. Hilsdale

223

7. Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule Caroline Humfress

266

8. Mapping, Registering, and Ordering: Time, Space, and Knowledge Laura Hostetler

288

9. Empire and Religion Amira K. Bennison

318

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10. Literature of Empire: Difference, Creativity, and Cosmopolitanism Javed Majeed

342

D I SPA R I T I E S O F P OW E R :  H I E R A R C H I E S , R E SI STA N C E , R E S O U R C E S 11. Empires and the Politics of Difference: Pathways of Incorporation and Exclusion Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper 12. Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern Kim A. Wagner

375 416

13. Imperial Metabolism: Empire as a Process of Ecologically Unequal Exchange Alf Hornborg

437

14. Ecology: Environments and Empires in World History, 3000 bce–​ca. 1900  ce James Beattie and Eugene Anderson

460

M E M O RY A N D D E C L I N E 15. Memories of Empire: Literature and Art, Nostalgia and Trauma Phiroze Vasunia

497

16. The End of Empires John A. Hall

523

Index of Places, Names, and Events

541

List of Contributors Eugene N. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. He has done research on ethnobiology, cultural ecology, and genocide. His books include The Food of China (Yale University Press, 1988), Ecologies of the Heart (Oxford University Press, 1996), The Pursuit of Ecotopia (Praeger, 2010), Caring for Place (2014), Everyone Eats (2014), Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (2014), and, with Barbara A. Anderson, Warning Signs of Genocide (2012). Peter Fibiger Bang is Associate Professor of History at the University of Copenhagen. His work has concentrated on (re)contextualizing the Roman Empire in world history, often in collaboration with his two co-​editors, and tackles a wide range of topics, from the economy to state-​ formation and power. A  mainstay has been the attempt to explore comparisons with other pre-​colonial empires such as the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the Chinese. Among his books are The Roman Bazaar (Cambridge 2008); with C. A. Bayly, Tributary Empires in Global History (Palgrave 2011); with D. Kołodziejczyk, Universal Empire (Cambridge 2012); with W. Scheidel, The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (Oxford 2013). Irregulare Aliquod Corpus? Comparison, World History and the Historical Sociology of the Roman Empire (Copenhagen 2014) offers a theoretical and methodological manifesto. C. A. Bayly was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of St. Catharine’s College, (Cambridge), Fellow of the British Academy and Trustee of the British Museum. He used his basis in late Mughal and Colonial Indian history to rethink the character of imperial and global history. Characteristic of his writing was an unmatched capacity to mobilize his wide-ranging interests to identify links between seemingly contradictory or unrelated phenomena and a keen sense of the agency of subject communities. From 2005 to 2009 he was the vice-​chair of a European research network, funded by COST and chaired by Peter Bang, that sought to explore comparisons between pre-​colonial empires. Among his many writings are Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Oxford 1983), Imperial Meridian (Harlow 1989), The Birth of the Modern World (Malden 2004) and the posthumous Remaking the Modern World 1900–​2015 (Hoboken & Chichester 2018). James Beattie is an environmental and world historian whose work focuses on the Asia-​Pacific region, mostly over the last 200 years. His 12 books and 60 articles and chapters explore cross-​ cultural exchanges occasioned by British imperialism, and the nexus between environment, gardens, health, and art. He is also founding editor of the interdisciplinary, refereed journal International Review of Environmental History, and co-​edits the book series Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. He is Associate Professor, The Centre for Science in Society, Victoria University of Wellington and Senior Research Associate, Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg. Amira K. Bennison is Professor in the History and Culture of the Maghrib at the University of Cambridge. Her work explores patterns of political legitimation in the medieval to early modern Maghrib from a variety of perspectives, including jihad ideology and urbanism. Her books include Jihad and its Interpretations in Pre-​Colonial Morocco (RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), The Great Caliphs (I. B. Tauris, 2009) and The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

x  List of Contributors Jane Burbank is Collegiate Professor and Professor of History and Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. She is the author of Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–​1922; Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–​1917; and, with Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. She co-​edited two studies of Russian empire: Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, and Russian Empire: Space, People, Power 1700–​1930. At present she is working on imperial law and Russian sovereignty, viewed from the province of Kazan, and on a history of the Russian legal tradition. Christopher Chase-​Dunn is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-​Systems at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Rise and Demise: Comparing World-​Systems (with Thomas D. Hall); The Wintu and Their Neighbors (with Kelly Mann); and The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism (with Terry Boswell). He is the founder and former editor of the Journal of World-​Systems Research. Chase-​Dunn is currently doing research on transnational social movements. He also studies the rise and fall of settlements and polities since the Stone Age and global state formation. Frederick Cooper is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005); Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (with Jane Burbank, 2010); Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–​1960 (2014); Africa in the World:  Capitalism, Empire, Nation-​State (2014); and Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (2018). John Haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History at Princeton University, Emeritus. His research focuses on the history of the medieval Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, in particular in the period from the seventh to the twelfth centuries; on state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times; on the impact of environmental stress on societal resilience in pre-​modern social systems; and on the production, distribution, and consumption of resources in the late ancient and medieval world. He is Executive Director of the Environmental History Lab in the Medieval Studies Program, Director of the Princeton Climate Change and History Research Initiative (https://​cchri.princeton. edu/​), and of the Avkat Archaeological Project (Turkey: www.princeton.edu/​avkat). John A.  Hall is the James McGill Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of many books, including recently Ernest Gellner (2010); The World of States (with John L. Campbell, 2015); and The Paradox of Vulnerability (with John L. Campbell, 2017). He is currently writing a book on Empires, Nations and States. Cecily J. Hilsdale, Associate Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture at McGill University in Montreal, specializes in the arts of Byzantium and the wider Mediterranean world. Her publications, including her book Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline (Cambridge, 2014), focus on the circulation of Byzantine luxury items as diplomatic gifts, as well as the related dissemination of Eastern styles, techniques, iconographies, and ideologies of imperium. Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His main research interest is to theorize the cultural and political dimensions of human-​ environmental relations in different societies in the past and present. His books include The Power of the Machine (AltaMira, 2001), Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange (Routledge, 2011), Global Magic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He has also co-​edited several collections at the interface of anthropology, environmental history, political ecology, and ecological economics. Laura Hostetler is Professor of History and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on ethnography and cartography as tools of empire building in eighteenth-​century China; Sino-​Western cultural exchange; and global early modernity. She is

List of Contributors  xi currently working on a translation of The Qing Illustrations of Tributary Peoples together with Professor Wu Xuemei. Caroline Humfress is Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on law, religion, and intellectual history. She has published widely on Late Antiquity (ca. 200–​ca. 600 ce), including a 2007 Oxford University Press monograph, Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity. Her forthcoming monograph, again with Oxford University Press, explores the phenomenon of “multi-​legalism.” She is also co-​editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law (Cambridge University Press). Dmytro Khutkyy is a public sociologist, practicing academic research at the Institute for Research on World-​Systems, University of California at Riverside, USA; applied research at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute, Italy; and civic activism at Reanimation Package of Reforms and the Coalition for the Advance of e-​Democracy, Ukraine. His research focus is digital democracy, innovative governance, and social change. Javed Majeed is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London. He is the author of a number of books and articles on modern South Asia, including Ungoverned Imaginings:  James Mill’s the History of British India and Orientalism (1992); Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity. Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (2007); and Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (2009). He is also the editor, with Christopher Shackle, of Hali’s Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam (1997); and with Isabel Hofmeyr, of India and South Africa (2016). His two-​volume study of G. A. Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India was published by Routledge in 2018. Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Stanford University. He works on long-​term global history. He is the author of Why the West Rules—​For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (2010); The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (2013); and Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolved (2015). Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and Kennedy-​Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or (co-​)editor of 19 other books, he has worked on premodern social and economic history, historical demography, and the comparative world history of labor, state formation, and inequality. Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London. He has written extensively about colonialism and the classical tradition. He is the author of The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford, 2013) and a co-​author of Postclassicisms (Chicago, 2019). He is currently writing a book about colonial/​postcolonial studies and the ancient world. Kim A.  Wagner is Professor of Global and Imperial History at Queen Mary, University of London. His research focuses on knowledge and resistance in British India, and on colonial violence and warfare more generally in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century global history. Wagner’s most recent publications include The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (Hurst/​OUP US/​Penguin India, 2017), and Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale/​Penguin India, 2019).

List of Figures, Tables and Maps List of Figures Figure 0.1: Traditional historiography and comparative contextualization

xxiii

Figure 2.1: The size of the single largest empire and the three largest empires in the world, 3000 BCE to 2000 CE (in million km2) 95 Source: Taagepera 1976a, 116–117, table 2. Figure 2.2: The size of the single largest empire and the three largest empires in the world, 3000 BCE to 2000 CE (in million km2, logarithmic scale) Source: Taagepera 1976a, 116–117, table 2.1.

96

Figure 2.3: Largest empires of the Old World, 550 BCE to 2000 CE (in million km2) 99 Source: Taagepera 1978a, 1978b, 1979, 1997. Figure 2.4: Largest Asian empires, 1570–1930 (in million km2) 100 Source: Taagepera 1997: 498–500. Figure 2.5: Largest Eurocentric empires, 1580–2000 (in million km2) 100 Source: Taagepera 1997: 498–502. Figure 2.6: The population of the single largest empire and the three largest empires in the world, 700 BCE to 2000 ce (in millions; logarithmic scale) Source: Based on Table 2.1, McEvedy and Jones 1978 and standard historical mapping resources.

101

Figure 2.7: The population of the single largest empire and three largest empires in the world as a proportion of world population, 700 BCE to 2000 ce (in percent) 102 Source: Based on Table 2.1, McEvedy and Jones 1978 and standard historical mapping resources. Figure 2.8: The proportion of the population of Europe claimed by the largest polity in that area, 250 BCE to​ 2000  CE (in percent) Source: Scheidel 2019, 37.

104

Figure 2.9: The proportion of the population of the Middle East and North Africa claimed by the largest polity in that area, 700 BCE to​ 2000  CE (in percent) Source: Scheidel 2019, 39.

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Figure 2.10: The proportion of the population of South Asia claimed by the largest polity in that area, 500 BCE to​ 2000  CE (in percent) Source: Scheidel 2019, 40.

105

Figure 2.11: The proportion of the population of East Asia claimed by the largest polity in that area, 250 BCE –​ 2000  CE 106 Source: Scheidel 2019, 41. Figure 2.12: Spatial distribution of the core areas of empires of at least 1 million km2 in Afroeurasia Source: Scheidel 2019, 273 (adapted from Turchin 2009, 204 fig.1).

107

xiv  List of Figures, Tables and Maps Figure 2.13: Probability of being part of large polities (>1,000,000 km2/ 1 century) at 100- year intervals, 600 bce to 1500 ce (probability rising from medium grey = low to black = high; light grey = zero). (a) 600 bce–400 ce. (b) 500–1500 ce Provided by James Bennett (University of Washington), on November 9, 2017, drawing on the data underlying Turchin, Currie, Turner, and Gavrilets 2013, 16386, who provide analogous heat maps for states of >100,000 km2.

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Figure 3.1: The evolution of political entities

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Figure 3.2: Waves of decolonization as shown by the number of colonial governors sent home. Source: Henige 1970.

135

Figure 3.3: Core configurations with and without hegemony.

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Figure 3.4: Levels of action in the architecture of global governance Source: Peter Berthelsen (based on Kennedy et al. 2002, 143 and Held and McGrew 2002, 66).

142

Figure 6.1: Obelisk of Thutmose III installed on the base of Emperor Theodosios in the Hippodrome of Constantinople (Istanbul)

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Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale. Figure 6.2: Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), Southwest Face

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Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale. Figure 6.3: Unfinished obelisk, Aswan, Egypt

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Photo: Shutterstock. Figure 6.4: Washington Monument, Washington DC

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Photo: Shutterstock. Figure 6.5: Luxor, first pylon with obelisk and statues of Ramses II

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Photo: Saskia Ltd. Cultural Documentation. Figure 6.6: Hatshepsut’s obelisk at Karnak

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Photo: Shutterstock. Figure 6.7: Hatshepsut with obelisks at Karnak, from red quartzite shine (now in Luxor Museum)

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Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Figure 6.8: Obelisk once installed at the Circus Maximus, now at the Piazza del Popolo

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Photo: Shutterstock. Figure 6.9: Obelisk once installed at the Campus Martius, now at the Piazza Montecitorio

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Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale. Figure 6.10: Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, exterior

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Photo: Shutterstock. Figure 6.11: Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, interior detail. Photo: Shutterstock.

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List of Figures, Tables and Maps  xv Figure 6.12: Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), southeast face

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Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale. Figure 6.13: Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), northwest face

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Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale. Figure 6.14: Detail of the frescoes in the southwestern turret of the Church of St Sophia, Kiev

250

Photo: Andrea Jerole/Scala/Art Resource, NY. Figure 6.15: Peştamal-​makers at the 1582 Circumcision Festival, Ottoman Imperial Festival Book, Surname-​i hümayun, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi library H 1344 (338b-​339a)

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Photo: Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi. Figure 6.16: Night spectacles of the 1582 Circumcision Festival (launching of fireworks and mock battle), Ottoman Imperial Festival Book, Surname-​i hümayun, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi library H 1344 (28b)

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Photo: Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi. Figure 6.17: Circumcision Festival of 1530 (scramble and acrobats), Hünername II, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi library H 1524

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Photo: Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi. Figure 6.18: Drawing of the relief from Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el Bahri, after Edouard Naville, The Temple of Deir el Bahari (London, 1908)

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Figure 6.19: Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), loer portion of the northeast face

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Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale. Figure 6.20: Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), lower portion of the southwest face

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Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale. Figure 6.21: Obelisk and base, Place de la Concorde, Paris

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Photo: Shutterstock. Figure 6.22: Obelisk in Coronation Park, Delhi

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Photo: Sunil Kumar. Figure 6.23: Coronation Park, Delhi

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Photo: Sunil Kumar. Figure 8.1: T and O map, 1472. From Isidori Iunioris, Epistola

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Source: The Newberry Library. Figure 8.2: Portolan Chart, ca. 1550

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Source: Library of Congress. https://​www.loc.gov/​item/​2010588182/​ Figure 8.3: Ptolemy, “Map of the World,” 1513 edition Source: Library of Congress. https://​www.loc.gov/​resource/​g3200m.gct00262/​?sp=77

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xvi  List of Figures, Tables and Maps Figure 8.4: Piri Reis, Portolan

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Source: Topkapi Library. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Piri_​reis_​ world_​map_​01.jpg Figure 8.5: Kangxi Atlas, 1721. Map of Guangxi Province

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Photo: The British Library. https://​www.loc.gov/​resource/​g7821fm.gct00232/​?sp=11 Figure 8.6: Yinka Shonibare, The Scramble for Africa (2003) Source: © Yinka Shonibare MBE. All Rights Reserved, DACS/​ARS, NY 2018. Figure 14.1: This eighteenth-​century seascape with islands depicts the Daoist mountains and isles, an idealized vision of the abode of the immortals. Karen Thornber explores the tension between environmentally sensitive doctrines such as Daoism and environmental reality Reproduced with permission from Canterbury Museum Figure 14.2: This rubbing, from Tang Emperor Taizong’s tomb, portrays Taizong’s own steed, which he rode while pacifying the eastern capital of Luoyang. Horses revolutionized warfare and enabled steppelanders to conquer Chinese territory

314

469

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Reproduced with permission from Canterbury Museum Figure 15.1: The Alexander Mosaic, ca. 100 BCE. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli Source: The British Library. Figure 15.2: Spiridione Roma, The East Offering Its Riches to Britannia, 1778. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London

501

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons. https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:The_​East_​offering_​its_​riches_​to_​ Britannia_​-​_​Roma_​Spiridone,_​1778_​-​_​BL_​Foster_​245.jpg Figure 15.3: The Leadenhall Street Mosaic Copyright: © Trustees of the British Museum.

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List of Tables Table 2.1: Empires that covered at least one million square kilometres

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Table 2.2: Empires that claimed at least 8 percent of the world population (in Percent)

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Table 4.1: More Than 2 Million Years of Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs)

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List of Maps Map I: Bronze to Iron Age, the Near-​Eastern “Invention” of empire (Third millennium to 300 BCE)52 Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland. Map II: The Classical Age, Culminating in the Formation of Large World Empires on the Margins of Eurasia: The Mediterranean and China (323 BCE–​600  CE)57 Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

List of Figures, Tables and Maps  xvii Map III: The Ecumenic Turn: Eclipse of the Old World and the Rise of Islam (600–1200) Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

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Map IV: The Mongol Moment: The Rise of Chinggis Khan and the Central Asian Steppe Followed by Regional Reassertion (1200–1450) Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

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Map V: Another World: The Separate, but Parallel Path of Imperial Formations in the Precolonial Americas Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

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Map VI: The Great Confluence: The Culmination of Universal Empires and the Conquest of the New World: Agrarian Consolidation and the Rise of European Commercial and Colonial Empires (1450–1750) Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland. Map VII: The Global Turn: The Age of European Colonialism, Subjection of Old Agrarian Empires to the European-​Led World Economy and Nationalist Secessions (1750–1914) Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland. Map VIII: The Twentieth Century: The Collapse of Colonial Empires and the Rise of Superpowers during the Cold War Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

67

71

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Map 3.1: Old World Trade Routes, c. 1340 Copyright: Eric Ross.

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Map 3.2: Old World Trade Routes, c.1490 Copyright: Eric Ross.

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Map 3.3: Mercantilist World-​Economy, c. 1530–1776 Copyright: Eric Ross.

138

Prolegomena Peter Fibiger Bang

It was my hope to give expression to the restlessness, the deep disorder, which the great explorations, the overthrow in three continents of established social organizations . . . this great upheaval has brought about . . . It was my hope to sketch a subject which, fifty years hence, a great historian might pursue. For there is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and antiquarian research; and on the subject of empire there is only the pamphleteering of churls . . . in that dream of writing I was attracted less by the act and the labour than by the calm and the order which the act would have implied.1

Half a century has passed since V. S. Naipaul penned these sentences in The Mimic Men, his examination of the postcolonial condition; and now it is time, time to write the history of empire. Yet the order and calm that he anticipated are nowhere in sight. The legacies of colonialism are as hotly contested as ever, while empire has defied expectations by returning to current agendas.2 It used to be part of received wisdom that empires were a thing of the past. History had taken a decisive turn from empire to nation. By the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama could even declare that history had come to an end. The future would belong to freedom and national democracy. This was the highpoint of the postcolonial dream, but also its last gasp. Such utopian hopes have since been dashed as history has returned with a vengeance. Humanitarian military interventions, neo-​ colonialism, the culture of historic commemoration, institutionalized racism, and ethnic conflicts in former imperial territories (including Europe) are but some of the issues that reveal the lingering legacies of empire in the present. Although anti-​ imperialist in rhetoric, all the leading powers of today—​the United States, China, as well as Russia—​may be thought, for better or worse, to pursue their own policies of domination. Humanity has moved beyond the postcolonial moment, marked by the dissolution of European overseas possessions, and imperialism has resurfaced as a global force. When the Roman poet Virgil made Jupiter promise “empire without end” either in time or space, he was more prophetic than he could have known.3 Empire, it turns out, is truly protean and its long and deep history continues. 1 Naipaul 1967, 38–​39. 2 Ward and Rasch 2019 for a window on the many public debates still raging around the legacies of the British Empire. 3 Virgil, Aeneid I, vv. 278–​279: his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi. The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.001.0001.

xx  PETER FIBIGER BANG Most theories of empire, however, remain wedded to the experience mapped out in the brief period when European powers dominated the world. This perspective, it is clear now, must be contextualized, the template widened and situated within a proper world history of conquest and domination. After all, a long time has passed since Europe could claim to dictate the course of world history: our intellectual horizon must be adjusted accordingly. This is what these volumes seek to do, by tracking the phenomenon of empire from its earliest beginnings in the third millennium bce up until the twenty-​first century and in all its global reach and variety. They cover a story that contains the usual and familiar suspects of Rome, the dynasties of China, the Mongols of Chinggis Khan, and the British, but also veer far outside the historical mainstream to capture the experience even of fairly nebulous entities such as the Songhay Empire of western Sub-​Saharan Africa or the Srivijaya perched across the Strait of Malacca. Not every power that has been, or could be, labeled an empire is included here: a selection had to be made with due attention to size and impact as well as cultural and geographical variety. Some will undoubtedly find fault with our choices; but the 45 chapters in Volume 2 that survey the histories of different empires across the millennia and around the planet should be enough to allow the contours of a truly global story to emerge with clarity. This is not a random collection of examples; it focuses on the three principal clusters that structure the study of empire: the vast realms of Western Afro-Eurasian antiquity, the grand agrarian dominions of Asia, and the colonial overseas possessions of Europe. These empires are of central importance, not only because of disciplinary conventions, but because in terms of their scale, durability, and modes of rule, they affected the lives of more people than other types of states and decisively shaped the course of much of human history. Paradoxically, reliance on “blunt” criteria of centrality rather than on perhaps more fashionable traits, such as marginality, makes it much easier to organize a less Eurocentric history of the imperial experience. Even our vision of the early modern period, frequently regarded as characterized above all by the formation of European colonial and commercial imperialism, perceptibly changes once this principle is applied. During that period, Asia was by no means in the grip of stagnation, as the historiographical myth used to have it. On the contrary, it witnessed vigorous and dynamic formation of new empires and dynasties with the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Qing. Between them, these imperial monarchies governed far larger populations than anything the contemporary European polities could aspire to control. Consequently, they lead the part devoted, in Volume 2, to those centuries. If calm turns out to be an elusive aspiration, the necessary labor invoked in Naipaul’s prescient observations has proven real enough. This project was conceived in Rome a decade ago and has been long in the making. As a couple of the peer reviewers who assessed our original proposal remarked, long delays had to be expected and successful completion would require repeated search for substitutes as some authors pulled out. The hard-​headed realism of these comments has by now been fully confirmed. Any endeavor that involves as many people as this project is

PROLEGOMENA  xxi bound to run up against life as it inevitably bursts into the ivory tower to upset even the best laid plans and the firmest of commitments. The only remedies against this unruliness are patience, a charitable approach to one’s colleagues—​all of us chronically overburdened with writing assignments—​a little innocuous deception—​and the odd, good-​humored use of unconventional editorial stratagems. One tardy author, for instance, had to put up with his editor turning up in person almost quite literally on his doorstep, from halfway around the globe, to coax the contribution out of him. Yet even the connective power of modern planetary transport and communication technology could not overcome every obstacle. Two-​thirds into the project, our editorial triad was sadly reduced to a duo by the untimely and unexpected death in 2015 of C. A. Bayly, or Chris. Just a few weeks before the fatal day, we spoke on the phone and one of his last remarks to me was “when will I see you next,” after which we began briefly to discuss plans for another workshop in Copenhagen to continue our conversation about comparative world history. We never got to finalize these plans, however, before silence fell. Now I am glad that I never got around to sending him my editorial comments for his chapter, still in the shape of a lecture, on the British Empire during the long nineteenth century. They would only have served to standardize what now reads as the final and very personal statement on the British Empire by one of its greatest historians. One can almost, as Nicolas Canny remarked to me in correspondence, hear Chris’s voice when one reads the chapter; and so the dialogue and the quest continue. It was precisely during one of our conversations that this project was born. We had worked together for some years on an attempt financed by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) to develop comparisons of very large pre-​colonial or tributary territorial empires. After the end of the final conference in Rome we met up, to enjoy a glass of wine and reflect on the whole comparative endeavor together with Walter (Scheidel), who had been running a parallel project comparing the ancient Roman and Chinese empires.4 The state of affairs was paradoxical. While many historians were sympathetic and happy to engage in comparative dialogues, few were prepared to take the final step and actually write comparative history. In that respect, the participants in our project truthfully mirrored both the condition of imperial history and the organization of the wider discipline. Academics are still mostly employed to write the history of single societies. There is no field of imperial history, but many histories of empires. Instead of going against the grain, we then decided to work with what was there. While the COST program had not generated a group of full-​fledged comparativists, it had built up an extraordinarily wide network of imperial historians and sociologists. Here was a solid basis from which to work, widen scope and ambition even further, and reach out for a genuine world history.

4 Bang and Bayly 2011; Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2012; Forsén and Salmeri 2008; Scheidel 2009, 2015.

xxii  PETER FIBIGER BANG A lingering deep-​seated skepticism toward comparative analysis and macro-​ historical synthesis remains common among most historians. For many practitioners of a discipline that prizes archival research and meticulous study of documents, a focus on cross-​cultural comparisons and broad-​ranging developments remains dubious, an activity prone to error and unable fully to do justice to the specifics of the circumstances, cultures, and societies in question. The comparativist labors under heightened suspicion. A transgressor, no generalist can hope to command the range of languages and plumb the depths of local antiquarian knowledge required to compete with the traditional area specialists who inhabit and often jealously guard the various territories across which comparative inquiry must roam. The continuing strength of this sentiment may, at least in part, explain the recent rush, in some quarters, toward connected histories at the expense of comparison, within the field of global and world history.5 The microscopic study of border-​crossing activities and cultural exchanges seems to offer a way to accommodate the agenda of globalization within a safely familiar disciplinary environment. “Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi/​if we want everything to remain as it is, it is necessary that everything changes.” It is difficult not to be reminded of the famous words from Il Gattopardo, the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa set in nineteenth-​ century Sicily. Expressing the hope of a member of the nobility to capture and annul the nationalist revolution of Mazzini and Garibaldi by joining the cause, their charm and cynicism have become emblematic of the capacity of “ancien regimes” of all kinds to endure and reassert themselves.6 Against these concerns of traditional historiography, we must object, comparative world history has something far more important to offer than merely a less skilled take on the same material that is already being handled with greater expertise by others. Reading through the pages of William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples from the 1970s, for instance, it is striking just how visionary his discussion of the significance of the Antonine and Justinianic plagues for the Roman Empire now appears. More than a generation later, these pandemics have come to occupy a central place in accounts of the empire composed by ancient historians.7 By contrast, McNeill’s understanding of the late Roman state apparatus, as an unbearably top-​heavy structure, does at a first glimpse seem a little out of touch—​but only until one remembers that it used to be mainstream among the specialists to denounce the multiplying offices of the late antique imperial state as emblematic of a corruption that eventually strangled the body politic.8 If part of McNeill’s analysis may now seem to be off the mark, this is not in any substantial way because his description of the past necessarily had to be more cursory and perhaps more likely to fall prey to mistakes and misunderstandings of details than more narrowly focused studies. Quite the reverse, by attempting to identify a broader picture it uncovered a dimension of past life and society that was not accessible to more traditional, seemingly safely anchored scholarship.

5 Conrad 2016, for a survey of the field, p. 9 and passim on connected histories. 6 Tomasi di Lampedusa 2002, 50.

7 McNeill 1976, 130–​142. See most recently, Harper 2017. 8 So MacMullen 1988; Jones 1964.

PROLEGOMENA  xxiii 1. Traditional Historiography: Societies, e.g. empires, studied as individual, separate sets

2. Comparative Contextualization: Comparison reveals how the individual sets, e.g. of empires, connect and overlap with other sets to form clusters or even subsets that may be part of a wider set, e.g. colonial empires or universal empires within the wider set of all empires. This perspective is inaccessible to students at step 1.

Figure 0.1  Traditional historiography and comparative contextualization

A short tour around set-​theory will help express this insight in general terms. Some may remember that K.  N. Chaudhuri failed to win many kudos from his colleagues when his ambitious Asia before Europe ventured onto this theoretical terrain a generation ago;9 but it is part of the folly of human nature happily to repeat the errors of others, usually in a more simplified version. Figure 0.1 tries to illustrate the argument. Step 1 shows the time-​tested, and institutionally predominant way of writing history. Here every society, however internally divided, tends to be conceived of as a single isolated set. Much speaks in favor of this approach, but as step 2 in Figure 0.1 illustrates, this is only one way of analyzing a social formation. Some significant aspects of reality remain hidden from sight: how the separate societal sets relate to each other, overlap, connect and form bigger sets. It is to recover this dimension of past existence that we need to compare and make visible the properties that are shared between individual societies, the commonalities.

9 Chaudhuri 1990, chs. 1 and 2.

xxiv  PETER FIBIGER BANG In a particularly influential social science version of this approach, comparison serves to sharpen causal analysis. Detection of a point of divergence makes it possible to address differences in outcomes between otherwise similar societies. An explanatory cause would seem to have been isolated. Yet, cases are commonly too few in number, past phenomena too imperfectly known, and human affairs generally too messy to permit solid, law-​like causal explanations to be formed.10 Comparison, however, not only falls short of its promise, it also accomplishes much more. In a very fundamental way, it breaks the isolation, illustrated in step 1 of the figure, to reveal how social formations form part of wider historical contexts, step 2. By identifying broad similarities between societies, comparison provides pointers and serves to contextualize individual cases by establishing parallels and identifying wider patterns.11 Differently put, the identification of analogies between social formations, with some shared characteristics, rearranges our singular examples as part of larger sets, empires for instance. That is urgently needed and a precondition for the pursuit of world history. To be sure, the commonalities and connections that become visible in this exercise will oftentimes be dismissed by the area specialists as too general and imprecise; but these qualms are, at least much of the time, misplaced. Rejection should not follow automatically from the fact that comparison presents a case in a different light and resolution than is customary. Why would we simply want epistemologically to privilege step 1 to the exclusion of step 2, confining our understanding solely to one perspective instead of the other? The value of pointing to parallels does not depend on absolute identity. Should an overlap of say 50, 60, or 80% between societies, by definition, be any less interesting than their differences? After all, few societal settings exist under such a pressure of forces that arrangements develop as completely predetermined, with no room left for inconsequential variation. As often as not, the real danger is rather that minute differences are elevated to a high explanatory position when what has really happened is that analysis has succumbed to the prejudice of small differences. On the issue of national identity, no one today could credibly maintain that each nationalism, in spite of all its predictable quirks, must be treated as unique and in isolation. Why should imperialism, a much older and even bruter force, the quest to conquer and dominate the resources of other societies and their populations, be viewed any differently? Contrary to the disciplinary inclination of our profession toward particularism, it must be emphasized that comparison simply allows us to see a social formation in a wider context, revealing a more general dimension of the past, invisible to the historian studying a society in the singular. That dimension is not any less real. Some phenomena emerge only when you take a step back and observe them from a distance sufficient to make the clutter of life look hazy and prevent infinite details from obscuring the broader pattern. Few historians of the Persian Empire wonder about 10 Sewell 2005, ch. 3, a critique of the influential view of the comparative method represented by Skocpol 1979, 33–​40; Lange 2013 broadly surveys the use of historical comparison in the social sciences. 11 Bang 2014.

PROLEGOMENA  xxv the extraordinary, revolutionary geographical expansion of imperial power that was so quickly achieved by the Achaemenids, few ask about the formation of the standing imperial army of Rome in a wider world historical context, or relate the role of Confucian literary elite-​culture in the stable government of vast expanses of territory to other imperial cosmopolitan cultures. Even the view, still not uncommon among students of European colonialism, that this phenomenon was of its own kind, the really defining form of imperialism, remains for the most part a more or less tacitly accepted assumption, rarely examined in the wider and deeper context that would be necessary to justify this position. These volumes refuse to choose between the two alternative perspectives on the past. They seek to harness the capacity of more conventional historiography to survey the phenomenon of imperialism in much of its sprawling variety, but also to situate this variety within wider contexts and thus reveal the bigger picture by observing the formation of empire over the very longue durée and the broadest geo­ graphical sweep. This is what the design of Figure 0.1 seeks to illustrate, with its image of individual empires forming a set of interlocking sets. The basic ambition of these volumes, then, is firmly to place the histories of empires in the context of other imperial formations, to form a world history and develop a new picture, paradoxically by the radical pursuit of traditional means. To this end, this work has been organized in two volumes, the first comparative and analytical in scope, the second, a history of histories. The opening chapter of Vol. 1 attempts to survey both definitions and the dominant theories of empire and range them into an analytical matrix which can be used to structure a world-​ historical synthesis. This is followed by a set of 15 comparative, thematic chapters, each of them seeking to explore a specific dimension of the multifarious experience of imperial societies across the centuries. No general theoretical framework holds sway among students of empire. The field is characterized by a fair number of schools, often competing and at loggerheads. However, rival theories need not necessarily be treated as mutually exclusive. Formation of empire has been too all-​encompassing a force in history, not to demand a heterogeneous approach. In fact, theoretical diversity may more profitably be understood as illuminating and interrogating different aspects of the operation of power and the imperial experience. Recent interest in the construction and negotiation of cultural and gender identities, for instance, does not so much supplant as complement earlier work on economic exploitation. Existing bodies of theory have, therefore, served to guide our identification and treatment of analytical themes. But it is a key point of these thematic chapters that they do not simply seek to introduce a set of abstract theory. They aim to put the historical experience more firmly into play. As no theories are on offer that encompass the imperial experience across the entire span of world history, the authors have been asked to revert to comparison to build from the ground up, so to speak, to reveal broader patterns for a wide range of thematics, covering a broad spectrum from resource extraction and social hierarchies to knowledge production, memories, and decline.

xxvi  PETER FIBIGER BANG Volume 2 of this work moves on to survey the development of empires through time and around the globe. It seeks to assemble a world history from a set of individual imperial histories, divided into eight periods of world-​historical time. Each phase is introduced by a short synthesis, fleshing out the main developments in a global context and perspective. As the individual histories chart the emergence and evolution of several kinds of imperial polities through different historical epochs and basic technological regimes, it would have been unreasonable to force each chapter into a single, narrow mold. A uniform template would have functioned rather as a straightjacket than as an efficient means of ensuring coherence—​a certain recipe for schematic results that would undo one of the most fundamental benefits of comparison, the inspiration arising from the confrontation of the habitual and well-​known with other less familiar experiences and ways of addressing a topic. Authors accordingly enjoyed considerable leeway in shaping their chapters in order to allow for both individual creativity and historical variation. Nevertheless, a few basic minimum requirements have been broadly adhered to. The chapters on particular empires are expected both to provide a chronological overview charting the historical course of their polities and to offer analysis of the military and economic foundation, the political organization of government and administration, as well as social and cultural history. These themes have provided a frame strong enough to give direction and allow a global vision to emerge from the many single studies included in these volumes. Overall, our history chapters converge on a view of the problem of imperial power that may be summarized in the historical sociology of Michael Mann as one of organizational capacity and logistical constraints.12 And in the combination of perspectives represented in the work as a whole, we hope to have placed the individual imperial histories firmly within a variety of comparative, interlocking world historical contexts. Now, at the end of the long, and it should be said, exciting labor which has gone into the completion of this work, it is a dear duty and great joy to acknowledge the help and advice generously offered by so many friends, students, and colleagues over the years. First of all, we must express our gratitude to the many contributors who agreed to join us on the journey, with much patience required from some, from others, to work under no little stress. In the final stages of the project, Alex Grøn Johnsen acted as an invaluable and exemplary research assistant, keeping track of contracts, permits, illustrations, standardizing the manuscript, and much, much more. Sven Wind Larsen and Emilie Sort Mikkelsen each joined him for periods in his manifold tasks, while Nicolai Bagger took on the challenge of creating the index. Jonathan Weiland and Peder Dam drew up a good number of maps for our volumes, executing them with efficiency and flair. Mark Pyzyk took care of revising the language of contributors whose first language is not English. Anni Haahr Henriksen, Thomas Otvald Jensen, and Peter Berthelsen gave much valued practical help at the very end of the production process. At Oxford University Press, Stefan Vranka has been a safe editorial anchor for our efforts while Raj Suthan,

12 Mann 1986.

PROLEGOMENA  xxvii with a steady hand, steered the manuscript through production. Professor Susan Bayly graciously trusted us to handle Chris’s contribution after his passing. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) must, yet again, be thanked for its original support of the foray into comparative history which has now culminated in this publication. So must Independent Research Fund Denmark, Culture and Communication, which financed a collective project that has made it such a delight to engage in thought about world history for the last few years at the Saxo Institute in Copenhagen. At a felicitous conjuncture, Jacob Tullberg, Karsten Johanning, Kristian Kanstrup Christensen, Lars-​Emil Nybo Nissen and Martin Müller came together to provide me with a vibrant conversational community around the study of empire. Finally, a very special thanks, to Elaine Yuan who has decided to travel through world history with me. These volumes represent the fruits of a dialogue between ancient and modern, Western and Asian history that started 20  years ago. Today, some would like to confine the agenda of global and world history to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the era that saw our planet spun into an ever-​thickening web of communication, commerce, and conflict woven, at first, by European colonialism. But, as humanity is progressively moving away from the days when the world was centered on Europe and history marched to its tune, this would be the wrong direction for our discipline. Quite the reverse, only precolonial society grants our imagination access to a life before Western hegemony. This is an experience that we can hardly afford to ignore in our efforts to come to grips with the seismic changes of our present. More than ever, history needs to cultivate a broader and longer view. Across centuries and cultures, the experiences of the past can still be made to speak to the concerns of our times. We leave the final words to Polybios, the Greek politician whom empire tore out of his own society more than 2,000 years ago and prompted to take up the pen and embark on the study of world history: From this point onwards history becomes an organic whole . . . all events bear a relationship and contributes to a single end . . . The fact is that we can obtain no more than an impression of a whole from a part, but certainly neither a thorough knowledge nor an accurate understanding . . . it is only by combining and comparing the various parts of the whole with one another and noting their resemblances and their differences that we shall arrive at a comprehensive view, and thus encompass both the practical benefits and the pleasures that the reading of history affords.13 Copenhagen, November 2018.

13 Polybios, Histories, book 1, ch. 3, line 4, and ch. 4, lines 9–​11 (translated by Scott-​Kilvert in Polybius 1979, 43, 45).

xxviii  PETER FIBIGER BANG

Bibliography Bang, P. F. 2014. Irregulare Aliquod Corpus? Copenhagen. Bang, P. F., and C. A. Bayly, eds. 2011. Tributary Empires in Global History. Basingstoke, UK. Bang, P. F., and D. Kołodziejczyk, eds. 2012. Universal Empire. Cambridge. Chaudhuri, K. N. 1990. Asia before Europe. Cambridge. Conrad, S. 2016. What Is Global History? Princeton, NJ. Forsén, B., and G. Salmeri. 2008. The Province Strikes Back: Imperial Dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean. Helsinki. Harper, K. 2017. The Fate of Rome. Princeton, NJ. Jones, A. H. M. 1964. The Later Roman Empire, 2 vols. Oxford and Norman. Lange, M. 2013. Comparative Historical Methods. London. MacMullen, R. 1988. Corruption and the Decline of Rome. New Haven, CT, and London. Mann, M. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1, Cambridge. McNeill, W. H. 1976. Plagues and Peoples. New York. Naipaul, V. S. 1967. The Mimic Men. London and New York. Polybius. 1979. The Rise of the Roman Empire. Translated by I. Scott-Kilvert. London. Scheidel, W., ed. 2009. Rome and China:  Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires. Oxford and New York. Scheidel, W., ed. 2015. State Power in Ancient China and Rome. Oxford and New York. Sewell, W. H. 2005. The Logics of History. Chicago. Skocpol, T. 1979. States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge. Tomasi di Lampedusa, G. 2002. Il Gattopardo, nuova edizione riveduta. Milan. Ward, S. and A. Rasch (eds.) 2019. Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain. London.

1 Empire—​A World History Anatomy and Concept, Theory and Synthesis Peter Fibiger Bang

Prologue: Anatomy of Power “Iraq’s leading Shi’a cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-​Sistani, is leading a convoy of thousands of people towards Najaf in an effort to end the conflict,” BBC reported on the morning of Thursday, August 26, 2004.1 The previous year, a US-​led coalition had invaded Iraq in what had been intended to be a quick operation to topple its dictator Saddam Hussein, and the occupying force was now busy instituting a kind of order in a divided and restive society. Yet another chapter was in the process of being written in the long history of conquest and domination—​ of empire, in short. It is an age-​old story, endlessly repeated, ever mutating and of global import. These volumes seek to chart and illuminate the imperial experience in its full reach, through the ages and across the continents; it will be a world history. But as with all history, it must spring from contemporary matters and concerns. Barely two months after the invasion, on May 1, 2003, US President George W. Bush had uncomprehendingly gone out to declare victory: “Mission Accomplished.”2 But it was “not even the beginning of the end,” to recall Churchill’s immortal phrase. Instead, it has turned out that the invasion sparked a radically transformative moment, a seismic shock whose waves still rage across the Middle East. More than a decade on, the region remains engulfed in war and revolutionary struggle. While the established political order is tottering, rival great powers seek to gain influence, broker new alliances, or defend old positions in a radically changing environment. Imperialism has been let out into the open and its lessons brutally put on display for anyone who cares (or can bear) to see. Historians, however, have no choice; it is their simple duty to observe, learn, and provide depth to contemporary experience. As the events in Iraq unfolded after the invasion in 2003, it quickly became clear that there was so much more to the imposition of a new political order than 1 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​2/​hi/​middle_​east/​3599352.stm (August 26, 2004). 2 The victory speech was delivered on board the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, under a banner stating, “Mission Accomplished”:  https://​georgewbush-​whitehouse.archives.gov/​news/​releases/​2003/​05/​20030501-​ 15.html. For the debates surrounding the slogan and speech, see the entry on Wikipedia: https://​en.wikipedia. org/​wiki/​Mission_​Accomplished_​speech Peter Fibiger Bang, Empire—​A World History  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0001.

2  Peter Fibiger Bang conquest itself.3 The character of imperial power, its operation, contested nature, and limitations, all were repeatedly revealed in the struggles of post-​Saddam Iraqi society, with painful but graphic clarity. The days of August 2004 were, in this respect, entirely typical, but also unusually emblematic of the wider historical question, and so they may serve to diagnose the problem of imperial power and its challenges. During this month, an incident playing out in and around Najaf had kept Iraq and the global public in thrall until Grand Ayatollah Ali al-​Sistani finally, as reported in the opening to this chapter, set his train of followers in motion to begin the end game and find a resolution of sorts to the conflict. Al-​Sistani had for a while been forced to follow events from a distance. Treatment of a heart condition had taken him to London just as the simmering conflicts among the many rivaling and mutually distrustful groups in post-​Saddam Iraq had again come to a boil. Removing the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein had been like blowing a heavy capstone off society. With the established political hierarchy gone, rival groups were cropping up everywhere to jostle for position, settle old scores, or simply undermine the putative postwar order.4 Among the Sunni population—​formerly dominant, but now ousted from power and fearful of its future prospects—​an insurgency was taking shape, one ferocious and resilient enough to have been revived repeatedly over the years, right up until the present, every time it looked as if it had been struck down. Their fight was further energized by the efforts of warriors drawn from the mobile pool of international Jihadists and Islamic terrorists who had similarly begun to flock to Iraq to fight the intrusive Western power under the banner of Al Qaeda. Divisions were no less intense among those who stood to gain from the change of regime imposed by American forces. Ayad Allawi, a Shi’a Muslim and long-​time exile, was handpicked by the US authorities and had just been installed as prime minister to head an interim government that would steer Iraq toward free elections the following year. But others, with firmer roots in the Shi’a majority, had different ambitions for their country and for themselves. One was Muqtada Al Sadr. He was the son of a prominent dynasty of Shi’a religious leaders that had suffered a heavy toll under the dictator, but was himself of little formal standing in the established clerical hierarchy. Yet, he had managed deftly to exploit the clout of his family name to build up a social movement among poorer segments of the Shi’a population. Radiating from the so-​called Sadr City, a suburb of Baghdad which used to carry the name of Saddam, the movement came armed with its own militia. A host of irregulars, inspired by Shi’a millenarian hopes, this “army” took its name after the Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah, and could be called upon to challenge the occupying force, as well as American plans for Iraq. “The little serpent has left, and the great 3 Sky 2015 offers an instructive glimpse into the complexities and entanglements of establishing a post-​ conquest order from the perspective of a participant. 4 Hashim 2006, 230–​270, for a basic analysis of the different social groups and the rivalries between their leaders. Although he does not treat the specific episode under discussion here, he does bring out both the strong position of al-​Sistani and the character of al-​Sadr’s challenge.

Empire—A World History  3 serpent has come,” Sadr declared with considerable swagger in a television interview to the American public. The lesser evil was Saddam. Now that he had been gotten rid of, “by the grace of God,” the invaders were the last thing that prevented the Shi’as from taking possession of Iraq and shaping its future according to their own wishes. The foreigners had to be made to go.5 Clashes began in March and April, but August saw renewed confrontation.6 One of the skirmishes took place close to the house of Al Sadr in the city of Najaf and brought things to an even higher pitch. With fires of rebellion flaring up across the country, Prime Minister Allawi was hard-​pressed to assert his authority. There could be no backing down; this was “a test of credibility.”7 The rickety troops of the Iraqi government were robustly “manned up” by several American battalions. Against this opponent, the Mahdi militia was no match. But it had an ace up its sleeve. When the Mahdi warriors were predictably and inexorably swept off the streets of Najaf, they retreated to occupy the city’s famed Imam Ali Mosque and cemetery. This move was a game-​changer. Housing the grave of Ali, the cousin of Muhammad and the fourth Caliph, whom the Shi’a hold as their first Imam, the shrine is one of the most venerated and holy sites in Shi’a Islam, attracting millions of pilgrims every year. An attack by a US-​Iraqi force, causing heavy damage to the Golden Mosque, would have served only to alienate the Shi’a population and undermine the legitimacy of the new government. The interim cabinet would have resembled little more than the handmaiden of a foreign occupier. By contrast, the status claimed by Al Sadr as the champion of the Iraqi population stood to be bolstered from such a happening, although the result would perhaps have been achieved at a high cost in human lives and potentially his own martyrdom. In short, “action did need to be taken . . . but there were significant risks,” as it was put in a memo by a British government official, and so the situation ground to a halt.8 For several weeks the American-​led troops laid siege to the sanctuary with the Mahdi army caught inside. Tension was building and the parties became increasingly nervous as the deadlock hardened. All the while, the protagonists were looking toward London to see what al-​Sistani might do. Al Sadr’s grandstanding not only repudiated the authority of the newly appointed government, it also challenged the position of Ayatollah al-​Sistani. As the highest-​ranking Shi’a cleric in Iraq, he was supposed to be in control of the Imam Ali shrine and stand as a leader of the community of the faithful in Iraq. Representing the Shi’a establishment, he 5 Quotes from a CBS article based on a television interview airing on the program 60 Minutes:  http://​ www.cbsnews.com/​news/​muqtada-​sadrs-​battle-​against-​us/​ (retrieved November 2016). For guidance on Muqtada al-​Sadr, the article on Wikipedia (as of Nov. 2016) provides a good overview and collects much useful material. 6 On the August 2004 conflict and events, see Report of Iraq Inquiry, vol. VII, 402–​412: https://​webarchive. nationalarchives.gov.uk/​20171123122743/​http://​www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/​the-​report/​. Additionally, contemporary reports in international news media, entries in Wikipedia, both on the specific episodes, the actors involved, and the places mentioned. 7 Report of Iraq Inquiry, section 9.3, no. 79, Vol. VII, 408. 8 Report of Iraq Inquiry, section 9.3, no. 67, Vol. VII, 406. The inquiry quotes minutes of a discussion between Cabinet office and the Prime Minister’s Office, August 11, 2004.

4  Peter Fibiger Bang had more to lose, and win, than al-​Sadr. He thus advocated a strategy of cautious cooperation with the American occupying force, while carefully guarding a degree of autonomy, instead of simply and submissively toeing the US line. If a solution were to be found, it would have to be through al-​Sistani. “We ask all believers to volunteer to go with us to Najaf,” he declared on his return in late August.9 After arriving in Najaf, a face-​saving compromise was negotiated. The Mahdi militiamen would hand over their weapons, but would be allowed to leave the mosque unharmed. That way, both the government and al-​Sadr could claim some sort of victory. But the real winner was al-​Sistani himself.10 He had reclaimed his position as the leading voice of the Shi’a population and had proven himself to be an indispensable partner for the Americans. For the time being, little could be achieved in Iraq without his support: He had to be listened to—​that had been clearly demonstrated by events. Here is a reminder, should one be needed, that invasion, conquest, and rule—​empire, simply put—​is never a straightforward matter. It always involves ­compromise—​ if not always to be reached just in the nick of time, then certainly to be wrestled out of messy and complex conflict. Initially, perhaps, it came as a surprise to a generation that had just seen the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, that the specter of empire would re-​emerge so forcefully on the international stage of the late 1990s and early 2000s. For a moment, it had looked as if the promise of the age of decolonization would finally be fulfilled and the last empires laid to rest. Now, already from a little distance in time, the surprising thing seems rather the opposite, that people had been able to believe that empire would fall off the map. But imperialism is the result of stark differences in power between societies. These never vanished. Quite the contrary, the power gradient between the strongest and the weakest is arguably steeper than ever before. Presumably, therefore, empire, in one form or other, will persist. Indeed, if a current of utopian expectations seems to have run through the 1990s, perhaps nowhere did this impulse beat stronger than in the unexpected turn toward celebrating and resurrecting a US imperialism. With the fall of the Soviet rival, the United States was left as the sole and unopposed superpower. The French foreign minister even coined the mildly deceptive phrase “hyper puissance,” to emphasize the unprecedented global reach and supremacy of the United States. This was a unipolar moment.11 Francis Fukuyama had predicted that the disappearance of communism as a credible alternative marked the end of history in terms of Hegelian development. The world had seen slavery and feudalism come and go, but there would be nothing beyond capitalist and liberal democracy.12 Others, however, felt less certain about the inescapable logic of history. To be on the safe side, they 9 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​2/​hi/​middle_​east/​3596760.stm 10 Report of Iraq Inquiry, section 9.3, no. 90, Vol. VII, 409. This section is an assessment made by Allawi, the interim prime minister. 11 Krauthammer 1990/​1991. 12 Fukuyama 1992.

Empire—A World History  5 preferred to lend philosophy a helping hand, so to speak, and to use the unmatched power of the United States to bring the inexorable grind of history to a halt, freezing the world order at the moment of American predominance and consolidating a new global empire of capitalism and democracy, before someone else might take over.13 Still other voices, horrified by genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the war that broke up Yugoslavia, advocated for a strong hand to step in and prevent such atrocities in the future. No power was available other than the United States, and so the world needed an “empire lite”—​Pax Americana—​to promote democracy and human rights.14 When on September 11, 2001, the horrifying and spectacular terrorist attacks hit New York City and the Pentagon, anything but a resolute and determined reaction would have been unthinkable. But that the response should entail a full-​scale invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq, fueled by ambitious policies to effect regime change and build democracy, can perhaps best be put down to the confluence of these different visions of world order. Conquest itself proved easy; winning the peace, however, was far more difficult. The daily conflict and struggles in the occupied societies soon revealed the democratic expectation to have been wildly utopian and naïve. The complexities involved in such an enterprise emerged with merciless clarity as ideology clashed with the challenges, even the mere reality, of occupation. Instead of sticking to high principles, the invading power was forced, at best (as the incident in Najaf brought out with such clarity), to compromise and to accommodate the wishes and ambitions of groups whose support was only lukewarm and whose agendas were their own. Not least, the significance of time itself as a factor had been underestimated. Most successful empires in world history have taken a long time to consolidate their conquests. The victims of hindsight and the foreshortening of time, historians of past empires have, perhaps frequently in their accounts, tended to gloss over the conflict and suffering necessary before a peaceful imperial order was reached. But, in this case, historians were quick to point out the hazardous nature of the project.15 In Afghanistan several invaders had failed miserably, from the British in the nineteenth century to the Russians in the twentieth. Iraq, too, had a modern history of resistance to Western colonial power while the so-​called Sykes-​Picot agreement, made high-​handedly by the British and French during World War I, had carved up Ottoman possessions in the Middle East with scant attention to the underlying society. The result had been a number of hollow states that were riven by ethnic and religious divisions, something later exacerbated by weak, but all the more brutal, autocratic regimes. In sum, a glance at the conflicted and tortured history of the modern Middle East would arguably have counseled caution. What was intended as a swing at the Gordian knot, radically to solve the deadlocked problems of the area, might, as it in fact did, turn out instead to be an act that had opened a virtual Pandora’s box in the Islamic world. It was



13 Donelly, Kagan, and Schmitt 2000. 14 Ignatief 2003.

15 Hobsbawm 2008; Porter 2006; Mann 2003.

6  Peter Fibiger Bang not simply that the conquerors had failed to acquire a sufficiently detailed grasp of the region’s recent history. There is more to history, after all, than the common-​sense, banal observation—​endlessly repeated and much cherished among practitioners of our craft—​that every society is unique, the result of a long and unrepeatable string of events. “One damned thing after another,” as the sneer goes. History also reveals broader patterns. On the streets of Najaf, in those days of August 2004, more than just the illusions of the new, democratic imperialism stood revealed. Rather, at a deeper level, the episode may be taken as emblematic of the imperial experience in world history. As it unfolded around the Imam Ali Mosque, the muddled conflict evoked a lesson drawn from the age-​old script of empire. In the history of the Jewish Rebellion against the Romans, during the reign of the emperor Nero, a remarkably, even uncannily, similar episode is narrated.16 The account was penned by Josephus, a Jew and sometime leader among the rebels, then a captive turned Roman citizen who had attracted the patronage of the rulers of the new Flavian imperial house. They had first been sent to Judea with a frightening army to quell the uprising, but then used it to place themselves on the throne in the struggles following the fall of Nero before finally returning from the capital to deliver the death knell to the insurgency in 70 ce with the conquest of Jerusalem and the burning of its famed temple, the cultic center of Judaism. Set up in the former urban home of the new dynasty, Josephus would tell his story from Rome, as an active eyewitness to events on both sides of the conflict.17 The preceding episode from modern Najaf will by now have prepared us to recognize the complexities of empire and the entangled web of conflicting loyalties equally present in the biography of Josephus. Jewish society had in many respects prospered since coming under Roman hegemony. Privileges had been granted lending recognition to many Jewish communities living around the Mediterranean, and the cult at the temple in Jerusalem had even attracted the sponsorship of the emperors. Pilgrims were gravitating in ever larger numbers to its great festivals.18 But there were also latent conflicts. The exclusivity of Jewish monotheism occasionally sparked clashes with the surrounding polytheistic society, including with the imperial overlords.19 To this may be added the periodic mobilization of vast, religiously roused, and easily stirred crowds of visitors gathering in Jerusalem for the cultic holidays. Such occasions were pregnant with revolution and the authorities were nervously on their guard. Jesus, if we may believe the Bible narrative, was crucified by Pontius Pilate after having entered the Holy City for Easter celebrations to the cries of “Hoseana” by a worshipping crowd saluting their new Messiah and king on Palm Sunday.20 Normally, however, the ferment of Jewish society was easily contained. 16 I was teaching the Jewish War of Josephus shortly after having followed the international news reports about the occupation of the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, and the resemblance was unmistakable. 17 Josephus, The Life, chap.  423 (on his living quarters in Rome), discussion in Hollander 2014. See Goodman 2007 for a history of the Jewish rebellion, including the incidents discussed in the following, from which I only occasionally differ slightly in emphasis and nuance. 18 Schwartz 2013. 19 E.g., Philo, Embassy to Gaius; Josephus, Jewish War, II, 13.7; 18.7; 20. 20 New Testament, John 12:12–​17; Matthew 21.

Empire—A World History  7 A generation after the governorship of Pilate, however, a series of events broke this state of affairs, spiraling completely out of control.21 Several conflicts across Palestine culminated in a confrontation with the Roman governor concerning the temple treasure in Jerusalem. Insult provoked high-​ handed repression. Blood was shed and an angry urban population retaliated, drove the governor away, butchered a small remaining Roman garrison, and then sent an imperial army, called in from neighboring Syria, running after it suffered heavy losses. This was full-​scale rebellion.22 Internal rivalries within Jewish society fanned these flames further. To persons acquainted with reportage of divisions within contemporary Iraq and their role in the post-​invasion strife, Josephus’s attempt to paint a picture distinguishing between moderate, responsible leaders and criminal rabble-​rousers sounds only too familiar. Besides being self-​serving—​Josephus had, after all, been among the rebel commanders—​it is also misleading. Rather, division reflected competition for leadership within the elite and between different groups in society. This theme comes to the forefront of Josephus’s account at an interlude in the fighting. After the initial defeats, the Romans had regrouped. The experienced senator Vespasian and his son, Titus, had been charged with the assignment of repressing the rebels. First, resistance was systematically rounded up by the invading legions throughout the territory and countryside. That was when Josephus was taken captive. Meanwhile, the rebels were left to wait in Jerusalem, their capital, and fight out internal rivalries among themselves.23 In charge was Ananos, senior among the high priests. He is the tragic hero of Josephus’s narrative, the only hope that the Jews had of negotiating an accommodating peace with the mighty empire. But he faced tough competition in John, a rival leader who had come up to Jerusalem after the fall of the nearby city of Gischala and who would manage to team up with the party of the so-​called Zealots. In a city rife with messianic expectations, the Zealots were the most fervent and unbending. Rejecting Roman hegemony at all costs, they recognized no sovereign power other than God’s. In what now looks almost like a preview of the episode around the Imam Ali Mosque, they proceeded to occupy the temple, mocking the leadership of the established religious hierarchy. Ananos led his troops to attack in an attempt to regain control of the shrine. The outer courtyard was taken, but when his soldiers reached the gates to the inner sanctuary, they were ordered to stop; the high priest would not risk spilling Jewish blood in the innermost and holiest part of the temple, an act which would in effect defile the sacred authority on which his own power rested and thus undermine his position at the head of Jewish society. Instead he decided to lay siege to the Zealots caught inside the holiest of holies; the result, a standoff—​just as we have learned to expect. But then the ancient episode departs dramatically from our



21 Goodman 1987.

22 Josephus, Jewish War, II, 14.6-​II, 17 and II, 18.9-​II, 19.

23 Josephus, Jewish War, IV, 3–​6.

8  Peter Fibiger Bang modern example. The Zealots received help from another group, the Idumaeans, broke out of the temple, and overcame the unsuspecting troops of Ananos. With victory complete, Ananos and other representatives of the clerical government were executed and the challenger, John, took command of the rebellion (at least for a while). From this point forward, the fate of Jerusalem was sealed in the eyes of Josephus; its leadership had become too radicalized to make possible any compromise with the invincible imperial colossus. Two millennia apart, what connects these parallel stories of senior clerics, temple occupation, renegade leadership rivals, and militias fueled by hopes of godly rule, all playing out in a setting of foreign military conquest, is the central position taken up by local elites in the workings of empire. The point, however, is not to make a spurious claim that the Middle East somehow never changes. Orientalism of this brand has justly been discredited by the critical efforts of Edward Said.24 Shared geography or civilization is only incidental to the argument. The parallel is more analytical, to be understood as a reflection of systemic similarities, as something structural in the situation of empire. That is the contention on which the present volumes of this collective work of history has been based. Look to any imperial contemporary historiography and they all agree; local elites hold the key to the consolidation of rule. Imperial power depended on and was constrained by the need to co-​opt elites whose interests and goals only partly overlapped with those of their overlords and of the metropolitan government.25 Going too far in one direction (for instance, by conceding too much to the central authority) meant that their authority in their local society might be undermined: too far in the other, and they would find themselves in the position of rebels. Of necessity, loyalties were mixed—​ always somewhere in between. In the history of the Mughal conquests in India, as Chris Bayly often reminded me in conversation, it is almost proverbial that often one member of a subjected line of princelings would collaborate with the imperial court while the other would rebel.26 That phenomenon, too, can be mirrored in far more ancient experience, this time in Caesar’s account of his conquest of Gaul. The first books include an extensive portrait of the two brothers, Dumnorix and Diviciacus, who belonged to the very cream of Gallic society.27 One, however, opted for a position of influence and 24 Said 1978. 25 On the character of local elites and the indirect character of imperial rule, Lugard 1923 is often cited as the basic theoretical authority; but his analysis (Lugard 1923, 203–​211) is based on a confident belief in the capacity of imperial administration to organize rule to secure near identity between the goals of local power and metropolitan government rather than working through a condition of ambiguous loyalties. 26 Paradigmatic, of course, is the case of the Maratha ruler Shivaji and his son Sambhaji that almost interchangeably rebelled and took service under the great Mughal, Aurangzeb. The fluid and muddled relationship of alliance and rebellion can be followed through the instructive account of Aurangzeb’s wars in the Deccan provided by the Tarikh-​i-​ Dilkasha, a contemporary Persian history written by a Mughal official and eye witness; see Khobrekar 1972, e.g., chaps. X, XII, XVII, XX, XXI, XXIII XXIV (p. 125 especially) and XXXI. See Wink 1986 for a lucid and illuminating theoretical discussion of these issues in late Mughal India, while Richards 1975 offers the fundamental analysis of Mughal expansion into the Deccan. 27 Caesar, Gallic War I, 16–​20; II, 14–​15. See Johnston 2017, 194–​199, 242, 253, for further discussion of Diviciacus and his wider relationship with Rome.

Empire—A World History  9 power as an ally of Caesar and the Romans, while the other secretly plotted against them—​at least, this is how the situation looked to the conqueror. But once discovered, Caesar could not simply punish the subversive family member. Such action would make the loyal brother look bad in the eyes of Gallic society and undermine his value as an ally. Imperial power, although it derives from military superiority and often generates myths of omnipotence, is beset by weakness, limitations, and a need to compromise. That is the enduring paradox. These deep commonalities in the imperial condition should not be ignored by historians. The experience of empire harks back to the third millennium bce and spans across the globe. It demands a world history survey, broad-​ranging and comparative in scope. As a topic, empire is calling out for study across traditional chronological divides and established geographical boundaries.28 Several synthesizing forays have been made into this territory over the last two decades, most successfully by Dominic Lieven, Jane Burbank, and Frederic Cooper, incidentally all of them contributors to the present work.29 But the challenges involved in such an enterprise came, perhaps, most fully to the fore in debates around David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism. This book was an ambitious, if polemical, attempt to reinterpret the character of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the height of its powers, the glue that kept the sprawling edifice together, Cannadine maintains, was provided by royal and aristocratic ceremony. Consciously emulating the pre-​industrial past, the powers of the modern age were harnessed to stage royal ceremonies and enact an aristocratic culture on a scale never matched, but only dreamt of by the monarchs and conquerors of yore. Plumes and parades, knighthoods and orders, classical monuments, and neo-​gothic estates, all in heaped profusion, created an extravagant historicizing space corseting the many societies subject to the British crown into a system of shared ranks. Hierarchy and aristocracy bridged diversity and race, or so it was claimed. This was the empire of people such as the last ruler of Indian Jaipur, who shared with the British aristocracy a passion for polo, a game which had grown out of the cavalry of the British-​Indian army, toured England with his team to scoop up all the trophies, and years later died from an accident during a match in Cirencester.30 Yet, this gallant image of the empire had little to say about crucial developments that have come to define the period, such as capitalist enterprise, the rise of professional middle classes, and the emergence of nationalism. The analysis was, so to speak, predicated more on the Indian colonial society of the residual and moribund princely states than that of the civil service, the rising Congress, and Gandhi.31

28 Gehler and Rollinger 2014, a compendious collection reaching across the ages. 29 Lieven 2000; Burbank and Cooper 2010. 30 The story of Man Singh II and his exploits on the polo fields of India and Britain as ruler of Rajasthan, commanding officer in the British Indian Army, and later prominent political leader in the Republic of post-​ independence India can be gleaned by the visitor walking through the many rooms of the royal palace museum in Jaipur (which remains the home of the former royal family and whose present head does his best to maintain the proud equestrian traditions of the family). More easy access to information about Man Singh II is offered by his biography on Wikipedia. 31 Cannadine 2001, on whom, see Hoffenberg 2002.

10  Peter Fibiger Bang But one can recognize the significance of commonalities across the ages without ignoring historical development. If the historical parallels are no more generally banal than the detailed twists and turns of individual imperial histories are all trivial, then the opposite is also true. This work attempts to give both sides of the question their due; it combines an insistence that accounting for shared commonalities requires a deeper history with an ambition of tracing the evolving course and shifting circumstances of empire over the ages. The parallel examples that opened this chapter were surprisingly similar, but they did nevertheless have different outcomes. The Romans went on to conquer Jerusalem and destroy the temple. This quickly earned the new ruling dynasty a foreign triumph, commemorated to this day on the Arch of Titus in the Forum Romanum. Its magnificent reliefs still depict the temple treasures being paraded in victorious celebration through the streets of the imperial capital. More fateful, with the demolition of the temple, the Jewish population was deprived of its symbolic and ceremonial rallying point. The Roman authorities had little sympathy for the mobilization of the wider subject population, especially to a cause that had turned out to be rebellious. The annual contribution that had customarily been sent, with the consent of the authorities, by believers to the temple was confiscated, to be paid in the future as a humiliating tribute to the imperial coffers. When the Jews rose again under Hadrian, the point was rammed home with added emphasis. From then on, they were forbidden even to enter their city.32 What the Roman authorities needed was to identify a select elite within local society that could govern on their behalf. A  time-​tested strategy, they had little reason to suspect it might disappoint them. Josephus, after all, had set out to write his long history of the rebellion to reassure his Roman masters and patrons that there was still a responsible segment of Jewish society on which they could rely and build a provincial order.33 In Iraq, on the other hand, the US-​led coalition aimed at exactly the opposite. By initiating a process toward democratic election and by removing the existing elite, they worked toward the political mobilization of the wider population. This threw open the competition for power and influence and intensified conflict in Iraqi society, all the while promoting an ideology celebrating the right of people to self-​determination—​a fragile base, as John Hall points out in Chapter 16 of this volume, on which to base a stable hegemonic order. As a problem of history then, empire is protean and confronts us with a need to examine both long-​lasting similarities and mutations produced by changing circumstances of time and locality. In the structure of the current work, this dual mandate has been fulfilled through a two-​pronged division. Volume 1 identifies a set of central aspects of the imperial experience in world history, and explores them

32 Josephus, Jewish War VII, 6.6; Goodman 2007, ­chapter 12. 33 Josephus, Jewish War VI, 2.1–​2 (this is the unstated, but obvious, implication). See further, preface 4 + 11; II, 16.4–​5, and 17.5 + 10; II, 19.5; II, 20.1; IV,151; IV, 3.10; IV, 5.2; VI, 4.3 + 7. Across these passages, Josephus develops the theme—​that it was criminal rabble rousers and fanatics who had driven Jewish society to destruction and made it impossible for the proper and worthy segments of the elite class to negotiate a responsible, if subject, peace.

Empire—A World History  11 across a series of analytical, comparative, and thematic chapters. Volume 2 then surveys the course of empire across the world, from its earliest beginnings in the third millennium societies of the ancient Near East to the globalized present. This is done through a sequence of chapters, each of which narrates the history of individual empires, interwoven with short synthesizing epochal overviews that identify the broader trends and patterns emerging through world history. There is no unified field dedicated to the exploration of empire yet; most empires are still studied only in the singular. But it is possible to distinguish three or four broad family clusters: ancient and pre-​colonial New World, Asian, and finally European colonial empires. Of these, it is the experience connected with European colonialism that overwhelmingly dominates our intellectual horizon. Not the least of the attractions of attempting a global and long-​term view is that it helps to put the recent colonial experience into perspective. To be sure, some may suspect behind such a move an attempt to exonerate Europe of its recent past, presumably by pointing out that plunder, pillage, and exploitation preceded modern colonialism. On the other hand, if one’s worldview has such feeble foundations that it would take nothing more to shake it, then perhaps it is better put to rest.34 It has long been recognized that colonialism has distorted our vision and left us with an exaggerated notion of the role of Europe in world history. Everything seemed to hinge on Europe, even history itself. What could not be neatly shoe-​ horned into its familiar sequence of ancient, medieval, and modern was simply left standing idle, outside the mainstream. But how to “provincialize Europe,” how to overcome Eurocentrism in a constructive manner, remains a burning issue.35 When Edward Said, for instance, identified the origin of Western colonial discourse about a subjectable and pliable Orient in the fifth-​century bce Greek play The Persians, he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that it was a piece of anti-​imperial literature.36 Written by Aeschylus, the text celebrated the unexpected victories that had enabled the Athenians to stave off the invasion of the over-​mighty hegemon of the times, the Achaemenid Empire, which stretched from Afghanistan to the Bosporus. The war, however, had been hard-​won—​the damnedest thing, really. Athens itself had first been burned and looted by the Persian force before victory had, in the end, been snatched from the jaws of predictable defeat.37 It would be a long time before Western scholarship and science would be able to impose a hegemonic discourse to define and dominate a colonial Middle East and Orient. The text had been written from a perspective of defiant resistance, not confident supremacy. Perhaps, better than any other, a long-​term and comparative approach to empire holds the key to a more sober and realistic view of the role played by Europe in world history. It does so, not by writing Europe out of the story, but by placing European colonialism in context, which reveals just how short-​lived it was and on how fragile a foundation it

34 See Robbins 2016 for a thoughtful discussion of this potential objection. 35 Chakrabarty [2000] 2008. 36 Said 1978, 21, 56–​57.

37 Narrated in the history of Herodotus, especially books 7–​9.

12  Peter Fibiger Bang rested. The world was made Eurocentric for a brief while, during the conflagration that produced the modern world; but before this, human society moved to a different rhythm and history converged on other things. This is an insight or form of knowledge that will be crucial in guiding our sense of the future, one in which the world is becoming steadily more modern and again increasingly less centered on Europe, to paraphrase the French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut.38

Concept and Definition As a concept, empire derives from Latin. Imperium signified the power and authority to command, and gradually came to denote the territories made subject to the Roman state through military conquest.39 Right from the beginning, the term has been endlessly debated. To some, it has been a source of slavery and oppression—​a mark of opprobrium and “scandal,” at least since Cicero, the Roman lawyer and politician, famously launched a prosecution of a provincial governor for abuse of his powers (see Chapter 9 of Volume 2). To others, it has been a bedrock of peace and prosperity, the foundation of law and civilization—​in short, the very basis of world order. Historians have traced the career of the concept through its many twists and turns, across the ages, as Latin gave way to vernacular languages across Europe.40 But conceptual history cannot provide the framework for a world history; it is too limited in scope. Confined to the literature and discourse of specific languages, the study of concepts does not comfortably cross time periods, cultures, and certainly not civilizations. Recently one of the most distinguished practitioners of the discipline even professed in a discussion of Hobbes (1588-​1679) that he preferred to stick with the part of the work by this classic philosopher of power written in English. Texts published by Hobbes in other languages had entirely different meanings and therefore belonged to other discourses—​as if there had not been a lively European “republic” of letters where authors read each other’s work across linguistic boundaries during the early modern period.41 Little wonder, then, that many students of cultures beyond the reach of the romance language community often feel a need to point out that these societies lacked concepts precisely identical to empire, though they usually proceed to observe that several close candidates can be found. Conceptual history, in short, is most at ease with the micro-​perspective; instead of generalization, it aims to recover specific meanings and seeks to capture minute differences in the use of very distinct terms. World history is bound to get lost in the meandering trail of such thick description. To serve as a common basis for the present project, a definition must be sought somewhere more sympathetic to generalized statements. For this, a turn toward sociology is necessary.

38 Finkielkraut 2005, 265, “le monde soit toujours plus moderne et toujours moins occidental.” 39 Richardson 2012.

40 See Pagden 1995 for one of the most successful examples. 41 Skinner 2010.

Empire—A World History  13 If empire, as a word, belongs within Western discourses, it is not difficult to find broad correspondences in non-​European languages. When the Qin monarchy conquered the last of its rivals on the central plains of China in 221 bce, it claimed to have united “all under heaven,” Tianxia, and the king elevated himself to Huangdi, to signal his august supremacy over ordinary kings, Wang. Under the succeeding Han dynasty, a critique developed of the Qin. The first emperor had relied too much on tyrannical command and brute force: the ruler ought rather to govern through his own virtuous example. From near and far, then, people in all their variety would orient themselves toward the court—​so it was claimed—​and voluntarily follow the royal model. “All under heaven” were to be pacified under the moral sway of the ruler and the world made to prosper by the harmonious and orderly organization of life.42 Another example of an imperial monarchy strung out between oppressive command and the peaceful order of civilization appeared under the Mauryan dynasty, which had extended its reach across the floodplains of North India by the turn of the third century bce. Aśoka, its most famous ruler, is justly admired for a number of surviving inscriptions. There, he envisaged the peaceable spread of his moral order, dhamma, to all corners of the earth. But these conciliatory proclamations had been preceded by bloody and terrifying wars of conquest, as the Mauryan lord lamented, reducing neighboring kingdoms to submission.43 Public professions of regret by imperial conquerors, however, were unusual. Celebration was the norm. “For Emperors,” it is stated in a Persian-​language mirror for princes of the seventeenth century, “no other thing is better than waging war against the infidel, the seizing of kingdoms and world conquest.”44 One of the titles under which the Muslim caliph was known was Amir al-​Muminin, “commander of the faithful,” a reflection that, long before Islam became a majority religion in the Middle East, it had developed as an expansive and conquering imperial order.45 The strength of a dynasty, in the eyes of the Maghrebi man of letters Ibn Khaldun (1332-​1406), was directly reflecteded in the extent and diversity of territories under its command. As time went on from the original moment of conquest, this power was bound to dissipate.46 Empire was not easily transformed into a stable and durable peacetime regime. Among the thinkers from which the modern sociological tradition hails, it is arguably Machiavelli—​the disillusioned, but clear-​sighted Florentine statesman of the Renaissance—​who came to identify the problem of empire most trenchantly. “However strong your armies may be,” it is stated pithily in The Prince, “you always need the backing of local people to take over a province.”47 Their support was necessary to hold on to a conquered territory and consolidate possession. “If you 42 A recurrent theme of the Discourses on Salt and Iron by Huan Kuan, Gale 1931; Nyland 2008; Mutschler and Mittag 2008, xvi. 43 For the 13th Major Rock Edict of Aśoka, see Thapar 1997, 255–​257, for a translation. 44 Hossayni 1783, 140, my translation. 45 Crone and Hinds 1986. 46 Ibn Khaldun 1967, 128–​130. 47 Machiavelli 1992, 5.

14  Peter Fibiger Bang maintain an army instead . . . ,” Machiavelli added a little further on, “the expense will be much greater, so that you may have to spend all the money you get from a state in standing guard over it: the profit may even turn to a loss.”48 Imperial power, to put it bluntly, rested on a narrow economy of force; it depended on forging alliances with local residents, making them govern on behalf of the conqueror, and curbing costs so that the empire might yield a surplus. As an instrument of rule, the army, the most expensive tool in the box of any state, was and remains inefficient and had to be used sparingly, as a last resort. For the everyday business of government, far cheaper solutions had to be found, lest the imperial possession become a drain on the treasury rather than a source of profit. Imperial governments, therefore, have generally been minimal, lean, and indirect in style. Machiavelli included in his discussion an analysis of the various methods of rule available to an imperial lord. The level of detail and variation required in his exposition is an indication that the application of these techniques must always be understood as in need of situational and prudent adjustment. However, the components in this flexible repertoire of power, to use a term later coined by Burbank and Cooper,49 may—​without doing too much violence to the thought of the old Florentine—​be condensed into three basic precepts. One can hold on to territory either by annihilation, colonization, or, finally, by rule through locally entrenched groups.50 Total annihilation, however, had obvious limitations. When writing about this policy, Machiavelli had the small, subject city-​state of Pisa in mind, which had proven difficult for Florence to keep in line.51 Particularly stubborn opposition might have to be overcome by acts of ruthless destruction. But normally this strategy was employed only selectively and precisely in locally circumscribed theaters as acts of exemplary punishment. Since the imperial establishment had to be kept to a minimum, government generally lacked the capacity to control and police territories tightly. Instead, it had to fall back on intermittent graphic and shocking interventions, which served as deterrents that demonstrated the steep price of resistance to remaining subject communities. Often born of weakness, such blunt acts of violence nevertheless had a profound effect. Memories of wanton and harrowing destruction are stamped upon every imperial history: the Amritsar massacre, the proverbial piling of decapitated heads into pyramids by Timur, the adage “Carthage must be destroyed.”52 But as a general strategy, blanket destruction was self-​defeating, since it reduced the value of the conquered territory (unless, of course, one could substitute a new community of settlers in place of those massacred).

48 Machiavelli 1992, 7. 49 Burbank and Cooper 2010. 50 Machiavelli 1992, ch. 5. Discussed by Doyle 1986, 36–​38, but primarily in terms of formal and infor­ mal rule. 51 See Hörnquist 2004 for a discussion of Machiavelli’s passages on empire in the context of Florentine imperialism and the relationship to Pisa. 52 See Wagner 2019 on fear and the Amritsar massacre.

Empire—A World History  15 Colonization, another word with a Latin root, was Machiavelli’s second solution. Colonialism has become synonymous with the age of European overseas expansion, and to some it simply represents the one true form of imperialism.53 But Machiavelli thought of the phenomenon mainly in Roman terms, as a strategy to transplant small communities of the conquerors to live among newly subjugated populations. Placed at strategic locations, these settlements served as anchors or bridgeheads of imperial power, communities whose loyalty would not be in doubt in times of trouble and which could be relied upon to serve as bases of re-​conquest, should it prove necessary. Such colonies of the ruling power can, in various forms, be found across many empires, from the ancient Near East to the garrison cities of the Caliphate, as well as the trading hubs and naval stations of European commercial empires. But to this must be added another kind of colonization in which an expanding population, often peasant in character, slowly moves into less densely populated areas and in the process either pushes the existing inhabitants off the land or absorbs them.54 Such colonization is sometimes considered as a phenomenon separate from empire proper. But in historical experience, if the two have not fully overlapped, then they have certainly been closely intertwined. Chinese history charts a steady movement from north to south, as peasants began to clear the land and engage in more intensive forms of irrigation agriculture.55 Likewise, the power of the Mughals followed in the wake of the expanding frontier of communities of Muslim cultivators into the Ganges Delta of Bengal.56 With the introduction of railways and steamships in the nineteenth century, this process vastly increased in strength and scope. In their millions, people of European peasant stock flocked to much less densely populated areas of North America, Siberia, Australia, and New Zealand, which had climates hospitable to their way of life. There, they pushed the indigenous populations to the margins and settled.57 But outside of these “Neo-​ Europes,” colonizers—​then as before—​would have had to build on top of existing populations. The third strategy of Machiavelli was to ally with a small privileged segment of the subject society and to rely on this group to govern, often on the basis of its own customs and laws. This has, through the centuries, been the default mode of empire, articulated through myriad and highly diverse local arrangements. Empires, therefore, are composite, layered and anything but uniform in their internal organization of power. They generally comprise a range of different territories and communities, subjected hierarchically in various ways to a dominant power. Among students of empire, there is broad agreement that this is the central characteristic.58 Raymond Aron, for instance, in his study of Peace and War, stated that “Imperialism according to the most simple and general definition, is the 53 E.g., Ness and Cope 2015, an encyclopedia of imperialism and anti-​imperialism which stays solely within the historical boundaries of European colonialism. 54 Osterhammel and Jansen 2012. 55 Elvin 2004. 56 Eaton 1993. 57 Crosby 1986. 58 For two surveys of various definitions of empire, see Scheidel 2013, 27–​30; and Go 2011, 5–​12.

16  Peter Fibiger Bang diplomatic and strategic conduct of a political unit which builds an empire, that is to say subjects foreign populations to its law.”59 Slightly more elaborate is Howe in his widely read introduction to imperial studies: “A kind of basic, consensus definition would be that an empire is a large political body which rules over territories outside its original borders. It has a central power or core territory—​whose inhabitants usually continue to form the dominant ethnic or national group in the entire system—​and an extensive periphery of dominated areas.”60 Much in the same vein, what makes several dynasties of Chinese history imperial to the influential philosopher Wang Hui is that “first, their hybrid systems and mechanisms of control are different from a pure system of enfeoffment or centralized administration culture. Second, they possess a society and economy of vast scope and a set of multinational ethnic relations that have been formed by military expansion, trade and immigration. Third, they possess multiple structures of power, with concentrated central power and structures of power generated by local culture existing side by side. Fourth, they work to make their own culture universal or to serve as the representative of ‘civilization.’ ”61 Empires, in short, are heterogeneous and normally polyethnic, hierarchical political entities, “a distinctive type of social formation. They are neither big societies on the one hand nor leagues of independent societies headed by a dominant partner on the other: they involve the exercise of domination by the rulers of a central society over the populations of peripheral societies without either absorbing them to the point that they become fellow-​members of the central society or disengaging from them to the point that they become confederates rather than subjects.” To continue with Garry Runciman, and through him Lord Halsbury, empire endures in “a convenient state between annexation and mere alliance.”62 It will be clear by now that to the majority of students—​though this is more often implicit than explicit—​empire represents a form of state, “an extended and durable polity in which a core society exercises formal and authoritarian power over subordinated peoples of outlying territories gained or maintained by coercion.”63 Domination is based on the permanent extraction of a surplus (in one form or other) from the subject communities and ultimately backed by armed force, the last and final recourse of rulers (military power is discussed by Morris in Chapter 4 of Volume 1). It might be objected that such a “statist” conception underestimates forms of domination achieved by more loosely organized groups. Fluid and mobile coalitions of roaming nomadic warriors have, for instance, been described as constituting a form of “kinetic empire.”64 But the emphasis on the significance of state-​like societies is basically confirmed by the empirical survey of the following volumes. Only where conquerors develop durable, centralized institutions to extract resources from a sedentarized population, sufficiently numerous to sustain

59 Aron [1984] 2004, quote translated by this author. 60 Howe 2001,14.

61 Wang 2014, 36–​37.

62 Runciman 2011, 99.

63 Crooks and Parsons 2016, 15. 64 Hämäläinen 2013.

Empire—A World History  17 a (military) division of labor between imperial rulers and tribute-​paying subjects, have such societies left enough of a mark (perhaps with one or two exceptions), to make it possible to write a history. Patchy nomadic power takes on slightly firmer contours only on the frontiers of sedentary societies, and may perhaps be seen as forming a kind of “shadow empire.”65 The statehood represented by the imperial experience, however, does not conform to the conventional definition. Weber famously ascribed to the modern state a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of physical force within a given territory.66 Since Hobbes wrote his Leviathan, it has become customary to see the state as an institution that, within its borders, creates a pacified civil society. This seventeenth-​ century classic of political science, however, was written in response to the experience of the English civil wars. To overcome internal division and conflict, society had to accept a harsh medicine. Hobbes uncompromisingly advocated strengthening the cohesiveness of state and society. Power had to be concentrated and made uniform. Inhabitants ought to transfer their right of self-​defense to a sovereign power that, in return, would enjoy sole responsibility for protecting them against aggression. As a result, the state has come to be understood as governing a firmly demarcated and evenly integrated territorial space with hard, militarized boundaries against the outside world from which it is independent. To Hobbes, this implied that it was unreasonable for a government to “demand of one nation more than of the other from the title of conquest.”67 The authority of the state, its sovereignty, was indivisible, uniform across the territories it held, and every community was a subject to the same degree. Not so for empire, which occupies a middle ground between full integration and external alliance, and which does not admit such a clear distinction between inside and outside. As a body politic, it is equivocal. Where Hobbes balked at mixed forms of power, diverse arrangements of rule and unequal treatment of subject peoples have been a hallmark of empires. This contradiction between the precept of absolute sovereignty and uneven imperial practice did not escape comment in the decades of intense debate that followed publication of the Leviathan in 1651. The widespread existence of what from Hobbes’s perspective would have to be seen as “compromised” or adulterated varieties of governmental power raised the question among his contemporaries of whether there were forms of authority that could not easily be captured in the new language of the Hobbesian program of standardized, uniform, and absolute sovereignty.68 Pufendorf, the German lawyer and historian (1632-​94), invented a category of irregular and monstrous power to account for those seemingly incongruent phenomena.69 Leibniz, the polymath (1646-​1716), went further in a 65 Barfield 2001; pace Hämäläinen 2013: whose objection is less a substantial than a normative and aesthetic one. 66 Weber 1972, 821–​822 (Part 2, ch. 8, §8). 67 Hobbes 1996, 142. On sovereignty, see van Creveld 1999, 170–​188. 68 Bang 2014, 9–​32. 69 Pufendorf 1675.

18  Peter Fibiger Bang biting critique. No serious power in Europe at that time, he objected, could properly meet the Hobbesian standard. All were expansionist in their aims and usually comprised a wide range of territories, each of which was administered differently. Adopting a Hobbesian notion of the state would force the analyst to conclude that they were all monstrosities, a result which was patently absurd. Better, then, to abandon the theory and substitute an alternative concept—​that is, that sovereignty is not absolute, but relative. It was, as Leibniz insisted, rather to be understood as a supremacy.70 This may still be the most useful way to approach imperial statehood—​as a supremacy. But this formulation also renders empire harder to delineate. It is far from clear at what point a supremacy is sufficiently strong to warrant the label of empire and when it is not. Gehler and Rollinger conclude from their vast recent compendium that empires, to count as such, must have been weighty enough to have generated a reception history.71 By the same token, many definitions include large territorial extent as an important criterion of empire—​and, indeed, on pragmatic grounds, it may serve as a very useful indicator—​but “big” is nevertheless vague and imprecise as an analytical concept.72 The size of humanity has changed over time and the population of the mightiest empires of antiquity now add up to no more than a middling nation. More rigor may be found in Osterhammel’s demand that to count as a proper empire, a power must be able to pursue its interests on a global scale, or in Münkler’s, that there must be an ambition and capacity to dominate the order of the world of which the empire forms a part.73 On the other hand, these restrictions seem too parochial and too narrowly predicated on specific historical circumstances. Only the United States of the twentieth century and Britain of the nineteenth could, for instance, be said ever in all of recorded history to have qualified as empires in the full sense of Osterhammel’s definition. This is a hopeless solution to the problem of definition and immediately burdens the analysis with a need to invent self-​contradictory and awkward ancillary terms such as “colonial empires without imperialism” in order to account for the experience of the many other ruling states that have existed over the centuries. Equally, not all successful expansionist powers attained a size at which they could be credited with hegemony within their world order or even begin to harbor ambitions in that direction. But did that make them any less imperial? Athens of the fifth century bce, under cover of the Delian league, dominated the islands of the Aegean Sea, but certainly never aspired to such a position of mastery in their wider world. Yet it is included by Münkler in his own discussion of empire. Big powers would normally have had to start small and work gradually at extending their sway over other territories, long before they rose to a position of predominance or even began to harbor such an aspiration. It 70 Leibniz 1972, see ­chapter 8 in particular, but also the attack on “sovereignty” in c­ hapter 9. 71 Gehler & Rollinger 2014, vol 1: 25. 72 Woolf 2012, 24–​25. 73 Osterhammel and Jansen 2012, 26–​28. Münkler 2005, 11–​34 (dismissing the common view that empires are characterized by polyethnicity, keeping different societies in subjection to a metropolitan power).

Empire—A World History  19 seems impossible, indeed contrived, to want to reserve the notion of empire for only the later hegemonic phases in the development of such expansive polities.74 In the final analysis, the minimal position of Michael Doyle seems much preferable. “Empire,” he concludes, “is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society.”75 An advantage of such a minimal definition is not least that it more effectively accommodates historical experience. From very early on, states began to compete for access to resources and sought to extend control over their surrounding frontiers and each other, without necessarily acquiring very extensive territories. Bigger empires eventually crystalized from this micro-​process of imperialist aggression among states to produce a historical pattern that has varied considerably over the past millennia. Charting its shifting trends and identifying the changing outcomes, however, is precisely a task which ought to be and has been reserved for the history of histories in Volume 2 of this project, rather than a job handed to formal and typological definition.76 As an analytical strategy, the latter would constantly be at risk of arbitrarily elevating the limited experience of one age to represent the norm in its quest for ever greater conceptual refinement. Another attraction of Doyle’s concept of empire is its emphasis on effective power. Empire may include territories not formally or directly subject to the ruling power, such as client states or economic dependencies. Decisive for determining inclusion, however, is whether these dependencies are able to resist demands of vital importance to their imperial overlords. A number of definitions add further depth to our understanding of the capacity of empires to control subject societies. Alexander Motyl likens empire to a wheel, with hub and spokes, but significantly no rim. The hub represents the metropolitan governing power which, at the center, is capable of dominating the subjects because they are kept separate, as spokes, whereas they have no overarching organization (no rim) to unite them against the ruler—​divide et impera.77 This image offers a variation on the insight contained in Ernest Gellner’s general model of complex pre-​industrial or, to use his own term, agro-​literate societies. He considered them to be laterally integrated across localities by a thin layer of elites who lorded it over locally bounded communities. The latter were made up of the vast majority of the population, but were unable successfully to break the elite’s hold on power because they had little or no organization above the local level. Subject communities lacked the means to mobilize and unite their superior numbers; they were, so to speak, “organizationally outflanked” by the extensive networks of the ruling classes. Complex agrarian societies favored the formation of vast empires. By contrast, in Gellner’s scheme, the modern industrialized world forced a breakup of these entities. The lateral, 74 Pittl 2014 for further critique. 75 Doyle 1986, 45. 76 See Strootman, van den Eijnde, and van Wijk 2019 for an example identifying sea-​empires as a particular type. 77 Motyl 2001, 12–​24.

20  Peter Fibiger Bang cross-​regional ties of the ruling groups were severed and torn asunder. Instead, regional states took over, in which geographically more circumscribed elites united with their underlying local societies, forming a new imagined community—​the nation.78 But, as Krishan Kumar has recently reminded us, the nation-​state cannot stand alone as the defining characteristic of modernity. Many of these nations, as they formed, acquired new colonial empires of their own, which structurally continued to rely on the governing logic of Gellner’s pre-​modern condition.79 Is empire modern or ancient? This is an issue that still confronts the student and stands at the heart of the theoretical debate about empire.

Theories of Empire In a famous and influential pamphlet of 1916, Lenin, the exiled radical and soon to be leader of the Russian Revolution, declared that empire represented the highest stage of capitalism. Colonialism answered the need of monopolistic corporations in the metropole to control the supply of raw materials, secure advantageous export markets, and gain privileged investment opportunities abroad.80 Shortly afterward, the Austro-​American economist Joseph Schumpeter countered the communist position by analyzing empire as an archaic relic, the result of the atavistic urge of the warrior classes of former times to dominate and seek honor—​the pursuit of war for its own sake. But thrift, hard work, free trade, and worldwide integration of markets were in the process of rendering this relic of bygone ages obsolete; the future belonged to more productive pursuits than those cherished by militaristic aristocracies.81 Ancient or modern, the tension between these two positions continues to resurface in scholarship on empire. Hardt and Negri, in what some at the turn of the millennium hoped would become a new Marxist manifesto, reproduced the opposition. In the past, they pronounced, there had been only imperialisms, but now with the planet-​wide extension of the capitalist system, humanity had entered the stage of Empire. Nothing was outside or beyond the reach of amorphous and anonymous globalization; the empire was everywhere and nowhere in particular. Few students of empire, though, have been willing or able to follow this grand, holistic vision, as unwieldy as it is totalizing.82 Compared to the topic of state-​formation, the field of imperial studies still lacks a comprehensive body of theory around which interpretations converge. To be sure, there is no shortage of theories of empire, but these usually tackle only part of the imperial experience or merely a single 78 Gellner 1983, ch. 2; Mann 1986, 35 for the term “organisationally outflanked” to sum up Gellner’s model. Also, see Mann 2005, 36. 79 Kumar 2017, ch. 1. 80 Lenin 2001 (1916 for the Russian text, the German edition appeared in 1917). 81 Schumpeter 1951 (an English translation of an article appearing originally in 1919 in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.) 82 Hardt and Negri 2000. See Cooper 2004; and Howe 2010 for critiques.

Empire—A World History  21 dimension. In this respect, theoretical diversity may perhaps mirror the composite nature of imperial power and authority, rather than disciplinary failure. A single cohesive formula, after all, is not easily established for a phenomenon that is by nature a hierarchical and irregular conglomerate of diverse arrangements. However, if myopia is to be the order of the day, most attempts to theorize empire have been dominated by the experience of colonialism and more often than not reflect modern skepticism and critique of empire. Behind the left-​liberal position of Lenin and the right-​liberal position of Schumpeter was J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism—​A Study. Published in 1902, it may count as the starting point of the modern theoretical discourse on empire. In a scathing analysis of the British Empire, Hobson intoned a set of themes that continue to animate the various branches of current imperialism theory. Empire, he objected to its supporters in his own time, represented the forceful appropriation of the resources of other people; it was theft and exploitation. In his world of expanding global markets, imperialism was a perversion.83 It attempted to force foreign markets to bow to special interests. Instead of developing its home economy by promoting the rights and spending power of ordinary people, the British government had been captured by a narrow oligarchy of financiers, industrialists, and landowners who kept privilege for themselves while seeking to make easy profits in monopolized colonial markets where they could rely on imperial domination to dictate the terms of trade and investment. Liberal democracy at home was undermined by subservience to the interests of hierarchy, speculative capitalism, and empire abroad. In this scheme of things, Hobson added, the universities and the church had been hijacked to provide ideological support for the cause of empire and to produce a body of knowledge to be employed in the control of the colonies. Nationalism, finally, was stirred to further fan the flames of colonial conquest. The interests and prestige of the nation, so it was claimed by the advocates of imperialism, necessitated expansion overseas. Otherwise, the nation would lose out in competition with other, mostly European powers, and its standing in international society would suffer. In the name of a vacuous and misdirected sense of national honor, Hobson concluded with undisguised dismay, the resources of society were being squandered in a rival military buildup and parasitic “scramble” for colonies, benefiting only the few, rather than finding employment in productive investment. The four themes identified by Hobson—​(a) an economic strategy to monopolize markets, (b) a form of aristocratic class interest, (c) an ideological system and mode of identity formation, and finally, (d)  an expression of interstate competition—​ continue to define the parameters of a field within which most current theories of empire can be mapped out. The following sections will chart and analyze, in succession, how a separate discourse has developed for each topic.



83 Cf. Hall 2013, ch. 10.

22  Peter Fibiger Bang

A.  Empire as Capitalism The notion of imperialism as a strategy to capture and monopolize markets has found its greatest resonance among socialist thinkers. Lenin’s pamphlet rose on the crest of a wave of Marxist writings linking capitalism with empire.84 In 1910, Rudolf Hilferding, who would become a prominent member of the German Social Democratic Party and minister of finance under the Weimar Republic, analyzed imperialism as the direct result of the rise of vast concentrations of capital in the financial markets. This form of capital, embodied in the business corporation, was squarely set against laissez faire. Too big to fail, to borrow a topical phrase, and too big for the home market, finance capital could not trust economic outcomes to the hazardous interplay of free markets, but required much greater certainty while pursuing a course of international investment; it had to rely on protective measures. “Das Finanzkapital will nicht Freiheit, sondern Herrschaft.” Not freedom, but domination—​that was the aim of corporate capitalism and it needed the support “eines starken Staates, der seine finanziellen Interessen im Ausland zur Geltung bringt, seine politische Macht einsetzt, um den kleineren Staaten günstige Lieferungsverträge und günstige Handelsverträge abzunötigen.” It must be a state, Hilferding continued, “der überall in der Welt ein­ greifen kann, um die ganze Welt in Anlagesphären für sein Finanzkapital verwandeln zu können.” Finally that state had to be strong enough to embark on a successful campaign of overseas colonial acquisition.85 Soon after, Rosa Luxemburg, the later martyr of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919, took the analysis deeper still. Capital, she observed in a 1913 monograph, constantly had to take in new territory and widen its reach to include ever more segments of society. To generate profits—​or, to be precise, surplus value—​ capitalism had to search outside itself. The accumulation of capital derived not from capitalists, nor from industrial workers, but instead depended on reaching out for “non-​capitalist social classes and societies.”86 Capitalism, therefore, had no choice but to go on expanding into the non-​capitalist world. “Imperialism is the political expression of the process of capital accumulation,” Luxemburg declared, “in its competition for the remaining, still not shackled, parts of the non-​capitalist world.”87 But when the opportunities for further expansion had been exhausted, crisis would follow as the capitalist powers became locked in steadily intensifying armed confrontation over access to territories already conquered. In a zero sum game, capitalism would then find itself moving toward a dead end, with no way out.

84 Mommsen 1981 remains the best guide to the debate about capitalism, economics, and empire. Further, see Maier 2006, ch. 1. 85 Hilferding [1910] 1968, vol. 2, ch. 22, quotations from pp. 456–​457. Mommsen 1981, 37 for a discussion of these passages. 86 Luxemburg [1913] 1975, 315: “. . . die Kapitalakkumulation als geschichtlicher Prozeß in allen ihren Beziehungen auf nichtkapitalistische Gesellschaftsschichten und -​formen angewiesen.” 87 Luxemburg [1913] 1975, 391 (my translation of the German from ­chapter 31: “Der Imperialismus ist der politische Ausdruck des Prozesses der Kapitalakkumulation in ihrem Konkurrenzkampf um die Reste des noch nicht mit Beschlag belegten nichtkapitalistischen Weltmilieus.”)

Empire—A World History  23 Eventually the conflicts and tensions of the economic system would usher in societal revolution and see the rise of the working classes to power. The road was paved for Lenin to conclude, “Capitalism has become imperialism.”88 A  few years later, this theory was elevated to official doctrine when a congress of the Communist International declared, “European capitalism derives its strength less from the European industrial countries than from its colonial possessions.”89 But here they failed to take proper account of Hobson’s original argument. In statistical terms, many of the colonies acquired by the European powers did not turn a profit. Far more trade and investment took place within the Euro-​ Atlantic world than between metropolis and colonies, a fact that was accepted, but glossed over, by Lenin. The colonies could be abandoned, in Hobson’s view, and the metropolitan societies would continue to grow richer by developing their internal markets. This conviction has in the main been vindicated by history. The colonial powers of his time have gone through two devastating world wars and de​colonization. Yet, even the biggest colonial power of them all, Great Britain, is today far more affluent than in the heyday of colonialism. Indeed, as Raymond Aron pointed out to the French public at the height of the vicious war fought against Algerian separatists in the 1950s, the state could not afford to hold on to its North African possession if it wanted to build up its home society and create a welfare state. Far from a source of profit, the colony would be a drain on resources; this was La tragédie Algérienne.90 The most profitable frontier of capitalist development was not necessarily located in the empires. But if capitalism and imperialism do not completely overlap, Marxist theories have been much more successful in pointing to disparities in power that often shape commercial exchange. Markets are not even playing fields, but often in themselves represent a form of power. The 1960s saw a number of notable voices. Kvame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary politician, popularized the phrase of neocolonialism while in the field of development economics, André Gunder Frank radicalized the insights of Rosa Luxemburg. Capitalism, he insisted, was not merely in the process of expanding into the world of colonies. These had long since been absorbed by the economic system and were already a part of it, but in an inferior position. “No part of the economy is feudal,” as Frank remarked about South America, “all of it is fully integrated into a capitalist system.”91 The all-​encompassing world market was designed to favor the metropolitan centers while peripheries were transformed into subsidiary suppliers of cheap raw materials. Capitalist exchange locked the colonial world into a position of permanent dependence, and it retained its subject status even after colonial rule ended. Underdevelopment was a product of capitalism and empire, not an expression of pre-​industrial, agrarian conditions that were still awaiting modernization. “Structure and development of the world capitalist system,”

88 Lenin [1917] 2001, 23.

89 Quoted from Mommsen 1981, 52.

90 Aron 1957. See further Hall in Chapter 16 of this volume. 91 Frank 1969, xiii; Nkrumah 1965.

24  Peter Fibiger Bang Frank concluded, “have long since incorporated and underdeveloped even the farthest outpost of ‘traditional’ society. . .”92 In his later years, Frank took his basic insights even further (one might even say to extremes), to postulate the existence of a single world economy, in operation from the Bronze Age to the present.93 While this view is, perhaps, a stark exaggeration, there have been other, more historically sensitive, attempts to consolidate theories of commercial dependence, often referred to as neo​colonialism, into a coherent body of thought. In these volumes, for instance, Hornborg examines empire in terms of unequal energy transfers between metropolis and subject society across history (Volume 1, Chapter 13). In general, a strong tradition has developed at the intersection of archaeology and anthropology to study the relationship between imperial center and provincial periphery, from unequal exchanges to the relationship between the articulation of power and the landscapes of the natural environment.94 However, most prominent among the scholars who pursue such approaches is Immanuel Wallerstein and his world-​systems analysis. He sees capitalism as constituting a so-​called world economy—​that is, a set of regional economies and societies linked together through markets in an “extensive,” international division of labor. At the core of this world system are powerful, affluent societies with strong states, able to call the tune for the other constituents. It is in the core of the world economy that we find the most advanced forms of technology and privileged types of wage labor. At the periphery, however, it is the opposite. Weak or absent state institutions make these societies vulnerable to exploitation from the core, and labor is rarely free, instead normally tied into various, seemingly archaic, forms of dependency (such as serfdom or slavery). The prime example of this is, of course, the so-​called triangular trade that saw the West Indies become a plantation economy from the sixteenth century onward, employing enslaved people brought from Africa for the production of sugar, rum, and other substances that were intended for sale on the  European market. In between core and periphery, Wallerstein posits a number of mediating semi-​peripheral societies. Significant, though, is the attempt to describe the steadily expanding world created by global capitalist markets as a hierarchy rather than the level playing field imagined by mainstream economists. The distribution of rewards in the economic system is “very skewed,” Wallerstein observes, and profits flow disproportionately to the core, the metropolitan centers, which dominate the periphery either through direct colonial governance or by indirect control that makes it too costly for the periphery to resist. It will be clear by now that, for Wallerstein as for the other Marxists thinkers, his theory is only tangentially one of imperialism—​rather, capitalism is the center of attention. But empire serves as an important vehicle of colonial, peripheral exploitation. Moreover, for Wallerstein, the modern, capitalist world-​system, as it



92 Frank 1969, xvi.

93 Frank 1998; Frank and Gills 1993.

94 Ekholm-​Friedman and Friedman 1979; Rosenzweig and Marston 2018.

Empire—A World History  25 developed and expanded from Europe beginning in the sixteenth century, is just one of several. History has in general been characterized by the formation of vast interconnected economic spaces. These world economies, though, “were highly unstable structures”; they tended quickly either to disintegrate or to morph into world empires when one predominant power emerged to conquer the other parts. World empire marks the main alternative form of world-​system in Wallerstein’s theoretical scheme. But it is a form about which he has had little to say. However, as his followers have abandoned the narrowly economic focus of the original approach and have lent more weight to politics, ideology, religion, and military power, world-​ systems analysis has widened to produce a more differentiated image of the imperial experience in world history, as demonstrated in Chapter 3 by Chase-​Dunn and Khutkyy in the present volume. This movement toward a more multidimensional analysis may be taken as a reflection that the old, highly charged dichotomy between Schumpeter and Lenin has begun to lose some of its force. Ideology is receding, giving way to historical sociology. It is a notable feature of Wallerstein’s world-​system that the analysis not only sees imperial hierarchical subjection, but also insists that competition is a crucial feature of modern capitalism. A region is not doomed forever to remain in the underdeveloped periphery, but may better its position. Similarly, the leading economic powers are likely to see their commercial hegemony challenged and, over time, supplanted by newcomers—​just as has happened with the meteoric rise of China over the last generation. Capitalism, in short, emerges both as an expression of imperialism and as an unstable foundation for imperial hegemony. Wallerstein’s analysis, therefore, may be read as an attempt to graft an analysis of power onto the model of free markets developed by classical economists.95 This is an ambition that he shares with a growing number of economists outside the Marxist camp, such as Robert Gilpin, and it is an agenda that speaks directly to the historical experience of empire.96 As Montesquieu remarked in the eighteenth century, it was characteristic of European states to treat and organize their colonies as market opportunities, while Adam Smith a quarter century later wrote his Wealth of Nations in a scathing attack on the edifice of monopolies, privileges, and protective measures which the state had erected to fortify these commercial interests. The so-​called mercantile system under which the early colonies had developed was to be abandoned and a regime of laissez faire substituted in its stead.97 Even at the height of the period when the belief in laissez faire ruled the waves under the supremacy of the British Empire of the nineteenth century, state intervention and power were never far off. In a now classic study, historians Robinson and Gallagher demonstrated that “free trade” was a position adopted by Britain from a position of strength and convenience.98 Having industrialized first, the British enjoyed an

95 Wallerstein 1974, conveniently summarized in c ­ hapter 7. Short quotations taken from pp. 347–​350. 96 E.g., Gilpin 1987.

97 Montesquieu [1748] 1833, Book 21, ch. 21, 194–​195; Smith [1776] 1981, Part IV. 98 Robinson and Gallagher 1953.

26  Peter Fibiger Bang enormous commercial advantage which made competition easy to win. But whenever they failed to achieve their commercial goals by peaceful means in overseas theaters, they rarely hesitated to call in assistance from their world-​spanning navy. Gunboat diplomacy, exemplified notoriously by the Opium Wars, cracked open markets otherwise closed to commercial penetration and served to underwrite an imperialism of “free trade.” Empire, and capitalist empire in particular, produced a minimalist and lean order; it existed on a narrow profit margin and was therefore based on a principle of least effort. Otherwise, martial activism might quickly see the profit squandered through costly military entanglements. Even Schumpeter, who originally posited an unbridgeable gap between empire and market, ended up developing an analysis of modern capitalism in which the common ground between him and the Marxists surprisingly springs to eye. With Luxemburg, he shared the notion that capitalism developed along a dynamic frontier, although in his case that frontier was more technological and economic than territorial. From Hilferding, he took over the idea that modern capital concentrations required monopoly power. He brought these two dimensions together in the theory of creative destruction. Industrial and capitalist innovation required enormous concentrations of capital. To justify the gigantic risks involved, companies had to suspend competition and seek forms of monopoly. As capitalism developed by ever moving into new economic territories, vast corporations, stuck with yesterday’s technology and unable to change because of prior commitments, would soon find themselves overtaken by development. In the meantime, they had to recoup their giant investments by seeking monopoly rents.99 The exercise of social power was essential for the operation of a dynamic market economy, and the activities of privileged financiers—​“gentlemanly capitalist,” as they have later been labeled in their nineteenth-​century guise—​who sought profits in overseas theaters subject to political domination, can now easily find their place within such a conceptual scheme.100 The imperialism of monopoly capitalism was, as Max Weber had observed, no coincidence.101 The significance of social and political power in generating profits was also made a theme by Raymond Aron, a voice of trenchant moderation among the intellectuals of post–​World War II France. In Imperial Republic he delivered a sharp, even prescient analysis of the United States of America in the modern world order. Markets were notionally free, but since international economic institutions had been designed from America and the dollar served as the universal reserve currency, the 99 Schumpeter [1942] 2015. Both Schumpeter and Hilferding had attended the same early twentieth-​ century seminar in Vienna, and the intellectual thought of Schumpeter remained in close dialogue with the work of Hilferding—​even if the essay on imperialism, while conceding a point to Hilferding, insisted that the connection of finance capitalism and empire was easily overstated and, in any case, a passing phenomenon (Schumpeter 1951, 80–​89). Monopolistic imperialism was a relic, a last gasp of the atavistic order of aristocratic, absolutist monarchy and its mercantilist strategies (pp. 89–​98). Yet, the overlap and close affinities between Hilferding and the fully developed theories of capitalism of Schumpeter are unmistakable, as rightly pointed out by Michaelides and Milios 2015. Reisman 2004, 52–​56, exaggerates the differences. 100 Cf. Cain and Hopkins 1986. 101 Weber 1972, 526.

Empire—A World History  27 United States was able to take advantage and derive substantial profits from its predominant position. The need of foreign countries to buy dollars made it possible to finance a considerable trade deficit and fund huge government debts, whose value would then be depleted by inflationary printing of more dollar bills—​a modern, indirect version of an imperial tribute or tax.102 However, the connection between imperial tribute and markets has been most lucidly theorized by the American historian of trade, F. C. Lane. About the early modern world, he observed that a traditional, classical economic analysis lacked one crucial and often determinant dimension: protection costs. Merchants needed protection, and its provision was an important part of economic activity. The world was full of wielders of armed force, predators ready to plunder or tax economic agents. Protection, therefore, might be organized by the economic agents themselves or they might pay some political power to flex its military muscles to prevent other armed people from plundering or taxing them. The state, from this perspective, becomes a protection racket, one predator offering to keep its rivals at bay in return for a settled sum—​in short, a seller of protection and thus a provider of an economic good: order. But since protection is based on brute force, competition is limited or very imperfect; clients are never allowed a free choice. It is not difficult to see how imperial power fits this template. In economic terms, protection verges toward monopoly, and providers of protection have normally been able to collect a surcharge over and above the actual costs of running their establishment in the first place. It is for this surcharge, or monopoly profit, that Lane reserves the label of tribute. In practice, though, it is very difficult to determine where protection costs proper end and tribute begins—​ just as historians endlessly debate whether empires have been a good thing or an oppressive burden, generators of order or plundering mechanisms. Such debates are probably insoluble. The answers simply represent alternative perspectives.103 What empire unquestionably does is to extract, mobilize, and ensure the exchange of resources.104 Moreover, the notion of “protection cost” opens a theoretical lens onto the imperial experience capable of spanning ancient and modern. Wallerstein, for instance, included a passing reference to Lane’s work in his analysis, but tellingly, and in a manner consistent with the Marxist tradition, continued to think of protection costs in terms of taxation in the context of pre-​capitalist world empires.105 Not so Lane, who had developed his analysis to account for the mercantilist policies and measures of the expanding early modern and capitalist world market, including the early modern East India trading companies, the predecessors of the multinational business corporation.106 Success among rival commercial groups and interests could, to

102 Aron 1972, 188–​219; Cf. Strange 1987. Campbell and Hall 2015, 26–​28, 32, 38, and 103–​106, bring the analysis of Aron up to date. 103 Lane 1958. 104 Maier 2006, 57–​59. 105 Wallerstein 1974, 16. 106 Steensgaard 1974.

28  Peter Fibiger Bang a large extent, be explained as a result of alternative ways of organizing protection. Among mainstream economists, these two, slightly contrasting perspectives have now been subsumed within a general inquiry about the role of the state. Under the banner of New Institutional Economics, North, Wallis, and Weingast have explored the question of violence, protection costs, and social order across history. States are analyzed as order-​producing predators and ruled by coalitions of elites that, for much of history, have been able to use their political power to secure economic benefits—​in the form of rents—​from the general population. This is “the natural state,” North, Wallis, and Weingast observe, and one might add, characteristic of the imperial condition.107 A predatory ruling class coalition, protection costs now take the theoretical survey to the second dimension of Hobson’s discussion: empire as aristocratic privilege and elite formation.

B.  Empire as Aristocratic Privilege If the question of empire-​as-​market has sprung from early twentieth century debates about the economics of colonialism and capitalism, the topic of empire-​ as-​aristocracy has been shaped by another primary concern about empire that was prominent at the time: how to turn vast territorial and dynastic domains into sovereign, centralized states capable of the intense mobilization necessary for modern mass warfare. From China to Russia, Austria-​Hungary, and the Ottomans, this was the burning issue for state elites—​that is, how to modernize the vast traditional societies over which they presided. Their polities had, increasingly in the eyes of contemporary observers, begun to seem doomed, decadent, and in the grip of interminable decline.108 In a pamphlet published in preparation for the peace negotiations after World War 1, the South African Boer and British general, Jan Smuts even advocated for the creation of a league of nations by the need to provide order in the geopolitical space that was about to be vacated by the collapsing territorial empires of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A decade on, Joseph Roth set a literary monument to these sentiments with the novel, Radetzkymarsch, a striking and satirical portrait of the moribund and increasingly meaningless aristocratic order of the fallen Austro-​Hungarian Empire.109 At the level of theory, Max Weber laid the decisive foundation for this perspective in his analysis of power and authority. Before the modern bureaucratic state, Weber identified patrimonialism as the characteristic type of political power. Under patrimonial conditions, rulers were by origin great landholders and treated their territory as a vast domain. Rule, therefore, took place on the basis of their household 107 North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009. 108 E.g., Jászi 1929. See Barkey and von Hagen 1997 for a modern offshoot of these debates. Ottoman history, therefore, was conceived as a long story of inexorable decline after the so-​called Classical Age of the sixteenth century; e.g., Inalcik 1973. 109 Smuts 1918; Roth 1932.

Empire—A World History  29 and their servants. But this aristocratic world of lords was also one of military conquest. Once the lord was able to expand his domains, the household became inadequate for organizing administration. Co-​optation of external allies was necessary to help govern the wider, increasingly imperial territory. Groups of state officials, often drawn from among other aristocrats and socially eminent people, were then forged into a body of “servants” to man the administrative offices of the extended domain; the patrimonial-​bureaucratic state and empire had emerged. Rulers here were normally absolutist in pretention, but were in practice severely constrained, not least by the need to respect the privileges and rights of its service-​aristocracies and elites; arbitrary monarchical whim was hemmed in by tradition and customary ritual. A perennial problem of the patrimonial-​bureaucratic empire, identified in Weber’s analysis, was the common habit of its elite officials to turn their offices and positions into private property or, stated differently, to substitute their own patrimonial household for that of the ruler. Such service elites constantly tended to drift back into society and make their power and resources independent of the central government. At all times, effective power and authority were highly decentralized and the state/​empire remained torn between its modern, bureaucratic component and its traditional, aristocratic element.110 After World War II, the Weberian sociology of the patrimonial-​bureaucratic empire was picked up in a number influential works. First was Oriental Despotism, by Karl August Wittfogel, which featured the give-​away subtitle, A Comparative Study of Total Power.111 Wittfogel’s was a passionate intervention in the Cold War political climate, a partisan book. It was an attempt to anchor the East-​West confrontation of liberal democracy and state communism in deep history. In his analysis of non-​ Western societies, Wittfogel was clearly most impressed by the absolutist and bureaucratic aspect of Weber’s concept. Asian societies, it was claimed, had depended on state irrigation schemes from far back. A centralized command economy had been the order of the day while autocratic and absolutist government had become deeply embedded within the social fabric. State totalitarianism was nothing new; it was predetermined by the long history of Oriental despots lording it over the toiling populations of the vast Asian landmasses. Yet, for the innocent bystander, it was difficult not to notice that the overlap between ancient irrigation-​based agriculture and communist dictatorships was only partial. Clearly, the explanatory value of the so-​called “hydraulic” thesis was limited. No serious historian today would lend much credence to this aspect of Wittfogel’s work. As Owen Lattimore, for instance, had already pointed out a few years before in his classic study of China and its inner Asian frontier, the basis of its historic empire lay not in the need for unlimited state-​power, but in the steady growth of intensive peasant agriculture.112 Where the ecological conditions made it impossible to sustain



110

Weber 1972, 580–​624 (along with pp. 625–​653)/​2nd part, ch. 9, parts 3 and 4. Further, Blake 1979, 2011. Wittfogel 1957. 112 Lattimore 1951. 111

30  Peter Fibiger Bang this form of life and its dense population, the power of the imperial government had lost traction. As the sown gave way to the steppe beyond the Great Wall, governmental command had been outpaced by the ability of mobile nomadic populations to move out of reach. Imperial power was highly restrained by the limits on transport experienced before the introduction of railways and underwent cycles of periodic weakening. The stable order of empire in China had only supported a narrow elite of landowning gentry and depended on its ability to collect revenue from a stationary peasantry; it had been a thoroughly traditional agricultural and aristocratic society with all the curbs on centralised power so well-​known from Weber’s discussion. In fact, over long stretches Oriental Despotism itself reads like a model exposition of the mechanisms of Weber’s patrimonial politics and the familiar constraints on the exercise of absolutist, monarchical power. Communism, Ernest Gellner was later to conclude, had been implemented in the 20th century as a radical strategy to force modernization on the old decentralized and composite agrarian empires of the Eurasian landmass. But in the heat of argument, Wittfogel had mistaken the harsh totalitarian medicine meted out by communist regimes, in order to quickly catch up and overcome the obstacles presented by the imperial ancien régime to modernization, for that traditional order itself.113 Only, as later observed by Motyl, when the totalitarian apparatus of, for instance, the Soviet Union, had begun to age and lethargy crept in, did its regime begin to show some of the same symptoms of structural decay, often seen in the case of the much weaker agrarian empires.114 Hot on the heels of Wittfogel, Schmuel Eisenstadt followed a few years after with a vast piece of comparative historical sociology, The Political Systems of Empires. His focus was directed more toward the eventually successful modernization of the monarchies of (Western) Europe. Given the inherently decentralized nature of power in the patrimonial-​bureaucratic empires, Eisenstadt identified a need for the monarchical court or metropolitan government to develop what he dubbed “free floating resources.” These were resources that had been freed from the control of local communities and allowed to move across the empire. This might, for instance, cover something as mundane as imperial taxes that could be spent outside their region of origin, or it might include the development of a common ruling ideology shared among the governing classes across the realm. Eisenstadt saw the states that were successful in this exercise as progressing toward a more coherent, bureaucratic form. Most patrimonial bureaucratic empires failed, however, and instead fragmented. This, of course, raises the issue of whether they are best viewed as attempts at modernization, in the first place.115 In The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, John H. Kautsky answered with a resounding no. Even down to language use, the two works represent opposite approaches.116 113 Gellner 1994, 36; Szporluk 1988, 214–​216 and c­ hapters 9, 13, and the conclusion. 114 Motyl 2001, introduction and c­ hapter 2. 115 Eisenstadt 1963, e.g., 91–​93, for “free floating resources.” De Weerdt 2016 for a recent reassessment, emphasizing the value of Eisenstadt’s work while also warning against its tendency to abstract generalization. 116 Kautsky 1982.

Empire—A World History  31 While Eisenstadt characterized his empires through an abstract, analytical, and to some extent even bureaucratic language of specialization of functions, Kautsky wrote of his empires in concrete terms. These were worlds created by a conquering warrior class, subjecting a peasant class and extracting its surplus product. Politics took place among rival aristocratic groups and revolved around war, the distribution of rank, distinction and privilege, and access to landed income. The majority of the population, meanwhile—​tax-​and rent-​paying peasant producers—​were left to observe the action from outside. Trade, to Kautsky’s mind, was essentially a foreign element, and was treated primarily as a potential driver of modernization, a transformative agent in a world of otherwise stable aristocratic predominance. But, a central point, once made with instructive emphasis by Patricia Crone about pre-​ industrial societies in general, is that the aristocratic world of warriors and peasants rested on a division of labor; it was a complex form of society.117 Historically, traders and the services of the bazaar were necessary to supply the many diverse demands generated by aristocratic households, monarchical courts and cities to uphold their form of life; merchants were an integral element of this system and normally found a place in the aristocratic order.118 As Gellner pointed out in his definition of pre-​industrial agrarian empires, the ruling classes, with access to the predominant transregional networks of power, were generally able to undermine local challenges to their position and absorb the energies of merchants inside existing hierarchies.119 John Hall, a contributor to these volumes, sharpened this ana­ lysis into a notion of capstone government. The extensive aristocratic empires of the pre-​industrial world were normally able to snuff out any dynamic social development that might threaten their hegemony. The rulers of patrimonial-​bureaucratic establishments had low enabling powers, but high blocking powers.120 That, however, is not an absolute statement, but rather, a relative one. They had low enabling powers compared to the modern bureaucratic state. But compared to what came before or to their contemporary alternatives, aristocratic imperial governments were frequently quite capacious. The city of Rome of the imperial period grew to a size which was not matched anywhere again in the Mediterranean and Europe until the dawn of industrialization.121 Such “empires of domination,” Michael Mann argued in The Sources of Social Power, sported a slowly but steadily accumulating stock of increasingly powerful modes of government and social organization. They were not the reservoirs of stagnation and inertia that they appeared to be to modernizing elites in the early twentieth century. To the latter, everything was about intensifying the powers of their state. But the empires of the past had excelled at something else—​extensive

117 Crone 1989, ch. 1. 118 Bang 2008. 119 Gellner 1983, ch. 2. Nissen 2019, chap. 5 for an illuminating, broadly Gellnerian, discussion of the position of merchants within aristocratic empires. 120 Hall 1985, 35, 52–​54. 121 Wojciech & Eich 2018; Morley 1996.

32  Peter Fibiger Bang mobilization. Normally, aristocratic empires rested quite lightly on the shoulders of subjects. The logistical constraints under pre-​industrial conditions of moving armies and transporting the necessary bulky supplies made close governmental control over long distances impossible. Nevertheless, empires were able to command vast resources by pooling together surplus wealth drawn from large numbers of far-​flung territories: a little from many, rather than a lot from a few. Key to their success was so-​called compulsory cooperation. The empires only had relatively tiny bureaucracies available. Instead they relied on forging relations with local elites that would take care of most of the actual government on the ground. The deal was sealed by the threat of military intervention in case of open disloyalty. This was the compulsory element. On the other hand, cooperative local elites also benefited, since their position was backed by the support of a strong military power, which augmented their ability to control local communities. Together, imperial and local aristocracies could mobilize more resources than before, and so the organizational capacity of societies increased as both groups thrived on collaboration.122 The formation of elites, imperial administration, and the collection of tributes are discussed by Haldon in Chapter 5 of Volume 1 of this work. Mann’s analysis of social power tracks a progressive line from ancient Mesopotamia to Roman antiquity but then loses sight of empire until the age of colonialism. Instead, attention shifts to historical development inside medieval and early modern Europe. Here Mann’s work differs markedly from that of John Hall, for instance, which surveys the character of social power across the main pre-​industrial civilizations, rather than sticking to the trajectory taken by European societies. Others, therefore, have expanded on Mann’s analysis of extensive agrarian empires to widen its reach. Among Marxist historians, the notion of a tributary mode of production has gained currency. Probing the character of pre-​capitalist societies, as well as the revolutionary potential of so-​called third world peasantries that Mao had so successfully tapped in the Communist take-​over of China, they have moved beyond the nineteenth-​century schemes of Marx and Hegel.123 These portrayed an immutable Asia that had been left outside the mainstream of historical development, which the two thinkers located firmly in Europe, and which progressed through distinct stages from slavery, to feudalism, capitalism, and then (perhaps) communism. Nonetheless, one can observe the exploitation of peasantry by political-​ warrior elites across most of pre-​industrial Eurasia and in the New World. Shahid Amin, followed by anthropologist Eric Wolf, coined the phrase “tributary mode of production” to integrate this widespread form of society into Marxist theory.124 In the 1980s, a debate followed between British historians Chris Wickham and John Haldon, the latter also a contributor to these volumes. Wickham posited a distinction between local feudal rents, which were predominant across medieval



122

Mann 1986–​2013, Vol. 1, chs. 5, 8, 9. Mao 1927 (I am grateful to Elaine Yuan for the reference to the classic report of Mao). 124 Wolf 1982, 1966; Amin, e.g., 1979, ch. 3. 123

Empire—A World History  33 Europe, and tributary imperial taxes that were characteristic of Asia. But whether rent or tribute, John Haldon objected, in this sense both represented the surplus product of the peasantry, extracted by political, aristocratic elites. These phenomena, therefore, belonged on the same baseline and were best subsumed within a broad common category of a tributary mode of production. Having divested feudalism of the particularly privileged progressive position that it had previously occupied in the grand scheme of historical evolution, what is left is a shifting, constantly renegotiated tributary balance between localized rent and metropolitan, imperial tax (further nuance added by Tullberg, Chapter 21 of Vol. 2).125 As if moving in to botanize within this newly opened, vast Eurasian expanse of tributary peasantries, several historical sociologists and sociologically minded historians have begun to widen Mann’s analysis, extending it from Roman antiquity to embrace Asia. A spate of sociological and comparative studies has explored the character of institutions, elite formation, and dynamics of historical development in the Roman Empire, China (from the Qin imperial unification through the many successive reconquests and refashionings of centralized government), and Muslim realms like the Mughal, seen either individually or in various combinations.126 Emerging from these efforts is an image of aristocratic empire that reveals many commonalities across traditional cultural and civilizational divides. These parallels, in turn, raise the question of whether or not we should understand the rise and fall of individual imperial polities purely in cyclical terms: one set of conquering lords simply following upon the weakening of another, without discernible societal development. Debates that center on the processes of imperial decline, however, have tended rather to shift the emphasis toward transformation and positive evolution. Since Weber, scholars have noted an underlying trend within vast agrarian imperial polities for central authority to loosen its hold on its “free floating resources” and see its powers drift back into the possession of groups entrenched in provincial societies outside the control of the imperial court. This should be understood, though, as an example not merely of the dissipation of powers, but of the buildup and strengthening of local elites under imperial rule—​in short, a dynamic development instead of unequivocal decline.127 At the same time, it is clear that when the nexus of imperial government and local elite becomes untethered, there is a visible drop-​off in the ability to muster large armies or to assemble vast concentrations of wealth.128 By some measures, the organizational capacity of power-​holders has diminished, while by some others it may have increased, often to the extent that an even stronger constellation of forces would be required for empires to re​form. In 125 Haldon 1993; Wickham 1985. 126 Hintze 1997; Bang 2008; Mutschler and Mittag 2008; Scheidel 2009, 2015; Hurlet 2008; Salmeri and Forsén 2008; Bang and Bayly 2011; Artan et al. 2011; Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2012; Auyang 2014; Wang 2015; Duindam 2015; Lavan, Payne, and Weisweiler 2016. Two notable early precursors, and still worthwhile, are Larsen 1978 and Duverger 1980. 127 Brown 1972; Bayly 1983; Garnsey and Humfress 2001; Tezcan 2010; Ward-​Perkins 2005 for a critique of the “transformation” argument. 128 Wickham 2005.

34  Peter Fibiger Bang the long run, although seemingly cyclical, the history of the aristocratic empires is one of slow consolidation and accumulating complexity. Through each reiteration, the imperial patterns of the past were steadily fortified through creative appropriation and reinterpretation by new rulers.129 This, for instance, is the light in which Dingxin Zhao has recently suggested that we understand the many successive dynasties of Chinese history. Under the Han dynasty, a model of empire was fashioned that was based on an amalgam of so-​called Confucian and legalist philosophy. The former set up an ethical ideal of exemplary rulership and elite behavior, while the latter stressed the authoritarian and despotic ability of government to command. For each new dynasty, this vision of empire succeeded in re-​establishing its predominance and gradually widening its hold on government and elite society. Far from being determined from the beginning, the unity of China was the outcome of this long historical process of the consolidation and deepening of a shared, aristocratic ruling-​class ideology, identity, culture, and style of government.130

C.  Empire as Identity and Culture The Confucian-​legalist model is not, of course, the only example of an imperial high culture. Empire as the articulation of a mission civilisatrice is a well-​worn theme, not least in self-​congratulatory and celebratory speeches. To generate a coherent body of theory, however, the topic of empire and culture—​the third dimension in Hobson’s analysis of empire—​had to await the era of anti-​colonial struggle and postcolonial analyses that followed. Gandhi famously declared in his 1909 manifesto, the Hind Swaraj, which outlined a strategy of passive resistance against British rule, that Indian liberty could not be won by force of arms. Violently ousting the British would merely produce a takeover of institutions and simply continue the colonial order. “In effect it means this: that we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English, and when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englishstan. This is not the Swaraj that I want.”131 Something more radical was needed to break away from imperial oppression and achieve self-​rule; it would take a comprehensive, uncompromising culture “war.” Frantz Fanon was later to agree with this analysis in his classic Les damnés de la terre of 1961. Written during the vicious Algerian War of Independence, however, which tore up both colonial and metropolitan society, Fanon had little patience with the message of nonviolence. On the contrary, he announced in firebrand fashion: “La decolonisation est toujours un phenomène violent . . . Dés sa naissance il est clair pour lui que ce monde rétréci . . . ne peut être remise en question que par la violence 129 Cf. Richardson 2017, emphasizing the difference between early state-​formation of the Bronze Age, and the more robust polities consolidating the patterns of the past during the Iron Age of the first millennium bce. 130 Zhao 2015. 131 Gandhi 1910, 21.

Empire—A World History  35 absolue.”132 Passive or violent resistance, however, were to a large extent a matter of strategy. All empires, to recall the insight of Michael Mann, depend on a form of compulsory cooperation. The disagreement between Gandhi and Fanon was a question of how to break that nexus, whether by withholding cooperation or by cutting the compulsory link. Both thinkers, though, converged in a more fundamental manner; they had come to see colonialism as a total cultural system. Liberation required more than the formal acquisition of power; it also meant sweeping away the whole complex of knowledge and culture that European colonial states had introduced. This civilizational edifice represented a form of domination, a tool of authority and administration. Without the whole establishment of lawyers and laws which the British had created in India, Gandhi went on to argue, they would be unable to govern; the Indians, therefore, had better stop collaborating in the application of this juridical system and refrain from using the colonial courts.133 Otherwise, if the colonized continued to make use of the modes of thinking and forms of technology employed by the European metropoles, they would be colluding in the perpetuation and reproduction of their own subjection and slavery. They would remain dependent on European power and repressed by what Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, identified as its cultural hegemony.134 In short, only by a wholesale rejection of Western civilization would the colonized be able to throw off the yoke of oppression and win a voice of their own, ridding themselves of the feeling of inferiority and gaining instead the ability to tell their own story, rather than having it told to them. Only then could they win dignity and agency in the world. These concerns and analyses of the anti-​colonial struggle soon fertilized academic theory.135 When grafted onto the branch of Foucauldian thought, their revolutionary fervor energized an entire field. In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism. A  milestone of postcolonialism, this work analyzed Western scholarship on the Middle East as a product of empire, a set of disciplines, institutions, and career opportunities devised to ensure European domination of the Arab world. Orientalism, in other words, denoted an entire system and infrastructure of knowledge, “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient . . . by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”136 In that sense, so-​called Orientalist scholarship did not so much deal with a set of preexisting societies or a cohesive region. Quite the reverse, the notion of a Middle East, and by implication

132 Fanon [1961] 2002, 39 and 41. The trauma of the Algerian war is discussed by Vasunia, in Chapter 15 of this Volume. 133 Gandhi 1910, ch. 11 (in chs. 9 and 12, railroads and Western-​style doctors are equally denounced). 134 Gramsci 1971, 206–​276, develops the notion of hegemony. For the general reader, this English collection may be more usefully accessible than the long, complete, but therefore also more meandering Italian edition of the copious body of fragments produced by Gramsci during his many years in prison. 135 See Osterhammel and Jansen 2012; Howe 2010, 2001 and Duara 2014 for introduction and guidance to the field of postcolonial studies and historiography. 136 Said 1978, 3.

36  Peter Fibiger Bang the Orient in general, was a discursive construction, imposed by Western academic disciplines and colonial authorities on the Arab countries. Fanon had made the scathing remark that “[l]‌es spécialistes colonialistes ne reconnaisent pas cette forme nouvelle et accourent au secours des traditions de la société autochtone. Ce sont les colonialistes qui font les défenseurs du style indigene.”137 Said now expanded on this insight to argue that Orientalism had been not so much concerned with the condition of the practical living present of the societies it purported to study. Rather, it had insisted that the “true” Orient was to be found in the dead matter of age-​old, classical texts and had to be held to a postulated and ossified “indigenous” style, to borrow the phrase of Fanon, which was nothing but an idealized abstraction of Western romantic thought and desire. “He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuck Hanem physically,” so Said illustrated his argument through a dissection of French novelist Flaubert’s portrait of an Egyptian courtesan, “but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental.’ ”138 The result of such Orientalism was a racist caricature or stereotype, an image that claimed a fundamental and insurmountable cultural difference between a dynamic, rational West and an immutable, irrational Orient that was defined by its eternal cultural essence. The analysis of Said has resonated powerfully across the academy. From literary theory, anthropology, and cultural studies to history, the response has been overwhelming. As with every important work, Orientalism has sparked controversy, not least for its one-​sidedness and quick, not to say unfair, dismissal of much serious scholarship as being determined solely by cultural stereotype.139 But, more importantly, it has also inspired a huge and much-​warranted work of deconstruction in order to break down the racist barriers inherited from the age of colonialism. A vast literature has now emerged examining representations of empire, how colonial life and subjects were conceived in metropolitan society, and how “the other” was culturally constructed and separated from an essentialized “us”—​dormant, stagnant, and exotically mysterious in contrast to a dynamic West.140 Noble savages, childlike but frightening primitives, wily sycophants, alluring objects of desire, or whatever other stereotype European dreams of a foreign and exiting world could project onto the colonies, these were grouped ethnically, put on display in exhibitions, circuses, or zoos, and ranged along a scale of development with its presumed zenith firmly located in Europe.141 Following this first wave, a further cluster of scholarship has looked at how imperial governments generated and collected bureaucratic forms of knowledge to put their subject communities in taxonomic order and discipline colonial populations (themes covered especially by Humfress in Chapter 7

137

Fanon 2002, 230–​231. Said 1978, 6. 139 Hall 2010: 364-​65; MacKenzie 1995. 140 Inden 1990; Harbsmeier 1994; Parker 2008. 141 Rydell 1984; Andreassen and Henningsen 2011. 138

Empire—A World History  37 and Hostetler in Chapter  8 of this volume). Grand museums, geographical and archaeological surveys, projects of legal codification, ethnographic accounts, all were harnessed together with the taking of population censuses to master territories and people, lay them open for control.142 Such metropolitan governmentality and its biopolitics, to use a term of Foucault’s, fashioned colonial populations into increasingly rigid racial hierarchies. Bodily regimes, gender roles, and sexual relations were transformed and policed by the authorities to delineate and maintain the boundaries between social groups and to fortify the predominance of a segregated white minority at the top. “Obsession with white prestige was a basic feature of colonial thinking” and progressively narrowed the scope for interaction and mixture.143 Even so, when the ideological and “scientific” expressions of a well-​ordered colonial rationality were confronted with real life and put to work in society, “they did not seem to produce the same sort of epistemological stability, the same kind of unambiguously transparent” situation that they were supposed to have, both by the authorities at the time and by the later postcolonial theorists.144 A series of studies have explored the clash of epistemologies between (putative) European colonizers and, for lack of a better word, indigenous populations. Embassies of European delegations to the Chinese court, Cook on Hawaii, or Cortez in Mexico, famed and notorious incidents, have been scrutinized as emblematic moments of encounter. While the Aztecs seem to have welcomed the Spaniards as the white gods that in their myths were expected to come and deliver them from evil, not every society was as epistemologically vulnerable to unexpected invasion. On Hawaii, the explorer and paragon of European science, Cook, was fitted into the local ritual calendar as the god Lono. But when he made an unexpected return, thus upsetting the seasonal order and threatening the ritual position of the king, he was killed by the islanders to realign their cosmos with the forces of the divine.145 Chinese emperors were for a long time ridiculed by uncomprehending European visitors for their allegedly self-​delusional and stubborn refusal to interact according to the conventions of European trade and diplomacy. But the insistence of the “Son of Heaven” on setting the rules of engagement was less an expression of his megalomaniacal failure to understand the true nature of the world than a way of asserting his prestige and maintaining power.146 The nature, drives, and motivations of both the Spanish and Portuguese overseas expansions were much alike, as Serge Gruzinsky has recently noted. What determined their very different shapes—​one forged out of territorial conquest, the other based on a thin maritime network of forts and naval footholds—​was governed to a very large extent by the character and epistemological frameworks of the societies into which the Iberians arrived. European

142

Cohen 1996; Scott 1998; Drayton 2000; Jasanoff 2005; Hevia 2012; Steinmetz 2015; Von Brescius 2019. Stoler 2002, 54; 2009. 144 Hevia 2012, 152. 145 Sahlins 1995 (contra Obeysekere 1992); Gruzinski 2013, 199–​202; Todorov 1984. 146 Sahlins 1989; Hevia 1995; Wills 1984. 143

38  Peter Fibiger Bang models could not simply be imposed on the colonies. Local conditions, dynamics, and communities significantly determined, or at least contributed to, the outcome of the colonial encounter.147 They constituted a screen that often made it difficult for metropolitan government to penetrate its overseas subject territories and fully understand them, or even to know what was going on. The condition of colonial society and empire in general can only to a limited extent be described in terms reminiscent of Foucault’s state, able to survey and control its population with panoptic powers.148 The reality of (white) minority rule was, often, less one of confident grasp than one of deep-​seated anxieties and information panics about the mysterious stirrings within colonial populations.149 Feelings of loneliness and boredom frequently accompanied the life of the colonial administrator.150 Spearheaded by the Indian school of subaltern studies, historians, anthropo­logists, and literary critics have set out to recover the hidden voices of the colonial situation (see Wagner in Chapter 12 of the present volume).151 They have revealed colonial societies capable of resisting and deflecting many of the demands of European power, as well as a reality beyond the reach of official reports and racial categories.152 Still others have focused on the independent dynamics of colonial societies and how they interacted with metropolitan government to create a “third space.” Colonial society occupied a middle ground, forged out of a dynamic encounter, provoking resistance as well as inviting cooperation.153 The latter, after all, was a crucial precondition of empire, as Gandhi had come to realize, and many individuals and groups in the colonies latched onto the opportunities offered by empire.154 Creolization, metissage, connected and transnational history—​these are just some of the theoretical labels under which empires are now being explored as globalizing arenas of circulation, mixture, and movement.155 Beyond the clear dichotomies of West and East, a cacophony of voices and agents has been uncovered. European colonial power and its discourse were much less hegemonic and coherent than Said originally presumed.156 The colonial and postcolonial condition was characterized by a “plurality that inheres in the ‘now,’ ” in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, a “lack of totality, the constant fragmentariness, that constitutes one’s present.”157 The sharply drawn frontlines characterizing the age of anti-​colonial struggle are gradually giving way to a more nuanced picture. European forms of social organization and conceptual categories, Chakrabarty continues, while influential and powerful, need not



147

Gruzinski 2013, ch. 7 and passim. Cooper 2005; Crooks and Parsons 2015, introduction and passim. 149 Bayly 1996. 150 Auerbach 2018. 151 Guha 1983; Spivak 1988; Morris 2010 (a follow-​up). 152 Burton 2016. 153 White 1991. 154 Metcalf 2007. 155 Dubois 2000; Bayly 2004; Gosden 2004; Ballantyne and Burton 2012. 156 Thomas 1994. 157 Chakrabarty [2000] 2008, 243. 148

Empire—A World History  39 so much be rejected outright as modified and extended to include and absorb non-​ European historical experience, capturing its diversity. If modernity came to Europe in the shape of industrialization, it came as colonial subjection in many other parts of the world. A primary concern of postcolonial theory has been to interrogate the formation of identities within a complex field of forces that constitute the imperial situation. This has revealed a world of composite, malleable, and multiple identities, often coexisting in the same person. Some of these are cosmopolitan in nature and oriented toward the metropolis, while others are more regionally or locally bounded. Here is a significant point of contact, overlap, and cross-​fertilization with studies of pre-​colonial empires; they generally emphasize the polyethnic character of imperial societies and the mixture of identities.158 But if such traditional empires were characterized by diversity and often celebrated difference, they were also highly hierarchical. Ottoman rule, for instance, is customarily praised for its tolerance of diverse faith communities. However, variety was accompanied by a dialogue of subordination; Islam remained the highest-​ranking religion. Subject elites, let alone communities, were not required to conform to a single cultural norm, but were instead ranged below the ruling group. This allowed them to inscribe the imperial power into their own local traditions and appropriate its authority. Meanwhile, court and government promoted common forms of ruling-​class culture across the empires in which subject elites could aspire to participate to varying degrees. The symbolism and splendor of courtly and imperial culture (see Volume 1, Chapter 6 by Hilsdale) offered a cosmopolitan language of power and distinction, both lending itself to expressing the claims of local leaders to pre-​eminence within their communities and offering an instrument of promotion outside for those with higher hopes and ambitions.159 Ethnic and social divisions of empire, with their concomitant politics of difference are further explored in this volume by Burbank and Cooper in Chapter  11, while the cosmopolitan literatures and religious systems serving as vehicles of dialogue and identity formation are discussed by Bennison in Chapter 9 and Majeed in Chapter 10. Empire, however, in this connection, generally transformed the culture of the conquerors as much as the subjects. The poet Horace, writing at the court of Augustus, may better than any other have distilled this process into a short, but effective formula with his tag “Captive Greece, captured her wild conqueror.”160 Roman imperial culture was forged out of Hellenistic models, not a pristine growth emanating from within the society of the victors. All the same, in the history of empires, the capacity of Chinese elite culture to leave its imprint and to a large extent absorb that of its several conquerors may be the strongest articulation of the



158

See Dench 2005 for an example. Lavan, Payne, and Weisweiler 2016, 6–​7; Bang and Kołoziejczyk 2012; Barkey 2008; McNeill 1986, ch. 1. 160 Horace, Epistulae II, 1, 156–​157. Further, Alcock 1993. 159

40  Peter Fibiger Bang transformative capacity of subject territories on the conquering society. The significance of colonies for the formation of European sovereignty, impersonal bureaucratic administration, liberalism and national culture has also increasingly become a theme in research.161 But in the case of nationalism, which attempted to integrate the wider population rather than focus on elites, this kind of imperial, cross-​cultural integration became suspect. To be sure, thinkers of older ages had often pondered the corrupting influence of empire on conquerors. In writings such as those of the Roman historian Sallust and the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, ancient warrior virtues of duty, discipline, and endurance were seen to give way to sloth and decadence amid the spoils of victory. Nonetheless, nationalism intensified the concern with the “corrupting” influence of empire on metropolitan society. As Lord Bryce counseled in an early twentieth-​century pamphlet analyzing empire, taking heed of the Roman example, the British should make sure to preserve the integrity of their national society at home and not allow the empire to be overtaken by cosmopolitan provincials.162 Of course, this policy blocked the ambitions of colonial upper classes, just at the moment when many colonials were responding to the enfranchising promise of the nationalist ideologies of the metropolis with rising expectations and attempts to embrace forms of imperial citizenship.163 Participating in the culture of empire, a strategy that had previously served as an outlet for the aspirations of subject elites, now came to seem fake, not quite capable of delivering on its promises.164 Emulation began to look like mere mimicry, to use the resentful expression of Homi Bhabha, a condition of lag rather than a successful strategy of empowerment. Colonized elites could only hope to become “almost the same” as the colonizers, “but not quite.” Imitation of the metropolis bred a culture of disappointment and made the question of subjectivization of the colonized a burning issue: how to become more than the “partial presence” conceded to indigenous elites under the system of European imperialism.165 The answer was found in generating and cultivating an independent, authentic (national) culture of one’s own. Catching up with the political and cultural status of the metropole now became the sole avenue to full political enfranchisement and recognition. And so it remains in the present world, where identity politics and “the memories of empire,” discussed by Vasunia in Chapter 15 of Volume 1, have become key instruments of social groups to seek political influence and recognition, as well as a primary focus of postcolonial theory.166

161 Lowe 2015; Wilson 2008; Hall and Rose 2006; Anghie 2005; Liu 2004; Anderson 1991, chs. 6–​7. 162 Bryce 1914. 163 E.g., Banerjee 2010. 164 Darwin 2013, for a discussion of cosmopolitan ethnicities that thrived in the service of empire, but fell victim to the culture of late nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century nationalism. 165 Bhabha 1994, quotations from pp. 122–​123. 166 Chatterjee 2012 (for a model example of the exploration of the contested and shifting memories of imperial colonialism). See further Stoler 2016

Empire—A World History  41

D.  Empire as International Competition and Geopolitics The twin notions of lagging and catching up point to yet another aspect of the question of empowerment and nationalism. Internal mobilization and identity formation were spurred on by a culture and system of international competition—​the fourth and final dimension in Hobson’s analysis of empire. As European powers moved swiftly to colonize much of the inhabited earth during the long nineteenth century, their military conflicts followed suit and came to play themselves out on a global canvas. Colonial overseas empire was celebrated as a source and expression of national greatness.167 In his famous Crystal Palace Speech of 1872, the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli would forge a winning Tory electoral platform to take on the so-​called cosmopolitan principles of the Liberal Party by vowing both to promote a more inclusive nationalism at home and to vigorously assert empire abroad. A strong nation needed to claim a leading position in the world, and external prestige befitted the inner strength of British society.168 Africa, in those years, saw a virtual scramble of European states vying with each other to secure a piece of “greatness,” reaching its conclusion at the congress of Berlin in 1884–​1885. Here, under the guidance of Bismarck, the master of carefully calibrated realpolitik and architect of German unification, the continent was carved up on the drawing board and divided among the various contending powers. Meanwhile, the British could think of themselves as involved in a “great game” with Russia, immortalized by Kipling on the pages of his novel Kim, over control of Central Asia and access to India. In foreign ministries and the general staffs of armies, information was increasingly gathered and accumulated on the various regions of the world, their resources, geographies, military capabilities, and regimes. This new bureaucratic material provided the substance for planning, the formulation of grand and global strategies, and, in time, of systematic theory in emerging academic fields of geopolitics and international relations.169 Among the pioneers in these fields, the British geographer Harold Mackinder holds a special place. “The grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility and natural pathways,” he observed in Democratic Ideals and Reality, published in early 1919, “is such as to lend itself to the growth of empires, and in the end of a single World Empire.”170 Well over a decade before, Mackinder had labeled the great landmass of Eurasia “the world island.” Railroads and other means of communication had tied its vast expanses and separate regions together as never before. From the center, its heartland, one power might now extend its sway over all the rest and acquire global domination. Unless, that is, one could carve up the Eurasian mainland in a way that would work as a counterbalance to the expansive drive of the big continental powers. This was the warning, which Mackinder attempted to issue to the diplomats

167

Berger and Miller 2015. Disraeli 1882, vol. 2, 530–​531. Hevia 2012. 170 Mackinder 1919, 2; Brzezinski 1997, 2012, for a modern disciple of stature in the world of policy advice. 168 169

42  Peter Fibiger Bang and politicians about to assemble at Versailles in 1919 to craft a new global order at the end of the Great War: keep the balance. If they wanted a democratic and liberal future, that would be the necessary precondition.171 The specter of a possible world empire has continued to haunt the discourse on international relations and runs as a powerful undercurrent through the literature, from Mackinder in the early twentieth century to the host of scholars in the last decades reflecting on the unipolar world dominated by America, or most recently the discussion of a possible new Chinese order by, for instance, Yuan Xuetong.172 Classic works of international relations that decisively shaped the field after World War II, such as Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations or Raymond Aron’s War and Peace among the Nations, all contained a discussion of the prospect of a world-​ governing empire.173 According to Carl Schmitt, the top jurist of Nazi Germany—​ who has rather astonishingly been taken out and dusted off in recent years—​the key issue was quite simply whether the order of the world would be organized as “einer Mehrheit grosser Räume gegenüber der globalen Raumordnung einer einheitlich beherrschten Welt  .  .  .  der Gegensatz von zentraler Weltherrschaft und gleich­ gewichtiger Raumordnung, von Universalismus und Pluralismus, Monopol und Polypol  .  .  .”174 Of these alternatives, in Schmitt’s view, the world as a political Universe rather than Pluriverse held scant attraction. Such an international society of boundless hegemony would be one that lacked solid grounding in reality, but would be based more on abstraction and airy principles. This was precisely the flaw of the new order of international politics, promoted in the context of the League of Nations and, subsequently, the United Nations. Dictated by the Atlantic victors of the two World Wars, and informed by Kantian moral philosophy, the framework for the new world order was presumed to be based on liberal principles and universal rights. However, without the necessary grounding in concrete territorial relations of power, the new Anglo-​American, liberal hegemony quickly descended into empty moralism. Enemies, Schmitt self-​righteously complained, were branded as criminals instead of legitimate proponents of competing interests.175 While Schmitt advocated an order directly opposed to the world that Mackinder had in mind, the two thinkers, nevertheless, shared a deep-​seated skepticism toward global hegemony. A well-​ordered world community had to be based on maintaining a balance of power between rival centers; it would be a plural society. As intellectual heir to the diplomatic practices of the early modern European system of states, and to its firm roots in amoral reason of state doctrines in which might more often than not makes right, the field of international relations is suffused with a baseline

171 Mackinder 1919, 194–​215. 172 Ikenberry 2011; Hurrell 2007, ch. 11; Yan 2011; Deudney 2007, 68–​88, in general chs. 8–​9 of the same volume offer much valuable guidance to the modern discourse on international politics, in their discussion of the issue of world government. See further, Mazower 2012 and also the discussion of Menzel 2014. 173 Aron [1962] 1984, ch. 24; Morgenthau [1948] 2006, ch. 29. 174 Schmitt 1950, 220. 175 Schmitt 1950, 200–​285.

Empire—A World History  43 realism—​its default position, so to speak.176 Morgenthau, the leading post–​World War II American exponent, in his textbook (on which several generations of political scientists have been weaned), tellingly included a disparaging chapter about the unfortunate messianic and utopian proselytizing dimension in the policies of the two ideologically rival superpowers of his time: the Soviet Union and the United States. In international politics, such lofty idealism was misapplied and bound to failure. Ideological concerns had to give way to the unsentimental and strategic pursuit of state interests—​my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Politics among nations was, first and foremost, a struggle for power.177 States constantly strove to better their position and increase their power in international society. Much of the time, however, this activity played out as moderate adjustments within the status quo, the key concept for Morgenthau. He restricted imperialism proper, by contrast, to policies pursued by a state to enhance its power by challenging the established international order and underlying balance of power. The analytical implications were remarkable, to say the least. As he undertook to explain to the incredulous reader, “when Churchill refused in 1942 ‘to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,’ he was speaking not as an imperialist but as a conservative in foreign affairs, a defender of the status quo of empire.” Apparently, imperialism only entailed the acquisition, and not the maintenance and defense, of empire, as if one did not logically follow from the other.178 More revealing than compelling, the analysis reflects the fact that the central concepts within the field of international relations have all been formulated in opposition to or denial of the feasibility of a universal or world empire. The aspiration to world rule, from this perspective, “knows no rational limits” and lacks moderation, the very basis of careful and measured calculation. It is, in short, unrealistic—​ the opposite of what state power should be. In contradistinction to world empire stands the sovereign nation-​state, an entity with a clearly bounded and demarcated territory, ideally the home of one people and recognized as the equal of other states, not subject to anyone. It is the building block of modern international society as envisioned by the United Nations. Domination and rivalries between such states might arguably, from this perspective, not best be described in terms of imperialism. How, for instance, to capture the relationship between the United States and its Western European NATO allies, all of them sovereign states, but none of them able to match their American partner and all dependent on her for their security? “Empire by invitation” was the oxymoron coined by Geier Lundestad.179 John Ikenberry, the current professor of international politics at Princeton, prefers to describe the Superpower as something less than fully imperial, the predominant state

176 E.g., Mearsheimer 2018; Kissinger 2014; Walz 1979. A bedrock under much of this thinking is the Westphalian order. 177 Morgenthau [1948] 2006, part 2: “International Politics as a struggle for power”; see ch. 20 on the (ill-​ conceived) ideological dimension in the policies of the two Superpowers. 178 Morgenthau 2006, 50–​59, quotation from p. 58. 179 Lundestad 1986, 1997, 2003.

44  Peter Fibiger Bang promoting a liberal world order. However, as Julian Go has argued, the situation of the United States seems, structurally, closely to mirror that of the British in the nineteenth century.180 At the turn of the twentieth century, Otto Hintze, the diplomatic historian and famed theorist of the state, argued in favor of the alternative concept of “world politics,” Weltpolitik, to describe the expansive ambitions of the contending states of his times.181 In former ages, world empires had dominated, he explained, but in the modern age, competition and pluralism have prevailed. Yet, imperialism has not disappeared; it has merely come to be inflected differently. If the major sovereign powers had mutually come to reject world rule, they were nevertheless all as busy as ever acquiring colonial possessions of their own. Some members of international society were clearly more equal than others. Subversively turning the American Monroe doctrine, which had declared the Western hemisphere closed to European intervention, against the post–​World War II US-​led international society, Carl Schmitt wanted to see the world carved up into a number of greater spheres, Grossräume, each dominated by one major power. As the limitations and constraints of the present Anglo-​American world order are revealed, his vision has begun to look increasingly prescient. Burzon and Wæver, for instance, warned against believing too much in the image of a unipolar, American-​led world. Instead of one global system, they saw security organized around a number of macro-​regional complexes.182 Hierarchy, a seemingly more neutral concept than empire, is a central dimension in the analysis of the struggle for order among modern states.183 Another conceptual alternative to empire frequently encountered in the literature is the notion of the Great Power. The classic work must be Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In this landmark interpretation, he undertook to analyze the diplomatic history of Europe and the Western world from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, as a succession of great power hegemonies. The Habsburgs, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, Great Britain, Imperial Russia, Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union, all found a place within the scheme of rise and fall. The prevalence of international competition and dynamically shifting alliances to maintain a balance of power had prevented any of these Great Powers from resting secure in their predominance within the Euro-​Atlantic system of states. Constant challenges on all fronts had made domination by a single power unsustainable. In turn, each great power had, in its moment of glory, come to experience how its resources were gradually exhausted. Too many interests to defend, in too many and too widely scattered theaters of conflict, had sapped the strength of the Titan and made hegemony too costly a burden to shoulder. Hear Kennedy describe the challenges of Imperial Britain: “In the critical year of 1895, for example, the Cabinet found itself worrying about the possible breakup of China

180

Ikenberry 2016; Go 2011. Hintze, “Imperialismus und Weltpolitik, 1907,” in Hintze 1962. Burzan and Wæver 2003. 183 Goh 2011; Lake 2009. 181 182

Empire—A World History  45 following the Sino-​Japanese War, about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as a result of the Armenian crisis, about the looming clash with Germany over Southern Africa at almost exactly the same time as the quarrel with the United States over the Venezuela-​British Guiana borders, about French military expeditions in equatorial Africa, and about a Russian drive toward the Hindu Kush.”184 Here we may, short of breath, leave Kennedy as he goes on, but with a manifest sense of the overextension faced by the hegemon. Instead of productive investment, economic resources were disproportionately channeled into armaments and squandered on futile, endless warfare. Eventually, Kennedy observed, the back of the leading power would be broken. The hour of reckoning usually came with the outbreak of a massive military conflagration, a “world war” embroiling all major powers. With its society in steep or relative decline, the hegemon was unable to come through such a brutal mea­ suring out of strength with its position intact. At the end of the fighting, the system was reoriented, with one of the economically more dynamic rivals, better able to shoulder the spiraling costs of warfare, taking over the predominant position. But success was short-​lived. Soon enough, the new leader would suffer the same ineluctable fate as its commitments in the game of international power politics also became overextended. A variation on the theme of the inevitable overstretch of empire, recently summarized by Herfried Münkler in his discussion of the logic of world domination, sees imperial power as inexorably being pulled into less powerful, frequently unrewarding peripheries for reasons beyond its control.185 Intervention may have to take place simply to keep rivals out. Often conflicts, particularly during the age of decolonization, took on a protracted character. Unable to match the superior technology and organization of the imperial armies in open battle, the irregular forces of resistance made use of guerrilla and terrorist tactics. Aiming at soft spots—​lines of supply and communication, small patrols, civilians—​their asymmetrical strategies sought to turn the over-​mighty colossus into a giant with feet of clay. After World War II, Carl Schmitt famously declared that the future would be written under the sign of the partisan. By refusing compromise and surrender, and by dragging out conflicts indeterminably, low-​level warfare attempted to make continued occupation too costly in the eyes of the hegemon and to undermine morale. Hiding among the civilian population, the guerrilla consciously hoped to provoke atrocious acts of over-​reaction that would simultaneously scandalize the metropolitan public and alien­ate colonial society. This strategy was fortified through the mass mobilization of the colonial population to the cause of nationalism and self-​rule. For the first time, reaching an accommodation with an imperial overlord had become a fundamentally illegitimate exercise, while the willingness to suffer very great losses to avoid continued colonial oppression had been heightened enormously. Empire, as John Hall points out in Chapter 16 of Volume 1, had become increasingly difficult.

184 185

Kennedy 1987, 292–​293. Münkler 2005, ch. 5.

46  Peter Fibiger Bang But the modern experience of the ways in which enduring rivalry and intense warfare undermine empire and reinforce political fragmentation is not necessarily generalizable across the span of world history. After all, competition usually generates a winner. In his study of the Evolution of International Society, Adam Watson argued that states do not normally exist in isolation. Rather, they can be seen to have formed systems in which they confronted each other militarily and competed with one another, right from their earliest beginnings in the third millennium bce.186 A whole range of configurations and outcomes are testified through time. At one end of a spectrum resides the polycentric option, familiar to students of the modern states system that originated in Europe. Normally, however, the balance of power mechanism, so important in curbing the hegemonic ambitions of the stronger contenders, does not endure or is not very strong in the first place. The tenacity of the modern balance of power mechanism, which forces states into ever tighter, yet never settled, military competition, seems, historically, quite extraordinary. More often than not, however, the balancing mechanism of state systems has been too feeble to prevent more extensive empires from beginning to form. At the other extreme of the spectrum, Watson locates universal empire, a situation in which one power manages to gobble up most or all of its rivals to establish supremacy over its entire “world.” To Watson, there existed a tentative equilibrium point between those two poles. More recently, in a comparative study of the early modern European states system and the so-​called warring states period in the Chinese world, Victoria Tin-​bor Hui has argued that the more probable outcome of interstate rivalry and competition is eventual conquest of all by one power. In a polycentric and adversarial system, odds are that in the long run contenders will fail consistently to gang up on each other to prevent one from becoming too powerful. Rather, a snowball effect is more likely. At some point, one power will reach a critical mass where it will be impossible for the others to block its attempt at further and complete conquest. In contrast to Euro-​Atlantic history, this was precisely what happened when, during the third century bce, the Qin dynasty extended its imperial sway over “all under Heaven” and became the first dynasty to rule the entire Chinese world, Tianxia.187 Among geopolitical thinkers, the notion of grand strategy has gained currency. Struggling to master the many challenges facing a great power and containing risks, general staffs have made it routine to develop comprehensive plans about how to juggle different and distant theaters of conflict at the same time. Famous, for instance, is the so-​called Schlieffen Plan, whose aim was to avoid having the German imperial army at the turn of the twentieth century fight a prolonged war on two fronts. All initial efforts had to be concentrated on the Western front, and then when a quick victory was secured, forces were to be shifted east to defeat Russia.

186 Watson 1992. 187 Hui 2005, chs. 2, 5. Scheidel 2019 explores the reasons behind the contrast between enduring polycentrism in post-​Roman Europe and serial empire formation in other temperate zones.

Empire—A World History  47 But, of course, things turned out very differently. In the intensely competitive environment of the modern state-​system, it was difficult to control the outcome. Where the Germans failed, however, the Romans arguably succeeded. In an eye-​opening book, the military strategist Edward Luttwak pointed out that at the height of its power, the Roman Empire achieved a very stable security regime.188 With most of its rivals conquered, large-​scale warfare had been pushed out to the most distant frontiers of their world. Luttwak wrote of the achievement of scientific borders; from a logistical perspective, dominion had been extended over the entire orbit of the Mediterranean to cover an optimum area. His interpretation was undoubtedly anachronistic and presupposed a degree of conscious geopolitical planning which was neither present nor possible in the Roman case.189 Nonetheless, Luttwak had, perhaps, better than anyone understood that the extension of the empire to include most of the greater Mediterranean world had created a very favorable situation. Few rivals remained that were capable of challenging the mighty empire and thus a long period of stable hegemony ensued. Stability of extensive empire was a product of significantly reduced competitive pressures. By the same token, the secret behind the enormous extent reached by the British Empire is often held to be the relative lack of challenge to its command of the high seas for much of the nineteenth century. Once the level of competition and conflict increased, its days were numbered.190 While many of the other bodies of theory that deal with empire have sprung from a concern with the inner drives and dynamics of imperial states and societies—​ capitalist profits, aristocratic war-​mongering, the culture of empire—​the field of international relations, broadly conceived, puts the emphasis differently. It tends to analyze empire in terms of systemic pressures and rivalries. Sometimes this gives an impression of empire as being driven entirely from the margins. Robinson and Gallagher, in their classic discussion of Victorian imperialism and diplomacy in Africa, placed agency squarely in the “colonial” theater. Business people, powerful men, and rival states—​it was their projects and ad hoc machinations on the spot that drove the process of empire. London and White Hall constantly found themselves chasing after events. A victim of circumstances and forces beyond its control, central government was mostly reactive, jumping from crisis to crisis, muddling through as best it could. The world might present itself like that to the scholar when working from the inside of a foreign ministry and going through the filing cabinets, case by case. But a state does not maintain an unmatched fleet, operating across the planet for more than a century at enormous expense, without a strong will to assert itself and without an expansive conception of its interests. Success, under conditions of systemic competition, depends on more than the ability deftly to maneuver 188 Luttwak 1976. See Parker 1998 and Allen 2000 for two further attempts at historical analysis in terms of a grand strategy, here for the Spanish Empire at the turn of the sixteenth century. 189 Mattern 1999; Whittaker 1994. 190 Darwin 2007, 222–​256. Not just the British Empire, but European colonialism in general benefited from a century of relative peace between the defeat of Napoleon and the outbreak of World War I.

48  Peter Fibiger Bang among allies and enemies; it also requires internal buildup and mobilization of the instruments of power. A full analysis of Empires, as Michael Doyle pointed out in his rare, comparative, theoretical, and synthesizing study, requires a combination of perspectives—​metropolitan as well as pericentric.191

Synthesis From A to D, the theoretical survey has had to traverse four separate discourses and revealed anything but uniformity of views. Perspectives and opinions diverge. Empire has been too important and many-​sided a historical phenomenon to allow for consensus to develop or for the various approaches to fuse. One of the more surprising insights to emerge from the literature, left here to the end, is that it is difficult to make a theoretically clear distinction between defense and aggression among states locked in mutual rivalry within the same system. The defensive measure of one party will seem to another an intolerable act of aggression. Was Stalin’s incorporation of Eastern Europe in a Communist block prompted by an understandable Soviet need for security against new invasions from the West? After the September 11th attacks, it very quickly became clear that the new doctrine of heightened security demands left no obvious limits to where US intervention might be required. Mommsen, the Nobel Prize laureate and towering nineteenth-​century historian, was even able to declare Roman imperialism to have been defensive in nature. As a phenomenon, imperialism—​the domination of weaker polities by stronger states and societies—​transcends individual justifications, however important these may have been. Imperialism is simply a central property of the process of state-​formation, a strong current, even if it has been moving to a historically alternating rhythm.192 No single cause explains its existence, nor can it be ascribed to just one class of people. Capitalist command of markets, territorial control of agrarian resources, aristocratic honor, religious mission, middle-​class profit, national assertion, and military rivalries all have been identified as crucial. But they have been so at varying times and in shifting constellations. Social power, as Michael Mann argued in his grand historical sociology, has no ultimate origin. It consists in the organizational capacity produced by the mobilization of people in all spheres of life—​economic, political, ideological, and military—​in different combinations and configurations.193 This is a useful take, perhaps in particular, for conceptualizing imperial power—​ a composite phenomenon, always a bundle—​and may help to impose a degree of order on the apparent, and often daunting myopia of history. In order to synthesize the imperial experience in world history, the four separate theoretical discourses 191 Doyle 1986, ch. 1. 192 Mommsen 1976, 307–​308 (the final paragraph of the chapter dedicated to the Third Macedonian War). See further the model discussion by Aron 1972, 9–​42, about the outbreak of the Cold War, and the futility of attempts to pin down the guilty party. 193 Mann 1986–​2013, Vol. 1, ch. 1.

Empire—A World History  49 can be arranged within the analytical scheme of Mann to constitute the dimensions of a matrix to structure our history and map the changing shape of empire. Economically, empire appeared as a form of monopoly power, which extracts resources and draws rents from protection. Politically, empire was revealed to rely on compulsory cooperation, harnessing select and privileged elites from subject societies, who performed the tasks of local government for the metropolis in return for a share in the “spoils of conquest and domination.” Ideologically, the consolidation of imperial rule depended on the formation of trans-​regional or cosmopolitan cultures that elevated local elites above their home community and tied them to the cause of empire. Finally, empire may be analyzed in terms of military contests. Rivalry produced conquest, while enduring competition undermined hegemony. For all of the characteristics identified, the governing logic is expansive and extensive rather than intensive. Successful conquest eliminates rivals by absorption and reduces the intensity of competition. Imperial cosmopolitanism has normally aimed at integrating elites in extensive networks spanning diverse regions, rather than at intensively appealing to the sentiments of the mass of population. Compulsory cooperation enables minimal government, but admits a large degree of autonomy to local communities and works as a serious constraint on the ability of the metropole to penetrate provincial society intensively. Monopolistic extraction of resources and protection money depends on widening the reach of the enterprise and then keeping costs at a stable minimum. Intensifying investment in the governmental apparatus might well outstrip income and undermine the surplus. But, how these different dimensions and basic characteristics of imperial power worked out in shifting combinations over time can hardly be expressed satisfactorily in a simple, abstract model. To capture the rich variety and changing weights of phenomena, to weave the different threads together and reveal historical development, the only viable strategy is narrative, pursued at different levels of generalization. In the many histories of individual empires that follow in Volume 2, we attempt to survey the imperial experience through time and across the globe via a large set of representative examples. This history of histories has been structured into eight chronological phases, each prefaced by a synthesizing overview that identifies the global themes, patterns, and connections characteristic of the period and its imperial developments. Volume 1 operates on a higher level of generalization and proceeds to examine a range of themes through concrete historical comparisons across the imperial experience. Here, first, comes the cumulative result or impression in broad outline, a narrative synthesis that seeks to take a global view and determine the predominant orders and trends in the long world history of empire from the perspective of the four key theoretical parameters of protection costs, elite formation, cosmopolitan culture, and military rivalry. To help the contours of this story emerge clearly, the narrative has been anchored in a set of eight world maps (Maps I–​VIII), one for each of the periods into which the narrative survey in Volume 2 has been divided (Parts I–​VIII). To be sure, maps—​and imperial maps especially—​risk unduly reifying the claims of power and of rulers, exaggerating the level of control actually achieved, blotting

50  Peter Fibiger Bang out rival perspectives while naturalizing the view from the metropolitan center. These are all legitimate concerns and have been voiced often enough (see Hostetler, Chap. 8 in this volume). Yet, even if there is an element of playing with fire, when painting the world in a few simple colors of empire, the map-​making game is more than merely crude, blunt, and deceptive. Synthesis feeds on simplification—​indeed needs it. History, after all, should be more than an exercise in the command of meandering detail. To remain relevant and offer guidance, it must also attempt to identify broader patterns and processes that only become visible by placing phenomena in sequence and grouping them within wider contexts; it demands the broad brush, and for that, few other tools are as helpful as global maps. These maps, then, tell a story that trace a glacially expanding universe of imperial polities in which European colonialism appears as only one, or perhaps two, in a series of significant milestones that delineate the eight phases into which this history has been divided. The first, however, is marked by the rise of empire in the ancient Near East. Empire emerged as a strong force in history, closely intertwined with the process of state formation, in the aftermath of the so-​called Bronze Age urban revolution, sometime during the third millennium bce.194

Map I. Bronze to Iron Age, the Near-​Eastern “Invention” of Empire (Third Millennium to 300 bce) By then agricultural populations had grown dense enough to sustain, or rather to invite, state-​formation. Early agriculturalists had been able to make do with less intensive forms of cultivation. Clearing a plot of land, they would use it for a number of years before moving on to fresh territory and starting over. Slash and burn agriculture was relatively undemanding in terms of labor and, as long as populations were small, much preferable from the perspective of peasant producers who would obviously aim to satisfy their needs at the least possible effort. The surplus of food generated even under this light regime was enough to support growing numbers of children and, for that reason, population slowly rose. Eventually, as it became more difficult to find attractive territory not already claimed by others, more intensive forms of agriculture became necessary. Regional patches evolved where peasants had to become more sedentary. The succeeding history of pre-​industrial societies, analyzed in this volume by Beattie and Anderson in Chapter 14 on the ecological interaction of empire and natural environment, was shaped by the gradually expanding frontier of this form of life.195 Populations of peasant cultivators and urban dwellers existed in 194 In the following, footnotes are kept to an absolute minimum. No attempt has been made systematically to refer to the many chapters of these two volumes (which would have caused the apparatus to run to inordinate length), but they obviously constitute the background to the synthesis attempted here. Nor has an attempt been made to harmonise chapters so as to iron out the inevitable exceptions or contradictions to the general pattern identified here. On the contrary, we hope that the detection of such will stimulate further thought and reflection, maybe even give rise to new questions. 195 For further discussion of “pre-​state” societies and imperialism, see chap. 3 by Chase-​Dunn and Khutkyy.

Empire—A World History  51 a dynamic relationship where growth in the size of territory and number of people was periodically capped by waves of the epidemic diseases that had developed to take advantage of bigger and denser human host populations. Occasionally such diseases struck with devastating effects, but each time, population bounced back and climbed to higher levels. In the long run, as we saw Lattimore argue above in the case of China, denser forms of sedentary peasant society expanded.196 This process first got under way in the flood valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus, and the Yellow River, where easy access to water created conditions particularly favorable to the cultivation of grain. High yields and labor-​intensive irrigation mutually reinforced one another. Copious harvests made it possible to feed more mouths, while the growing number of people constituted a ready pool of labor that could be used to expand the irrigation works even further. Soon the level of population had become unsustainable outside the river valleys; the peasantry was trapped and lay open to predatory elites. In return for a part of the surplus generated through the hard toil of sedentary peasant families, priests and warriors emerged to offer protection from the combined evils of divine wrath and armed assault.197 This was the beginning of urbanization and state-​formation. In the sale of protection, however, the underlying logic favored economies of scale, as F. C. Lane realized. Soon enough the state elites of warriors and priests began to compete with their neighbors in an attempt both to expand their holdings and gain access to rare prestige goods and natural resources, both of which had to be gathered from outside the simple production world of peasant society. At least by the end of the third millennium bce, empire had emerged among the rivaling small-​state societies of the ancient Near East (phase I on the map). When writing, Lane had in mind the compact, middling monarchies of early modern Europe. Yet, although a middling size in territorial extent—​big enough not to be easily overcome by enemies and small enough to remain closely governable—​was increasingly perceived as the ideal among European thinkers of this period, a political theorist such as Giovanni Botero still recognized some advantages in more extensive empires. In the Della Ragion di Stato, he included a set of trenchant observations about the big empire builders of his late sixteenth-​ century world. Both the Spanish and the Ottomans, he realized, enjoyed a number of strategic advantages. Externally, each of these powers could keep their army continuously occupied by moving it from one enemy theater to the next. Their troops, therefore, were always well trained and sharp. Internally, the rule over diverse, but separate, communities meant that opposition could be overcome. Individually, isolated rebels were normally little match for the specialized army of a metropolitan government that could draw on the resources of the entire realm.198 Among state-​ forming societies, in other words, the economy of force often favored the continuous 196 McNeill 1976; Scheidel 2007, 2017; Boserup 1965 remains crisp and unmatched, as does Lattimore 1951. Nissen 2019 for an attempt to explore the sociological effects in a comparative study of the late, pre-​ colonial world of Eurasia. 197 Mann 1986–​2013, vol. 1, chs. 3–​4. 198 Botero [1589] 1930, 17–21, 66–67 (Libro Primo: Quali stati siano più durabili . . . ; Libro Secundo: Capi di Prudenza); Lane 1958. See further Bethencourt, Chap. 30 of Vol. 2.

52  Peter Fibiger Bang

Map I.  Bronze to Iron Age, the Near-​Eastern “Invention” of Empire (Third Millennium to 300 bce). Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

Empire—A World History  53 expansion of a predominant power, while the vast majority of neighboring societies gradually fell subject to its rule. Eliminating most of the competition brought about a stable situation that allowed the conquering “monopolist” to postpone the moment when the wheel of “creative destruction” would predictably roll again and overturn their hegemony. To a modern historian, perhaps, ancient empires may appear to be nothing more than a steady stream of conquerors in which one unstable and ephemeral regime succeeded the other. But behind the line of seemingly endless conquests there was a slowly accumulating trend toward the formation and consolidation of very stable and durable imperial hegemonies that lasted for centuries. The ancient Near East was first to experience this development. Already a long-​cherished dream of rulers, the prospect of universal empire came within reach when the so-​called Neo Assyrian Empire, the great power to appear after the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age, brought the processes of Levantine state-​formation to their logical end point (ca. 900–​600 bce). After having subjected the entire Mesopotamian area to their rule, the Assyrians began to extend their sway over Egypt (phase II). At the height of its power, the empire then unexpectedly collapsed toward the end of the seventh century bce. Stability had eluded the hegemon, but only briefly. Imperial rule of extensive territories necessitated the co-​optation of strong local elites. The logistical constraints of pre-​mechanized transport severely limited the range and speed of movement of both armies and government personnel. Tight central control was impossible, and so most governmental functions had to be performed by locally anchored power holders. Within the Assyrian realm, the ancient city-​state of Babylon claimed a powerful position. Quite in keeping with the expectations of Botero, Assyrian rulers had been able to constrain this alternative center of authority several times. However, as societies with state-​formation could support greater numbers of people on the same area of land, their way of life continued geographically to expand in tandem with the slow growth of peasant populations. Not only did the gaps between the more densely populated, sedentary societies grow smaller, as old centers such as Egypt and Mesopotamia were gradually drawn into the same imperial complex, but new and potentially destabilizing powers also developed on the margins of the old cores. One of them, the Medes of Western Iran, allied with the rebellious Babylonians in a pattern that was to be repeated over the course of imperial history, to form a crushing alliance that took down their Assyrian overlords.199 But the downfall of the hegemon simultaneously opened up opportunities for others. Soon, another group that had formed on the fringes of the Mesopotamian world, the Persians, joined the fray. Under the leadership of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius I, the Achaemenid dynasty more than fully completed the work of the Assyrians to establish an unparalleled hegemonic

199 Scheidel discusses the significance of such marginal powers for empire formation in chap. 2 of vol. 1, but as Lattimore 1951 observed in the case of China, usually they would have embarked on a process of state-​ formation of their own before they rose to become an irresistible conquering force.

54  Peter Fibiger Bang position. The universal empire of the Persian “great kings” represents a revolution in world history. Their power dramatically broke through the bounds of the world defined by the old Near Eastern monarchies in the region strung out between the flood valleys of Mesopotamia and the Nile. The trail left by the conquering armies of the Persians reached from western Anatolia to the river Indus, and from Afghanistan in Central Asia to Southern Egypt and Eastern Libya in North Africa. Between the late sixth and late fourth century bce, the king of kings stood paramount in the world of states and rulers as his authority sought to embrace a staggering and unprecedented variety of peoples. The sprawling realm was characterized by enormous diversity in forms of subjection and degrees of effective control, exercised by a very thin central government that relied on a principle of hierarchical subjection to keep the edifice together, rather than uniform integration. Over some areas, authority was little more than nominal. Others were out of reach, even to the mighty imperial armies. No one, however, could rival the range of resources that were delivered as tribute to the Achaemenid lord by his countless subject communities. The ability to command the special products and people from almost everywhere, the depths of his coffers, and the splendor of the court became proverbial. Some, of course, might try to defy Persian arms and, at times, even succeed. The Greek historian Herodotus immortalized the victories scored by the Athenians and other Hellenic city-​states against the Persian Titan during the early fifth century bce. Crucial to the autonomy of the small city-​states of the Aegean, to be sure, the defeats were little more than scratches on an imperial edifice that remained stable and unmatched. Decades later, the Achaemenid rulers helped finance the successful efforts of Sparta, the other great member of the Hellenic resistance, to bring down Athens; divide and conquer. In the long run, empire would win out.200 However, it might do so in surprising ways. The origins of the Persians themselves had been obscure. They may have started out as nomadic pastoralists. The mobility of nomads, and their often plentiful access to horses, gave them a potential military advantage over sedentary populations where horses were scarcer and peasants normally were needed for working the land rather than available for military service. Time and again, ambulant groups appeared along the frontier of more densely settled agricultural societies. Here, sedentary rulers might employ them as a ready reservoir of military recruits. At other times, the nomads might themselves join the ranks of conquerors and military rulers. Historians have sought to capture the phenomenon of such mobile warrior coalitions through concepts such as shadow or kinetic empires. Some have even thought to identify the nomads as the main driver of pre-​colonial world history. Yet, the advantages of mobility were also its weakness: their political organization normally remained relatively transient. The great anthropologist Jack Goody rightly identified the Bronze Age revolution of the fourth and early third millennium

200

Hyland 2017.

Empire—A World History  55 bce as a decisive dividing line in history. It was among the slowly expanding societies, which were able to fully adopt the organizational and technological changes of this transformation, that more elaborate and stable forms of social complexity developed and through which the main current of history ran. In areas and regions that remained thinly populated, the results of the revolution did not easily take root. Goody saw this in particular as a contrast between Eurasia and the lands of Sub-​ Saharan Africa.201 But one could easily add to this the endless steppe lands of Asia or the vast forests and mountain regions that lay strewn between tracts of more densely settled regions. State-​formation and empire only haltingly made headway in these frontier territories. Elites were unable to impose the necessary controls on populations that continued to be mobile and were able to move out of reach.202 Permanence necessitated a transfer of political elites onto more crowded terrain where tributes, taxes, and rent could be extracted to make state-​formation possible. In the case of the Persians, they had already begun to adopt and adjust to the demands of sedentary life and state-​formation before the onset of conquests.203 Rather than a sudden eruption of nomadic power, the unprecedented scale taken on by the Achaemenid empire reflects growth in the number of societies capable of state-​formation. This area had begun to spread decisively beyond the old core areas of Mesopotamia and Egypt, in a band stretching across Afro-Eurasia within the temperate and sub-​tropical zones, eventually also reaching down into the tropics. Both to the east and west of the empire, state societies continued to grow (phase III). Beyond the city-​states of the Aegean, a political cosmos of smaller city-​state empires was emerging. The world history of empire tracks the slowly but steadily expanding frontier of state-​like societies. However, the realm of the Achaemenids had reached a size whose dimensions, treated in general by Scheidel in Chapter 2 of this volume, especially Table 2.1, was almost as large as could be mastered in a world where transport and communication depended on muscle power and wind energy.204 This became clear when the Achaemenid dynasty, in its turn, finally fell prey to a new monarchy that had formed on its westernmost frontier. During the century preceding the ascension of Alexander in 336 bce, the kingdom of Macedon had developed its resources to be able to finance a forceful military. In the hands of its new, young, and daring king, the army of Macedon turned into an invincible machine of conquest. A formula had been devised against which the Achaemenid ruler, irrespective of his greater resources, knew no remedy. A decade of campaigns made Alexander master of the world, earned him the eponym “the Great,” and set a standard that would be emulated by conquerors for millennia to come—​all before 201 Goody 1996. 202 Scott 2009. 203 Briant 2002, 21. On new dynasties emerging on the frontier rather than hailing from beyond the horizon of the sown, Lattimore 1951: 540-​49 made this point forcefully across the chronological span of Chinese history. 204 Taagepera 1978 and 1997. These statistical studies—​whose view on several individual empires can easily be challenged, but whose overall findings are not in doubt—​identify three broad clusters of empire size: a Bronze Age; an Iron Age until early modernity (600 bce–​1600/​1700); and a modern one connected with European colonialism (1600/​1700 to the present).

56  Peter Fibiger Bang his early death in 323 bce. By then the army of Alexander had traversed the Persian Empire to its furthest corners, until the soldiers refused to march any further at the Hyphasis River in the Punjab of North India and forced their adventurous king to turn back to Babylon. The succession struggle, however, showed that the new-won empire could not be held together. Pushing against the boundaries of the possible, the old Achaemenid dominion fractured into a number of rival monarchies as the former generals of Alexander became caught up in internecine war over the spoils of conquest.

Map II. The Classical Age, Culminating in the Formation of Large World Empires on the Margins of Eurasia: The Mediterranean and China (323 bce–​600  ce) The old core of Iran and Mesopotamia held firm, first under the Seleucid and then Parthian dynasties, but Syria, Anatolia, Macedonia, and Egypt were slowly drawn away by the gravitational pull of the new system of rivaling states forming in the Mediterranean as state-​formation had spread and matured along its coastlines. Eventually, the Roman city-​state, right at the center, came out victorious to unite the greater Mediterranean under the new universal monarchy of Augustus at the turn of the first century ce. To the east of Alexander’s conquered Achaemenid realm, the formation of empire equally moved into a higher gear among the evolving kingdoms on the flood plains of northern India. Under the Mauryan dynasty, much of the subcontinent was assembled in a loose, universal hegemony. If their rule was short-​lived, they soon found strong successors, especially the Kushanas, whose power reached across the Hindu Kush. Still further east, another system of rival, or warring, states had been forming and expanding in the center of China. Just as in India, state-​formation had roots that stretched back to the third millennium bce. Presumably conquest had begun very early on, but our historical records are weaker there than in the Near East. From the late second millennium bce, records testify to a world ritually united under the Zhou dynasty. There is, however, a strong inclination to take Chinese unity for granted and to date it back to the region’s earliest history. But it is with the conquests by the Qin that the first strong empire appears in the Chinese world. In 221 bce the Qin monarchy had overcome its last remaining sedentary rivals to subject “all under heaven.” Although the first imperial family quickly fell to the forces of rebellion, it was only to be supplanted by a new dynasty. The foundation of the empire proved sound and afforded the Western and Eastern Han 400 years of basically stable rule. In the three centuries following Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenids, a string of universal imperial complexes had arisen in the wake of the growth of more densely settled peasant societies across the Afro-​Eurasian landmass, from its western to its eastern fringes: Mediterranean, Mesopotamian-​Iranian, North Indian–​Central Asian, and Chinese. The advantages of monopolistic supremacy asserted themselves once again.

Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

Empire—A World History  57

Map II.  The Classical Age, Culminating in the Formation of Large World Empires on the Margins of Eurasia: The Mediterranean and China (323 bce–​600  ce).

58  Peter Fibiger Bang This was the classical age. A realist might point out that neither of these empires was really universal—​not merely in the banal sense that there were a number of coexisting imperial complexes. After all, the Chinese and Romans were too far away and knew too little of one another to think, in political terms, of their worlds as one. However, even in the nearer world of each, some rivals were always left in the interstices. But the claim to universal monarchy was not an absolute one; it spoke into a universe of rival powers. A universal emperor was not unable to recognize rivals, nor was he ignorant of people out of his reach. Instead, he staked out a more or less successful claim to preeminence and supremacy. The rest of the world could, in this sense, be ranked, sometimes only symbolically, below him. As the Mauryan emperor Aśoka proudly proclaimed on inscriptions, his dhamma or order reached wide beyond the range of the hard power of his armies.205 The vast imperial polities continued, like the Achaemenids before them, to preside over a wide variety of peoples and territories, organized hierarchically, often by very different methods and forms of subjection. Even so, the resources at the disposal of imperial governments did develop. The massed infantry armies of the Chinese and especially the Romans achieved both a size and degree of institutional consolidation that would not be bettered before the early modern period. Meanwhile, imperial government might rest upon military supremacy, but it depended on the co-​optation of local elites to collect tributes and manage the peace. Anything else would both have been too slow and too costly. The Achaemenids seem to have reserved the top ranks in the hierarchy of elites for a narrow Perso-​ ethnic ruling class. During the classical age the most successful courts slowly began to throw their nets wider. In the portrait of the powerful first minister of the Qin dynasty, Li Si, written by Sima Qian at the turn of the first century bce, the ability of governments to command a wider range of materials is listed among the clear benefits of empire. But the ruler should not restrict himself to enjoying the greater riches, rare products, and natural resources that an extensive empire provided. Indeed, as the first minister is made to opine, if the monarch found such trifling materials important, how could he, in the far more important matter of appointing his officials, allow himself to make do with people only from his own original kingdom, instead of selecting the most eminent men from around his vast realm?206 The courts of imperial rulers had from the very beginning constituted a cosmopolitan environment where elites from diverse origins mingled and sought favor. That made the venues of the monarch a crucible of aristocratic culture, and during the classical age this assimilative force intensified. Not only did the courts preside over the formation of cosmopolitan elites across Eurasia, they also tended to cast their nets wider and reach increasingly extended circles of upper-​class society, and thereby fostered the spread of a shared aristocratic culture whose expressions have come, today, to be associated with the major civilizations of our world.

205 206

13th Major Rock edict of Aśoka, translation in Thapar 1997, 255–​257. Sima Qian, Shiji, ch. 87 (biography of Li Si; for a translation, see Sima Qian 2007, 25–​27).

Empire—A World History  59 From the third century ce onward, the stability of the empires of the classical age was slowly undermined. No one benefited more from the imposition of the imperial peace than the local governing elites who saw their position strengthened, with the paradoxical result that the metropolitan center risked being squeezed out of its provinces. Equally, along the often expanding frontiers of imperial society, rivals cropped up. Alone or in combination, both factors would, just as previously in the case of the Assyrian and the Achaemenid empires, prove fatal in the end. To this must be added the effect of occasional Pan-​Eurasian pandemics, though more as a factor that exacerbated structural strains that had slowly built up within the imperial polities, rather than as a main cause. The so-​called Justinianic plague of the sixth century certainly weakened the fiscal basis of empire in both the Mediterranean and Irano-​Mesopotamian macro-​ regions by significantly denting their populations, but fell far short of destroying the foundation of imperial power per se. Quite the reverse, the impulse toward the formation of vast empires remained undimmed. Far from a graveyard of empires, the new age dawning would turn out to be one of vibrant imperial renewal.

Map III. The Ecumenic Turn: Eclipse of the Old World and the Rise of Islam (600–​1200) From the space in between the Romans and the Sassanians, the Arabs rose to eclipse both powers by the fourth decade of the seventh century. The entire Irano-​Mesopotamian imperial complex and about half the Mediterranean were swiftly conquered, united under the rule of the caliph. At the eastern extreme of Eurasia, the Sui and Tang dynasties had succeeded in reconquering the territories of the former Han Empire. Both of these mighty powers may be seen as the fulfillment of the cosmopolitan developments of the previous phase. As elites of widely scattered geographical backgrounds had been welded into greater unity, so denser networks of cultural integration had evolved. Imperial cultures experienced what might be described as an ecumenic turn as truth and cultural expressions more forcefully began to transcend local particularisms, tying old regions into a wider imperial cosmos. “How will the law be established universally except by a universal ruler?” This question was evidently intended to be rhetorical. Circulating in the Arabic translation of an originally Greek text, it formed part of a short tract on kingship, masquerading as a letter of advice from Aristotle to his world-​conquering pupil, Alexander. Both were, by this period, firmly established across Western Afro-Eurasia as emblems of kingship and philosophy, truth and power. Ideally the two could be merged and the world made to conform to doctrine, godly, philosophical, and legal. “Blessed is he who will gaze on the splendor of that day when people unite under one rule and one king,” as the letter added further on, that would be a happy time when war and slaughter had ceded to harmony and order.207 207 Letter of Aristotle to Alexander, 4.2 and 10.4–​5 (text and trans. in Swain 2013, quotation from pp. 187, 199). See Fowden 2012.

60  Peter Fibiger Bang

Map III.  The Ecumenic Turn: Eclipse of the Old World and the Rise of Islam (600–​1200). Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

Empire—A World History  61 Claims that unity represented the right order of the universe echoed across Eurasia and over subsequent centuries. In the Mediterranean and the Near East, monotheisms gained traction. God was henceforth to be written in the singular, to everyone and everywhere the same. Christianity, from the fourth century, and Islam from the seventh, emerged as predominant when they became the creeds of strong imperial governments. The phenomenon, however, extended far beyond the traditional monotheist religions. At the court of the Gupta emperors of North India, developments under the previous dynasties came together to turn Sanskrit culture into a powerful model, inspiring emulation in the following centuries among rulers and elites across the Himalayas and Southeast Asia. Rigidly governed by grammar and anchored in an artful canon of classical literary works, Sanskrit claimed to be both time-​and placeless, it was an instrument of distinction available, no matter the locality, to political and religious elites seeking to set themselves apart from the ruled. A grand Sanskrit cosmopolis developed which saw both the gods of Hinduism and its reformist Buddhist offshoot spread far and wide.208 Buddhist monks traversing the narrow corridors of Central Asia likewise found sponsorship at the courts of Chinese rulers. But here the import of Indian wisdom was combined with a redoubled effort at strengthening the cosmopolitan literary culture that had been inherited from the Han. Under the Tang, the contours of what became the famous civil service examination system of later dynasties took on a firmer shape. Increasing numbers of officeholders in the imperial service were appointed after tests had been administered to examine their mastery of the so-​called Confucian canon of texts. From east to west, the world of Afro-Eurasia saw the consolidation and further diffusion of a number of ecumenic and literary “truth languages” promoted by the leading imperial courts—​Arabic, Han Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian, to name the most successful.209 Meanwhile, local elites continued to slowly hollow out the hold of established imperial centers on their subject societies. Likewise, populations capable of sustaining state-​building elites continued to expand, gradually, both along internal frontiers and further to the north—​ beyond the Rhine and the Danube in Europe—​and south—​deeper into South and Southeast Asia. Empire was not slow to follow. In Western-​Central Europe, the Carolingians attempted to claim succession from Rome, even as emperors still ruled on the Bosporus in what was left of the old Roman Empire after the Muslim conquests. In Southeast Asia, powers such as the Srivijaya, perched across the straits of Malacca, and later the Khmers in Indo-​China began to carve out empires of their own.



208 209

Pollock 2006. Anderson 1991, 14–​16, for the notion of “truth language.”

62  Peter Fibiger Bang

Map IV. The Mongol Moment: The Rise of Chinggis Khan and the Central Asian Steppe, Followed by Regional Reassertion (1200–​1450) By the twelfth century, the world of Eurasia was characterized by a number of imperial commonwealths where the memories and cultural models of universal empire lingered while the position of the former hegemon was reduced mostly to symbolic status. In Europe, for instance, the aspiration to create a new universal monarchy lived on in the so-​called Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, but in practice, effective power resided in a number of regional monarchies, each entertaining its own hopes of expansion. The same could be said of the Muslim commonwealth. The caliphs residing in Baghdad still held symbolic and religious prestige, but the power to command had splintered between a number of monarchies, some of them middling empires in their own right. Even the Chinese area was divided between a number of northern powers and the Song dynasty, whose basis had gravitated from the historical central plain along the Yellow River to the south, which had gradually been colonized by an expanding peasantry. Political fragmentation, moreover, opened the possibility for lean and small merchant empires to emerge at the interstices, such as that of Venice in the Mediterranean. All the while, forms of imperial statecraft continued to expand. Christian powers pushed northward and eastward in Europe. From the Mediterranean coastline, Islam trickled southward below the Sahara where state building elites began to adopt its precepts and eventually formed the loose Mali and Songhay empires, a process which unfolded, precisely as might be predicted, into one of the zones of original food cultivation (indicated on map I). However, this was the Mongol moment. Sometimes elevated to the status of the engine of world history, the peoples of the Central Asian steppe had thus far been only one group of potential conquerors among many. Recently, they had begun to establish a number of permanent monarchies in the northern parts of China. Learning from these state-​builders, Chinggis Khan united the people of the steppes as never before and turned them into a formidable fighting force that, over the course of three generations, cut down one sedentary monarchy after another until the power of the Mongol khagan ran from the south of China to the Russian principalities on the doorstep of Europe. The empire of the Great Khan is commonly labeled the largest in history (with the exception of the British, which did not form a contiguous whole), but here, more than usual, the standard caveats against the illusions of imperial map-​making apply. Much of the territory included was very thinly populated and it is a moot point what, if anything, imperial authority could have meant in such regions. The area covered is perhaps better approached as a trail of conquests, much like Alexander’s path through the Achaemenid Empire, centuries before. And just as in the time of the Macedonian conqueror, it quickly became clear that the enormous territory could not be held together. The much larger size of the Mongol area, on the other hand, reflects both the continuous expansion of taxable peasant populations and

Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

Empire—A World History  63

Map IV.  The Mongol Moment: The Rise of Chinggis Khan and the Central Asian Steppe, Followed by Regional Reassertion (1200–​1450).

64  Peter Fibiger Bang that the classical regions capable of state-​formation had grown closer together. Even so, the power to rule had to be immediately delegated to regional Khans and, within a few decades, the various macro-​regions veered off in their own direction as Mongol lords struck deals with existing local aristocracies to anchor their rule. Less than a century after the conquest of China was completed (1279), the Mongol royal line, already domesticated by the local elites into the Yuan dynasty, fell to internal rebellion in 1368. A new Chinese dynasty had arisen, the Ming, but it stood on the shoulders of the Mongol conquerors. When the emperors of the new royal house launched the set of now famous naval expeditions to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to proclaim the universal reach of their power, they could do so as effective rulers of the entire Chinese macro-​region of sedentary peasant populations. If Mongol supremacy proved ephemeral, their impact nevertheless was deep and lasting; they reinvigorated the trend toward the formation of extensive empire and overcame the forces of division in several of the old Eurasian macro-​regions.

Map V. Another World: The Separate, but Parallel Path of Imperial Formations in the Precolonial Americas The next phase, gaining steam during the fifteenth century, would witness the formation of a series of universal monarchies running in a band across Eurasia. But it would also see the reconnection with a branch of humanity that had developed in a largely separate universe in the Americas since the end of the last Ice Age. Most of the development of human culture and habitation, preceding the arrival of Columbus, can only be recovered through archaeology and must remain in the realm of prehistory. But it is clear that, even from early on, zones of sedentary agriculture, with concomitant formation of priestly and warrior elites, did develop. By the first millennium ce very complex societies can be found, e.g., in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian highlands of the Andes or in the form of the Mayan city-​states in Meso-​America. Conquests almost certainly took place in this world, and some of these cultures are occasionally labeled empires by archaeologists. In the century before European arrival, vague generalizations give way to certainty. Among the polities of Meso-​America and the Andean highlands in Peru and Ecuador, the Aztec triple alliance and the Incas embarked upon successful campaigns of conquest, gradually subjecting neighboring polities until, by the turn of the fifteenth century, they had established two substantial hegemonic empires in Central America and along the Andes in South America, from Ecuador to Chile. These were, by far, the most extensive empires in the New World up to that point. And like empires in the Old World, the Aztec and Inca lords equally demanded tributes from their subjects to gain access to a share of the agricultural surplus, manpower, and precious, exotic resources such as colorful bird feathers that were used as marks of distinction by the rulers. To do so, they also had to co-​opt local rulers and elites, who were given material privileges and formal honors in return for administering the order of empire.

Empire—A World History  65

Map V.  Another World: The Separate, but Parallel Path of Imperial Formations in the Precolonial Americas. Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

Map VI. The Great Confluence: The Culmination of Universal Empires and the Conquest of the New World: Agrarian Consolidation and the Rise of European Commercial and Colonial Empires (1450–​1750) Much would, therefore, have appeared recognizable to the Spanish conquistadores when they arrived on the American mainland in the early sixteenth century. With unfailing instincts, they successfully allied with some local rivals and enemies of the imperial overlords in order to take them down. The short time, a span of less than 20 years, in which trifling numbers of Spanish adventurers managed to conquer the two great empires of the Americas, has never ceased to astonish. Yet, the Spanish

66  Peter Fibiger Bang conquests simply accentuate, albeit in the extreme, the pattern so familiar from Eurasian imperial history, where growth along the margins, combined with internal opposition, creates a deadly cocktail for the established hegemon. Only here, growth on the margins meant the expansion of densely settled Eurasian societies. Eventually, these found their way across the Atlantic. The Viking Norsemen had already touched ground in the Americas as they jumped from Iceland to Greenland, before finally making landfall in Newfoundland at the turn of the first millennium. But the number of people participating in this navigational diaspora were exceedingly small, even at the best of times, and connections tenuous. When the Black Death with its enormous toll on population hit, the demographic base of the European North Atlantic was seriously weakened and so its world contracted again during the fourteenth century. But it stands to reason that, at some point, the feat would be repeated.210 When it did, the results were remarkable and catastrophic for the indigenous population—​ less because of European, let alone Spanish, exceptionalism than of the advantages enjoyed and exploited by Afro-Eurasian societies in general. The grand conquests achieved by small troops of Spanish soldiers in the New World stand in sharp contrast to the ultimate failure of the imperial ambitions of the Iberian Habsburgs in Europe, where their real army, numbering in the tens of thousands of crack troops, was engaged in ceaseless warfare. With Charles V (1500–​1558), the Habsburg family had produced an heir who seemed destined to reunite Catholic Christianity under a new Roman Universal Empire. In addition to the thrones of Spain, Austria, and the Netherlands, he also gained the title of Holy Roman Emperor, an unprecedented accumulation of power and resources which was boosted further still by the conquests in the New World. Even so, in spite of a life diligently spent on campaign, secure hegemonic monopoly in Europe proved elusive. In Central-​Western Europe the Reformation broke out, irrepressibly rejecting the supremacy of Roman power, whether in the form of the emperor or the pope.211 Yet, where the Habsburgs failed, others were more successful in their claim to universal hegemony—​even to Roman power. On the eastern frontier of the Habsburg domains, the Ottoman dynasty had vigorously risen and steadily accumulated an empire. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and of Mamluk Syria and Egypt in 1516–​1517—​including guardianship of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina—​they could credibly lay claim to the two great titles of late West Eurasian antiquity, caliph and caesar. Soon their writ ran from Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf to the Balkans and Hungary. From a Western European perspective, the period between 1450 and 1750 might customarily be described as the failure of universal empire and the rise of overseas colonies. But to a person looking out from North India, such as the seventeenth-​century man of Persian letters Abu Taleb Hosayni, the world presented itself as shaped by a number of grand imperial monarchies with

210 Hansen 2020 (for an argument that the Viking discoveries marks the beginnings of globalization). 211 For the failure of large-​scale empire-​building in sixteenth-​century western Europe, and more generally in post-​Roman Europe west of Russia, see Scheidel 2019, chs. 5–​6.

Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

Empire—A World History  67

Map VI.  The Great Confluence: The Culmination of Universal Empires and the Conquest of the New World: Agrarian Consolidation and the Rise of European Commercial and Colonial Empires (1450–​1750).

68  Peter Fibiger Bang roots dating back to antiquity.212 Following hot on the heels of the Ottoman Kaiser-​i Rum were the great Mughals. Drawing on their Central Asian and Iranian cultural background, they combined the notion of a Persian Shahanshah (i.e., king of kings) with Indian rulership, to extend the writ of empire over most of the subcontinent as never before. Still further east was the Chinese empire. With the Ming dynasty ailing under the usual tendency of local elites to arrogate the powers of the central state, their empire was about to be taken over by a new state emerging on the northeastern frontier. The Manchu Qing dynasty presided over an unprecedented expansion into Central Asia and the Himalayan Plateau, as well as along internal frontiers, which saw a staggering growth of population. These grand monarchies have been labeled gunpowder and post-​nomadic empires. They were anything but the stagnant, moribund entities that they were later dismissed as. Successfully combining their nomadic background with new military technologies and the traditions of the great sedentary societies, they brought the formation of universal empires across AfroEurasia to their culmination. Cosmopolitan elites fanned out from the courts of these lofty rulers, enjoying the fruits of monopolistic supremacy.213 Under these circumstances, the small and middling monarchies of Europe were left to expand onto territories where opposition was less formidable and competition less intense. Portugal and Spain would lead the way. Hoping to bypass the position of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean as the agents of the lucrative trade in precious oriental exports to Europe, they set out into the Atlantic dreaming of the fabled riches of India and of vast conquests. In the New World, they encountered a set of societies where large empires had begun to form, but which were still in their early stages and existed, relatively speaking, under conditions of much less intensive military rivalry. Stone axes and clubs were standard weaponry, in comparison to the iron and gunpowder of the invaders. More important for the long-​term viability of the Spanish conquests was epidemic disease. The larger, densely settled populations of Eurasia had developed a modus vivendi with a greater set of group diseases. When these arrived in the Americas, the impact was disastrous. Waves of smallpox and other epidemics ravaged the unaccustomed populations, causing millions and millions of deaths. Whole landscapes were laid waste and the total population of the Americas was dramatically decimated. As the Portuguese clawed their way down the African coastline and eventually into the Indian Ocean, they enjoyed no such dramatic advantage. Their ships, armed with cannon and honed navigating the rough Atlantic, did, however, allow them to muscle their way into the fine-​spun commercial oceanic networks of South and Southeast Asia. Lacking the capacity for vast territorial conquests, they had to make do with a less likely target—​the seaborne world of the merchant, which for all the allure of its riches also presented greater obstacles to control by putative empire builders; the traders of the seas were mobile and elusive. Nevertheless, 212 Five mighty emperors, known not by their name, but by their ancient, long-​established title alone, as Abu Taleb Hosayni wrote (1783, 130–​131/​Persian text with facing English translation; for a full quotation, see introduction to Part VI in Volume 2). 213 Wink 2011; Di Cosmo 1999; Hodgson 1974, vol. 3.

Empire—A World History  69 the Portuguese made the most of their limited resources to establish a set of nodal points along the oceanic trading routes that lined the great sedentary societies of Asia. These provided a slim base from which an ambitious attempt was launched to command the trade in spices to Europe and tax traffic on the sea lanes. While none of this dramatically changed the balance of power between the regions of the Old World, the expansion of the two Iberian powers during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries established both the beginnings of a new global commercial network and a novel pattern of empire. Gold and silver mined in South America, cash crops cultivated on plantations in the Caribbean, as well as spices and textiles from the Indian Ocean, combined to energize the long-​distance trade of the Old World and transform an operation that had previously taken place in regional stages into a global commercial system. The effects were manifold. The great imperial monarchies of Eurasia found it easier to maintain large silver coinages that again facilitated taxation and markets. Slavery had been a regular feature of the labor supply in most state-​forming societies from the very beginning. Captives taken in war were one source, while another were populations living both on internal and external frontiers. Eastern Africa had, for instance, supplied the societies of the Indian Ocean with slaves for centuries. Now, in a much more intensive fashion, western Sub-​Saharan Africa became a source of slaves for entrepreneurs trying to make American lands, with their desperately dwindling population and labor supply, profitable. Millions of enslaved people were shipped across the Atlantic. Around the Caribbean, in southern parts of North America and in Brazil, a ruthlessly exploitative plantation economy developed on the basis of black slavery - the effects of which continue to scar their modern successor societies. Where the Spanish and Portuguese went, their European rivals were not slow to follow. At the turn of the seventeenth century, both the Dutch and the English were mounting challenges to the Iberian powers and setting out to build their own colonial outposts in the Caribbean, in North America, and in the Indian Ocean. Enduring military confrontation and standoff in Europe spawned competition overseas. Private entrepreneurs were chartered to generate overseas income to fill the coffers of rulers busily engaged at home in a desperate struggle to increase revenues. Mercantilism was imperialism by business corporation. Acquisition of distant overseas colonies began to rival the conquest of neighbors as the most important strategy of imperial expansion. Inside Europe, by contrast, the principle of sovereignty was taking hold. State-​actors were increasingly constituted as equal and autonomous, rejecting notions of imperial supremacy. That was the result of the failure of universal empire in Europe. But the price of independence was high. The inability of one power to assert itself did not simply lead to the mutual destruction or general weakening of contenders. Instead, a system crystallized that institutionalized the survival of a number of middling powers, locked in competition with each other. To stay in the game, states had continuously to reform and increase their capacity to finance wars, whose costs kept spiraling upward. The so-​called military revolution, following the introduction of firearms in the fifteenth century, never really stopped, but kept rolling on in a series of ever more expensive, innovative

70  Peter Fibiger Bang waves. Colonies came to complement intensified metropolitan demands on their domestic populations.

Map VII. The Global Turn: The Age of European Colonialism, Subjection of Old Agrarian Empires to the European-​Led World Economy and Nationalist Secessions (1750–​1914) By the middle of the eighteenth century, the system based on rival, warlike European metropoles and overseas colonies had gained significantly in strength and capacity. A threshold was about to be crossed and the world history of empire took a global turn. The European style of gunpowder warfare had developed to a level of intensity that the power gradient had begun to tip decisively in its favor, while at the same time global naval networks, dominated by European powers, had grown much thicker. The ceaseless wars and rivalries between the great powers of Europe increasingly came to play out on a global scale, just at a moment when the grand imperial dynasties of Asia were experiencing one of the recurrent decentralizing cycles that saw their power dissipate, taken over, to a larger or smaller extent, by provincial elites.214 The Mughals were first, followed by the Ottomans, and then a little later the Qing. As a consequence, the balance of power between the great societies of Eurasia was dramatically upended. What had been impossible to the Portuguese in the sixteenth century was now achieved by the competing societies of the Euro-​Atlantic world, who embarked on a period of unprecedented global colonial expansion at an ever accelerating pace. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, industrialization added enormously to the firepower and logistical capacity of colonizers. Railroads, steamships, ironclad warships, bigger cannon, rapid firing rifles, electric telegraphs, and scientific breakthroughs in medicine combined to make it possible for Europeans to overcome resistance, travel in much greater numbers than before, and open up vast inland areas whose products and raw materials could suddenly be carted out to feed into the arterial routes of the fast-​growing oceanic global trading system. Spearheaded by the British under the paradoxical slogan of free trade, their European rivals joined “the great game,” forcibly reducing vast tracts of the planet to the status of colony, commercial dependency, or settlement by immigrant Europeans. Gradually, but inexorably, the formation of empire across the planet was subsumed under the dynamic of the fiercely competitive system of European great powers. Where empires had once tended to congeal around a center when rivals absorbed each other, forming stable near monopolies, they now became an overseas expression of the capacity of competing states in the center to assert themselves. At the conference in Berlin in 1884–​1885, the great (and smaller) powers of Europe simply met at the negotiating table to carve up Africa between them. In the eyes of the Western public, the rest of the world began to look like a static and inert mass. But

214

Bayly 2004, 1989.

Empire—A World History  71

Map VII.  The Global Turn: The Age of European Colonialism, Subjection of Old Agrarian Empires to the European-​Led World Economy and Nationalist Secessions (1750–​1914). Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

72  Peter Fibiger Bang that was a trick of the light. As with all imperialism, European colonial enterprises also required them to tap into the dynamic forces of subject societies and cooperate with local elites and populations if their projects were to succeed. The majority of soldiers in the British army in India were Sepoys—​locally recruited, mostly high-​caste Hindus. Across the societies subject to the pressures and stresses of the expanding European colonial order and world economy, the response was manifold and quick. In 1857, the Sepoys rose in a great rebellion. At roughly the same time, a failed entrant to the Chinese civil service examinations, who was inspired by Christian missionaries, rose up to lead the Taiping, proclaiming himself as the brother of Jesus, in a massive uprising against the Qing. All along, Comanche warriors had for a period successfully roamed the south western plains of North America to extend a fluid imperial network on the advancing frontier of colonial settler society. In fact, a drastic reorientation was taking place. Empire had for a long time fostered cosmopolitan forms of identity, ideology, and knowledge. Under the strains and opportunities of the new colonial order, the old ecumenical communities of the book and the manuscript were breaking up and more globalized forms of ideology were taking their place. The colonial empires had widely extended and intensified lines of contact, communication, and travel to become incubators of new, transregional publics; intense political and ideological international debate was animated by the medium of the printing press and the electrical telegraph. Some reacted to the pressure by advocating reform of established beliefs. Islam, for instance, was anything but a spent force. Warriors, responding to a call to Jihad, had extended the loose authority of the Sokoto Caliphate over large areas of West Africa well before falling victim to a British expeditionary force in 1903. Across the British, Ottoman, and Russian imperial worlds one can trace the development of a network of Pan-​Islamic reformists and revolutionaries with deep ramifications in the present world. These renovators advocated a more austere, Arabizing version of Islam, rather than the Persianizing traditions patronized by the monarchical courts in the previous centuries.215 Other reformers opted into the discourses and beliefs of the colonial authorities, adding forceful contributions of their own. Christianity saw considerable growth in colonial societies. But the dominant creeds were secular and celebrated liberalism, modernizing reform, scientific progress, and the nation. Colonial elites engaged with the metropoles in a vibrant conversation about what these ideas could mean for their societies.216 This culture of internationalism allowed for communication across communities within and across the empires. It was, however, also a fractious and volatile formula, full of internal contradiction and tension. Increasingly, a sense of racial hierarchies developed, reinforced by metropolitan governments: Westerners first, others second, or third, even. Racism and its cultural arrogance would justify the most horrific acts of colonial repression. The murderous exploitation of the Belgian Congo or the genocidal war against the Herero in German East Africa are but some of the worst examples. Such acts and notions, however, were difficult to square with ideas of

215 216

Alavi 2015. Bayly 2011.

Empire—A World History  73 national self-​determination, sovereignty, and freedom from colonial rule, which had run as a powerful current through the international discourse since the American War of Independence 1775–1783.217 Anti-​imperialism emerged, for the first time, as an ideology fully able to match the cosmopolitan claims of empire builders (See Majeed, Chap. 10 in this volume).218 Elites in the colonies, and societies feeling pressure from encroaching Western powers, quickly began to harbor aspirations of liberty, modernization, and the formation of their own nations to bring them to par with metropolitan society. Both late Chinese and Ottoman history is characterized by desperate efforts to catch up. With the Meiji restoration, Japan opted to pursue radical reform with ruthless determination in order to match Western colonial powers and join the club of imperial states. The world was becoming centered on Euro-​Atlantic models. Normally, however, European empires could contain the forces of secession and national resistance. The combination of superior firepower and internal divisions within and between colonial societies gave metropolitan government the familiar advantages. Nevertheless, European colonialism was inherently unstable. In the historiographies of the major powers the reader will often encounter a succession of imperial projects. A first, second, or even a third empire can be found squeezed into what was, chronologically, little more than a century (so e.g. Todd in chap. 34 of vol. 2). Just as Britain was beginning to create a new empire in India, it lost a large part of its American colonies. France would have experienced the collapse of two imperial ventures before building up its vast possessions in Africa and Indo-​China in the second half of the nineteenth century. The perseverance of competition at the metropolitan heart of European colonialism witnessed the repeated destruction of empire. The history of European power politics can be written as a succession of great powers whose domination over the continent was repeatedly broken by counter-​ alliances formed by their competitors. The relative strength of rivals was put to the test in grand wars that would recur at intervals to embroil much of the continent and the colonies in a merciless mobilization of force.219 These World Wars were massive conflagrations that left the political landscape drastically altered. New powers would arise, while the hegemons of old were left exhausted. Losers, and sometimes even winners, were confronted with rising colonial elites who, under the inspiration of the new ideologies of national independence, attempted to sever ties with the weakened metropole. After every great war there followed a wave of decolonization (See further Chase-​Dunn and Khutkyy in chap. 3 of volume 1). This label is usually reserved for the aftermath of World War II that saw the unravelling of European overseas empires. But already long before that period, North and South America, as well as Central-​Eastern Europe, had been taken over by new nations that had arisen out of the wreckage of empire after a Great War.220 If empires might (with Frederic Lane) be perceived as a form of monopoly, which achieved stability by suspending competition through conquest, 217 Anderson 1991, 2005; Armitage 2008. 218 Ballantyne and Burton 2012. 219 Kennedy 1987. 220 Darwin 2007 is excellent on the necessity of peace to stabilize empire and the destructive effects of world wars on the colonial system.

74  Peter Fibiger Bang then with European colonialism empire had entered its Schumpeterian phase. Here empire, much like capitalist business corporations, may be understood as a form of monopoly that briefly enjoys a respite from competition, just before the forces of creative destruction set in again and see the former giant overtaken by newcomers.

Map VIII. The Twentieth Century: The Collapse of Colonial Empires and the Rise of Superpowers The newcomers to the scramble for colonies were, first and foremost, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Of these, the first two rose to challenge the leading colonial powers, Britain and France. The ramifications of the ensuing conflict shaped the twentieth century and radically redrew the world map. Over the course of World War I and II, the planet was engulfed by an epic and uncompromising struggle. The horrors and atrocities unleashed by full-​scale industrial warfare were unlike anything seen before; the Jewish Holocaust and the nuclear bomb reflected military confrontations fought mercilessly and without limits. Old dynasties fell, and revolutions, be they nationalist, fascist, or communist, spread like wildfire across Eurasia in societies desperately seeking to modernize under the pressures and strains of total war.221 In the end, the result was unexpected. What had started in defense of old empires, or in pursuit of new ones, ended with the triumphant rise to world dominance of two self-​styled anti-​imperial powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Not even the wide sprawl of loosely governed territories possessed by the leading colonial powers, Great Britain and France, had been enough to withstand the intensity of mobilization achieved by the Fascist powers. The extensive logic of territorial imperial rule, even one beefed up by modern industrial transport and communication, had been insufficient to match the strength generated from a strong industrial base in the home metropole, when it was single-​mindedly geared toward warfare. Only when the United States and the Soviet Union, each with a strong metropolitan industrial base of their own, entered the war did the balance tip decisively against the newcomers. Both societies had grown enormously during the nineteenth century through colonization by settlers, migrating from the old core regions in a movement westward and eastward, into the less densely populated areas of the North American and Asian continents. This gave them greater mass than the other contenders, and at the end of the war, they emerged predominant. A copious portfolio of colonies had not been the most important factor in ensuring success, and consequently empire began to look like a thing of the past. The future seemed to belong to the nation-​state and a vigorous industrial home economy. Under the new world order, the plug was quickly pulled on the European colonial empires. Everywhere the self-determination of peoples was celebrated as the only genuinely legitimate principle of political organization. New nations vigorously rose to assert and, if need be, fight for their independence in a tidal wave of decolonization sweeping across Asia and Africa.

221

Gerwarth and Manela 2014.

Copyright: Peter Fibiger Bang with Jonathan Weiland.

Empire—A World History  75

Map VIII.  The Twentieth Century: The Collapse of Colonial Empires and the Rise of Superpowers during the Cold War.

76  Peter Fibiger Bang Yet, while the two new superpowers, each professing their rival version of a liberating enlightenment ideology, might have seen themselves as anti-​imperialist, in practice both set about constructing a rival world order under their own leadership. The Soviet Union stepped into the shoes of the former Russian empire of the czars, while the United States took over much of the strategic commitments of the British and French empires. After the introduction of the atomic bomb, however, an all-​out showdown was out of the question. Open conflict would mean mutual destruction, and so the world was locked into a cold war between two rival blocks, one communist, the other liberal and capitalist, but both universal and cross-​cultural in reach. Territorial control mattered more in the former while, in the latter, the basic imperial principle of indirect rule was driven to its logical conclusion. The American empire was structured not around territorial possessions, but around a planetary web of military bases, regional alliances, and a global economic network that simultaneously offered local allied elites the attractive, but sometimes elusive, prospect of growth while laying their economies open to American corporations. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it looked as if the long history of empire had finally reached its conclusion. With no rivals left, the United States seemed poised to unilaterally preside over the future world order. A Universal Empire had risen to extend its peace across the planet—​Pax Americana. The moment of undisputed hegemony, however, proved short-​lived. Just as the Soviet Union fell out of the competition because it was unable to produce economic growth at a rate even remotely comparable to the American bloc, Communist China was entering an era of economic reform and explosive growth. A few decades on, the revolutionary nation-​state, created to salvage the old Qing dynasty’s polyethnic monarchy from the combined onslaught of Japanese and European colonialism, is generating its own gravitational pull strong enough to begin to balance, if not yet fully match, the American superpower. Meanwhile, a new Russian state, a successor to the Soviet Union, has absorbed the shock of collapse and has begun to reassert a stronger position for itself in the international order. India, like China home to nearly a fifth of humanity, and just like China heir to a vast imperial space, has also entered a phase of high growth and looks destined to carve out a powerful position for itself. Once more, growth among states seems to create a league of big imperial powers. In that respect, the development of a more polycentric order—​after a brief interlude in which the world was made to center on the Euro-​Atlantic—​may be seen as a kind of normalization. But if the coming global multipolarity may seem like a return to a well-​known historical pattern, it also bears an uncanny resemblance to the geopolitical vision of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his visceral hatred of Anglophone globalization. The political order of the world, a principle unrepentantly restated by him in the aftermath of World War II, should be carved up into a number of greater imperial hemispheres. Yet, tempting as some may find it, in the present return to history, to seek counsel for the future in the embittered writings of this theorist of the order of power, such

Empire—A World History  77 a turn would ignore the continued significance, indeed the overwhelming force of the global economic and political system originally produced by colonialism. That global system was not merely oppressive, it also generated forces of liberation and autonomy. Our future will depend upon how these two patterns, globalization and a league of hegemonies, merge. To guide this process, the last thing we need is a prophet of politics as absolute conflict, but rather an ecumenical capacity for dialogue and compromise.222

Conclusion It is time to draw up the balance sheet for this project and offer a word about how it changes our view of empire in world history. When Howe wrote his much read and excellent introduction to empire two decades ago, he drew a fundamental distinction between ancient empire, essentially unstable and ephemeral, and the modern colonial projects of European powers, characterized by their great strength and deep impact. The story presented here is almost the opposite. But not entirely. There is no question about the impact of overseas colonial empires on the current shape of human societies across the planet. Even so, the transformative force of imperialism is anything but a recent phenomenon. The impact of empire has been strong and enduring throughout history. On the question of stability, however, the image really appears radically different.223 Ancient empires, on a first glance, seem to have had everything operating against them. Pre-​mechanized transport and communication created such obstacles to movement and centralized control that one would believe the forces of localism to have been intractable. Yet, the historian is still confronted by the question of Gibbon:  Why did a substantial number of them last for so long?224 The answer lies in hegemonic monopoly. The process of state-​formation generated a forceful current that ran contrary to fragmentation. Conquest of rivals and the imposition of hegemony produced economies of scale. A bigger army could be maintained without continuously raising taxes. If most rivals were overcome, the empire came to enjoy a position of near monopoly that, short of new powerful challengers, might last for centuries. The stability of universal empires, then, was not a question of chance or arrested development. It came as the culmination of the process of state-​formation that saw these empires presiding over the extensive growth of state-​like societies across Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. Many expect from the history of empire an endless series of conquerors and their regimes and may in the narratives of these volumes think to find little but confirmation. Yet, the broader contours of the story charted here are, nonetheless, determined by the silent and suffering majority rather than the high-​profile matter



222

Cf. Duara 2015, 90, “we need the weak exclusivity of premodern or early modern histories. . . .” A view supported by the impression of Gehler and Rollinger 2014, 25. 224 Gibbon 1994, 119 (from the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West). 223

78  Peter Fibiger Bang of warrior romance; the world history of empire registers the expansive growth of societies with sedentary populations dense enough to be dominated and to sustain a form of centralized rule.225 As this form of life slowly spread out from its small Bronze Age beginnings, populations became more numerous, human habitation denser, and the gaps between societal clusters smaller. Eventually, the great societies of Eurasia and America became linked in a global network, and from there a radical transformation began to take place. The epicenter of this global revolution was Europe. Historians will probably never stop debating why this was the case, and there is no simple explanation. Every decade has produced a spate of works addressing The Great Divergence. Ascribing the rise of Europe to deeply ingrained cultural conditions is clearly unsatisfactory. European predominance was, in world historical time, short-​lived, a brief imbalance from which the world is already recovering, the result of a number of interconnected, mutually reinforcing developments. Much depended on this historical conjuncture. It is difficult to see the transformation taking place in the substantially smaller world of, say, the Classical Age. To this must be added a number of structural changes that gradually forced societal development onto a more intensive track. Enduring military competition between the Great Powers in Europe from the sixteenth century and industrialization from the late eighteenth, both combined to invert the previous pattern of empire. Where empires had once been able to benefit from the extensive growth of peasant populations and state-​building societies, intensive growth took over. Size was not enough, often even woefully insufficient. Rather, greater social power came out of continuous economic per capita growth, technological innovation, and steadily higher mobilization rates. This gave the middling states of Europe a comparative advantage and enabled an explosive global wave of overseas colonization. It is not without reason that historians have often been impressed by the strength of colonialism and tend to take its experience as constitutive of empire in general. However, even as it looked set in stone, the European order of the world was inherently unstable. The intensity of competition constantly undermined and tore down imperial dominions while an ever-​growing number of societies, having absorbed the initial shock, learned to adapt to more intensive ways of statecraft and economics. Human society, it was widely believed, had entered a postcolonial era. But it was in fact already moving beyond. The collapse of the colonial order did not simply signal the liberation of nations and the end of hierarchy among state-​ societies. It was as much a sign that size had regained its importance. Now, however, it was less a matter of extensive territorial conquests than a question of intensive mobilization of a vast metropolitan base, both militarily and economically. A precondition for projecting power in the current international order is, increasingly, sheer mass. The great and coming powers of the moment are all such empire nations—​the United States, Russia, China, India. By contrast, the Europeans find

225

“Walled in by the state”, as Guha 2002: 46-​47 would say.

Empire—A World History  79 themselves stuck in conflict over whether to—​much against the grain of their own history—​give up their highly cherished national independence and turn toward a form of imperial unity that could guarantee both stability and lend the continent greater weight in the world.226

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226 This text has gone through a long period of digestion and I am grateful to the many audiences that have patiently listened to my reflections over the years, apart from numerous history students in Copenhagen, especially in Tübingen, Cambridge, Pisa, Beijing, and Berlin, where Frank Kolb, Robin Osborne, Giovanni Salmeri, Wang Hui, Chris Hahn and Claudia Tiersch generously hosted talks for me on the character of empire in world history. Dingxin Zhao and Yanfei Sun kindly invited me to enjoy the congenial atmosphere of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Zhejiang in Hangzhou, where much of the synthesis took shape during the autumn of 2017. John Hall and Krishan Kumar gave of their own time to offer instructive comments on draft versions as well as much appreciated encouragement. Jacob Tullberg, Lars-​Emil Nybo Nissen, Kristian Kanstrup Christensen, Alex Johnsen, Nicolai Bagger, Sven Wind Larsen, Hans Erik Havsteen, Gregers Stjerne and Mathias Dahl Meier, finally, gathered over a glass of wine on a lovely summer evening to subject the text to a last test. Rasmus Mariager and, not to forget, my two co-​editors have been invaluable interlocutors on the topic of empire. A few of the examples discussed here have been included in my contribution to a Danish high-​school textbook, which I got involved in as this project developed, but presented in a much shorter format and without documentation.

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SYST E MS OF P OW E R : MIL ITA RY, E C ONOM Y, E LI T E S

2 The Scale of Empire Territory, Population, Distribution Walter Scheidel

As we saw in the opening chapter, there are many ways of defining “empire.” Unlike various forms of diversity and some degree of core-​periphery stratification, size as such need not count as an essential ingredient. In practice, however, internal stratification has commonly been associated with claims to spatially extensive territories and/​ or substantial populations. Given that for most of recorded history, empire-​building was the most effective way of scaling up social cooperation beyond the level of local communities, city-​states, and small territorial states, most of the best-​known imperial polities were very large and sometimes enormous. Traced over the long run of history, from the earliest empires of the Fertile Crescent to the global network of possessions of the modern European colonial powers, changes in the geographical and demographic scale of empire add up to an evolutionary profile which in turn casts light on some of the driving forces behind these shifts. This chapter approaches this topic from several angles, by looking at spatial reach and duration, population size, and long-​term patterns in different parts of the world. In so doing, this survey provides context for the many chapters that follow and helps situate individual cases on a broad spectrum of historical outcomes.

Territory Spatial size is a basic metric of the scale of empire formation. Attempts to measure the amount of land claimed by imperial powers have a long pedigree:  the most comprehensive set of estimates, produced by Rein Taagepera from the 1970s to the 1990s, forms the basis for this section. With some modifications drawn from more recent scholarship, Table 2.1 summarizes his findings concerning all known empires that are thought to have covered at least one million square kilometers of land.1 1 Taagepera 1978a, 1978b, 1979, 1997. Table 2.1 is based mostly on Taagepera 1979, 121–​122, 125–​126, 128–​129, 132–​133; and 1997, 492–​502, with corrections from Cioffi-​Revilla, Rogers, Wilcox and Alterman 2011, 103, table 1, for several Inner Asian empires, and from Etemad 2007, 134–​187, for modern colonial empires. This list may not be complete (for instance, the Western Zhou Empire in China is another candidate), and some entries with putative areas of 1 million km2 are doubtful borderline cases. Walter Scheidel, The Scale of Empire  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0002.

92  Walter Scheidel Table 2.1  Empires That Covered at Least One Million Square Kilometers Empire

World Region

Date

Area (in million km2)

(1) Traditional empires Egypt Axum Fatimid Almoravid Almohad Mali Mamluk Inca Xiongnu Xianbei Rouran Goktürk Uigur Tufan (Tibet) Khazar Khorezm Qara Qitai Mongol Golden Horde Chagatai Timurid Zhungar Shang Qin Western Han Jin Former Qin Northern Zhou Liang Sui Tang Liao Northern Song Jurchen Ming Qing Rome Huns East Roman Frankish Kiev

Africa Africa Africa Africa Africa Africa Africa America Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia Central Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia East Asia Europe Europe Europe Europe Europe

–​1300 350 969 1120 1200 1380 1400 1527 –​176 200 405 557 800 800 850 1210 1210 1270 1310 1350 1405 1650 –​1122 –​220 –​50 280 376 577 579 589 715 947 1000 1126 1400 1790 117 441 555 814 1000

1 1.25 4.1 1 2 1.1 2.1 2 4 4.5 4 6 1.5 4.6 3 4 2.5 24 6 3.5 4.4 3.6 1.25 2.3 6 3.1 1.5 1.3 3 5.4 2.6 3.1 2.3 3.1 14.7 5 4 2.7 1.2 2.1

The Scale of Empire  93 Table 2.1  Continued Empire

World Region

Byzantine Holy Roman Empire Lithuania-​Poland Ottoman Russia

Europe Europe Europe Europe Europe

Khmer Maurya Saka Kushan Gupta Hephthalite Harsha Pratihara Ghurid Delhi Mughal Maratha Assyria Media Achaemenid Macedonian Seleucid Bactria Parthia Sasanian Umayyad Abbasid Samanid Buyid Ghaznavid Seljuk Ayyubid Ilkhanate Safavid

SE Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia S Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia SW Asia

(2) European colonial empires Portugal

Europe

Spain

Europe

Date

Area (in million km2)

1025 1050 1480 1683 1800 1895 1290 –​260 20 200 400 470 648 860 1200 1312 1690 1760 –​670 –​585 –​500 323 –​301 –​184 1 550 750 800 928 980 1029 1080 1190 1310 1630

1.35 1 1.1 5.2 15.5 22.8 1 3.4 2.6 2 3.5 4 1 1 2 3.2 4 2.5 1.4 2.8 5.5 5.2 3.9 2.5 2.8 3.5 11.1 8.3 2.85 1.6 (segmented) 3.4 3.9 2 3.75 2.9

1760 1938 1640 1760

8.5 2.1 7.1 12.3 Continued

94  Walter Scheidel Table 2.1  Continued Empire

World Region

Netherlands France

Europe Europe

Britain

Europe

(3) Other United States (incl. annexed territories)

America

Soviet Union

Europe

Date

Area (in million km2)

1938 1880 1938 1960 1760 1938 1950 1960

2.1 0.7 12.1 3.1 3.5 33.6 9.5 5

1900 1945 1950

9.67 9.37 22.3

Note: Negative dates are bce.

It goes without saying that the maps from which these totals are derived can be deceptive. They represent empires at a particular point in time, mostly at their maximum spatial reach, whereas the size of their territorial holdings could vary considerably over time (see Figure 2.3 later in this chapter). More importantly, the boundaries of empire are notoriously hard to define (see Chapter 1). Imperial rule was sometimes highly indirect in nature, relying on vassal regimes to manage subordinate populations. On occasion, imperial centers might lose effective control over areas that nominally remained under their authority to local elites or warlords:  our tabulation is predicated on the simplifying assumption of formal unity for as long as no overtly independent polities had emerged in the territory of a given empire. Moreover, some of these empires included large stretches of steppe or even desert that were not in any meaningful sense ruled by them. Egypt is a classic example, with a cultivable area of some 20,000 square kilometers in antiquity but often conventionally equated with its modern territory of one million square kilometers, 96 percent of which remain sparsely inhabited or empty even today. The Mongol Empire, spanning as it did the full width of the Eurasian steppe and endowed with supremely ill-​defined northern boundaries, is another.2 The figures in Table 2.1 try to take account of a state’s capacity to project power over terrain that lacked state-​level competitors, even if that terrain could not be steadily controlled. In general, our totals therefore tend to be generous rather than conservative, albeit in a fairly consistent manner. Overall, anything resembling precision

2 Estimates vary from 23.5 million km2 (Taagepera 1997, 499) to 29.5 million km2 (Cioffi-​Revilla, Rogers, Wilcox and Alterman 2011, 103, table 1).

The Scale of Empire  95 70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0 –3000 –2750 –2500 –2250 –2000 –1750 –1500 –1250 –1000 –750 –500 –250 Largest

1

250

500

750

1000 1250 1500 1750 2000

Three largest

Figure 2.1.  The size of the single largest empire and the three largest empires in the world, 3000 bce to 2000 ce (in million km2). Source: Taagepera 1976a, 116–​117, table 2.

often remains beyond our reach. These tallies are simply meant to convey a sense of orders of magnitude. Their main purpose is to help us understand how the spatial reach of empires changed over time as the largest of them kept growing in size (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). The logarithmic distribution in Figure 2.2 adds much-​needed resolution that allows us to distinguish between different phases of imperial growth. Figure 2.1 is nevertheless instructive in documenting just how long it took for more ambitious scaling-​ up to occur after states had first appeared in the historical record. For about half of the five millennia under review, imperial formations (whether we count them from Old Kingdom Egypt or more conservatively from Sargon’s Akkadian Empire) did not expand beyond a few hundred thousand square kilometers, much of which were often not even permanently settled. A major step-​up occurred in the sixth century bce: for the first time, the formation and rapid expansion of an Iran-​centered empire established by the Medians and especially the Persian Achaemenid dynasty united previously politically distinct regions such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Iran, and the Indus Valley. This process created a fairly durable empire that was almost an order of magnitude larger than anything that had existed before.3 Just as the Middle East had been the first part of the world to support imperial formations covering hundreds of 3 The Neo-​Assyrian Empire of the seventh century bce had failed to hold on to Egypt, and its expansion into Asia Minor and Iran was quite limited in scope. Earlier East Asian polities under the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties did not grow much beyond one million km2 and were characterized by substantial internal segmentation.

96  Walter Scheidel 100

10

1

0.1 –3000

–2500

–2000

–1500

–1000

–500

Largest

0

500

1000

1500

2000

Three largest

Figure 2.2.  The size of the single largest empire and the three largest empires in the world, 3000 bce to 2000 ce (in million km2, logarithmic scale). Source: Based on the largest empires listed in Table 2.1.

thousands of square kilometers, it also inaugurated the era of empires of several million square kilometers. It may be tempting to explain this leadership role as an outgrowth of advantageous ecological conditions that had long provided a powerful impetus for sedentary agriculture and growing social complexity.4 Yet macro-​ social evolution swiftly converged across much of the temperate core zone of the Old World. Similarly sized empires—​Maurya and Qin—​appeared in the late fourth and the third centuries bce in South and East Asia. Within a few centuries, the territorial heft of the Achaemenid Empire was matched by that of the Han and Roman empires at opposite ends of the Eurasian land mass. Both of them covered around five or six million square kilometers, or closer to four million if marginal arid lands are excluded. At the height of their power, the Achaemenid as well as the Roman empires spanned four modern time zones.5 Figures  2.1 and 2.2 might make it seem as though the Umayyad Caliphate brought another significant step-​up, doubling maximum territorial size to about 11 million square kilometers and extending over six time zones instead of four. However, it was the predominantly arid expanses of the Arabian Peninsula that contributed much of these gains. In terms of control over cultivable land, the 4 Diamond 1997 and Morris 2010, 81–​134, are the most accessible discussions. 5 The five million or so square kilometers claimed by the Xiongnu steppe empire of the second century bce (Taagepera 1979, 128, ascribes as many as 9 million km2 to this entity, corrected in Table 2.1) mostly consisted of marginal land.

The Scale of Empire  97 Caliphate was thus only moderately larger than the Achaemenid Empire had been 1,200 years earlier, adding the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula—​both of them soon to be lost—​but excluding Asia Minor. The accompanying increase in east-​west extension likewise proved unsustainable. From this perspective, we may conclude that an effective ceiling in the mid-​single-​digit million square kilometers remained in place until the Mongol expansion set new standards. At its peak in the late thirteenth century, Kublai Khan’s realm nominally covered (at least) 24 million square kilometers and traversed nine modern time zones. Similar in surface area to Russia before World War I and second only to the mature British Empire, it remains the largest Afroeurasian Empire in history. Once again, sparsely inhabited steppe areas accounted for much of this step-​up, and growing segmentation even before the death of Kublai Khan in 1294 quickly eroded territorial integrity. Some of these unprecedented successes were later replicated by the Manchu, who came to control what had been the eastern reaches of the Mongol domain, a territory perhaps approaching 15 million square kilometers around 1800 if peripheral stretches of steppe and taiga are included. By then Russia had attained a similar size, thanks mainly to expansion across Siberia. From the sixteenth century onward, the Spanish overseas empire had been the largest of the European colonial empires: in 1800, its territorial spread was comparable to that of Qing China and Russia. By the early twentieth century, the British Empire finally surpassed all of them, eventually covering some 35 million square kilometers. The French colonial possessions by contrast never amounted to more than a third of the British possessions, much of them African desert. Globally, imperial territorial concentration peaked prior to World War II when the five largest powers (the British Empire, the Soviet Union, the French Empire, the United States, and Nationalist China) claimed 88 million square kilometers, fully two-​thirds of the earth’s land mass excluding Antarctica. Since then, the maximum size of empire has steadily dropped, from 35 million square kilometers for the prewar British Empire to 22 million for the postwar Soviet Union and currently 17 million for the Russian Federation (inasmuch as the latter even belongs in this category). Territorial growth of the largest empire in the world was generally accompanied by corresponding growth among the runners-​up. Although the formation of the Achaemenid Empire temporarily created a monopolistic super-​state that was vastly larger than any competitors, other parts of the Old World followed suit within a few centuries:  as Figure  2.1 shows, from the last few centuries of the first millennium bce onward the combined size of the second and third largest empires matched or exceeded that of the top-​ranked one, a pattern that was only very briefly interrupted by the nominally united Mongol Empire of the late thirteenth century which crowded out serious competitors. This parallel development subsequently continued into the twentieth century, as the explosive

98  Walter Scheidel geographical growth of the British Empire was matched by that of Russia and the French colonies. As already noted, the secular expansion of empire was not a linear process. Figure  2.1 highlights sharp discontinuities with respect to both “floors” and “ceilings” (that is, the lower and upper limits of the size of the largest empires). Major step-​ups took place in the sixth century bce and (after an abortive Mongol spurt in the thirteenth century) again in the seventeenth century. This was true for the single largest as well as for the three largest empires in the world at any given time. In addition to raising territorial reach to new heights, the first of these shifts also established a new “floor”: from that point onward, the largest empire in the world would never again claim fewer than 2.5  million square kilometers, well in excess of the “ceiling” for the largest empires prior to the sixth century bce.6 The organizational and technological changes behind this fundamental shift still await systematic analysis. This period witnessed a concatenation of developments, including enhanced military capacity of steppe populations and more generally the growing importance of cavalry, rising urbanization levels, and the emergence of major “Axial Age” religions, all of which arguably interacted in promoting macro-​social scaling-​up.7 Even though several of the leading empires of the time did not critically rely on “horse power” (while war chariots and elephants played a major role in Mauryan expansion, Qin and Rome primarily relied on mass mobilization of heavy infantry), it was crucial in creating steppe empires in the multimillion square kilometer range.8 Around the world, substantial expansion beyond the “ceiling” of five to six million square kilometers that had already been reached 2,500 years ago was made possible only by the incorporation of ecologically marginal zones. Pioneered by the Umayyads and the Mongols, this strategy did not become sustainable in the long term until the seventeenth century, when it was successfully employed by the Manchu Qing and especially by Russia. The step-​up that can be observed in that century was in large measure a function of technological progress (in weapons technology and logistics) and correspondingly widening disparities between conquerors and the inhabitants of sparsely settled arid or forested areas. Much the same was true of the European colonial empires, first of Spain (albeit to a comparatively modest extent, in the North American Southwest and in the southern cone of South America) and then much more massively of the British Empire (in Canada, Australia, and Africa) and the French colonies (in Africa). Later still, the Soviet Union was built in the first instance around a developed core of not more 6 As noted by Taagepera 1978a, 120–​121. 7 See the concise summary in Turchin 2009, 201. 8 For a model simulation of trends in large-​scale state formation from 1500 bce to 1500 ce that highlights the importance of the employment of and exposure to horse-​based military power in the development of imperial polities, see Turchin, Currie, Turner, and Gavrilets 2013.

The Scale of Empire  99 24 22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 –550

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than six million square kilometers in Europe and east of the Urals, broadly similar in size to the more densely populated parts of the United States and China. Cores of this size were not substantially different from the settled areas of close to four million square kilometers in the ancient Roman and Han empires 2,000 years ago. This continuity points to the presence of a long-​term constraint on effective empire growth that could only be overcome by massively expanding into marginal and peripheral regions. Figure 2.3 tracks the evolution of the largest traditional empires over time.9 The principal Old World empires were capable of surviving at or near peak size for extended periods of time: for about four centuries in the case of the Han, Roman, and Ottoman empires, and for about three centuries in the case of the Tang and Qing empires and most recently Russia. By contrast, the Umayyad Caliphate and especially the Mongol empires proved to be more fragile formations that were prone to fission. This was generally true of steppe-​based empires.10 It was only fairly recently, in the modern era, that global colonial empires set up by European powers in a centrifugal process of expansion away from their shared European core came to match or surpass the ceilings established by contiguous Old World empires (Figures 2.4–​2.5).

9 This excludes the European global colonial empires, on which see Figure 2.5. 10 For the duration of steppe empires, see Cioffi-​Revilla, Rogers, Wilcox, and Alterman 2011. On parabolic decline curves, see esp. Taagepera 1997, 481–​484, and cf. 1978b for earlier empires; see also Motyl 2001,  41–​46.

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The Scale of Empire  101

Population Territory is not the only key measure of imperial scale. In fact, the growing importance of marginal land in boosting the spatial size of more recent historical empires suggests that surface area per se may not be the most meaningful indicator of imperial expansion. Population size is the main alternative (Figure 2.6).11 Even allowing for considerable margins of error, we observe a secular increase from empires of just a few million subjects, such as the Neo-​Assyrian Empire of the seventh century bce, to empires in excess of 10  million, beginning with the Achaemenid and Maurya formations. In the following centuries, the Roman, Han, and Tang empires laid claim to populations in the mid-​tens of millions. The spatially more extensive Umayyad Caliphate, by contrast, lagged behind these early behemoths. The 100-​million barrier was first breached by the Northern Song in eleventh-​century ce China. Empire on this scale remained the preserve of East Asia (including the Mongol domain at its peak) until the Mughals passed this threshold in the seventeenth century, followed by the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth centuries and the French colonial empire in the early twentieth century. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, the British Empire temporarily rivaled

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Figure 2.6.  The population of the single largest empire and the three largest empires in the world, 700 bce to 2000 ce (in millions; logarithmic scale). Source: Based on Table 2.1, McEvedy and Jones 1978 and standard historical mapping resources.

11 Information about population numbers is even less solid than for territorial size, and all the more so the farther we move back in time. This section relies on the mixture of evidence, estimates, and informed guesswork in McEvedy and Jones 1978, which remains the only comprehensive set of population totals for all the different parts of the world at regular intervals from 400 bce to 1950. While many of these figures are open to debate—​and ancient population levels in particular have been underestimated—​their overall consistency across time and space ensures adequate comparability, at least between macro-​regions and in relation to total world population. For discussion of this data set, see Scheidel 2019, 533–​535.

102  Walter Scheidel 70

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Figure 2.7.  The population of the single largest empire and three largest empires in the world as a proportion of world population, 700 bce to 2000 ce (in percent). Source: Based on Table 2.1, McEvedy and Jones 1978 and standard historical mapping resources.

China’s demographic weight. World War II very briefly pushed the population under Japanese control to a level similar to that of the British Empire, of roughly half a billion each, while China’s standing declined due to partial foreign occupation, slipping below that of Nazi Germany at its equally short-​lived peak in the early 1940s. However, considering the enormous growth of the overall world population, from perhaps 200 to 300 million at the beginning of the Common Era to two and a half billion at the time of World War II, change in absolute population number is only part of the story.12 In order to control for ongoing global demographic expansion, we need to consider instead the share of the world population that was claimed by the largest empires at a given point in time (Figure 2.7). Figure  2.7 reveals a striking profile. The relative demographic size of the three largest empires in the world was never again as massive as it was in the later stages of antiquity when the Roman, Kushan, and Han empires exercised some measure of control over as many as two-​thirds of all people on earth. This extreme degree of imperial consolidation was facilitated by the concentration of much of our species in the temperate core zone of Afroeurasia that sustained large-​scale state formation and lent disproportionate demographic weight to the resultant imperial structures. In this respect, the world population has not been similarly politically concentrated ever since. In 1900, China, the British Empire, and Russia accounted for perhaps 60 percent of the global population, and the three demographically largest powers of World War II around 1942—​Britain, Japan, and Germany—​for somewhat less than that. 12 For rival estimates of global population number, see McEvedy and Jones 1978, 342 fig. 6.2, 353–​354; Cohen 1995, 400–​401.

The Scale of Empire  103 Geographical and temporal differences in demographic scale become clearer when we rank the most populous empires in history relative to world population (Table 2.2).13 Table 2.2  Empires That Claimed at Least 8 Percent of the World Population (in Percent) Empire

World Region

Date

Share

Qing Northern Song Western Han Mongol Roman Jin Ming Qin Mughal Tang Delhi British Japan Maurya Former Qin Northern Zhou Macedonian Harsha Gupta Northern Wei Umayyad Achaemenid Former Yan Jurchen Germany Kushan Pala Later Zhao Hepththalite Sasanian Maratha USSR Nanda Seleucid Pratihara Ghurid France

East Asia East Asia East Asia Central Asia Europe East Asia East Asia East Asia South Asia East Asia South Asia Europe East Asia South Asia East Asia East Asia Southwest Asia South Asia South Asia East Asia Southwest Asia Southwest Asia East Asia East Asia Europe South Asia South Asia East Asia South Asia Southwest Asia South Asia Europe South Asia Southwest Asia South Asia South Asia Europe

1800 1100 1 1290 150 280 1600 –​220 1700 900 1350 1938 1943 –​250 376 580 –​323 647 450 500 750 –​450 366 1200 1943 200 800 330 500 626 1750 1940 –​325 –​280 900 1200 1812

37 33 32 31 30 28 28 24 24 23 23 23 20 19 19 16 15 15 13 13 13 12 12 12 12 11 11 10 9 9 9 9 8 8 8 8 8

13 As Figure 2.6, with conservative corrections for the persistent underestimating of ancient population number (from 200 bce to 600 ce) in McEvedy and Jones 1978.

104  Walter Scheidel I chose a cutoff point of 8 percent in order to arrive at a sample of roughly similar size to that for territory in Table 2.1, and also because the underlying estimates inspire greater confidence than those for smaller entities, as regionally specific uncertainties tend to cancel each other out. Even so, it must be stressed that most of the numbers are merely rough approximations, best interpreted as the center values of wider ranges (of, say, plus or minus one or two percentage points), especially for the more distant past. At the same time, they are unlikely to be consistently wide of the mark and therefore offer at least a sense of relative magnitude and broad patterns. Whatever the quality of the data, the demographic preeminence of East Asia cannot be in doubt. Seven of the eight largest empires were based in China, including (demographically speaking) the Mongol Empire. The next-​largest imperial polities were created in South Asia during the period of Islamic conquests. More recently, the British and the (extremely short-​lived) Japanese colonial empires likewise relied on South Asia and East Asia, respectively, in order to attain high scores in this survey. In this context, the Roman Empire, the highest-​ranked European empire by a wide margin, represents a genuine outlier. Consideration of the demographic evolution of empire in different parts of the Old World throws this particular anomaly and more general systematic intra-​ continental differences into sharp relief (Figures 2.8–​2.11).14 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 –250 –150 –50

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Figure 2.8.  The proportion of the population of Europe claimed by the largest polity in that area, 250 bce to 2000 ce (in percent). Source: Scheidel 2019, 37. Key: Roman Empire: 250, 200, 150, 100, 50 BCE, 1, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400 CE; Western Roman Empire: 450; Ostrogothic kingdom/​Visigothic kingdom: 500; Byzantine Empire (Frankish Empire): 550; Frankish Empire: 600, 650, 700, 750, 800, 850; Frankish Empire: 900, 950; Holy Roman Empire: 1000, 1050, 1100, 1150, 1200, 1250; France: 1300, 1350, 1400, 1450, 1500; Spanish Habsburg Empire: 1550, 1600; France: 1650, 1700, 1750, 1800, 1812; Russia: 1815, 1850, 1900, 1933; Germany: 1943; Russia: 1945, 1950, 2000. In 1933, 1945, 1950: Russia = USSR.

14 Figures 2.8–​2.11 are taken from Scheidel 2019, 31–​48, which provides detailed discussion.

The Scale of Empire  105

Figure 2.9.  The proportion of the population of the Middle East and North Africa claimed by the largest polity in that area, 700 bce to 2000 ce (in percent). Source: Scheidel 2019, 39. Key: Assyrian Empire: 700, 665, 650 BCE; Egypt: 600 BCE; Median Empire: 550 BCE; Achaemenid Empire: 500, 450, 400, 350 BCE; Seleucid Empire: 300, 250, 200, 150 BCE; Parthian Empire: 100 BCE; Roman Empire: 50 BCE, 1, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, 550, 600, 610 CE; Sasanian Empire: 626; Roman Empire: 630; Umayyad Empire: 650, 700, 750, 800, 850; Tulunid Empire: 900; Roman Empire: 950; Fatimid Empire: 1000, 1050; Seljuk Empire: 1092; Fatimid Empire: 1100; Fatimid Empire (Rum Seljuk Empire): 1150; Ayyubid Empire: 1200; Mamluk Empire (Mongol Empire): 1250; Mamluk Empire (Ilkhanid Empire): 1300; Mamluk Empire: 1350; Mamluk Empire (Timurid Empire): 1400; Mamluk Empire: 1450, 1500; Ottoman Empire: 1550, 1600, 1650, 1700, 1750, 1800, 1850, 1900; Egypt: 1950, 2000. 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 –500 –400 –300 –200 –100 1

100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000

Figure 2.10.  The proportion of the population of South Asia claimed by the largest polity in that area, 500 bce to 2000 ce (in percent). Source: Scheidel 2019, 40. Key: Maghada: 500, 450, 400, 350 BCE; Nanda Empire: 325 BCE; Maurya Empire: 300, 250 BCE; Satavahara: 200 BCE; Shunga Empire: 150, 100 BCE; Saka Empire: 50 BCE, 1 CE; Kushan Empire: 50, 100, 150, 200; Gupta Empire: 300, 350, 400, 450; Gupta Empire/​Hephthalites 500; Harsha Empire: 647; Chalukya of Badami Empire: 650, 700, 750; Pala Empire: 800; Pratihara Empire: 850, 900; Rashtrakuta Empire: 950; Chola Empire: 1000, 1050; Chola Empire (Western Chalukya Empire): 1100; Chola Empire: 1150; Ghurid Sultanate: 1200; Sultanate of Delhi: 1236, 1250, 1300, 1350; Vijayanagara Empire (Bahmani Sultanate): 1400; Vijayanagara: 1450; Sultanate of Delhi: 1500; Mughal Empire: 1550, 1600, 1650, 1700; Maratha Empire: 1750; British Empire: 1800, 1850, 1900; India: 1950, 2000. Dashed line: no entries for 250, 550, 600. The upward arrows indicate probable undercount due to the need to disaggregate historical population numbers within India based on more recent census data: see Scheidel 2019, 534–​535.

106  Walter Scheidel 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 –250 –150 –50

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Figure 2.11.  The proportion of the population of East Asia claimed by the largest polity in that area, 250 bce to 2000 ce. Source: Scheidel 2019, 41. Key: Qin: 250 BCE; Western Han: 200, 150, 100, 50 BCE, 1 CE; Eastern Han: 50, 100, 150, 200; Northern Wei: 225; Jin: 265, 280, 290; Liu Han: 330; Former Yan: 366; Former Qin: 376; Eastern Jin: 400; Liu Song: 440; Northern Wei: 500; Liang: 535; Northern Zhou: 580; Sui: 590, 600; Tang: 650, 700, 750, 800, 850, 900; Later Liang: 920; Northern Song: 960, 980, 1000, 1050, 1100; Southern Song: 1150, 1200, 1250; Yuan: 1300, 1350; Ming: 1400, 1450, 1500, 1550, 1600; Qing: 1650, 1700, 1750, 1800, 1850, 1900; China: 1933; Japan: 1943; China: 1950, 2000.

The default pattern is one of monopolistic or near-​monopolistic empire alternating with interstitial periods characterized by greater political polycentrism. Thanks to the resilience of universal empire in China, East Asia experienced ever-​ shrinking intervals between very large formations and an exceptional degree of imperial dominance, especially from the sixth century ce onward. The Middle East and North Africa produced a more balanced sequence of fairly dominant empires interspersed with considerable fragmentation. Much the same applies to South Asia, whose largest empires often proved comparatively fragile. Smaller regions such as Southeast Asia, Mexico, and the Andes, not shown here, likewise tend to conform to variants of this oscillation pattern, albeit on a shorter overall time scale. The same is true of Africa’s Sahel-​Sudan belt. European state formation famously constitutes an outlier:  one-​ off quasi-​ monopolistic empire under Rome gave way to an entire millennium between Charlemagne and Napoleon when no single power ever managed to control more than one-​fifth of the continent’s population. While the rise of Russia gradually raised this ceiling, more aggressive attempts at empire-​building under Napoleon and Hitler remained short-​lived. The proximate and ultimate causes of European exceptionalism continue to be debated.15 15 For a recent discussion, see Hoffman 2015, 104–​153. Scheidel 2019, 127–​334, reviews and builds on existing scholarship on this question. See also in the next section.

Source: Scheidel 2019, 273 (adapted from Turchin 2009, 204 fig.1)

The Scale of Empire  107

Figure 2.12.  Spatial distribution of the core areas of empires of at least 1 million km2 in Afroeurasia.

108  Walter Scheidel

Distribution Finally, a quick look at the overall geographical distribution of large empires. Over the long run, empire formation used to cluster strongly along the frontier between the agricultural societies that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the steppe populations bordering them to the north and sometimes also to the south (Figure 2.12). Of the 73 large pre-​colonial empires listed in Table 2.1, up to 62 fall more or less decisively into this category, and 54 of these developed in proximity to the Eurasian steppe. Conversely, very few of them arose at greater remove from the steppe frontier, most notably the Roman Empire, the Angkorian Empire in Southeast Asia, and the Inca Empire in western South America. Although we must not put too much weight on precise numbers—​some of these empires were effectively continuations of existing ones and need not be classified as discrete cases—​ the overall pattern is clear.16 Structural tensions between agriculturalists and herders on both sides of this ecological transition zone may have been particularly conducive to large-​scale empire building. Steppe empires have been shown to have fed off and responded to state formation in nearby sedentary societies, and more complex feedback loops might also have influenced the latter process. From a global perspective, this is currently the most economical model to account for divergence in outcomes in the long term, between more intensive and larger-​scale empire formation in and close to frontier regions and often more muted scaling-​up in the protected rimlands of Europe, southern India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. The absence of universal empire from much of post-​Roman Europe accords well with this model, as does more extensive imperial expansion by the more exposed polities of Kiev, Lithuania, and especially Russia.17 An alternative focus on global population share rather than territorial size removes the numerous spatially extensive but thinly populated steppe empires featured in Table 2.1. Nevertheless, this approach yields fairly similar results. Twenty of the 32 traditional empires listed in Table 2.2 originated at or close to steppe frontiers, and another seven at somewhat greater remove. Once again, ancient Rome is the principal outlier among the few exceptions to this norm.18 A more fine-​grained picture emerges from a “heat map” that measures the likelihood of a particular area being part of an imperial state in excess of one million square kilometers that lasted for at least a century (Figure 2.13). The data sets reviewed in this chapter show that large-​scale comparisons can help us identify broader patterns and underlying causes that might otherwise remain submerged in a morass of historical detail. More complex analyses would also be 16 Data in Scheidel 2019, 567 n.28. 17 Steppe frontier as propellant: Turchin 2009. Steppe empires: Barfield 1989. Protected rimlands: Lieberman 2009, 97–​114. See now also Scheidel 2019, 270–​306. For a more general theory of state formation driven by differences in culture and mode of subsistence, see also Turchin 2003, 50–​93. 18 Data in Scheidel 2019, 567 n.31.

The Scale of Empire  109 (a)

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fruitful, for instance by relating territorial or population size to empire duration or other variables such as spatial elongation or ecological diversity.19 The relationship between the size of empires and their capital cities likewise invites systematic comparison.20 Regularities in outcomes in different parts of the world might be traced

19 For the tendency of historical empires to expand more east-​west than north-​south, in keeping with Diamond’s 1997 premises, see Turchin, Adams, and Hall 2006. 20 Data about the size of premodern urban populations are generally poor: the most ambitious survey, Modelski 2003, highlights the severe limitations of the evidence. For a more selective and critical approach, see Morris 2013, 144–​172. Chase-​Dunn, Alvarez, and Pasciuti 2005 investigate correlations between city size and empire formation since the Bronze Age.

110  Walter Scheidel back to shared influences ranging from climate change to social-​economic and political-​military interaction.21 Much work remains to be done.

Bibliography Barfield, T.  J. 1989. The Perilous Frontier:  Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757. Cambridge, MA. Chase-​Dunn, C., A. Alvarez, and D. Pasciuti. 2005. “Power and Size: Urbanization and Empire Formation in World-​Systems since the Bronze Age.” In C. Chase-​Dunn and E. N. Anderson, eds., The Historical Evolution of World-​Systems, 92–​112. New York. Cioffi-​Revilla, C., J. D. Rogers, S. P. Wilcox, and J. Alterman. 2011. “Computing the Steppes: Data Analysis for Agent-​Based Models of Polities in Inner Asia.” In U. Brosseder and B. K. Miller, eds., Xiongnu Archaeology: Multidisciplinary Perspectives of the First Steppe Empire in Inner Asia, 97–​110. Bonn. Cohen, J. E. 1995. How Many People Can the Earth Support? New York. Etemad, B.  2007. Possessing the World:  Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century. New York. Hall, T. D., and P. Turchin. 2007. “Lessons from Population Ecology for World-​Systems Analyses of Long-​Distance Synchrony.” In A. Hornborg and C. Crumley, eds., The World System and the Earth System: Global Socioenvironmental Change and Sustainability since the Neolithic, 74–​90. Walnut Creek, CA. Hoffman, P. T. 2015. Why Did Europe Conquer the World? Princeton, NJ. Lieberman, V.  2009. Strange Parallels:  Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.  800–​1830. Volume 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands. Cambridge. McEvedy, C., and R. Jones. 1978. Atlas of World Population History. Harmondsworth, UK. Modelski, G. 2003. World Cities –​3000 to 2000. Washington, DC. Morris, I. 2010. Why the West Rules—​For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future. New York. Morris, I. 2013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton, NJ. Motyl, A. J. 2001. Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires. New York. Scheidel, W.  2019. Escape from Rome:  The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. Princeton, NJ. Taagepera, R. 1978a. “Size and Duration of Empires: Systematics of Size.” Social Science Research 7: 108–​127. Taagepera, R. 1978b. “Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-​Decline Curves, 3000 to 600 B.C.” Social Science Research 7: 180–​196. Taagepera, R. 1979. “Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-​Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D.” Social Science History 3: 115–​138. Taagepera, R. 1997. “Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia.” International Studies Quarterly 41: 475–​504. Turchin, P. 2003. Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall. Princeton, NJ. Turchin, P. 2009. “A Theory for Formation of Large Empires.” Journal of Global History 4: 191–​217. Turchin, P., J. M. Adams, and T. D. Hall. 2006. “East-​West Orientation of Historical Empires and Modern States.” Journal of World-​System Research 12: 219–​229. Turchin, P., T. E. Currie, E. A. L. Turner, and S. Gavrilets. 2013. “War, Space, and the Evolution of Old World Complex Societies.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110: 16384–​16389.

21 For different perspectives on this issue, see, e.g., Hall and Turchin 2007; Lieberman 2009. See also Chapters 3 and 4 in this volume.

3 The Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism in Interpolity Systems Christopher Chase-​Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy

Human geopolitics and imperialism are of prehistoric provenance in the sense that human groups fought with each other, made alliances, and some used coercion to extract resources from others well before the invention of writing, cities, or states.1 Moreover, territoriality is a feature of interaction among microorganisms, insects, plants, and animals, so a complete prehension of the roots of human imperialism would need to take this larger biogeographical context into account.2 But we will not try to reach for such a lofty goal in this chapter. Rather, we will confine ourselves mainly to what is known about the sociocultural evolution of interpolity competition, conflict, and cooperation among humans since the Paleolithic Age. We focus on the emergence of imperialism and the development of geopolitics among humans since the Stone Age in order to provide evolutionary and historical perspective for recent changes in the structures and processes of global governance. Many political scientists who study international relations see a universal logic of power in the competition and conflict that occurs among ostensibly autonomous states. This game-​theoretic geopolitical logic is thought to be an eternal feature of power itself. The idea is that competition among states is a dog-​eat-​dog churning struggle in which states seek to take territory and resources from one another. The main restriction on the big eating the small is that the small sometimes band together to re-​balance power differentials enough to prevent the large from conquering them. Other political scientists emphasize the logic of the struggle for power among autonomous polities in terms of that logic’s reinforcement by underlying cultural and institutional structures. These scholars are more likely to see important differences across systems and to allow for the evolution of geopolitics over long periods of time. Both of these approaches have merit. We seek here to outline how geopolitics actually works over the long run in order to sort out those aspects that change from those that do not. We agree with those 1 Thanks to Evan Heimlich and E. N. Anderson for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft. 2 Organized warfare and competition for territory first emerged among social insects, especially ants, about 50 million years ago. In an early version of imperialism, some ants kill the queen in an invaded colony and substitute their queen for the dispatched old queen and thus harness the labor of the invaded colony for raising and feeding the offspring of the invaders. The ant/​human comparison reveals a fascinating case of parallel evolution in which rather similar behaviors and social structures emerged by very different processes of selection—​Darwinian in the case of insects, cultural in the case of humans (Gowdy and Krall 2015). Christopher Chase-​Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy, The Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism in Interpolity Systems  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0003.

112  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy theorists of social change who view multilevel interpolity selection as an important force, with the emphasis on the transhistorical importance of warfare.3 But we also suppose that warfare itself evolves and that a world without war is at least a theoretical possibility that could emerge in the future despite the long history (and prehistory) in which humans have legally and frequently killed one another. Over time, as polities have become more complex and hierarchical, have human institutions and cultural constructions come to matter more, or less? Was there an age in which competition among polities was completely unmediated by shared cultures? Is there a sociocultural evolutionary trend that is analogous to the tendency in biological evolution to transition from predation to parasitism to mutualism in interpolity systems, or do they all operate according to a similar underlying geopolitical logic in which might makes right? Suitable answers to these questions emerge through considering how geopolitics remained the same or evolved as chiefdoms, states, and empires emerged and as trade networks and economic institutions became more important. The world-​systems perspective emerged during the world revolution of 1968 and the anti-​war movement that produced a generation of scholars who saw the peoples of Global South (then called the “Third World”) as more than an underdeveloped backwater. Stimulated by dependency approaches to the history of Latin America and Africa, Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Samir Amin formulated a theoretical perspective on the emergence and evolution of the modern world-​system.4 They conceptualized the global power structure and wrote an analytic narrative in which the peoples of the non-​core, by resisting and rebelling, had been active participants in the shaping of the emergent global structures of power. The history of colonialism and decolonization were seen to have importantly shaped the structures and institutions of the whole global system. A more profound awareness of Eurocentrism was accompanied by the realization that most national histories had been written as if each country were on the moon. The nation-​state as an inviolate, pristine unit of analysis was now seen to be an inadequate model for understanding world history. National societies came to be understood as socially constructed parts of a larger stratified global political economy and geoculture that was itself evolving. Wallerstein sees the system as constituted by a hierarchical division of labor between core, peripheral, and semiperipheral zones, with the semiperiphery composed of mixed and intermediate forms that somewhat mollify the great polarization processes of uneven development. The comparative evolutionary5 world-​systems perspective emerged when some of the world-​system scholars became interested in the long-​term continuities and 3 E.g., Mann 1986, 2013. 4 Still the best introduction to the world-​system approach for the general reader is that by Shannon 1996. Chase-​Dunn and Lerro 2014 have also written a textbook for upper division undergraduates that uses the comparative evolutionary world-​systems perspective to tell the story of globalization since the Paleolithic Era. 5 Use of the word “evolution” still requires explanation. We mean long-​term patterned change in social structures, especially the development of complex divisions of labor and hierarchy. We do not mean biological

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  113 qualitative transformations that only become evident when the modern world-​ system is compared with earlier world-​systems.6 Important controversies still rage over the right way to spatially bound whole systems, but here we will employ the network interaction approach developed by Chase-​Dunn and Hall.7 The comparative world-​systems perspective is a strategy that focuses on whole interpolity systems rather than single polities. Its main insight is that important interaction networks (trade, information flows, alliances, and fighting) have woven polities and cultures together since the beginning of human sociocultural evolution. Explanations of social change need to consider interpolity systems (world-​ systems) as the units that evolve. Though interpolity interaction networks were rather small when transportation was mainly a matter of carrying goods on one’s back or in small boats, globalization, in the sense of the expansion and intensification of larger and larger interaction networks, is hardly new. Indeed it has been increasing for millennia, albeit unevenly and in waves.8 World-​systems are whole systems of interacting polities9 and settlements.10 System-​ness here means that these polities and settlements are interacting with one another in important ways—​such interactions are two-​way, necessary, structured, regularized, and reproductive. Systemic interconnectedness exists when interactions importantly influence the lives of people and are consequential for social continuity or social change. All premodern world-​systems extended over only parts of the Earth. The word “world” here refers to the importantly connected interaction networks in which people live, whether these are spatially small or large. All of these worlds are large from the point of view of the people living within them. While small-​scale world-​systems have little in the way of interpolity exploitation and domination, core/​periphery hierarchies emerged and became more important features of world-​systems as techniques for conquering and exploiting evolved. The evolutionary world-​systems perspective sees semiperipheral development as an important cause of human sociocultural evolution. Semiperiphery is a special zone in a world-​system, which is neither as developed and structurally central as a core, nor as backward and distant as periphery. Therefore it possesses an optimal balance of resources and structural conditions for technological, military, and social innovations, which can be later scaled up wider in a world-​system. Chase-​Dunn and

evolution, which is a very different topic, and neither do we mean “progress,” a normative notion that is unnecessary for the scientific study of social change. 6 Frank and Gills 1993; Chase-​Dunn and Hall 1997. 7 Chase-​Dunn and Hall 1997; see also Chase-​Dunn and Jorgenson 2003. 8 Chase-​Dunn 2006; Beaujard 2010; Jennings 2010. 9 We use the term “polity” to generally denote a spatially bounded realm of sovereign authority such as a band, tribe, chiefdom, state, or empire. We designate polities as subsystems of world-​systems because they are easier to bound spatially than are societies. 10 The term “settlement” includes camps, hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. Settlements are spatially bounded for comparative purposes as the contiguous built-​up area.

114  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy Hall11 asserted that it had most often been polities out on the edge (in semiperipheral regions) that had transformed the institutional structures and accomplished the upward sweeps. This hypothesis is part of a larger claim that people in semiperipheral locations usually play the transformative roles that cause the emergence of greater sociocultural complexity and hierarchy within world-​systems. This hypothesis of semiperipheral development is an important justification supporting the claim that world-​systems, rather than single polities, are the right unit of analysis for explaining human sociocultural evolution. Semiperipheral development has taken various forms: semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms, semi­ peripheral marcher states, semiperipheral capitalist city-​states, the peripheral and then semiperipheral position of Europe in the larger Afroeurasian Prestige Goods Network, modern semiperipheral nation-​states that have risen to hegemony (the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and contemporary peoples in semiperipheral locations that are engaging in, and supporting, novel and potentially transformative movements. Eschewing the politics of boosterism and progress, we nevertheless assert that the real evolution of political entities in world prehistory and world history approxi­ mates the sequence shown in Figure 3.1. There is a rise-​and-​fall cycle in all interpolity systems:  moreover, occasional upsweeps occur. In upsweeps, a polity of greater size and complexity emerges. Subsequently comes a process by which others catch up. We see a general evolution in the institutions that facilitate cooperation among human groups. Small-​scale human polities are egalitarian; they establish integrity primarily via kinship—​that is, via an ideological construction of identities and associated rights and obligations that are understood as “blood” relations. Ethnographers

Size and Complexity

Tributary Empires

Early States Chiefdoms Tribes Bands

Time

Figure 3.1.  The evolution of political entities.

11 Chase-​Dunn and Hall 1997.

Global State Formation Modern Hegemons

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  115 have established that various societies of Homo sapiens have deployed radically different kinds of kinship systems—​this is why the identities are ideological rather than biological. In matrilineal systems, descent is reckoned in the female line. The mother’s brother is the social father. Kinship is a socially constructed moral order based on consensus about what is proper, what is improper, and the obligations and rights associated with social roles such as mother, child, father, uncle, brother, sister, grandfather, etc. Obviously some polities use words like “cousin” or “uncle” to designate alliances or obligations, so-​called fictive kin. But the main point here is that all kinship systems are fictive in the sense that they greatly rely on consensual definitions that are culturally constructed. Some anthropologists refer to societies that are primarily integrated by kinship obligations as kin-​based modes of production.12 Sociologists see them as normatively integrated by a moral order, what Emile Durkheim called “mechanical solidarity.” As polities get larger, more complex, and more hierarchical, normative integration based on consensus about what exists and what is good becomes less effective, and so institutions are invented that enforce the rules even in the absence of consensus. States with specialized mechanisms of regional control emerge. Writing allows the invention of the law—​written rules that must be obeyed. Thus consensus-​based norms become official written rules that can be applied to different peoples who are within the jurisdiction of the state whether or not they share the same value systems as the rulers who promulgate the laws. Taxation and tribute also become important sources of support for authorities. Normative regulation does not disappear, but it becomes shored up by institutionalized mechanisms of legitimate coercion—​the state, the military, the police, courts, the law, and prisons. These institutions allow polities to become even bigger and to shore up even greater hierarchies. These kinds of systems are sometimes characterized as tributary modes of accumulation (see further Haldon in Chap. 5 of this volume). Historically the importance of state power—​as an organizing force in the economy and as an instrument in competition among states for territory and control of trade routes—​increased as states became more centralized and larger. Warfare became a central mechanism of both survival and expansion, and group, rather than individual, selection became an even more important driver of social change with the rise of states. In the Bronze Age, at the same time that institutionalized coercion was becoming predominant over the top of normatively integrated kinship structures, something like money, market exchange, and the sale of land and interest-​bearing loans emerged. They were not yet the main ways that social labor was mobilized or the economy was regulated. At first, theocracies produced what is known as the “temple economy” and then battle kings emerged. But the seeds of commodification were sown. At interstices of the tributary states and empires, some city-​states specialized in long-​distance trade. In these trade-​based city-​states the rulers acquired wealth

12 E.g., Wolf 1997.

116  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy and power by successfully organizing and facilitating the making of profits from long-​distance trade. The tributary states and empires became more monetized and wage labor appeared in some sectors. Debt became a major element in class relations, and slavery and prostitution became widespread.13 The rise of markets and money became an important element in geopolitical competition among polities for the provisioning of armies and navies. But ruling classes of most states remained primarily dependent on the control of state institutions themselves for accumulation. A group of capitalist city-​states in the Mediterranean was followed by the emergence of nation-​states that were to a greater degree dependent on finance capital. Eventually came the emergence of a nation-​state in which capitalists themselves held state power—​the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ce. The logic of geopolitics was changed by the emergence of commodified economies, the growing predominance of profit taking over taxation and tribute, and the growing power of money. Warfare did not disappear, but it was waged for somewhat different purposes. In addition to the evolutionary sequence from normative regulation to institutionalized coercion and then to market integration, we also see continuities that seem to characterize driving forces behind expansion and complexity in all periods. Population pressure is a relationship between population density, technology, organization, and the availability of resources. Population growth often causes increases in population pressure, but these can be ameliorated by technological change or by increases in available resources because of climate change or migration to new regions. Thus, population pressure varies, and this causes variation in the rate of within-​polity and between-​polity conflict. When population pressure is high, there is more conflict. So there is a cycle of increasing and decreasing warfare in all systems. Warfare reduces population pressure by killing people14 and by giving preference to males, rather than females, as the former increase manpower while the latter generally increase population.15 This is the kind of predator/​prey demographic regulator that operates among animals and insects. Humans sometimes transcend this challenge by inventing new methods of production and new forms of organization that allow for higher population density without increasing population pressure. So the warfare rate is cyclical in all world-​systems. Geopolitical institutions emerge in periods of increased warfare, but they do not usually dissolve during periods of less warfare, so there is a ratchet effect in which polities become more and more organized to deal with warfare over time. This is one important mechanism driving the emergence of hierarchy—​chiefdom formation, state formation, empire formation, etc., in which authorities emerge that regulate violence and make rules about property. 13 Graeber 2011. 14 Warfare sometimes also destroys resources such as irrigation systems and so can also increase population pressure rather than reducing it. 15 Harris 1977.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  117

The Geopolitics of Foraging Bands Nomadic hunter-​gatherer bands cooperated and competed with other bands when they met. These were autonomous polities16 in the general sense of an authority structure that was not subject to the control of a larger human authority. Decisions were made by discursive communications among adults using a linguistically constructed moral order based on consensual definitions of kinship. Labor was mobilized by a consensual system of obligations based on kinship in which sharing and reciprocity were the main forms of exchange. Relations among bands involved both positive and negative reciprocity.17 A form of territoriality existed among nomadic foragers (hunter-​gatherers) when different groups arrived at the same resource site (food, water, lithic raw materials) at the same time. If the sought resource was plentiful relative to demand, peaceful coexistence or even cooperation was more likely. If the resource was not plentiful, conflict was more likely. Conflict is dangerous and so the smaller or weaker group was likely to retreat. Competition among nomadic groups for territorial resources was one of the main causes of the migrations of modern humans out of Africa, across Eurasia, and to the Americas. In addition to resource scarcity, linguistic and kinship ties also influenced the likelihood of competition vs. cooperation. Kinship categories allowed for the construction of cooperative ties among bands. Individuals not present could be categorized as cousins or uncles thought to be related by blood or spiritual kinship to members of the band. Acknowledged family connections among bands (tribes) often prescribed cooperation and proscribed violent competition.18 And relations with non-​kin others or strangers were also culturally constructed in the sense that humans who were not classified as kin were usually thought to be inferior and dangerous. Thus were the interpolity interactions among nomadic foraging bands already cultural because both kinship and otherness were socially constructed. And, as Georg Simmel19 pointed out, conflict itself is an important form of social interaction both within and between polities. Nomadic foragers thus participated in interpolity systems of alliances and enmities that greatly affected their life chances. These were small-​scale international systems. The elaboration of othering continued as population density increased: nomadic foragers developed yearly circular migration routes, and, with further increases in population density, these routes became more compact and groups developed differentiated regional identities that are indicated by stylistic differences in

16 The modern definition of sovereignty as a legal concept emerged in the sixteenth-​century European interstate system, but the condition of autonomy obviously existed and was theorized in earlier interpolity systems. 17 Sahlins 1972. 18 Kelly 1985. 19 Simmel 1955.

118  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy toolkits, especially projectile points.20 Further population growth and the emergence of a more diversified foraging strategy (hunting smaller game, fishing, and gathering more vegetable materials) eventually led to the emergence of sedentary foragers living in winter villages. Yet migration continued to fill up the lands. At first the sites most suited to prevailing technologies and cultures were occupied. Later migration filled in remaining spaces. Even then, some areas remained unoccupied. Competing territorial groups often left unoccupied buffer zones in order to minimize the chances of encountering dangerous competitors for space.

Mesolithic Geopolitics Geopolitics among territorial sedentary hunter-​gatherers is a complex mix of defending resource spaces from trespass and organizing cooperation among groups.21 Between groups of ethnohistorically known, sedentary, diversified for­ agers, trespass was the most frequent cause of disputes. In indigenous northern California before the arrival of the Europeans, a small-​scale world-​system composed of sedentary hunter-​gatherers was organized as an interpolity system of autonomous territorial “tribelets”—​usually two or three villages recognizing the authority of a single headman.22 Leadership in these polities was based mainly on the ability of the headman (sometimes a headwoman) to make coherent speeches on important occasions such as those ”big times” in which a tribelet would invite people from other tribelets to come to a feast. But headmen also tended to be able to afford more than one wife, sometimes as many as four. A preference for sororal polygyny meant that the headman’s second wife was usually a sister of his first wife, but the third (or fourth) wife was likely to be the daughter of a headman of another tribelet. Thus sororal polygyny was a partial constraint on the ability of headmen to form interpolity alliances cemented by marriage. Intermarriage was still an important mechanism for forging inter­ tribelet alliances, but the kinship system was not efficiently tuned to maximize such alliances. This limitation tended to help cap the small spatial scale of these polities and interpolity alliances. Reciprocal gift exchanges, dancing, feasting, and gambling were important integrative activities that occurred during big times, also called “trade feasts” by

20 Nassaney and Sassaman 1995. Long-​distance diffusion and adoption of new weapon technologies such as the atlatl (spear-​thrower) and the bow and arrow increased the efficiency of both hunting and warfare, and once neighbors had adopted these devices, the pressure to follow suit was great. Nevertheless, the transition from atlatls to bows seems to have occurred gradually and unevenly over a period of about 500 years on the American plains, during which both technologies were in use (Tarabek 2013; see also Erlandson, Wats, and Jew 2014). 21 Chase-​Dunn and Mann 1996. 22 Kroeber 1976.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  119 ethnographers. These trade feasts usually occurred when the host polity had a surplus of food. Ethnographers such as Vayda23 think that these trade feasts were opportunities for groups to develop cooperative alliances that would have been useful during periods of scarcity and/​or conflict. There was inter-​tribelet warfare, even among speakers of the same language. Violent interpolity encounters took two forms. There were raids in which one group would attack another, killing and taking captives, stealing stored food and other valuables. Raids occurred more frequently between tribelets that did not share a common or related language, and in areas in which control of some important resource was in dispute (e.g., a valuable lithic outcropping). A more frequent type of warfare was sometimes called a line war. In line wars the headmen of two disputing tribelets would bring warriors dressed for war and carrying weapons to an appointed place. At a signal, the two squads would shoot arrows or throw rocks at one another until some were injured. Then the two headmen would confer to see if an agreement resolving the conflict could be reached. If no agreement were reached, another round of shooting and throwing might ensue. This encounter continued until the headmen could reach an agreement. Line wars were more likely to occur between tribelets that shared a common language or linguistically related dialects. Charges of trespassing (unauthorized use of gathering or hunting sites claimed by a tribelet) often led to line wars. The institution of the line war allowed conflicts to be resolved with relatively little damage to the contending parties. But the more damaging raid wars also occurred, and some inter-​tribelet relationships were understood as particularly conflictual—​for instance, the valley-​dwelling Wintu’s name for the hill-​living Yana translates as “Enemy in the East.” But even across these conflictive divides there was occasional trading and inter­ marriages. It should be said that even though there was warfare among tribelets in this system, war itself was not a very central preoccupation of these polities. They were mostly focused on subsistence pursuits and forms of recreation such as dancing and gambling. The geopolitical logic in such a system is already one that might be termed antagonistic cooperation, because it interlinks both competitive and cooperative modes. The clashes involved assessments of the relative fighting power of adversaries, risk, and the array of weapons available to each side. Ethnocentism intensified warfare, though weapons were lethal enough to motivate foraging bands to tame the hostilities.24 Economic exchange (reciprocal gift-​giving between the headmen of tribelets) provided a buffer against times of scarcity and helped to produce alliances that were useful when conflicts emerged. Reciprocal exchanges also reduced the propensity to raid during periods of shortage.25



23 Vayda 1967.

24 Gintis, van Schaik, and Boehm 2015. 25 Vayda 1967.

120  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy Chase-​Dunn and Mann26 conclude that the northern California world-​system was an instance of an interaction network based on reciprocal gift-​giving and warfare, without much of a core/​periphery hierarchy in which core polities dominated and/​or exploited non-​core polities. Population density and the size and effectiveness of intervillage alliances were crucial factors in determining who won when raid wars broke out. Thus the Wintu (valley people with larger villages) tended to have the upper hand in warfare with hill people such as the Yana, who had smaller villages and thus fewer warriors to call on when a conflict broke out. Demographic power was the main arbiter in intergroup competition based on violence. But this demographic advantage was not used by the valley people to dominate and exploit the labor of the hill people. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Wintu had been very slowly encroaching on the territory of the Yana at the rate of around 30 years per kilometer.27 This hardly constitutes a case of expansionist conquest of the kind known from the history of states and empires. Trade in such systems was highly structured by the small territorial and demographic scale of polities. Long-​distance trade ventures or procurement treks were extremely dangerous because individuals or small groups of “strangers” found in territory claimed by unknown others were likely to be killed. All interpolity exchange of goods was between headmen of immediate neighboring polities or neighbors of neighbors who were also known. This “down-​the-​line” form of exchange nevertheless allowed highly valuable goods (such as bow staves and woodpecker scalps) to move rather long distances, and so linked polities that had no direct interactions with one another in a larger network of exchange. The geopolitical point here is that the absence of larger authorities and the very local nature of cooperative arrangements among polities restricted the size of trade networks. But even in these small-​scale systems there were transregional phenomena, such as the use of clam-​shell disc beads as a medium of transregional exchange, and a transregional sign language and counting schema. Via these cultural inventions, prestige goods and information could move from polity to polity, linking the people of the northern Sacramento Valley and surrounding mountains with those living in the delta region of the Sacramento and the adjacent Clear Lake region of California. Geopolitics was local, but it facilitated the emergence of long-​distance down-​the-​ line exchange networks. The comparative study of group identity and feelings of solidarity in anthropological perspective sheds important light on the issue of whether or not nationalism and the nation-​state are entirely modern phenomena tied to the emergence of civic culture in Europe and analyzed as a process of nation-​building in the postcolonial world. A bright line often divides modern nationalism, with its emphasis on popular sovereignty, from earlier multicultural empire states in which central culture was carried by elites but not by masses.28 Modern nationalism is undoubtedly the

26 Chase-​Dunn and Mann 1996.

27 Chase-​Dunn and Mann 1996, 120–​123. 28 E.g., Anderson 1991; Gellner 1991.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  121 most important socially constructed solidarity in the contemporary world-​system. Global culture contains a template that is filled in by all states that claim membership in the club that is the United Nations.29 The “people” must have a unique historical identity, language, traditions, styles, etc., that distinguish them from their neighbors, and national pomp and ceremony are important ritual occasions that must not be mocked. But group solidarity is an important variable in all polities and an anthropological framework of comparison suggests that sentiments of group solidarity have long played an important role in geopolitics. Early forms of “we-​feeling” need to be carefully compared with modern nationalism in order to prehend the similarities and the differences. Within Wintu tribelets, group solidarity was reinforced by invidious comparisons with neighboring tribelets. According to the Sacramento River villages, the people that lived on the Middle River (McCloud River) did not know how to properly prepare acorn mush. The Middle River people contend that duckbill created the universes, while all right-​thinking people know that coyote created the universe as a kind of joke. Correct behavior and beliefs were contrasted with those of the neighboring polities, and geographical distance as well as linguistic differences increased the strength of othering until the point is reached in which distant strangers are seen as malevolent beings with which no cooperation is possible. Collective solidarity within the tribelet and among tribelets was expressed mainly in kinship terms, but these terms themselves were rather flexible. Group solidarity was important, especially when collective labor needed to be mobilized or when interpolity conflicts broke out. The polities that had more internal solidarity were better able to defend themselves.

A Case of Non-​commodified and Indirect Economic Imperialism It would simplify matters if we could conclude that all systems of stateless foragers were like the one in northern California, lacking a core/​periphery hierarchy. But the Pacific Northwest featured a large, hierarchical system in which the core polities had enough economic power to motivate the peripheral polities to employ warfare against one another. Within the coastal polities (Haida, Kwatkiutl, Tlingit, etc.), hereditary “big men” maintained their status and power in a system of competitive feasting and gift-​giving known as the potlach. These maritime polities were hunter-​gatherers with access to valuable coastal food resources (marine mammals, fish, and shellfish): they had enough economic power to extract war captives from peripheral polities. The peripheral polities raided one another and sold captives in exchange for food and other valuables. The coastal polities had ranked lineages,

29 Meyer 2009.

122  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy slaves, and a very strong ideology of superior birth. Between 5 and 25 percent of the population of the coastal polities were slaves.30 This was an unusual kind of core/​ periphery hierarchy. This development differs not only from the world-​system of indigenous northern California, but moreover it differs from the model of core-​polity armies conquering and exploiting non-​core peoples that we know so well from historical sources. The Pacific Northwest shows the existence of economic imperialism in the absence of pronounced commodification. A proto-​money (dentalium shells) was used as medium of exchange. But most exchange took the form of reciprocal gift-​giving carried out by village heads. This down-​the-​line trade relocated war captives from distant slave raiders to the maritime core polities.31 Slaves and their children in the core polities often became integrated into the local kinship system by marriage and adoption; so this was a very different kind of system from the better-​known chattel slavery that emerged in more commodified and more hierarchical polities.32 This differential shows that core/​periphery hierarchy (exploitation and domination) can exist even among polities that are not in direct contact with one another, and in a situation in which the core does not use coercion on the non-​core to extract resources. A core-​periphery hierarchy can operate without any direct coercion exerted by core polities if these have a resource that is in great demand. In this situation peripheral polities will be motivated to coerce one another in order to be able to obtain valuables from the core. This is an unusual case, in which core polities, lacking ability to project military power, still were able to extract resources from non-​core polities, and in which economic power was exerted in the absence of commodified relations. All the polities in the Pacific Northwest were integrated by kin-​based sharing and reciprocity. Interpolity relations consisted of raiding, line wars, and gift exchanges among polity heads. Dentalium shells were a symbol of value that facilitated reciprocal gift-​giving among polity heads in this large regional network, but they were not really money (a generalized medium of exchange). This was a system in which something like economic imperialism existed, but in the absence of commodified exchange or the projection of force to extract tribute. It was the high value of trade items that motivated peripheral polities to use force on one another.

Chiefdoms and Tribute So far we have been discussing the nature of geopolitics in world-​systems in which polities were relatively small in scale. The Pacific Northwest was unusual in the extent to which rather small core polities were able to extract labor from non-​core 30 Mitchell and Donald 1985. 31 The Modocs, who were neighbors of the Wintu in northern California, were within the southernmost edge of this network. 32 Patterson 1982.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  123 polities. Most small-​scale polities were not able to do this. The northern California example is much more typical. There is a general pattern in which the degree of hierarchy within polities is associated with the degree of interpolity exploitation and domination. Marshal Sahlins’s33 classic article examined how segmentary lineages facilitated large alliances among households and communities within a tribe, and how those lineages that were more successful at organizing large-​scale cooperation were able to conquer and extract resources from relatively smaller lineage confederacies. Raymond Kelly’s34 study of the Nuer-​Dinka relationship is a good example of this kind of demographic power. Both the Nuer and the Dinka were pastoralists, but the Nuer had a kinship structure that facilitated the mobilization of larger alliances, and so they were able to extract both cattle and slaves from the Dinka in a system that Kelly calls “tribal imperialism.” Classes and more centralized hierarchies (called chiefdoms) are known to have emerged in many different regions in which sedentism and horticulture had already appeared.35 According to Gerhard Lenski,36 intense warfare and conquering other polities became economically profitable for the first time among advanced horticultural societies (those that employed metal, copper or bronze, not iron, tools for gardening). He contends that more technologically advanced and complex polities had a higher probability of engaging in systematic warfare. Using a cross-​cultural sample, he found that among hunting and gathering polities none had perpetual warfare and only 27 percent had frequent warfare; among simple horticultural polities 5 percent had perpetual warfare and 55 percent had frequent warfare; among advanced horticultural polities 34 percent had perpetual warfare and 48 percent had frequent warfare.37 Despite the fact that chiefdoms continued to rely on hierarchical forms of kinship (ranked lineages, conical clans, etc.), some paramount chiefs are ethnohistorically known to have extracted tribute from neighbors over whom they held a military advantage.38 Chiefdoms experienced a rise and fall pattern that was somewhat similar in form to that of larger states and empires.39 Some of the rises were the result of conquest by semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms, but others may have been the outcome of a demographic process somewhat similar to the “secular cycles” described for state-​based systems by Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov.40 Turchin and Nefedov formalized Jack Goldstone’s41 model of the secular cycle, an approximately 200-​year-​long demographic cycle, in which population grows and then decreases. Population pressures emerge because the number of mouths to be fed and the size of the group of elites get too large for

33 Sahlins 1961. 34 Kelly 1985.

35 Wright 2006.

36 Lenski 2005, 95. 37 Lenski 2005.

38 Rountree 1993; Chase-​Dunn and Lerro 2014, 109–​118. 39 Anderson 1994.

40 Goldstone 1991; Turchin and Nefedov 2009. 41 Goldstone 1991.

124  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy the resource base, causing conflict and the disruption of the polity. Turchin and Nefedov test their model on a number of agrarian empires, confirming the principle that population growth and elite overproduction lead to sociopolitical instability within states. However, we think that somewhat similar processes may have been operating within chiefdom polities. Marshall Sahlins42 describes chiefs as “eating the land too much.” The size and wealth of the class of sacred chiefs is limited by the productivity of workers and the availability of resources. But chiefs are able to husband resources and to mobilize labor in projects that sometimes increase the availability of food. Chiefs also regulate land use and invent forms of property that facilitate their continued ability to appropriate surplus product from commoners. Thus the functional theory of stratification works, except that overshoot is a common mistake and this leads to the dissolution of the paramount chiefdom back into smaller and less centralized polities. Chiefdoms also exhibit another pattern known from historical systems, the creation of larger conquest-​based polities by semiperipheral marcher chiefs who come from less favored ecological locations. Patrick Kirch43 notes this pattern on Pacific islands and archipelagos. Kirch also studied an instance when island-​wide chiefdom formation repeatedly failed. The Marquesas Islands are steep, with narrow valleys that can only connect with one another by sea, but boat traffic is difficult because of the lack of good landing sites. Kirch44 shows that archaeological evidence shows a cycle of periods with intense warfare and cannibalism among the polities of the steep valleys, followed by periods of relatively less conflict as populations and population pressures recover. This is the kind of demographic regulator referred to in the preceding. No polity was able to conquer the others to create an island-​wide chiefdom because of the difficult transportation and communication barriers. In a situation of a relatively high population density, the frequency and intensity of warfare increases, and polities begin to devote resources to turning their boys into warriors. Men are the warriors among the sedentary hunter-​gatherers of California described earlier, but the warrior identity is not more important than the hunter identity for the males in the California polities. On the Chesapeake Bay, warfare was more intense. Buffer zones or “no-​mans-​land” regions in which warring groups had abandoned territory so as not to run into one another were found by John Smith during his exploration of the bay. Boys were trained from a young age to withstand torture. Thus did the masculine identity become warriorized. This was a piece of the evolution of interpolity relations in which the selves within polities became specialized for the purposes of interpolity conflict. Ritual cannibalism and scalping were often part of this transition, demonstrating a form of respect for the powers of the enemy.45 42 Sahlins 1958. 43 Kirch 1984. 44 Kirch 1991. 45 When the Maori say, “I ate your grandfather,” it is an insult to be sure, but it is also a claim to have appropriated the power of your ancestor.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  125 The phenomenon of rise and fall, which seems to exist in all world-​systems with even a modicum of interpolity hierarchy, sheds important light on the controversies about when and where chiefdom formation and state formation first occurred. If a cycle of centralization and decentralization within a set of polities is the norm, it makes it hard to identify crucial cases that embody whatever distinctions we want to make between chiefdoms and states. In addition to scale and complexity, archaeologists Johnson and Earle46 define the difference between chiefdoms and states in terms of specialized institutions of regional control—​bureaucracies and dedicated military organizations. This is a useful distinction that has implications for geopolitics. The existence of a dedicated military caste, as opposed to a temporary group of allies of the chief, means the emergence of a group of military specialists who are often closely linked to the king’s household or his authority. States are usually larger and more complex and more internally hierarchical than are chiefdoms. It also seems to be always the case that so-​called pristine states only emerged in regions that already had chiefdoms.47 A long-​ lasting system of competing and allying city-​ states emerged in Mesopotamia, while in Egypt an empire joining Upper and Lower Egypt emerged rather quickly. The Mesopotamian system was more often a multicentric international system of competing states, while the Egyptian system was more frequently under the control of a single central state. On the flood plain of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, the great productivity of large-​scale, irrigated agriculture enabled the formation of Uruk, the world’s first city, and its state. Uruk was at first a theocracy that defined its priests and subjects as slaves of the city-​god. The redistributive temple economy came to overlay the kin-​based reciprocities of lineages within the city. The early Bronze Age Mesopotamian Uruk expansion (studied by Guillermo Algaze)48 combined short-​range tribute-​taking with long-​distance trade. It did so primarily by establishing Uruk quarters in the settlements of regions that were important sources of imports for the world’s first city.49 The emergence of competing city-​states on the flood plain of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced a situation of hegemonic rise and fall. It caused cities to build walls and increased the power of their battle kings. Sumerian rulers imported labor from adjacent regions. Eventually a Semitic-​speaking working class rebelled under the leadership of Sargon, a cupbearer to the king of Kish. Sargon’s revolt produced the upsurge of the Akkadian Empire. This was primarily an ethnic revolt, yet the non-​core ties and characteristics of the Akkadians played an important role in the revolt and in the success of the subsequent conquest empire.50 46 Johnson and Earle 1987. 47 Wright 2006; Norman Yoffee 2005 argues that there is no direct line from the chiefdom to the state. He does not see the process of semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms as the agents that create early states. It is typically not the biggest or oldest chiefdoms that create states, but smaller, more marginal chiefdoms out on the edge who conquer larger regions. 48 Algaze 1993, 2000. 49 Stein 1999. 50 Diakonoff 1973.

126  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy Balance-​of-​power dynamics were operating, but not strongly enough to prevent the emergence of the first of the world’s large empires. Sargon built a new capital city, Agade, standardized weights and measures, and used the cuneiform symbols that had been invented by the Sumerians to produce records and documents in the Akkadian language. But the empire was too big to hold together with the available “technologies of power.”51 It collapsed and was succeeded by the Third Dynasty of Ur, a Sumerian restoration (see further Steinkeller, Chap. 2 in Vol. 2). The Ur polity was much smaller territorially, but the trade networks that had emerged under the aegis of the Akkadian Empire allowed the city of Ur to grow to a very large population size, constituting an urban upsweep.52 The Sumerian interpolity system also refined a distinction between civilization and savagery, as can been seen in the epic of Gilgamesh. A Sumerian description of the invading Guti as wild animals is a version of othering that strongly prefigures modern racism. In all the world regions in which states had emerged (Mesopotamia, Egypt, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes) new technologies of power—​such as professional soldiers and the expansion of trade networks—​yielded empire upsweeps. As the battle king became the model of authority in tributary states and empires, the world’s main form of imperialism focused on the conquest, subjugation, and exploitation of adjacent territories. This was classical imperialism. The main instrument of expansion was the army. Next, in order to make empires work as machines for extracting resources from distant peoples, deeper techniques of power needed to be developed to incorporate more distant peoples into the larger structures of the empire. It was not enough to send a large army to defeat whatever resistance might be offered. Booty was good, but sustaining an empire meant developing institutions that facilitated a degree of consent. Thus did conquerors take advantage of the rise of world religions, in which membership in the larger “universal” moral community was increasingly delinked from kinship. This reconfiguration facilitated larger empires by reducing the level of resistance to taxation and tribute.53 As empires layered their tributary mode of accumulation over older, kin-​based, normative social regulation, they made larger cities possible by reducing the transaction and protection costs of trade, which encouraged the formation of larger and denser trade networks.54 Empires meanwhile built specialized, imperial cities as the symbolic centers of their power. 51 Mann 1986. 52 Inoue et al. 2015. 53 Though quantitative estimates of scale, such as the territorial sizes of polities, are imperfect as indicators of state formation, it is still useful to examine these because they allow us to compare different regions using the same indicator and to study change over very long periods of time. We can determine which instances were unprecedented increases in scale. These scale upsweeps can be identified once we have fairly frequent estimates of the sizes of largest polities in a region (see Inoue et al. 2012). Identifying these cases, which are the events that led to the long-​term trend toward larger and larger polities, allows us to test different explanations of state formation. The results so far for 21 territorial size upsweeps show that just more than half were caused by conquests made by semiperipheral or peripheral marcher states (Chase-​Dunn et al. 2015). Most of the others were caused by the internal (within-​polity) secular cycles described by Turchin and Nefedov 2009. 54 Mann 1986.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  127 These empires fell after expansion eventually reached a point of diminishing returns beyond which further expansion was too costly. At that point resource scarcities caused prices to change and swollen ranks of elites began to fight with each other over the remains. Then political weakness within the empire encouraged challengers from within and from outside. Historians and political scientists who compare the interstate systems of the East and West have noticed a great divergence that occurred after the fall of the Han Empire and the Western Roman Empire.55 Though a new empire as large as the Han soon emerged in China, the fall of the Western Roman Empire did not soon yield an imperial recovery. Instead a number of smaller empires emerged in the space of Rome’s imperium. This distinction is thought to reveal important differences that emerged between the East and the West. Both regions continued to experience cycles of rise and fall, but the size difference among polities was greater in the East: unified China was much larger than the other large polities in East Asia, whereas the West contained a number of smaller polities and a less centralized and more competitive system of power. International relations theorists often emphasize the importance of certain institutions that emerged in the competitive interstate system of the West. They see the invention of international agreements regulating diplomacy among the Italian city-​states, and later the treaty of Westphalia, as important for preventing the emergence of a core-​wide empire in the West. George Modelski56 noted an important difference in the rules of the interstate system in South Asia and those that emerged in the European interstate system: namely, because the institutional nature of the European interstate system allowed for the existence of equal relations among states, it was more efficient in facilitating a balance of power, which prevented the emergence of the core-​wide empire. On the other hand, Khautilya’s Arthaśāstra, sage advice provided to the Chandragupta Maurya (who founded the first large empire in South Asia), set up a system of vertical relations among superior and inferior polities that did not allow, in principle, for the possibility of equal relations among polities. Modelski noted that this was also a feature of other early interstate systems. According to David Chandler’s57 study of diplomatic relations among the kingdoms of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand—​all of which were influenced by the Chinese model58—​relations among states were described in terms of hierarchical kinship relations. Cambodia was cast as the child, while Vietnam was the mother and Thailand was the father. The hierarchical pronouns of the languages made it nearly impossible to describe relations between equal states. Modelski contended that the institutional nature of the European interstate system, which allowed for the existence of equal relations, was more efficient in

55 Hui 2008; Scheidel 2009. 56 Modelski 1964.

57 Chandler 1996, 113–​116.

58 Fairbank 1968; Hamashita 2003.

128  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy facilitating the balance of power and the prevention of the emergence of a core-​ wide empire. While this was probably not the most important way in which Europe was different, it may have played a role in the reproduction of a more multicentric and competitive interstate system in Europe. Most of the literature on modern nationalism focuses on the comparison between empires in which a dominant center sought to govern and extract resources from a culturally diverse periphery. Victor Lieberman’s59 important study of the emergence of political and cultural integration in mainland Southeast Asia notes a process that he calls “politicized ethnicity” that emerged in waves in Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam, and somewhat less successfully in Cambodia and in island Southeast Asia (Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines). A  process of the standardization of language and religion had been going on since the emergence of what Lieberman calls the “charter states” in the period from 800 to 1200 ce in the Southeast Asian mainland. Though there was nothing like the notion of popular sovereignty, people out in the villages came to see themselves as members of a political collectivity with a distinct culture, language, historical heritage, and religious beliefs that was centered in the capital and embodied by the king. This was not multicultural empire, but neither was it what we think of as modern nationalism. According to Lieberman, this process meant that when the European colonial powers arrived and tried to promote national identities to facilitate their administrative control they had much more to work with on the mainland than they did in island Southeast Asia, where nationalism became a postcolonial project carried out by nation-​building elites. Because Lieberman’s study focuses mainly on the formation of the charter states (Pagan, Angkor, Dai Viet, and Ahutya) and their efforts to break down the local cultures of the hill peoples, he only occasionally mentions how collective solidarities had also emerged on a smaller scale in the peripheral chiefdoms that preceded state formation in Southeast Asia. There was already an inter-​chiefdom geopolitics going on before the emergence of the states, and “we-​feeling” was already an important aspect of that process.

Specialized Trading States and Commercializing Empires The logic of tributary empires always had an economic aspect in the sense that empires use institutionalized coercion to extract resources. But very early in the Bronze Age, world-​systems in which tributary states predominated show, in the interstices between tributary states, the emergence of marginal polities that specialized in profiting from trade. These were semiperipheral capitalist city-​states: the elites in control of state power in these small states used what political and military power they had to facilitate profit-​making rather than the gathering of tribute.

59 Lieberman 2009, 40–​43.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  129 Here we are using a rather inclusive definition of capitalism in order to highlight a niche that emerged within the networks of exchange and military interaction: some polities were able to specialize in trading commodities.60 The first of these was Dilmun, probably located on the island of Bahrain in the Persian/​Arabian Gulf. The Dilmunites were intermediaries in the trade between Mesopotamia and Harappan cities that emerged in the valley of the Indus River in what is now Pakistan. Most of the polities that specialized in trade were maritime polities, because transportation over water is much less expensive than over land, and can be combined with seapower—​the use of watercraft for exercising coercion. A partial exception was the Old Assyrian city-​state located on the Tigris River in northern Mesopotamia. This was the city-​state of Assur, controlled by merchants who used donkey caravans to transport tin and copper along the trade routes connecting Cappadocia (now Turkey) with Mesopotamia.61 More famous, perhaps, are the Phoenician city-​states (Byblos, Sidon, Tyre) that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean. These combined merchant capitalism (buying cheap and selling dear) with the production of commodities for the carrying trade (imperial purple cloth, glass, Greek-​style statuary, etc.). The Phoenicians are also famous for spreading the use of the alphabet, in which written symbols represent sounds instead of ideas. These semiperipheral capitalist city-​states not only took advantage of existing trade networks. They expanded and intensified trade networks and provided incentives for producers to increase production for sale. The Phoenicians and the Greeks both established settler colonies in the western Mediterranean, and the Phoenicians also had an entrepôt at Moghador down the West African coast in what is now Mauritania. These colonies generally became independent competitors of the city-​states that had founded them, rather than parts of a larger empire. Carthage was somewhat of an exception in producing a rather large empire in the western Mediterranean and Iberia during its period of contention with the expanding Romans (see further Scheidel, Chap. 5 in Vol. 2). The West produced semiperipheral capitalist city-​states specializing in trade, including some of the Italian city-​states and the Germanic Hanseatic League in early modern times. Southeast Asia produced some of its own.62 The actions of the semiperipheral capitalist city-​states had a commercializing effect on the tributary empires, as kings became savvier about ways to benefit from the profit-​making activities of merchants without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The main challenge was letting the merchants and capitalists make money—​and taxing them—​while barring them from taking over. Tributary empires increasingly succeeded at this challenge as world-​systems became larger and more complex. 60 We use the term “commodity” in the Marxist sense of a standardized product that is produced for sale in a price-​setting market in order to make profit. So this includes both raw materials and finished luxury goods that were produced for sale. 61 Larsen 1976, 1987, 1992. 62 Chase-​Dunn et al. 2015.

130  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy

The Evolution of Global Governance Ancient and classical imperialism was mainly a matter of one state conquering adjacent states and extracting tribute. The Aztec, Incan, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman empires are all examples. This was the use of state power, especially military power, to extract resources from peoples. Empires of this kind expanded, reached their limits, and then eventually fell. Why did some states succeed at conquest while others failed and collapsed? Gerhard Lenski63 performed a factor analysis of cross-​cultural data that examined the intensity of warfare among polities. Lenski found that crucial advantages tended to accrue to polities that had larger populations, and hence greater military manpower, better weapons, and higher sociopolitical complexity. Efficient bureaucratic organization also facilitated the appropriation of resources. Most importantly, according to Lenski, the strongest cause was technological advantages, especially more efficient subsistence technologies.64 In a similar vein, Jared Diamond65 lists crucial factors that made a particular polity more likely to be able to defeat others: • A large, dense population, so that the polity was relatively immune to epidemic diseases; • A location within a continent oriented horizontally to the equator, so that the polity included large areas of temperate climate, rapid species spreading, and rapid cultural diffusion;66 • Suitable indigenous candidates for domestication of flora and fauna, so that the polity featured, in the form of extensive food surpluses and storage, an abundance of energy-​efficiency; • Sedentariness and internal stratification; • Relatively efficient, basic technologies of production, transportation, and communication, which in turn led to more proximate factors including the wide spread of epidemic diseases, the use of horses, steel weapons, gunpowder, guns, and oceangoing ships; and deployment of complex political organization and writing. Using historical data on Asian and North African empires from ancient Sumer to Sung China, Sergey Nefedov67 demonstrates the interplay between geographical conditions (including ecological carrying capacity and abrupt oscillations 63 Lenski 2005, 114–​116. 64 Of course, these forms of power cannot explain all successful conquests. The principle of semiperipheral development points to the numerous instances in which less centralized and technologically backward polities conquered older core polities to produce unusually large empires. Our study of polity upsweeps shows that more than half of these were the result of conquests by peripheral or semiperipheral marcher states (Chase-​Dunn et al. 2015). 65 Diamond 1997. 66 See also Turchin et al. 2006. 67 Nefedov 2008.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  131 of it), demographic cycles (reckoning with epidemics as well as growth or contraction phases), and a wide range of other factors—​including social structural transformations (accounting for bureaucracy, army structure, and balancing of powers between the state, elites, and commoners), cultural diffusion, fundamental technological and military innovations, revolutions, wars, and empires—​in order to predict the cycles and crises of polities. As with Lenski, the principal factor in Nefedov’s theory is technology—​meaning fundamental innovations that increase the production of food and thus extend ecological capacity. Military innovations in weaponry or tactics, as well as new forms of social organization such as tax reforms or state bureaucracies, were also important factors. These innovations generated competitive advantages and the capability to expand territorially at expense of neighbors.68 Certain developments eventually set the stage for human rights as an ideology that would increasingly moderate class relations within polities, and moderate both warfare and cooperation among polities. Although state power itself was a key to the success of the empires and tributary states, they also needed to overcome the resistance of the conquered populations in order to effectively gather resources. World religions that separated kinship from membership in a moral community emerged in the peripheral and semiperipheral regions of the world empires, and were eventually taken over by the imperial centers.69 These religions (Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam) located the agency for incorporation into the moral community at the level of the individual, rather than through kin ties. These world religions constituted both the conquerors and the conquered as members of the same moral community. This reduced resistance but it also provided a vocabulary for conquered peoples to make claims on the emperor.

Sex and Empire Walter Scheidel’s70 fascinating discussion of empires and harems employs an evolutionary psychology approach to explain why men with power wanted to gain sexual access to large numbers of women. Wealthy and powerful kings could have both the R and the K reproduction strategies.71 However, Scheidel in his article72 did not try to explain why monogamy became the predominant form of marriage in modern global culture, even for rich and powerful men. Most polities had allowed polygyny (one husband, more than one wife) for a small number of men. Human instincts 68 Nefedov 2008, 23. 69 Harris 1977. 70 Scheidel 2009b. 71 In ecology, the R strategy is pursued by weeds and most fish. They have a large number of offspring and only a few survive. The K strategy, which is better in more stable contexts, involves having only a few offspring, spending a large amount of resources on these as the bearers of the genetic future of the parents. Kings could do both by having a legitimate male heir with their primary wife (the queen) and also having a lot of children with their concubines. 72 Scheidel 2009b.

132  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy probably have not changed much over the past 2,000 years, but there are few polities remaining that allow wealthy and powerful men to have more than one wife (at the same time). So evolutionary psychology cannot supply the answer. In subsequent work, Scheidel73 has tried to address what is known about the causes of what he calls the institution of “socially imposed universal monogamy” (SIUM) and its displacement of polygyny74 in world history. A  purely historicist explanation would note that the Romans and the Greeks were monogamous and the polities that descended from them eventually took over the world and so monogamy was imposed by the powerful. Christianity got monogamy from the Romans, as a perusal of the Old Testament will make plain. Christians took over most of the world as a result of European colonialism and the rise of industrial capitalism. Thereby, the rules of the winners became the global moral order. This is probably the best overall explanation, although Scheidel75 points out that there is very little research on the history of colonialism and monogamy that would substantiate this account. In the meantime, Henrich, Boyd, and Richardson76 have published a study of polygyny and monogamy that suggests a number of ways in which SIUM is functional for society. This raises the issue of the direction of the causal arrow between winners and monogamy. Is SIUM a competitive advantage in competition among polities, and if so, how does that work? Since the gender birthrate is naturally 50/​50, elite polygyny deprives some men of wives. This is a well-​known problem for modern religious groups who practice polygyny. Many young men have no prospect of marrying because older richer men have taken most of the women. Henrich, Boyd, and Richardson77 contend that monogamous marriage systems reduce competition among males for mates and decrease the number of unattached males who are an important group in the commission of violent crimes. So monogamy decreases competition among men and lowers the crime rate. And women also benefit from SIUM because it reduces the average male/​female age difference within marriages, lowers the fertility rate, and reduces gender inequality and within-​household violence. Henrich, Boyd, and Richardson78 also contend that polygyny may have been functional for war-​making empires because it increased the size of the pool of unattached young males who could serve as soldiers who were strongly motivated to capture women from other polities. But it is also possible that SIUM facilitates greater solidarity between elites and their soldiers than does elite polygyny. Greater solidarity between classes is a big 73 Scheidel 2009c. 74 Polygamy is a general term that includes both polygyny (one husband, more than one wife) and polyandry (one wife and more than one husband). Polyandry exists but is very rare. Polygyny was allowed in the majority of human societies. It attained extreme forms in the gigantic harems of kings in ancient and some classical empires (Scheidel 2009b), but has now been replaced by monogamy as the predominant form of marriage. 75 Scheidel 2015. 76 Henrich et al. 2012. 77 Henrich et al. 2012. 78 Henrich et al. 2012.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  133 advantage in competition among states. Soldiers and citizens are more likely to identify with, and to support, leaders who seem to follow the general moral rules regarding legitimate access to women. This might have been an important source of Greek and Roman advantages over their polygynous opponents. However, once monogamy became sanctified by the religion of the European West, it became part of the cultural package that European colonialism imposed on most of the rest of the world. So economic and military power, as well as possible functional advantages, must be an important part of the explanation of the spread of SIUM. And once a global moral order has emerged, emulation of global modernity also should be noted as a factor. China was never a colony, but the Peoples Republic made polygyny illegal in 1955. Laws prohibiting polygyny were adopted in 1880 in Japan as part of the modernization effort that was the Meiji Restoration. Postcolonial India made polygyny illegal in 1953.79 Therefore, the spread of monogamy was a matter of both imposition and emulation. This is relevant for our examination of geopolitics and imperialism because it demonstrates the emergence of a global moral order that somewhat modifies the operation of the “might makes right” logic of geopolitics.

From Territorial to Neo-​colonial Imperialism In the Bronze Age some powerful city-​states that specialized in trading, rather than conquering adjacent neighbors, developed a different kind of empire: they established colonies in distant regions to facilitate their trade. In the modern world-​ system, core nation-​states deployed this commercial form of colonialism. This development marked a shift in emphasis from tribute-​gathering to profit-​making. A capitalist world-​system eventually emerged. Modern colonial empires replicated, on a much larger scale, a tactic that some Phoenician and Greek city-​states had pioneered at interstices between tributary empires. Imperialism evolved through three epochs: tributary imperialism, colonial empires, and neo-​colonial dependency. The old form of tributary empire—​which involved conquering adjacent territory and extracting tribute and taxes—​yielded to the emergence of thalassocratic empires in which a “mother country” established dominion over distant colonies in order to facilitate competitive commodity production and profit-​making. Meanwhile commodification had been expanding and deepening since the Stone Age. The modern, Europe-​centered world-​system has become increasingly capitalist in waves of commodification and decommodification since the thirteenth century ce.80 These waves of capitalism corresponded to the increasing size of the hegemonic core state, and to changes in the structure of interpolity relations.

79 Henrich et al. 2012, 657.

80 Chase-​Dunn and Lerro 2014.

134  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy

Map 3.1.  Old World Trade Routes, c. 1340 Copyright: Eric Ross.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  135 The question of when capitalism became the world-​system’s predominant mode of accumulation remains contentious. No human society has ever commodified everything:  moral and political orders shelter some aspects of life from market forces and privatization. Waves of deepening commodification, interspersed by periods of decommodification, have accompanied shifts in the dynamics of political power and in the logics of domination and exploitation. All world-​systems large and small have something like global governance in the sense that patterns of interaction among polities become at least partly institutionalized and develop a distinct logic. In Europe the interstate system (what political scientists usually call the “international system”) was formalized in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which proclaimed that states should recognize and protect each other’s territorial sovereignty; the treaty required that any state breaching the territorial sovereignty of another state would face punishment by all the other states. This formal interstate system did not apply to colonies outside of Europe, and many of the European great powers continued to hold or expand colonial empires in distant regions. But the Westphalian system became extended to the rest of the world as a result of decolonization movements that established sovereign states in what had formerly been dependent colonies. These occurred in two main waves (see Figure 3.2). The European interstate system extended to the rest of the world via these waves of decolonization and by incorporating China and the few other states that were never colonized by European empires. The result is a single global system of states. Waves of Decolonization

40

Number of colonies that gained independence

35 30 25 20 15 10 5

1750 1755 1760 1765 1770 1775 1780 1785 1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830 1835 1840 1845 1850 1855 1860 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

0

Year

Figure 3.2.  Waves of decolonization as shown by the number of colonial governors sent home. Source: Henige 1970.

136  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy

Map 3.2.  Old World Trade Routes, c.1490 Copyright: Eric Ross.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  137 The shift toward profit-​making as the main form of accumulation changed the game in which core powers rise and fall. In the contemporary system the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers has replaced the rise and fall of territorial empires. Contemporary core powers do not try, or do not succeed if they try, to conquer neighboring core states. Rather they use their military power to set up a world in which they can succeed at making profits. Waves of decolonization since the late eighteenth century transformed the system of colonial empires into a system of neocolonialism in which global power is exercised through the hegemony of the United States, international governmental organizations, financial exchanges, and property arrangements that allow actors in rich and powerful countries to exploit non-​core peoples. The demise of the old territorial and colonial empires resulted in a single global polity of formally sovereign states and a system in which economic power is stronger than it has ever been at the level of a whole world-​system. Such a system may be ripe for the emergence of a true world state, though that has not happened yet and may not happen soon because the interstate system is highly institutionalized. The political globalization evident in the trajectory of global governance evolved because the great powers and the largest firms were in heavy contention with one another for geopolitical power and for economic resources, but also because resistance emerged within the polities of the core and in the regions of the non-​core. The series of hegemonies, waves of colonial expansion and decolonization, and the emergence of a proto-​world-​state occurred as the global elites tried to compete with one another and to contain resistance from below. We have already mentioned the waves of decolonization:  other important forces of resistance were slave revolts, the labor movement, the extension of citizenship to men of no property, the women’s movement, and other associated rebellions and social movements. These movements affected the evolution of global governance in part because the rebellions often clustered together in time, forming world revolutions.81

World Revolutions Institutions of global governance have evolved as they have over the centuries because core states and core capitalists compete with one another for global hegemony in a context in which subordinate classes and peoples in non-​core areas resist the power structures of global governance. Hegemony and resistance co-​ evolve and this tension is a major factor in structuring world historical social change. Resistance and rebellion from subordinate classes and from the non-​core have tended to cluster together in time as the contradictions of power, domination, and exploitation have produced somewhat similar conditions in non-​core regions distant from one another. Even though the non-​core rebellions and resistance

81 Arrighi et al. 1989; Wallerstein 2004.

138  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy

Map 3.3.  Mercantilist World-Economy, c. 1530–1776 Copyright: Eric Ross.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  139 movements were not very directly connected with one another in earlier centuries, their synchronous consequences converged on the core states, and especially on the hegemon. This phenomenon of widespread synchronous resistance and rebellion is termed “world revolution.” The world revolution of 1789 involved the colonial rebellion in North America, the French revolution, numerous slave revolts in the Western Hemisphere, and the Haitian revolution. The outcome of the struggle between Britain and France for hegemony was shaped by rebellions in the periphery: the Haitian revolution cost the French state the loss of a major source of revenue, and the newly decolonized United States battled the British in the War of 1812 while Britain was engaged in deadly combat with Napoleon. The world revolution of 1848 involved democratic, labor, and nationalist demands in Europe, but in the United States it mainly resulted in the emergence of several new Christian sects and utopian communities, many of which perpetuated socialist and communist ideas already popular in Europe. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter-​Day Saints (Mormons), advocated community ownership of property. In China the Taiping rebellion combined the impetus of earlier Chinese landless peasant rebellions (e.g., the White Lotus religion) with the impetus of Christian millenarianism. A preacher from Tennessee gave Christian tracts to the leader of the Taiping, who concluded that he himself was Jesus’ s brother. With this development, an Asian cycle—​of dynastic rise and fall, and of peasant rebellion—​converged with the Western world revolution of 1848. The world revolution of 1917 included the upheaval in Russia during which the Bolsheviks came to state power, the collapse of the Second International’ s vow that European workers should not fight one another, and the foundation by Vladimir Lenin of the Third International that met in Moscow from 1919 to 1927. It also included the Mexican and Chinese revolutions and the Seattle general strike of 1919. American communist John Reed from Portland in 1919 authored a famous account of the Russian Revolution entitled Ten Days That Shook the World. In the world revolution of 1968, workers in France and Italy, and students in Mexico and China, joined a revolt of students and soldiers in the United States. The world revolution of 1989 was a rebellion against Soviet domination in Eastern Europe that brought global issues of human and civil rights to the attention of more progressives in the West. Some see the global justice movement and waves of protest that have emerged since the Zapatista revolt of 1994 as the emergence of another world revolution—​a rebellion against the neoliberal globalization project and the neo-​conservative imperial project of the United States.82 World revolutions have become much more directly interconnected as social movements have become increasingly transnational, and popular groups and global parties have emerged to engage in politics on a global scale. They also have become more frequent, and now seem to be overlapping one another in time.

82 Chase-​Dunn and Niemeyer 2009.

140  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy

Hegemon

Hegemony

Hegemonic Rivalry

Figure 3.3.  Core configurations with and without hegemony.

The ongoing evolution of capitalism and of global governance is significantly a response to resistance and rebellions from below. As Boswell and Chase-​Dunn83 contend, capitalism and socialism have dialectically interacted with one another in a positive feedback loop resembling a spiral. Labor and socialist movements came obviously in reaction to capitalist industrialization. In addition, the World Revolution of 1917 and the waves of decolonization spurred the rise of US hegemony and of post–​World War II global institutions. Hegemony in the contemporary interstate system primarily refers to a time period, “in which the ongoing rivalry between the so-​called ‘great powers’ is so unbalanced that one power can largely impose its rules and its wishes . . . in the economic, political, military, diplomatic, and even cultural arenas” (see Figure 3.3).84 Elaborating on Immanuel Wallerstein’s conception of hegemony, we would suggest a more comprehensive list of comparative advantages that are involved in contemporary rise and fall. These include technological-​economic (technological, production, commercial, and financial), military-​political (military, political, and diplomatic), sociocultural (institutional, normative, and cultural). Alternately, a more Gramscian understanding of hegemony deepens perspectives on the geopolitical evolution of the modern world-​system. According to Giovanni Arrighi,85 the hegemon necessarily inculcates a universalistic ideology portraying its interest as the general interest. The moral high ground matters because power based only on coercion is far too expensive. The “civilizational mission” or “making the world safe for democracy” serves to paint hegemony as leadership. Further advantage accrues



83 Boswell and Chase-​Dunn 2000. 84 Wallerstein 2000, 255. 85 Arrighi 1994.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  141 when the hegemon also has a comparative advantage in leading technologies and can sell or give away goods that are widely valued. From the beginning the interstate system was led by a series of hegemonic core powers that rose and fell—​the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the British in the nineteenth century, and the United States in the twentieth century. Global governance has been, and still remains, largely governance by hegemony, with a cycle of hegemonic rises and falls consolidated in violent contests among contenders—​ world wars. World wars (land-​based, destructive wars involving almost all the major military powers of the epoch) in the modern capitalist world-​economy were:  the Thirty Years’ War (1618–​1648), when Dutch interests triumphed over Habsburg in the world-​economy; the Napoleonic Wars (1792–​1815), when British interests triumphed over French; and long Eurasian wars (1914–​1945), when US interests triumphed over German and Japan.86 This governance by hegemony continues to be the strongest institutional element in the contemporary system. Yet over the last 200 years a modicum of global regulation emerged via international political organizations overlaying the interstate system. After the Napoleonic Wars, Britain, Russia, Prussia and the Austro-​ Hungarian Empire created the Concert of Europe, an international organization aimed to help support monarchies and to prevent future revolutions of the French type and episodes of the Napoleonic kind. The Concert of Europe disintegrated over disagreements between its main sponsors, but was followed after World War I by the League of Nations, and after World War II by the United Nations and the international financial multilateral organizations—​the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and eventually the World Trade Organization. These and regional military treaty organizations such as NATO, SEATO, etc., formed a proto-​world-​ state overlaying the extant national states. These multilateral institutions did not dismantle the interstate system. Rather they supplemented the system of separate territorial sovereign states, which had only recently been extended to newly decolonized regions. (see Figure 3.4). US founding and support of these multilateral institutions has helped legitimate the hegemonic leadership of the United States. Michael Mann points out a specific feature of the current hegemon: unlike previous empires, the United States does not seek a direct empire of overseas colonies, but rather it exercises influence over an informal empire of client states.87 Yet because the interstate system and governance by hegemony are still the mainstays of global governance, the multilateral institutions depend heavily on the goodwill of the most powerful states. And the United States still unilaterally controls the bulk of global military capability. Another important aspect of contemporary global governance is based on the expansion and proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). These voluntary associations have become important players in world politics, especially

86 Wallerstein 2000, 258. 87 Mann 2013, 275.

142  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy International organizations

UN organizations

Regional integration Projects (EU, NAFTA etc.) Nation-states Local politics

Private global players - Multinational corporations - Media - International banks

National and global civil society - NGOs - Interest organizations - Science

Figure 3.4.  Levels of action in the architecture of global governance. Source: Peter Berthelsen (based on Kennedy et al. 2002, 143 and Held and McGrew 2002, 66).

in the non-​core, where in the era of neoliberalism they have taken on many of the functions formerly performed or claimed by national states. Some NGOs are supported by core states88 and play supportive roles in favor of the interests of their sponsors, while others have important relations with anti-​systemic transnational social movements and play an important, if contentious role in global civil society. So the formation of a true global state, with a monopoly of legitimate violence, is not near. Even the existing institutions of global governance are illegitimate insofar as they violate the notions of democracy that have become accepted by most of the world’s peoples. While global democracy would mean majority rule on a global scale, global governance by hegemony is undemocratic. There is a world military force—​that of the United States—​but its commander-​in-​chief is not elected by the peoples of the world, only by the citizens of the United States. The only valid explanation for this power is “might makes right.” So contemporary global governance is, in this sense, illegitimate.

Systemic Crises and Future Possibilities In the 1970s the world-​system entered a long period of economic stagnation. Core states suffered a sharp decline of profits in manufacturing as Germany and

88 E.g., Robinson 1994.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  143 Japan finally caught up with the United States.89 Many industries relocated from core countries to semiperipheral and peripheral countries with lower wage levels. Unemployment, underemployment, and more precarious employment increased in many areas. Much investment in the core shifted from production to financial services. Governments’ total debt rose. Meanwhile the United States had lost a major war against a small country—​Vietnam. Soon the United States, Western Europe, and Japan became economic equals, engaging in a competition among themselves.90 US economic hegemony declined in steps since its huge predominance after World War II, when it had 35 percent of world GDP. At the end of 2014 China became the biggest economy in the world (having produced Intl$ 17.6 trillion worth of GDP PPP in 2014, compared to Intl$ 17.4 trillion of the US).91 In addition, the United States has lost its commercial edge, as China became the world’s biggest merchandise trader in 2013 (totaling US$ 4,159 billion of imports and exports, compared to US$ 3,909 billion of the US).92 It is likely that US technological, production, commercial, financial, military-​political, and sociocultural comparative advantages will continue to decline. The hegemon’s increasing reliance on military superiority as an instrument of foreign policy may be partly due to the decreasing availability of other advantages. This seems redolent of the “imperial overreach” that was an important characteristic of British hegemonic decline. In any case, the contemporary global system is rapidly becoming politically and economically multipolar. Though a new hegemon may rise, meanwhile we face continued political-​economic rivalry among increasingly equal contenders. Immanuel Wallerstein93 has predicted that the future rivalry among states is more likely to tilt toward Asia as Japan and China increasingly cooperate in alliance with the United States and that this bloc will increasingly compete with Europe. Wallerstein94 notes the pattern in the modern world-​system in which a sea/​air power tends to defeat a land-​based power. On this basis he contends that the sea/​air power of Japan (with China as a partner), with the help of the previous hegemonic power, the United States, is likely to triumph over the land-​based power—​the European Union (with Russia as its ally). Another possible outcome is a second round of US hegemony based on comparative advantages in higher education and high technology (in biotechnologies, green technologies, and nanotechnologies) and related new lead industries,95 together with its unusually flexible institutional structures.96 89 Brenner 2002. 90 Wallerstein 2006. 91 International Monetary Fund 2015. 92 World Trade Organization 2015. 93 Wallerstein 2006. 94 Wallerstein 2000, 439–​441. 95 Modelski and Thompson 1994 point out the importance that the rise of industries that apply new technologies have been in the process of hegemonic rise and fall (what they call the power cycle). New lead industries, such as factory production of cotton textiles in the early nineteenth century, were important for the growing centrality of the British hegemony in the world economy, but eventually the comparative advantage in a new lead industry declines as competitors emerge abroad. Keeping hegemony means staying ahead of the curve, but this is difficult to sustain, so hegemons end up using their centrality in global economic circuits to make profits on financial services rather than production. This sequence describes well both the British and the US hegemonies. 96 Chase-​Dunn et al. 2011, 17–​18; Galtung 2009.

144  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy Wallerstein97 also contends that the modern world-​system has entered, since the 1970s, into a systemic and structural crisis that will lead to the emergence of a qualitatively different kind of world-​system in the next several decades. The systemic contradictions of capitalism have produced system-​level asymptotes (ceilings) that cannot be transcended within the logic of capitalism. These are the long-​run rising cost of labor, increases in taxation, and the increasing cost of raw materials. These rising costs will sooner or later make it unprofitable to engage in capitalist investment, and so a new system will emerge. Wallerstein contends that the new system could take the form of global egalitarian democracy or a global tributary state in which the elite uses state power and coercion to continue to extract surplus product from the global working class. According to Wallerstein, the world revolution of 1968 was a turning point that marked a decline of centrist liberal ideology; this decline undermined the global political culture that had undergirded the main institutions of the capitalist world-​ system.98 Moreover, capitalists have experienced new pressures to raise wages, new pressures to source raw materials, and new pressures to pay for a wide range of expenses that they previously were able to externalize—​expenses that are ecological (e.g., waste disposal), infrastructural (e.g., roads, communications, electrical power), and transactional (e.g., taxation in exchange for state provision of security, infrastructure, and social services, including education, health, employment, and pensions).99 As capitalism reaches its limits to growth, captains of industry can continue to relocate production facilities from urban cores to rural peripheries where costs are lower. But there are a diminishing number of locales with low ecological standards, cheap raw materials, low taxation levels, modest welfare expectations, and a suitable labor force (cheap, disciplined, and skilled). Previously profitable production in China, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan is becoming more expensive. And wages are also going up in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. Due to the export-​oriented industrialization in those countries, local workers now expect and demand higher wages, and so earn more. Further, as these workers access more opportunities for education and employment, and experience a rise of average standards of living, they increasingly decide to have fewer children. Meanwhile the basic contradictions (or paradoxes or tensions) of capital threaten the perpetuation of the capitalist system. These include the domination of exchange value over use value; financial speculation decoupled from the social value of labor; unresolved tensions that set private property and individual interests against public property and collective interests; the state’s incapacity to mediate these tensions; and capitalists’ ongoing, private appropriation of the collective wealth of dispossessed workers, and a general, growing incapacity to slow the redistribution of wealth upward. At some foreseeable point, previously applied “fixes” will become too costly

97 Wallerstein 2011, 35. 98 Wallerstein 2004, 77. 99 Wallerstein 2004.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  145 and politically unacceptable.100 Then only a fundamental transformation or systemic collapse will resolve these contradictions. The capitalist world-​economy—​which was itself proceeded by other qualitatively distinct modes of accumulation—​is highly unlikely to last forever: Eventually it will evolve into another kind of system, perhaps after some global catastrophe brought on by inter-​imperial rivalry101 or ecological disaster, or some combination of the two. Given the destructive potential of modern weaponry, such another war among powerful states would likely disintegrate the modern world-​system. Aggravated by ecological collapse, it could be a mighty catastrophe from which recovery would be very slow. A happier possibility would be a transformation of existing institutions, granting the global proletariat more rights and providing higher standards of living at the expense of the global capitalist class. But this option may be unlikely, given that the total amount of required resources would be immense, especially during a global economic decline, and especially while rising popular demands might prove impossible to satisfy because of environmental constraints. A more probable future scenario—​supported by the long-​term trend toward increasing democracy and global state formation—​would be the emergence of a democratic global government. A global democracy that represented the interests of the world’s peoples and that required a majority of them to consent regarding major decisions that affect their lives might be successfully promoted by a network of alliances among progressive social movements and political regimes (for example, there have been provocative proposals advanced as alternatives from Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, and South Africa, and in many discussions at the World Social Forum.102 A useful distinction can be made between exploratory and normative forecasts. Exploratory forecasts—​grounded on available data and aiming to analyze future perspectives objectively, in light of known causal interconnections and most feasible outcomes—​tend to be reliable for a system that is functioning within known parameters. But in times of systemic chaos, parameters tend to be unpredictable. Then a certain small impetus—​particularly at a bifurcation point—​becomes more likely to result in systemic change. So the more a system is in chaos, the more relevant normative forecasts—​ based on agentive social change—​ become. Such forecasts start from values. They portray a desired vision of a future and seek opportunities to reach it. The transformations can be revolutionary, interstitial (e.g., erecting new structures within the old), or symbiotic with the old system (e.g., social democratic).103 The real utopias approach, elaborated by Erik Olin Wright, studies and promotes desirable and achievable alternatives to contemporary institutional structures that demonstrate the falsehood of the claim that there is no alternative to capitalist

100

Harvey 2014. Patomaki 2008. Chase-​Dunn et al. 2011, 24–​25. 103 Wright 2011, 303–​304. 101 102

146  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy globalization. Examples range from worker-​owned enterprises and crowdfunding, to guaranteed basic income and empowered participatory governance.104 Wright’s approach complements that of Michael Burawoy’s105 promotion of public sociology—​ reflexive knowledge for the general public and provision of helpful information to social movements by social scientists who are also social activists.

Conclusions So, what can be concluded regarding the questions we have raised about the evolution of geopolitical institutions, imperialism, and warfare? We asked whether or not there was ever an age in which competition among polities was completely unmediated by shared cultures. And we wondered whether or not institutions and culture have come to matter more (or less) as polities became more complex and hierarchical. And we also asked whether or not there was a sociocultural evolutionary trend that was (is) analogous to the tendency in biological evolution to transition from predation to parasitism to mutualism in interpolity systems, or do they all operate according to a similar underlying geopolitical logic in which might makes right? As we said in the beginning, competition and conflict among groups of organisms are not unique to humans. The ecology of territoriality is an important component of Darwinian selection in biological evolution, and this sometimes involves competition among groups. But in this study we focus mainly on humans who already had language and institutions even when competing groups were very small nomadic foraging bands. So our survey begins with the Paleolithic, the Old Stone Age, when nomadic hunter-​gatherer bands were autonomous polities that competed with one another for natural resources. It is clear that geopolitics has always been important, but it has changed its form as polities and relations among them have become more complex and more hierarchical. Geopolitics was already cultural and institutional when societies were very small because the definitions of group membership and of otherness were culturally constructed using a discourse about kinship. The consensual moral order was even more consequential in these small-​scale systems than it became later, because markets and states that are relatively less dependent on normative consensus had not yet emerged. So the moral order was more important when it was the only institutional game in town. Imperialism, on the other hand, did not exist among very small-​scale human polities. It emerged and has evolved, taking different predominant forms in different epochs. But it emerged much earlier than is usually supposed by scholars who study states and empires. We found that territoriality and interpolity alliances and enmities were very important in relations among sedentary hunter-​gatherer tribelets in precontact Northern

104 105

Wright 2011. Burawoy 2005.

Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism  147 California. Interpolity alliances were cemented by reciprocal gift-​giving and by marriage alliances in which a headman would marry the daughter of a headman from another polity. Warfare was institutionalized as line and raid wars, but the intensity of warfare was relatively low. Masculine identities were constructed more around the role of hunter than the role of warrior. Though there was competition and conflict among small-​scale polities in this system, there was nothing in the way of imperialism in which some polities systematically extracted resources or labor from other polities. We described a somewhat unusual instance of economic imperialism in the Pacific Northwest where core societies were able to use their surpluses of food to obtain slaves from peripheral societies who exercised coercion on one another in order to obtain war captives for trade. This was an interesting early instance of economic imperialism even in the absence of commodified economic relations or the direct projection of force. We also discussed the importance of demographic power as revealed in the segmentary lineages of the Neur and Dinka pastoralists. This was another instance of pre-​state imperialism, but one in which, unlike the Pacific Northwest, the Neur core exercised coercion over the Dinka periphery. Geopolitics and core/​periphery exploitation are still important, though the rise of economic power and transnational institutions have altered the way that geopolitics works. The rise of chiefdoms and states led to the invention of new techniques of power that allowed core states to extract resources from distant peoples. This involved institutions that facilitated the extraction of tribute and the control of distant conquered polities. Administrative techniques allowed conquest to evolve from plunder to more sustained exploitation. But empires were still limited by the amount of resistance that was mounted against them. The emergence from the non-​ core of social movements with universalistic religious ideologies were appropriated by empires to more effectively legitimate their rule. This reduced resistance and made it possible for empires to last longer before they collapsed. The emergence of commodified wealth (money), goods, land, and labor reduced the importance of conquest as the main mechanism supporting complexity and hierarchy. The semiperipheral capitalist city-​states who were the agents of commodification since the Bronze Age eventually produced large-​scale regional trade networks. This led to the development of more sophisticated approaches to economic development even within the tributary empires, as kings learned to tax wealthy merchants rather than simply taking their property from them. The capitalist city-​states pioneered a new form of imperialism—​the colonial empire in which distant colonies were brought under control because of their important role in the provision of raw materials for the production of commodities or to facilitate transportation and communications. During the rise of Europe, core states themselves adopted colonial imperialism and the older territorial empires faded away. And then the nature of imperialism changed once again as a result of the waves of decolonization that have occurred in the modern world-​system. Rather than formal colonialism, a system of unequal exchange is reproduced through the

148  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy use of hegemonic foreign policy, clientelism, and international political and economic institutions. We contend that the hierarchical form that global governance now takes should not be called “empire” because it relies much more on consent and economic power than most empires did. But a true world empire could emerge in the future if a minority that is willing to use them to sustain its privileges further monopolizes mechanisms of control. Thus geopolitics and imperialism are still important. An emerging global moral order is also important, but remains in the background as military/​political and, increasingly, economic logics predominate in the contemporary global system.

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4 Empire and Military Organization Ian Morris

1. Introduction The history of empire is the history of organized violence. Almost all empires are born in violence, sustained by it, and die in it, too. Managing violence is “job number one” for empires. To be sure, managing violence is not the only job an empire must do, as Chapters 3–​14 in this book show clearly; but it is the job without which none of the other jobs matter. According to the maritime historian Nicholas Rodger, “To describe the eighteenth-​century British state, in war or peace, without mentioning the Royal Navy is a feat of intellectual virtuosity  .  .  .  as difficult as writing a history of Switzerland without mentioning mountains, or writing a novel without using the letter ‘e’.”1 The same applies to the military organizations of every empire in history. The chapters of Volume 2 demonstrate that imperialists over the ages have found many ways to manage violence—​so many, perhaps, that trying to boil them down into a single chapter is a fool’s errand. Consequently, instead of trying to catalog every arrangement ever attempted, I limit myself here to abstracting a few principles from the mass of data. All empires, I suggest, face much the same basic set of tasks and challenges on the military front, even if the forms these tasks take, their importance, and their relative weighting vary enormously. But despite such complications, no political organization can become an empire and survive if it fails at any of these tasks and challenges; failure at even one of them is fatal. That is why managing violence is “job number one” for empires. Definitional discussions are rarely exciting, but I do need to begin (section 2) with a few words about the two terms in my title, “empire” and “military organization.” I go on in sections 3 and 4 to set out the major tasks that imperial military organizations need to perform and the major challenges that empires must overcome to make this happen. In section 5, I sketch the forms these solutions have taken across the five thousand years that empires have existed, and in section 6, I offer a few concluding thoughts.

1 Rodger 2004, lxiii. Ian Morris, Empire and Military Organization  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0004.

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2.  What Are We Talking About? 2.1. Empires Peter Bang’s discussion in Chapter  1 of this volume shows clearly enough that historians do not agree over what the word “empire” should mean. But, like culture, religion, or pornography, it is the sort of thing that most scholars feel they know when they see it, and even without the benefit of consensus around a detailed definition, the editors felt able to identify 50-​odd case studies in imperialism for inclusion in these volumes. I suspect that most historians will not only agree that most of these count as empires, but also that few major empires have been left off the list. Five things seem to unite the empires in this book. First, they are political organizations. Churches, firms, families, and other kin-​based groupings can have imperial aspects, but none is an empire. Empires are states, run by governments, whether that means monarchies, aristocracies, democracies, or some hybrid. Second, empires wield coercive power, above all through the military organizations to which I will turn in a moment. However imperial it might look in some ways, no organization that lacks military power—​such as the interwar League of Nations—​is an empire. Third, empires dominate geographically extensive areas. There is no agreement on just how big a political organization with coercive powers needs to be to count as an empire, but nearly all the examples in this book controlled at least one million square kilometers.2 Fourth, within these large territories, the imperial government has priority in important respects over all other organizations. I am deliberately wording this criterion vaguely. No imperial government has ever controlled everything in the territories it rules, but on the other hand, if too many military, legal, economic, or cultural decisions escape its oversight, it ceases to be an empire in any meaningful sense. Fifth, there is a strong sense of foreignness between rulers and ruled in empires. This is what makes “empire” a distinct subcategory of the larger category of “state.” My first four criteria apply to all states, but this fifth criterion applies only to empires. All five criteria are fuzzy, and we should think of each as forming a scale on which specific societies score more or less points, with only a few societies—​roughly the 50-​some discussed in this book—​scoring enough to make it into the “empire” category. No society has ever been a “perfect” empire, scoring full marks on every dimension. Rather, empire is what the sociologist Max Weber called an “ideal type, achieved by the one-​sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-​sidedly 2 Taagepera 1978, 1979 remain useful surveys of the size of empires.

Empire and Military Organization  157 emphasized viewpoints into a unified mental construct. In its conceptual purity, this mental construct can never be found empirically in reality. It is a utopia.”3 The ideal-​type empire, then, is a political organization exercising significant coercive powers across a geographically extensive territory, within which it has priority in important ways over all other organizations and is perceived by its subjects as an alien, foreign force.4

2.2. Military Organizations The ideal-​type military organization can be defined more briefly as a group empowered by rulers to use force. These groups come in a staggering variety of forms, and one of the most important factors in an empire’s success is its ability to see which forms will work best for it and its willingness to adapt its force composition to circumstances. Once again, it is useful to range the possibilities along a spectrum, this time running from centralized organization to decentralized. At the centralized end are militaries directly administered by government bureaucracies. Their members are typically fed, housed, clothed, and paid salaries by the state, often have a complex hierarchy of ranks, and in some cases undergo lengthy apprenticeships or even formal education. Centralized military organizations therefore have huge logistical requirements and are normally the most expensive item in an empire’s budget. Only in the twentieth century ce did governments’ social spending come to rival and then overtake military expenditures. Almost every empire has had an army, in the sense of a centralized organization empowered to use violence on land, and in the last two centuries most empires have also established centralized police forces, distinguished from the army by being limited to operating within the empire’s territory, restricted in the amount of violence they can use, and charged with bringing enemies to court rather than killing them.5 (Spies, by contrast, have been around for millennia, and in modern empires are often a mirror image of the police, operating primarily outside the empire and outside the law.) Since the first millennium bce, many empires have also had centralized navies, authorized to use violence on water. All twentieth-​century empires had centralized air forces, and in the twenty-​first century, the American, Chinese, and Russian governments also operate centralized forces in outer space and cyberspace. At the other end of the spectrum are decentralized militaries. These are run as much in their own members’ interests as in those of the empire, and answer either loosely or not at all to government bureaucrats. Such groups normally rely more on 3 Weber 1949, 90. Emphases in original. 4 This definition of course draws on a large literature in the social sciences, in particular combining elements from the discussions of empire and state in Doyle 1986, 45; Tilly 1992, 1–​2; and Mann 1986, 112. See further, “Concept and Definition,” in Bang, Chapter 1, Volume 1 of the current work. 5 Blurring the distinctions, most armed forces now also have military police, lawyers, and courts martial of their own.

158  Ian Morris plunder and extortion than on salaries, and generally make up their own rules of engagement. Decentralized militaries can be inexpensive for the empire that uses them, but they are also difficult to control. Because decentralized militaries are cheap and need little logistical infrastructure, in the twenty-​first century most people think of them primarily as tools of resistance to imperialism, but empires have in fact regularly employed bandits, mobs, insurgents, militias, terrorists, and pirates. Decentralized organizations have been rare in the air (hijackers being the obvious exception) and almost unknown in outer space, but they are very prominent in cyber conflict, in the form of hackers. Empires also have a great deal of choice in how they recruit the members of their militaries. Decentralized groups typically rely on volunteers (whether that means drunken hooligans in mobs, committed ideologues in terrorist cells, or pirates only in it for the money), although they will often kidnap some of their members too, but centralized forces often combine volunteers with more extensive conscription. Until a few centuries ago it was common for empires to cultivate aristocrats who would fight as officers without pay or would even pay themselves for the right to hold commissions, and would take responsibility for raising peasant levies from their estates. More recently, most empires have shifted instead toward maintaining small professional forces in peacetime (often retaining an unofficial hereditary officer caste) and augmenting them with millions of conscripts when war breaks out. But this comes nowhere near exhausting the possibilities: plenty of empires have outsourced organized violence by hiring military contractors or foreign mercenaries, or even by inducing other societies to do their fighting for them. The link between these very diverse groups is that the empire’s rulers empower them to use force. Without this legitimacy, the organizations would simply be criminal gangs,6 and for Weber, the right to confer this legitimacy was the defining feature of a government. “Only certain political communities,” he argued, “are considered to be capable of ‘legitimizing,’ by virtue of mandate or permission, the exercise of physical coercion by any other community.” Empire is a circular argument: the main tool an empire has for convincing its subjects that its agents are the only people allowed to be violent is law, but law’s legitimacy rests on the empire’s ability to enforce it with violence. As Weber explained it, For the purpose of exercising and threatening such coercion, the fully matured political community has developed a system of casuistic rules to which that particular “legitimacy” is imputed. This system of rules constitutes the “legal order,” and the political community is regarded as its sole normal creator, since that community has, in modern times, normally usurped the power to compel by physical coercion respect for those rules.7

6 One of the thorniest definitional questions is what makes the difference between a state and a mafia. Gambetta 1994 is particularly good on this. 7 Weber 1968, 904.

Empire and Military Organization  159 Legitimacy and military power are inseparable. The more legitimate an empire appears relative to its internal and external challengers and/​or the greater its superiority in force seems relative to such rivals, the less likely it is to face challenges that actually require it to use force. On the other hand, it regularly happens that the more an empire uses force, the less legitimate it comes to seem. Asked in 1907 how the state’s violent response to peaceful protests two years earlier had changed his views of the Romanov Empire, one Russian peasant replied that “[f]‌ive years ago, there was a belief as well as fear. Now the belief is all gone and only the fear remains.”8 Ten years after that, the empire was all gone too. Machiavelli is best remembered today for saying that it is better for a ruler to be feared than loved, but, as he also stressed, the best thing of all is to be feared and loved.9

3.  The Tasks of Imperial Militaries Soldiers often say that the military’s main jobs are killing people and breaking things. By extension, we might say that an imperialist’s main job is channeling slaughter and destruction in directions that help the empire—​basically what Clausewitz had in mind when he called war “the continuation of policy with the admixture of other means.”10 Looking at the 50-​odd examples in these volumes, three main channels seem to be particularly useful to empires.

3.1. Conquest The first of these is conquest. Nearly all empires begin in military conquest and feed on a diet of it. To be sure, empires do not have to begin or grow this way; empire by invitation, in which one group willingly surrenders some or all of its sovereignty to foreigners, is also possible. However, in practice this rarely happened, except when it seemed like the lesser of two evils, with the alternative being violent conquest by a stronger empire. Sometimes this reality is very clear, as when many Greek city-​ states voluntarily joined the Persian Empire in 481 bce to avoid attack, and when many of the same states accepted Athenian dominance from the 470s on, again as a way to avoid Persian conquest. Similarly, in June 1940 the French and British empires seriously discussed merging, despite centuries of hostility, as an alternative to being forced into Hitler’s Reich. Even when fear of conquest was less immediate, it often provided the subtext for empire by invitation. The most striking cases—​even if neither fits squarely into our definition of empire—​are probably the decisions by the 13 ex-​British colonies in



8 Cited from Figes 2006, 203. 9 Machiavelli 1513, ch. 17.

10 Clausewitz [1832] 1976, 605.

160  Ian Morris North America in 1787 and six long-​time rivals in Western Europe in the 1950s to hand over much of their sovereignty to federal governments. Even though no one invaded anyone in either situation, both decisions were heavily influenced by fear of external aggression (from the British, French, and Spanish empires in the eighteenth century and the Soviet in the twentieth) and memories of terrible recent wars. Conquest was not necessary, but it focused the mind wonderfully. Empire by invitation can take many other forms, although all in the end seem to come back to conquest. Dynastic marriage and inheritance can create empires without bloodshed, but the unions nearly always end up having to be defended—​ or are destroyed—​by force. The Angevin Empire is a good example, assembled by inheritance in 1154, but almost constantly at war until decisively defeated at Bouvines in 1214; and Charles V’s Habsburg Empire, the fruit of countless clever marriages and timely deaths, dragged much of Europe into violence after 1519. Empire by inheritance is certainly not empire by conquest, but it tends to turn into empire by war anyway. Yet another alternative is what historians often call “informal empire.” In the most famous case, despite never having been conquered by Britain, much of the nineteenth-​century Middle East and Latin America were so thoroughly at the City of London’s mercy that their sovereignty was fatally compromised. However, Britain’s informal empire was created by economic means as an adjunct to the formal empire that it created through conquest, and empire by invitation was unimaginable without an accompanying empire by coercion. The same applies to the networks of dependent client kingdoms that imperialists have been using as an inexpensive adjunct since the Third Dynasty of Ur in the twenty-​first century bce. Every empire in this book began and expanded through conquest. Plenty of empires used non-​military methods, too, but we can probably conclude that military organizations able to conquer other polities are always necessary, even if not always sufficient, for empires.

3.2.  Managing External Relations After conquering an empire, the second main task for military organizations is in managing its external relations. In an essay written in 1804, Clausewitz concluded that there are really only two kinds of war, aiming “either to totally destroy the enemy . . . or else to prescribe peace terms to him.”11 The first of these is what I called conquest; the second, the military management of external relations. One form of this is often called “gunboat diplomacy,” using the threat of force, either defensively (to deter potential aggressors from acting) or aggressively (to bully other groups into complying with the empire’s wishes). Alternatively, actual violence can be



11 Cited from Howard 2002, 36.

Empire and Military Organization  161 unleashed, again either defensively or aggressively, but stopping short of annexing a defeated enemy. These categories overlapped and came in an astonishing variety of forms. At one extreme are campaigns like those of China’s Wudi emperor, who repeatedly sent armies hundreds of thousands strong out into the steppes in the 130s–​120s bce to terrorize the Xiongnu nomads into stopping raiding his border provinces; at the other, the kind of “savage wars of peace” memorialized by Rudyard Kipling,12 sometimes undertaken by just a handful of soldiers, sailors, or airmen (including those piloting their craft remotely) and often leaving little or no trace in the historical record. Most empires, including the most modern, have been engaged almost constantly in conflicts at various points on this spectrum. The place where force is applied most constantly to the management of external relations, though, is usually border control. Empires need to protect taxpayers living near their frontiers from being robbed by outsiders, usually want to control who comes and goes across these frontiers, and would often like to make anyone trading across the frontiers pay for the privilege (which, of course, also means chasing down smugglers who evade these costs). As a result, empires regularly station much of their military along their borders and often spend heavily to provide them with walls, forts, and fleets to make their jobs easier.

3.3.  Managing Internal Relations Finally, empires also use military organizations for managing internal relations. Often this means tasks that modern states and empires hive off functionally specific gendarmeries whose right to use force is strictly limited; but in premodern times, armies and navies were often the only tools available for overcoming resistance to the government, whether that came from unruly crowds, organized crime, or uprisings involving millions of subjects. Militaries could also be used to collect and escort tax revenues (although that might instead be subcontracted to private tax farmers), to protect trade routes and markets, and basically to provide force in any capacity that the empire’s rulers needed it. Some empires regularly used their militaries to enforce religious orthodoxy or other moral imperatives (such as nineteenth-​century Britain’s naval campaigns to suppress the slave trade), and most deployed them even in tasks that did not call for violence (such as construction or relief work), because the military was often the only organization able to provide enough manpower. It might almost be quicker to make a list of functions that military organizations don’t perform for empires than of those they do perform. Basically, pretty much any task we can imagine has been carried out by the military in some empire or another. However, at the level of abstraction required by this short chapter, conquest

12 Kipling 1899.

162  Ian Morris and managing external and internal relations do seem to cover the major roles. The bottom line, though, is that no empire can function without military organizations.

4.  The Challenges of Military Organizations However, while no empire can live without military organizations, living with them is not easy either. Two central problems—​how to pay for the military and how to control it—​have come up again and again.

4.1.  Funding Military Organizations The simplest way to fund military organizations is through plunder, because in addition to killing people and breaking things, militaries are also good at stealing things. We find the same basic pattern, which I like to call “low-​end empire,”13 in most of the earliest empires. A ruler surrounds himself14 with great warriors, whom he charges with the task of recruiting retinues. The warlords then bring these troops to fight for the ruler, who shares the plunder he wins with his lords. These lords then pass on smaller shares to their lieutenants, who in turn pass smaller shares to their foot soldiers, and so on. By the time the ruler has rewarded everyone adequately, he himself might keep only slightly more loot than his greatest magnates had received. That, however, is not necessarily a problem; even though the ruler has little wealth coming in, even less is going out, because he does not have to pay for much in the way of bureaucracy or standing armies. Decentralized militaries funded on this basis can create great empires. In the ninth century bce, plunder fueled Assyria’s conquest of much of the Middle East and the Zhou dynasty’s conquest of much of China’s Yellow River basin, and five centuries later, Rome conquered most of Italy using a cleverly modified version of low-​end imperialism. The great weakness of this system, though, is that it requires a constant supply of plunder. One result is a powerful internal dynamic favoring endless war, even when war is not necessarily in the empire’s interests; another result is the military’s disinclination to perform tasks that are not likely to generate much loot, even when those jobs are clearly essential. Not surprisingly, military elites in low-​end empires regularly turn on each other once they have plucked the lowest-​ hanging fruit, because while civil war is rarely in the empire’s interest, it is often the easiest way for decentralized militaries to steal more stuff. In some cases, this weakness forces empires to move toward an alternative, “high-​end” approach to military funding. This basically flips the low-​end model on

13 I explain what I mean by low-​and high-​end empires at greater length in Morris 2010, 228–​254. 14 Or occasionally herself. However, the story of empire and military organization is so strongly gendered that it seems reasonable to call rulers and commanders “he” throughout.

Empire and Military Organization  163 its head. Instead of inviting aristocrats to join him in war and then sharing out the takings, rulers cut these old-​fashioned elites and their decentralized forces out of the loop. In their place, rulers hire their own officers and troops, centralizing military institutions. Instead of funding the entire enterprise, plunder now becomes just an incentive for extra efforts (even in mid-​nineteenth-​century Western Europe, “prize money” from the sale of captured ships could make naval officers rich men), with financing instead resting on tax revenue. The tax-​and-​spend model had many advantages over plunder. Most obviously, it gave the ruler much more control over the military, and freed him from the addiction to short-​term profits to pay off his aristocrats. The steady income it provided made it easier to maintain standing armies and navies, which in turn made it easier to raise military standards (either by hiring long-​service professionals or by recruiting mercenaries). The scale of revenue involved—​premodern rulers regularly captured 2–​3 percent of their empires’ gross domestic product (GDP), and twentieth-​century governments drove this up above 50 percent—​also meant that militaries could become much bigger. It is hard to imagine an empire keeping 2 percent of its adult males under arms for centuries at a stretch, as Rome did, without a high-​end, tax-​based system, and plunder could not possibly pay for modern empires’ air forces and nuclear deterrents. The historian Keith Hopkins suggested that mobilizing enough cash to pay for a standing army of 300,000 men in fact acted as a major fiscal stimulus for the Roman Empire, which was forced to raise tax revenues in its rich interior provinces and then send the bulk of them to the army, which spent them on food in the frontier provinces where it was stationed.15 However, using taxes to pay for centralized military organizations has equally obvious drawbacks. First and foremost, it is very expensive. As I already mentioned, the military is typically by far the biggest item in an empire’s budget. Further, taxation is complicated; it calls for much bigger bureaucracies than had been needed to administer plunder, and not every empire found it easy to recruit enough literate and numerate functionaries to run their revenue systems effectively. Creating effective civil services, moreover, might also mean creating bureaucrats who were so important to the running of the military that—​as repeatedly happened in China—​ they turned into major political players, rivaling the emperor. And even when rulers could find enough bureaucrats who were willing to work with them, the taxpayers were probably not eager to hand over their money, and might demand concessions of all kinds. The most famous case is of course Britain’s American subjects in the 1770s, but most empires have found themselves locked in endless negotiations with tight-​fisted taxpayers. Empires had two options when, as often happened, they found themselves struggling to pay their militaries: they could lower their expenditures or increase their revenues. I will begin with cost-​cutting strategies, of which there were several. One was simply to ignore the problem, and even the best-​run empires regularly

15 Hopkins 2009.

164  Ian Morris allowed their troops’ salaries to fall months or even years into arrears. Troops typically tolerated a lot of financial abuse, because their own options were of course limited; but when rulers miscalculated and went too far, the results could be catastrophic. When England stopped paying its sailors in 1667, for instance, they struck sail to prevent their ships from being put to sea (hence the expression “striking” over wages), and Dutch raiders promptly burned or towed away much of the Royal Navy. China’s Han dynasty had an even worse experience when it stopped paying the troops guarding its western frontiers in the late second century ce. Their rebellion led not only to the loss of the western provinces, but also to the fall of the ruling dynasty and the breakup of the entire empire. A second cost-​cutting trick, used by almost all empires at one time or another, was to inflate the problem away by debasing the coinage or printing more paper money. The classic case here is the Roman Empire, which introduced a new coin called the antoninianus in 215 ce. In theory, this was worth two of the older denarii, but never contained more than 1.6 times as much metal; and between the 240s and the 270s, its silver content was reduced from about 40 percent (the rest being copper) to about 2 percent. The result was runaway inflation and a downward spiral into economic and military chaos. A third way to cut costs to bring them into line with income was to reduce the military’s bills by making troops self-​sufficient. Armies were often full of men conscripted straight off the farm; so, their masters reasoned, why not put those who were not actually fighting back on the farm and have them grow their own food? Many empires tried this, particularly for garrisons that were likely to stay in one place across multiple agricultural seasons, such as those along China’s thousand-​ mile frontier with the Inner Asian steppes. Modern empires have found their own variants, such as putting officers on half pay in peacetime, enrolling veterans in reserves that can be called up quickly in emergencies, or allowing military men to run businesses of their own. However, the inevitable loss of government leverage when soldiers do not depend on it for their incomes and of professionalism when troops put fending for themselves ahead of fighting or training mean that this is only ever a partial solution. Instead of reducing expenditure until it matches income, governments can of course try to increase income until it matches the demands of military organizations. This, however, is difficult. There are usually strict limits on how high an empire can raise taxes. In most premodern empires, the peasants who made up the bulk of the population were exploited just about as much as was possible without making famine a constant problem, and the variations in different empires’ tax rates came down not to humaneness but to the balance of power between governments and aristocrats. Basically, the more wealth landowners seized from farmers as rent, the less governments could seize as tax. As I mentioned earlier, premodern empires regularly appropriated 2–​3 percent of GDP, and going much above that normally meant squeezing the elites so hard that they were ready to consider civil war. Much the same applied to squeezing rich merchants. Most imperial rulers thought of

Empire and Military Organization  165 them as cash machines, paying out on demand, but those empires that indulged this urge too often—​such as Habsburg Spain—​quickly ran their economies into the ground and saw traders and financiers decamp. Only under the very special conditions of twentieth-​century total war have rulers been able to bite deeply into elite assets and income.16 The most important tool in increasing revenue, and arguably the most important tool in the entire history of imperial military organization, was debt. Ancient empires found it difficult to hoard vast amounts of bullion during peacetime to be ready for wartime demands, and confiscating elite fortunes, extracting forced loans, or abruptly increasing taxes to pay for wars usually created major political problems. Some rulers found a partial solution in taking loans (forced or not) from temples and churches, which were better placed to amass land and bullion in peacetime, but the bottom line was that through most of history, instruments of sovereign debt were so poorly developed that all empires struggled to pay their bills. Alexander the Great was effectively bankrupt when he invaded Persia in 334 bce. The outlines of a solution began taking shape in twelfth-​century ce Europe, with the creation of Italian banks big enough to lend rulers the kinds of sums they needed to make war. However, the fact that bankers could not sue empires that defaulted made the system highly unstable, and the answer only emerged in the early seventeenth century, when the Dutch Republic hit on the idea of creating a secondary market for government bonds. This allowed capitalists to buy pieces of the national debt and sell them, along with the interest they paid, to other investors. In combination with laws making sovereign default more difficult, this allowed Dutch governments to borrow on an entirely new scale and to spread repayments over generations. The Dutch fought almost constantly in the seventeenth century, but even though the national debt ballooned from 50 million to 250 million guilders between 1632 and 1752, the interest the government paid fell from 8.33 percent in the 1590s to below 2.5 percent in 1747. England added a crucial refinement to this fiscal revolution in 1694 by opening a national bank to manage the public debt, backed up by allocating specific taxes to pay interest on each bond issue. The novelist Daniel Defoe was only half-​joking when he wrote in 1725 that “credit makes the soldier fight without pay, the armies without provisions.”17 During World War II, after almost running out of money in 1941, Britain was able to borrow £3.6 billion, roughly three-​quarters of the nation’s entire prewar wealth. The bulk of it came from lenders within Britain’s own empire, although the United States took over most of the debt in 1946.18 The last repayment was only made in December 2006. Without the fiscal revolution that made this kind of long-​term borrowing possible, the military organizations that created modern empires would have been inconceivable. 16 Scheidel 2017. 17 Defoe 1725, vol. 1, ch. 25. 18 This was in addition to roughly £8 billion ($32 billion) worth of material that the United States provided under the Lend-​Lease agreement.

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4.2.  Controlling Military Organizations After finance, the biggest challenge in running an empire’s military organizations was probably what social scientists call the principal-​agent problem. People form organizations to accomplish tasks that are too big for any individual, but to make such an organization succeed, the person at the top—​the principal—​has to delegate powers to agents lower down the chain of command, who in turn delegate powers to subagents even further down the chain. Because all these agents are only human, they have agendas of their own, and these are not necessarily consistent with their principals’ plans. Consequently, principals constantly have to deal with agents who will not do as they are told. Clausewitz saw this as a primary factor in what he called “friction”: “The military machine,” he explained, “is basically very simple and very easy to manage. But we should bear in mind that none of its components is of one piece: each part is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction. . . . A battalion is made up of individuals, the least important of whom may chance to delay things and sometimes make them go wrong.”19 A principal walks a tightrope. If he keeps his agents weak by delegating few powers to them, they will find it harder to thwart his wishes—​but also harder to carry them out; while if he makes them strong by delegating great powers to them, they will be better placed to carry out his instructions—​but also better placed to resist them, and even, since the powers delegated to agents include control of armed men, to kill him. For thousands of years, principals have tried to limit these problems by imposing strict discipline in military organizations, with gruesome punishments for any hint of disobedience, but discipline only works if other members of the organization side with the principal rather than the rebel. “Orders” are always negotiations. “The machine itself begins to resist,” Clausewitz noted, “and the commander needs tremendous will-​power to overcome this resistance . . . the inertia of the whole gradually comes to rest on the commander’s will alone.”20 Generally speaking, the less centralized the military, the more severe its principal-​ agent problems. Hence the crucial importance of legitimacy: unless a ruler can convince his agents that it would be wrong of them to push every negotiation to the limit and exploit every opportunity for self-​aggrandizement, friction will soon paralyze the organization. Kings consequently devoted enormous ingenuity to raising the psychological costs of disobedience. Ninth-​century bce Assyrian kings, for instance, spent considerable amounts of time networking with the “Sons of Heaven” (mar banûti), the major landowners who ruled their own estates as virtual mini-​ kingdoms and provided the bulk of the empire’s troops. Monarchs visited them, brought them together at the capital for hunts, feasts, and festivals, and showered them with gifts and honors—​but not too many, because making the mar banûti over-​mighty spelled disaster.

19 Clausewitz [1832] 1976, 119.

20 Clausewitz [1832] 1976, 121, 104.

Empire and Military Organization  167 The second major strategy for principals in low-​end empires, pursued in tandem with cultivating the major agents, was to promote the idea that the gods wanted them to rule, which meant that agents who resisted the principal were guilty of blasphemy as well as treason. This required kings either to devote enormous energy to presiding over religious activities or to delegate such activities to religious agents whom they then had to cultivate just as assiduously as their military men—​yet almost every empire followed this path. Rebels pushed back with theories justifying resistance, such as the famous Chinese concept of a “Mandate of Heaven.” After the Zhou dynasty overthrew the Shang dynasty around 1046 bce, its rulers argued that the gods and ancestors had been so appalled by the Shang kings’ drunkenness and license that they had transferred their mandate to the Zhou instead. This was a propaganda success, although it had a built-​in time-​bomb: if the gods could withdraw their mandate from the Shang, they could withdraw it from the Zhou too, and after 810 bce, as the Zhou began suffering military reverses, increasing numbers of lords insisted that the gods had done just that. Shifting toward a high-​end empire solved some of these problems, but created new ones, too. Scale was the greatest of these. While low-​end kings had typically led their armies in person, high-​end rulers often just had too much to do. The classic case here is the Roman Empire, which regularly faced multiple simultaneous threats everywhere from the Tyne to the Tigris. Emperors constantly had to delegate control over enormous armies to agents, and their agents constantly repaid their confidence by turning these armies against them. Thus, Tacitus says, was “the secret of empire”21 revealed—​whoever has the biggest army has sovereignty. Roman and other emperors tried out every imaginable response, including frequent rotation of commanders, appointing only low-​caste generals whom other important agents might be unwilling to follow, delegating power only to their own kin, recalling or killing agents who proved too successful, and breaking their empires down into smaller units so a principal was always available to lead large armies in person; but at some point or other, every empire would find itself with a commander-​in-​chief whose willpower (as Clausewitz put it) was inadequate to overcome the machine’s resistance. Even China’s Tang dynasty eventually fell victim to the iron law of agency, despite its astonishing seventh-​century ce successes in keeping control over a million-​man army as it conquered much of Central Asia (an officer who moved even 10 men without permission faced a year in prison; one who moved a regiment risked strangulation). According to legend, in the 740s ce its emperor Xuanzong became more interested in pleasing his courtesan Yang Guifei than in managing his subordinates, and agreed to give her favorite general An Lushan command of much of the army on the northern frontier. In 755, An rebelled, and the only way for Xuanzong to defeat him was to give other generals even bigger armies (and to agree to their demand to execute his girlfriend Yang). The empire never recovered from the civil wars that followed.

21 Tacitus, Histories 1.4.

168  Ian Morris On a day-​to-​day basis, imperial rulers have to cut deals with mighty agents and make constant cost–​benefit decisions. Keeping the military paid, controlled, and busy either conquering or managing other problems is not easy. A few rulers have what Clausewitz called the “very highly developed mental aptitude for a particular occupation”22 that it demands. Most just muddle along, while a not insignificant number—​including Xuanzong—​are downright terrible at it.

5.  Militaries as Learning Organizations So far, I  have been looking at the functions of imperial militaries and the challenges involved in performing them very abstractly, as timeless realities equally relevant to Sargon of Akkad and Xi Jinping. However, if an empire is to last long, its militaries also have to understand how the environment of threats and opportunities in which they operate is evolving and to be able to adapt along with it. Particularly rapid changes in the environment have forced twenty-​first-​ century militaries to become acutely aware of the need to be effective learning institutions,23 but this issue is not in itself new. In one sense, the history of war is actually the story of how military organizations have worked out new ways to perform their tasks. In their book Hope Is Not a Method, former US Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan and strategic planner Michael Harper identify the three key elements in what they call “the learning challenge” as “the right culture, the knowledge itself, and access to the knowledge.”24 Unfortunately, the learning cultures and structures of all imperial militaries before the last few hundred years are black boxes to historians, but the stories our sources tell about their wars suggest that the best ancient and medieval armies, like the best modern ones, did excel at involving everyone, not just the top brass, in the educational process. In 56 bce, for instance, when Julius Caesar sent his Mediterranean-​style galleys against the big sailing ships of the Veneti tribe in Brittany, he discovered, to his horror, that “[o]‌ur ships were unable to harm theirs by ramming them (they were so strongly built) or, because of their height, to aim missiles at them with any success. For the same reason, it was difficult to board them with grappling irons.”25 But his sailors did not wait for their baffled superiors to tell them what to do: rigging up long poles with hooks on the end, they grabbed the ropes tying the yardarms to the masts on the Veneti’s ships and then rowed away hard, pulling down the sails. It worked, leaving the enemy vessels sitting ducks. On a larger scale, the strategist Edward Luttwak made a convincing case in the 1970s that the Roman Empire’s grand strategy evolved through three stages (of

22 Clausewitz [1832] 1976, 100. 23 See particularly Nagl 2002.

24 Sullivan and Harper 1996, 206. 25 Julius Caesar, Gallic War, 3.14.

Empire and Military Organization  169 relying on client kingdoms, preclusive frontier defenses, and defense in depth) between the late first century bce and the late third ce,26 even though Roman writers say next to nothing about such strategic pivots. This suggests (to me, at least) that learning was probably driven by men on the ground, from Hadrian’s Wall to the headwaters of the Euphrates, as much as by the emperors and senatorial elite on whom our ancient texts focus. However exactly they did it, imperial militaries have constantly adapted to their changing environments, producing a series of what analysts have recently taken to calling “Revolutions in Military Affairs” (RMAs). The analyst Andrew Krepinevich defines these as “compris[ing] four elements: technological change, systems development, operational innovation, and organizational adaptation,” and leading to “a dramatic increase—​often an order of magnitude or greater—​in the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed forces.” They happen “when the application of new technologies into a significant number of military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of conflict.”27 Spectacularly one-​sided victories, such as that of the US-​led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, seem to come about when one military has mastered the operational art required to exploit the latest RMA while its opponent has not,28 but with just a few exceptions from the classical Mediterranean, we only have enough evidence to trace this process in the last few centuries. However, it is clear enough that ever since empires began, those that spearheaded RMAs or adapted to them quickly prospered, while those that did not, did not. Every military historian has his or her own list of RMAs, but it seems to me that since the age of empires began there have been roughly a dozen major ones (Table 4.1). By my count, the first five were made in the Middle East or Inner Asia, the middle two in China, and the most recent five in Western Europe and North America. A further four RMAs pre-​date the rise of empires: the invention of stone weapons in Africa, probably about 2.4 million years ago; the invention of the bow and arrow, again in Africa, about 60,000 years ago; the invention of fortifications in the Middle East by 4300 bce; and the first bronze weapons and armor, also in the Middle East, by 3500 bce.29 In time, the first three of these RMAs all either spread to or were independently invented in most other parts of the world, but—​for reasons that remain unclear—​despite being able to produce beautiful metal ornaments, the civilizations of the New World never armed their soldiers with bronze. The first RMA to be associated with ancient empires, and perhaps the one that made them possible, was the invention of discipline. War among hunter-​gatherer bands and horticultural tribes is notoriously anarchic, relying much more on 26 Luttwak 1976. 27 Krepinevich 1994, 30–​31. 28 Biddle 2004. 29 I go through my list in detail in Morris 2014, 81–​287, 370–​377. Most archaeologists suspect that the famous “walls of Jericho,” dating around 9300 bce, were not actually fortifications at all (Bar-​Yosef 1986).

170  Ian Morris Table 4.1  More Than 2 Million Years of Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs) RMA

Date

Origin

Pre-​imperial era a. Stone weapons b. Bow and arrow c. Fortifications d. Bronze arms and armor

2.4 million years ago 60,000 years ago c. 4300 bce c. 3500 bce

Africa Africa Middle East Middle East

Imperial era 1. Discipline 2. Chariots 3. Mass infantry 4. Cavalry 5. Navies 6. Guns 7. Oceangoing ships 8. Fiscal-​military states 9. People’s War 10. Mechanization 11. Thermonuclear weapons 12. Computerization

c. 2450 bce c. 1700 bce c. 850 bce c. 800 bce c. 520 bce 1150–​1288 ce c. 1400 c. 1600 c. 1800 c. 1850 1952 1980s

Middle East Middle East/​Central Asia Middle East Central Asia Middle East China China Western Europe Western Europe/​North America Western Europe/​North America North America North America

ambushes than battles. Fighters tend to come and go as they please, closing for the kill only when they heavily outnumber an enemy and running away when they do not. But the Vulture Stele, a famous limestone relief carved at Lagash in what is now Iraq around 2450 bce, shows something very different. Apparently disciplined infantry with helmets, spears, and large shields advance in dense ranks behind their king Eannatum, trampling dead enemies. An accompanying inscription says that Eannatum had won a pitched battle against the city of Umma after it had occupied some of Lagash’s farmland. Eannatum then went on to incorporate Umma and much of the rest of Sumer into his kingdom. While Caesar’s Tenth Legion would probably not have been very impressed by the discipline of Eannatum’s army, genuine soldiers—​the kind of man who would rather die than disgrace his regiment—​probably began replacing wilder warriors on the battlefields of the Middle East in the later third millennium bce. Empire-​ making would have been impossible without soldiers who had internalized enough discipline and esprit de corps to be willing to get right up close to other men who were trying to kill them, and we should not be surprised that Mesopotamia, the most developed, urbanized, and organized region in the world at the time, was where they made their appearance. Any city that did not follow Lagash’s lead in creating a somewhat-​disciplined military would become its victim, which must have set off an organizational race. By the 2330s, Sargon of Akkad—​often praised or blamed as being the first man to create a true empire—​could even boast of the

Empire and Military Organization  171 “5,400 men I made to eat before me each day,”30 apparently referring to a centralized standing army. His subjects provided food, wool, and weapons so Sargon’s troops could train full-​time. Discipline, like most of the early RMAs, subsequently spread to or was reinvented in every part of the world, reaching Mesoamerica by the second century ce, southern Africa by the fifteenth, and Oceania in the eighteenth. The second RMA, though, was geographically more limited, because it depended on an animal that was not available everywhere: the horse. It would be hard to overstate the importance of horses in the history of empire. They should perhaps have had a chapter of their own in this book. The first people to find a military use for horses, though, were not the imperialists of the Middle East, but herders in what is now Kazakhstan. Horses were first domesticated here, around 4000 bce, and by 2100 bce, herders had bred bigger, leggier beasts (although still much smaller than modern breeds) and worked out how to yoke them to small, light chariots. By 1900, traders and/​or migrants (probably a group known as the Hurrians) had carried these across the Caucasus Mountains, and by 1700 were using them to carry men armed with the latest, high-​tech composite bows. Chariots literally ran rings around armies that had not changed much since Sargon’s day, turning plodding infantry into arrow fodder. So thick was their fire, said the later Indian epic the Mahabharata, that “the sun disappeared behind arrows shot back and forth.”31 Chariots exposed Middle Eastern armies’ limitations as learning institutions. The great powers of Egypt and Babylon were slow to adopt them, while smaller, marginal groups such as the Kassites, Hyksos, and Hittites were nimbler. Starting around 1700 bce, chariot-​users consistently defeated and sometimes overthrew the great empires. However, when the richest empires did finally embrace this RMA, their wealth and centralized institutions allowed them to field thousands of chariots at a time. Many historians would say that Egypt’s New Kingdom (conventionally dated ca. 1550–​1077 bce) was in fact the world’s first true empire, built on the back of its chariots. Chariots dominated the Middle East’s imperial wars after 1600 bce, reaching China around 1000 bce and India around 400 bce; when Caesar invaded Britain in 55 bce, the natives there, too, were riding chariots into battle. However, chariots did not spread beyond Eurasia, for the very good reasons that there were no horses to yoke to chariots in the Americas, Australasia, or Oceania, and while horses could be exported across the Sahara, the disease environment there was too hostile to them to make this worthwhile. Two further RMAs drove chariots back off Eurasian battlefields during the first millennium bce. One (RMA number three on my list) was the rise of mass, iron-​ armed infantry armies and a quantum leap in the logistical sophistication needed

30 Cited from Kuhrt 1995, 55.

31 Mahabharata 4 (47) 31.6–​7, cited from Drews 1992, 125.

172  Ian Morris to support them. Assyria at times fielded over 100,000 men in the ninth century, and across the next few hundred years it gobbled up every nearby empire that did not rise to the same level. Some historians would say that the first state to warrant the label “empire” was in fact Assyria, particularly after the centralizing reforms of Tiglath-​Pileser III in the 740s bce. By 450 bce, similar mass armies and imperial states were established in China, and before 300 bce India’s Mauryan Empire was fielding masses of infantry, too. Some scholars would put the fifteenth-​century Aztec and Inca empires in the same category, while others see classical empires of this kind as being purely Eurasian. Another breakthrough, RMA number 4, followed soon after: the coming of true cavalry. By 900 bce, steppe herders were breeding horses strong enough to carry a man on their backs all day long, and in the eighth century, Scythian and Cimmerian mounted raids became a fact of life along Assyria’s northern borders. The Assyrian military learned quickly, hiring steppe cavalry and training their own imitations, but no agrarian empire ever completely got the measure of the steppe nomads. Horses were far more abundant than people in Inner Asia, and when a warlord could corral enough riders into attacking a single target (or when a paymaster from one of the established agrarian empires could hire enough cavalrymen to use against his enemies), they were irresistible. In 612 bce, Scythian cavalry played a major role in overthrowing the Assyrian Empire, and mounted bandits terrorized the northern Middle East for decades thereafter. My fifth RMA was the creation of true fleets. Empires had been using ships in war for many centuries, but only around 520 bce did the Persian Empire start hiring and building specialized war galleys by the hundreds and using a navy to project power in novel ways. Although Persia’s military organizations are now remembered chiefly for being defeated by the Greeks, they should really be known for their capacity to learn. By 500 bce, Persia had not only the world’s first genuine navy but also the first bureaucracy able to support perhaps a million soldiers and sailors, as well as the first army to integrate cavalry fully with infantry. The genius of Alexander of Macedon, who destroyed the empire in the 330s–​320s, lay in combining Persian cavalry tactics with Greek infantry procedures. Surprisingly, perhaps, military learning in the Roman and Han empires of the last few centuries bce and first few ce was limited to perfecting older RMAs rather than generating new ones (although, as Otto von Bismarck supposedly said, fools learn from experience, but wise men learn from other people’s experience).32 But like almost every agrarian empire, neither ever really learned to control the increasingly sophisticated nomadic empires on the steppes, and the first and early second millennia ce saw a steady, long-​term decline in the size and wealth of settled empires in the face of Inner Asian raiders. This was only reversed in the mid-​second

32 The likely sources of this (mis)quotation are discussed at https://​en.wikiquote.org/​wiki/​Talk:Otto_​von_​ Bismarck#Only_​a_​fool_​learns_​from_​his_​own_​mistakes._​The_​wise_​man_​learns_​from_​the_​mistakes_​of_​ others (accessed April 12, 2018).

Empire and Military Organization  173 millennium ce as part of a cluster of RMAs even more remarkable than that of the mid-​first millennium  bce. Probably no other RMA was as transformative as the gun (number six). Chinese alchemists had been experimenting with gunpowder since the ninth century ce and were making crude bombs by 1044. A relief carving in Sichuan dating around 1150 possibly shows a true gun (that is, a tube containing gunpowder that explodes with enough force to shoot out a bullet at lethal speed), but the oldest actual gun comes from the site of a Manchurian battle fought in 1288. Early guns were slow to load and wildly inaccurate, and their main use in fourteenth-​century China was against such big, static targets as city walls and slow-​moving ships. While both of these were abundant, as was the case in the civil wars against the ruling Mongol dynasty in the Yangzi Valley, Chinese gunners made rapid advances; but after the 1360s, the end of these wars meant that fast-​moving steppe nomads once again became the China’s main enemies. Fourteenth-​century firearms were not much use against them, and the Ming dynasty shifted its military investment back toward walls and horse archers. Innovation did not stop, though, in Europe. Probably no invention in history has ever spread as quickly as the gun, which had reached Italy by 1326; and because European wars continued to involve sieges and ships, innovation actually accelerated. Artillerymen switched from stone to iron cannonballs, learned to “corn” powder to make it explode more fiercely, and started casting lightweight cannons with short, thick barrels to take advantage of the first two innovations. In 1494, armed with just a few dozen of these, Charles VIII of France blasted holes in the walls of Italian cities that had resisted attackers for centuries. “No wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days,” Machiavelli concluded.33 By then, another RMA (number seven), the oceangoing ship, was offering the possibility of empires that linked multiple continents. Like the gun, these were pioneered in China—​which, by 1400, had ships that could potentially have sailed anywhere in the world—​but were perfected in Western Europe. In 1420, Portuguese sailors discovered Madeira; in 1473, they crossed the equator; in 1487 Bartolomeu Dias showed that they could sail around the bottom of Africa into the Indian Ocean; and in 1492 the Italian Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean. Equipped with ships and guns, sixteenth-​century Iberian imperialists established toeholds in Africa and Asia and completely destroyed the Aztec and Inca empires in America. Dutch, French, and English imitators soon followed them. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an eighth RMA—​the invention of the new kinds of national debt that I mentioned earlier—​pushed the sixth and seventh RMAs in unexpected directions. For the first time since the age of ancient empires, European governments mobilized forces hundreds of thousands strong. On land, enormous armies were equipped with constantly improving arquebuses

33 Machiavelli 1531, 2.17.

174  Ian Morris and muskets and new volleying tactics, spewing out such walls of fire that they could now reliably defeat nomadic cavalry and get their long Inner Asian frontiers under control. At sea, bigger fleets of ships, able to carry more and better cannon and using them in new, line-​ahead formations, accomplished much the same thing. They even managed something that had never before been possible, learning to command the oceans in the sense modern naval strategists use that expression, of preventing hostile merchants and navies from going to sea at all.34 These developments shifted the global balance of power decisively in Europe’s favor, and, within Europe, tipped it toward Britain and France. What really distinguishes the mid-​second millennium ce cluster of RMAs from that of the mid-​first millennium bce, though, is that it was merely the prelude to even more remarkable breakthroughs. By the time of the Carnatic and Bengal Wars in 1750s India, RMAs six through eight had given European empires the ability to project power into most parts of the planet that lay within reach of a coastline, but modern militaries’ massive logistical and organizational needs had also made them ponderous and brittle. This opened the way for a ninth RMA: People’s War. “In 1793,” said Clausewitz (who lived through it), “a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people.” What he meant was that—​beginning as a weapon against imperialism in 1770s North America and then turning into a weapon of imperialism in 1790s France—​ revolutionary regimes discovered that they could substitute mass and enthusiasm for professionalism and logistics. “The full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance,” Clausewitz observed; “The resources and efforts now available for use surpassed all conventional limits; nothing now impeded the vigor with which war could now be waged.”35 As Clausewitz saw it, People’s War created a “remarkable trinity,” in which governments, militaries, and the people as a whole worked together, making it possible to wage “absolute war”—​defined as “[w]‌ar untrammeled by any conventional restraints . . . [and] broken loose in all its elemental fury.” “Once barriers—​which in a sense consist only of man’s ignorance of what is possible—​are torn down,” he noted, “they are not easily set up again.”36 A million Frenchmen volunteered to fight in 1793, and Napoleon’s mastery of the art of using the new armies came close to turning Europe into a French Empire. It took Napoleon’s rival imperialists nearly two decades to learn to wage their own versions of People’s Wars, but the balance of power that resulted made 1815–​ 1914 one of the most peaceful centuries in Europe’s history. However, this balance prevailed only within the continent; across the oceans, the imbalance of power between Europe (and its settler colonies) and the rest of the world widened still further.



34 Mahan 1890.

35 Clausewitz [1832] 1976, 591, 592. 36 Clausewitz [1832] 1976, 70, 593.

Empire and Military Organization  175 In the 1860s, a tenth RMA, of mechanization and automation, began in Europe and North America, making the West versus the Rest imbalance so large that Britain and France took direct control of more than one-​third of the world’s landmass (and all of the Old World’s oceans). However, like many earlier RMAs, it also shook up the status quo. When one empire mastered the new methods faster than another, as in Germany’s Wars of Unification between 1864 and 1871, short and bloody fighting could produce shockingly decisive results; but when two or more empires had learned them roughly equally well, as in the First World War, the fighting became so long and bloody that it drove the people to walk away from Clausewitz’s trinity, bringing down most of Europe’s empires. Military historians often subdivide my tenth RMA into multiple smaller RMAs, marked by machine guns, infiltration tactics, tanks, aircraft, Blitzkrieg operations, and countless other developments. When looked at on a timescale like this chapter’s, though, it makes more sense to see a continuous era of modern military growth between the 1860s and 1940s, in which creative destruction played an even bigger part than in the corresponding era of modern economic growth. The true rupture, and eleventh RMA, came not with some specific type of mechanization, but with the invention of thermonuclear weapons in 1952. As late as 1948, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated that if they dropped their entire arsenal of 133 atomic bombs on Soviet cities, they would kill 3 million people—​a horrific number, but just one-​eighth of what the Soviets had lost fighting Germany between 1941 and 1945. Nuclear/​atomic/​fission bombs threatened to make war deadlier, but not to transform it. Thermonuclear/​hydrogen/​fusion bombs, however, changed everything. The first fusion bomb had a blast equivalent to 700 Hiroshimas. It could kill everyone and level every building within three miles of ground zero. Six miles out, clothes would burst into flames and bodies would be tossed through the air at fatal speeds. Even 11 miles away, anyone in the open air would suffer second-​degree burns and radiation poisoning. By the late 1950s, the Soviets had hundreds of these bombs and the Americans thousands. The US Department of Defense calculated that the opening days of a war would kill 75 million Americans, 100 million Soviets, and 115 million other Europeans; but by the mid-​1970s, when there were tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and the Soviets attained parity with the Americans, the first strikes might have killed everyone on earth. Terrified of stumbling into a nuclear war, the Soviet and American empires (if this is the right term for them) had to find ways to compete without actually waging war. One was to use proxies, mostly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which had the advantage of driving the final nails into the coffins of Western Europe’s colonial empires, which had already been shaken to their foundations by World War II. Another method, though, was to struggle for hearts and minds, trying to repeat the 1918 achievement of breaking the enemy’s trinity by driving wedges between the people, the army, and the government. Some historians, though, argue that the last of my RMAs, computerization, in fact played the decisive role in bringing down the Soviet Empire. One theory holds that in 1982, when Israel used American-​made

176  Ian Morris computerized weapon systems to destroy 17 of Syria’s Soviet-​made surface-​to-​ air missile sites and shoot down 92 of its Soviet planes for the loss of three (or six, depending who was counting) of its own, Moscow flew into a panic and joined an arms race that quickly bankrupted it, leading directly to the revolutions of 1989. Other historians, however, emphasize a wider range of factors, both military and non-​military.37 Whatever the truth, the outcome has been an extraordinary quarter-​century in which the American Empire (again, if that is the right label) has been the sole superpower, with a full-​spectrum dominance of land, sea, air, outer space, and cyberspace without parallel in history. However, as Clausewitz would probably have warned American governments, mastering an RMA does not automatically translate into political success. As I write, American military power has neither deterred nor destroyed Islamist terrorism and insurgency; China has begun challenging America’s all-​important naval domination of the West Pacific; and North Korea is threatening the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945. What American military organizations can do to impose their government’s will remains to be seen.38

6.  Conclusion Out of the myriad details of the military histories of empires, we can distill a few general points. First, there can be no empire without military organizations, in the sense of groups of people to whom governments delegate the legitimate right to shed blood. Second, these organizations must be able to not only conquer the empire’s rivals, destroying and annexing them, but also apply force to help the empire manage its internal and external relations. Third, empires have to work out ways to control military organizations and pay for them; and fourth, as the history of RMAs shows all too clearly, military organizations must be institutions capable of learning, because, pace Tacitus, the secret of empire actually consists of military adaptation to the evolving threat environment. If we fail to grasp these basic principles, the military history of empires is likely to dissolve into the infamous ODTAA, “one damned thing after another.”39 But on the other hand, if left at this level of generality, the principles run afoul of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called the characteristic weakness of all social-​ scientific theorizing—​ that “[t]‌ heoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations they govern that they don’t make much sense or hold much interest apart from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if they were not general, they would not be theoretical), but because, stated independently of their applications, they seem either commonplace or vacant.”40

37 Westad 2005; Plokhy 2015; and Service 2015 give a sense of the range of views. 38 Smith 2005 looks at post–​Cold War strategy in very Clausewitzian terms. 39 Toynbee 1957, 265. 40 Geertz 1973, 25.

Empire and Military Organization  177 What this means, I think, is that this chapter will be most useful if read alongside the imperial case-​studies that fill the second volume of this work. As Clausewitz himself said, “Theory exists so that one does not have to start afresh every time sorting out the raw material and ploughing through it, but will find it ready to hand and in good order.”41

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41 Clausewitz [1832] 1965, 141.

178  Ian Morris Taagepera, R. 1979. “Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-​Decline Curve, 600 BC to 600 ad.” Social Science Research 8: 115–​138. Toynbee, A. 1957. A Study of History, vol. II. Abridged edition. New York. Weber, M. 1949. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Glencoe, IL. Weber, M. 1968. Economy and Society. 2 vols. Translated and edited by G. Roth and K. Wittich. Berkeley. Westad, O. A. 2005. The Global Cold War. Cambridge.

5 The Political Economy of Empire “Imperial Capital” and the Formation of Central and Regional Elites John Haldon

Framework for Discussion Empires are both simple and complex. Simple, because they are broadly identifiable through a small number of key elements in common—​extended territorial polities dominated by a core, usually with a substantial element of coercive power at its disposal; they tend to entail the incorporation of local elites, and often local religious cultures, into a system dominated by the center; the language and culture of the core tends to become the dominant language of the empire’s administration and elite culture; and they evolve, to a greater or lesser degree, an imperial ideology through which the existence of the imperial system can be legitimated. But they are at the same time complex, because no single “version” of empire exists: rather, we are confronted by a vast array of empirically verifiable forms, and each set of forms originates, functions, and evolves differently. The relationship between imperial political ideologies and local elites, between local and regional elites and the core, between different levels of elite activity and the imperial administration or military, generates innumerable variations on the theme; and the relationship between means of exchange, monetization and market activity, imperial fiscal management and the collection and consumption of resources, all vary massively from case to case, even if, as noted earlier, these can often be reduced to a smaller set of ideal-​ typical forms.1 The origins of an empire generally determine the forms of revenue sought by different types of empire, so that taxation, tribute, and trade all coexist in different proportions and occupy different positions within the imperial system according to geography, cultural tradition, access to precious metals, the political conjuncture, technological development, and the structures of rule and administration. And these features reflect relationships, or sets of relationships, that involve all aspects of social power as elaborated by Mann—​collective and distributive, intensive and 1 For a useful general survey of notions of imperialism and empire and how to approach them, see Mommsen 1982 and the literature cited in Burbank and Cooper 2010, 461–​462; Darwin 2008; Hardt and Negri 2000. For the evolution of theories of imperialism, see Etherington 1984; Hobson [1902] 1965; Brewer 1980; still interesting and useful is Winslow 1931; and see also Koebner and Schmidt 1965. John Haldon, The Political Economy of Empire  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0005.

180  John Haldon extensive, diffused and authoritative. Using those rubrics, a heuristic framework can be constructed that helps us understand the dynamics of imperial systems in both space and across time. Social power in this sense is indeed fundamental to the actual configuration of different networks of social relations and to the state formations which develop out of them. Equally important is Mann’s elaboration of states as constituting themselves as autonomous actors in the evolution of social-​ economic and power relations, although of course empires, as “multilevel states,” in many respects do not necessarily conform in this regard.2 One point worth noting at the outset is that, viewed from a modern perspective, imperial systems and the economic structures that maintain them have evolved: the succession of empires over time shows a succession of imperial forms that vary in terms of the extent of their integration of subordinate elites, of their power over conquered lands, of the sophistication of resource extraction and redistribution, as well as in respect of patterns of ideological integration. The Hittite “empire,” with its loosely federated vassal polities drawn into a network of commercial and gift-​ exchange relationships focused on court and temple, is an early variant; the militaristic Assyrian Empire, a conquest polity with an insistence on the primacy of its god Assur over all others, its centralized control over local elites, and the fragile interdependency between ruler, military elite, and conquest, another. Indeed, without wishing merely to list the differences between these, each of the major ancient imperial systems—​the Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires, to name but a few—​presents a variation on one key theme: the maintenance of a balance between the interests of the center in the extraction of surplus resources (whether in bullion, manpower, services, or produce—​usually a combination of all of these) and the interests of the elites (also varying in configuration, origin, and internal articulation), including religious and temple elites, who effected the rulers’ or courts’ policies. As we shall see, the equation shifts in more recent times, chiefly as systems and techniques of communication are transformed from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ce. But empires thus appear as solutions, in a sense, to managing networks of power relationships and their extension or maintenance, solutions which work until the wider context in which they formed shifts sufficiently for the original solution to begin to fail—​in Runciman’s neo-​Darwinian terms, empires represent, at the level of exchange relationships and the exploitation of human and material resources, the agglomeration of bundles of successful competitive social practices evolving out of and responding to specific sets of circumstances. Runciman is concerned to pinpoint the micro-​structural elements that facilitate change in social relations and that lead to the continued evolution or the blocking of certain modes of power distribution.3 If social practice does not adequately adjust to changes in broader social relations, the balance of resources, or external relationships with other territorial powers, the empires they support fail, generally 2 See Mann 1986a, esp. 6–​10; 1986b. 3 Runciman 1989.

The Political Economy of Empire  181 to be replaced by new sets of institutional practices—​new imperial systems—​which correspond better to the shift in circumstances and which assure the vested or perceived interests of the elites in the social-​cultural systems they embrace, whether old or new. In contrast, Mann takes as the ultimate focus of his explanatory model the structures of social power underlying and generating state-​building and imperialist expansion. There have been many discussions of “empire” and “empires,” each with their own specific point of view and set of questions, each comparing a range of empires or imperial systems against one another under a range of different theoretical perspectives, and Chapter 1 of this volume has summarized much of the debate of which they are part. Given the vast spectrum of imperial forms across human history, a chapter on the political economy of empire(s) can barely scratch the surface of the range of possible issues that this phrase encompasses. In what follows, I will consider a small number of key questions, questions that the comparative historian of empires as well the historian of specific imperial systems might wish to ask and that may serve as useful heuristic foci on which to concentrate in interrogating the sources and in elucidating the ways in which a given empire worked and evolved. And in terms of political economy, these will largely be concerned with the post-​ expansionist phase of empire, since we should probably differentiate, as far as is possible, between “empire” as an established territorial political dominance, as opposed to “imperialism,” the (ongoing) process of expansion, conquest, and incorporation. There may thus be significant differences between the military and economic phases of an imperial project.4 We can approach the political economy of traditional empires through certain key features which all systems have in common, although their forms, and the way they function in respect of what we may call their cultural geography, vary widely, often to the extent that it is difficult to identify the most important functional aspects in every case. There are two primary issues on which it seems worth concentrating when examining a given empire or comparing a particular group of empires. First, control over resources: this entails establishing not simply the means by which resources were collected, distributed, and consumed, but also origins of control in the first place—​the means by which a state comes to have power over resources may inflect the subsequent means of control, especially since we must understand resources to include both agrarian and pastoral production as well as minerals, labor-​power, and people. Control of resources also involves some discussion of the relationship between the different types and sources of imperial income, whether material or ideological, and the ways in which they were turned into what we might call “imperial capital”; as well as the means for managing resources, given that some systems were comparatively more efficient than others. In the second place, the closely associated issue of how rulers or governments exercise 4 See, for example, Postgate 1979 and the survey of imperial forms in Darwin 2008; for the early modern period, Rothschild 2004.

182  John Haldon control over those who manage resources on their behalf: an aspect which requires looking at the relationship between conquering and conquered elites, between the structures of power operating in the provinces and those emanating from the ruler or court, at the ways in which central and local elites were themselves formed or transformed under imperial hegemony, and at the ways in which identities and loyalties evolved or were created, compromised, or transformed. All these inevitably entail many other issues, but they do offer a focal point for comparison. And their importance is crucial to understanding how empires rise, reproduce themselves, and fail or transform.

Traditional Imperial Systems This process of evolution should not be understood as a unilinear or progressive “improvement” through a series of preordained stages, but in contrast as a non-​ deterministic series of diverse social evolutionary tracks or paths of cultural, sociopolitical, and economic development:  imperial systems arise as they evolve a dynamic equilibrium with their geopolitical, ecological, and sociocultural environment in respect of the prevailing local economic, political, and social relationships around them. In the pre-​modern world, compare the Assyrian with the Roman imperial systems, for example—​both good examples of conquest empires, but each evolving a very different strategic response to the existence of subordinate conquered elites, with the Roman solution proving remarkably successful over a relatively long period and with a remarkable territorial reach. Cultural assimilation, including linguistic assimilation, incorporation into the upper echelons of the power-​elite, and finally political-​cultural integration were key aspects of this process. Empires then thrive for longer or shorter periods, depending on their broader context, before they may fail, to be replaced by other forms as conditions change. Imperial systems which retain a degree of systemic flexibility—​good examples are the long-​lived Byzantine Empire and its successor the Ottoman Empire—​survive longer than those which are organizationally or ideologically more brittle. And with each successive empire that arises in a particular geopolitical niche, a more effective range of solutions to the problems of imperial rule becomes available, albeit constrained by cultural perceptions.5 As has been noted earlier in this volume, empire as a concept, as well as its embodiment in existing political systems, entails power and dominance, in which one society or segment of a society exercises power over others. Crucially, empire entails exploitation and the extraction of resources. In another sense, however, since few pre-​modern state systems can be described as national states—​in which elites and subordinate groups share the same language and (perceived) ethnic identities (such 5 See Goldstone and Haldon 2006, 24–​27.

The Political Economy of Empire  183 as in ancient Greece, for example, or in ancient Sumeria and in the Indus Valley cultures)—​many pre-​modern states can be described as “empires” because they entailed the subjection by a small, cohesive dominant group of other less powerful groups (often including groups who were also different linguistically, religiously, or ethnically), and they were politically autonomous, claiming rights over the exploitation of resources. They claimed a monopoly over raising taxes or exacting tribute from their subjects, and they required service from their subjects, whether labor and skills for construction or other purposes, or military. They also—​although in very diverse and widely different ways—​regulated matters such as the transmission of land and wealth, thus generating or at least employing a legal system of some sort. Political leadership was usually (although not always) dominated by a single homogeneous group, with disproportionate access and control over economic and other benefits of empire. And finally, the elite justified its hegemony in terms of a coherent ideology or set of values. This relationship of dominance is achieved through a variety of means, so that at one end of the spectrum we can find empires founded and maintained through military conquest intended to maximize the extraction of resources to the advantage of the conqueror (so-​called predator states), while at the other, equally effective imperial systems can evolve based almost entirely on commercial enterprise combined with a less evident form of coercive power, such as the merchant empires of Venice and Genoa. By the same token, as empires establish themselves, and where they survive over a number of generations, they can also become internalized by the cultures they originally subjugated—​so that “empire” in the sense of conquest-​state transforms into “state” in which the various conquered cultures, or key elements of them, including their elites, participate at the same level and as fully as the original conquerors. This is true of many territories within the Roman Empire, for example; it applies equally to some of the lands conquered by the early Arab Islamic Empire; and there are other examples.6 “Empire” is thus in many respects a constantly shifting concept, describing initially a straightforward process of conquest and domination, but rapidly transforming according to circumstances. The key to the maintenance and survival of any imperial system is the control of sufficient resources to keep the ruler and imperial elite in power, to safeguard territorial integrity, to promote expansion, and to resource the activities of the court, ruler, or government, however configured, in respect of diplomatic activity and conspicuous investment in ritual, ceremonial, and ideological structures necessary to the legitimation of their power and authority. These features represent the political economy of empires, the sets of relationships through which resources are obtained, collected, managed, and consumed and through which the political system—​in effect, the distribution of power and authority—​is maintained. A number of publications have presented a comparative and descriptive account 6 See Woolf 1998 and Millar 2006.

184  John Haldon of “empire,” and have drawn attention to many of the points I want to make here.7 Much of what I have to say here has in consequence been the subject of prior discussion, so in this chapter I want merely to draw out some of the common structuring features of imperial political economy, features that contribute to the ways in which empires are configured, while at the same time conceding that the almost inexhaustible range of empirical versions or variations on any of these themes prohibits too crude a generalization. Yet while it is important to stress complexity, and show how these fundamental structures are given expression and operate through a wide variety of culturally determined forms, some fundamental determining features of all imperial systems can be picked out.

Colonial Empires and Some Comparisons There are really fundamental differences between the European colonial empires of the sixteenth century and afterward and what we might call the “traditional” land empires of Eurasia or pre-​Columbian America, even if many of the points made earlier also apply to them. The early mercantilist empires depended upon slave-​ manned plantations and often oppressive commercial regulations—​that were not necessarily very effective in the longer term—​to obtain a trade surplus. By the early nineteenth century “free trade imperialism,” supported by liberal political economic theory, meant a qualitative transformation of imperial political economy as a capitalist “world-​system” was created. Such differences quickly amounted also to a qualitative transformation of political relationships within the colonising societies as well as between them, and differences between contrasting modes of exploitation of colonial possessions played a key role: whether managed directly by imposed ruling elites (who may or may not eradicate existing elites and indigenous populations, as in North America, for example, or Australasia), indirectly through the co-​option of established elites (or indigenous replacements of such elites), or by a combination of imposed administrative apparatuses with preexisting elite co-​option, as with the British in India, these arrangements directly affected both economic and political structures and relationships between colonies and metropolis.8 By the same token, the form taken by the economic relationship between the imperial core and its colonies directly affected the social and economic structures of the core territory or country. In the initial stages of imperial development it reflected the production of specific market-​orientated products—​tobacco, sugar, cotton, slaves, etc.—​or control over goods whose value can be massively increased through export from the colony to “home” markets where demand is high, in particular spices, which were at the heart of the initial Portuguese push around the coast of Africa into the Indian 7 For example, and among many recent works: Chase-​Dunn and Hall 1997; Alcock et al. 2001; Morris and Scheidel 2009; Burbank and Cooper 2010. 8 See Iyer 2010. For a good, if brief, discussion, of modes of colonization and control, see Runciman 1989, 273–​278.

The Political Economy of Empire  185 Ocean. The resulting super-​profits were then reflected in investments at both the imperial core as well as in the infrastructures of control of the colonial possessions, benefiting those who controlled one or more of the home market, the means of transport, or the centers of production. The expansion of the English East India Company in competition with its Dutch counterpart from the first half of the seventeenth century illustrates some of these features very clearly.9 Of course, such imperial and colonial expansion is not sui generis—​the preexisting political situation, in particular competition over limited resources between rival polities, plays a structuring role. Thus rivalry between France, England, Holland, and Spain—​the “classic” European imperial powers from the sixteenth century—​in different combinations at different times, and complicated by ideological differences (Catholic Spain and France vs. Protestant England and Holland, for example), were major stimuli to the quest for expanded resources. But as imperial competition evolved, so strategic competition also came to play a role.10 Once in motion, such competition generated further friction and further economic growth as both trade and commerce expanded to meet demand, while at the same time competition around the military control over or protection of distant markets and colonies led to direct conflict. Additionally, the impact of substantial new revenues derived from the exploitation of colonial economies impacted directly on the economy of the home or core region. This could have both positive and negative outcomes: the clearest example of the latter is in the case of Spain, where the import of vast quantities of bullion inhibited investment in manufacturing, supported expensive military undertakings, especially in Europe, and contributed to the ossification of Spanish socioeconomic structures, with the result that the kingdom of Spain was transformed into little more than a clearing house for the exchange of South American bullion and other forms of wealth for northern European manufactured goods via Spanish markets.11 In the case of Britain, in contrast, and somewhat later in the process of global European imperialism, the wealth extracted in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the colonies, especially from India (raw materials for the English cotton industry) fueled the agrarian and industrial revolutions, a transformative process that also brought with it, ultimately, direct state control of India after the abolition of the outmoded East India Company.12 Such competition in the early modern period, as well as more recently, has also promoted the quest for knowledge and understanding of the worlds now brought into the purview of the core cultures. But this was not an even playing field, from a structural perspective: the relative degree of success or failure in this arena reflected also the sociopolitical structure of the core, so that the open, pluralistic competitive political culture of seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century England turned out to be far more conducive to private enterprise in the generation of new

9 Pincus 2012; Jardine 2008; Chaudhuri 1981.

10 Hont 2005; and essays in Tracy 1991. 11 Spate 1983, 256–​265. 12 O’Brien 1998.

186  John Haldon knowledge—​natural scientific as well as in terms of practical application—​than the centralized “compromised autocracies” of France, Austria-​Hungary, or Spain.13 Early modern colonial empires depended, therefore, on a qualitatively different type of political economy from traditional land empires. Inter-​colony commerce, asymmetrical trading and exchange mechanisms, and settler or plantation economies played a key and complexly interwoven role, and they evolved in a world-​market context with a potential for resource-​redistribution and projection of power vastly greater—​both potentially and, in most cases, actually—​than anything possible in a traditional imperial system. They also evolved in the context of a rapidly changing technology of transport and weaponry from the sixteenth century on. One result of this was awareness of the central importance of controlling commerce and keeping routes of access open—​something to which earlier states had also paid attention (one thinks of Sasanian Persian interests in the Gulf and along the northern Silk Route, for example, among many),14 but which in the context of trans-​oceanic colonial competition became far more nuanced and had a much more dramatic impact on state as well as private finance. As Adam Smith, and indeed many other commentators on trade and economics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries observed, controlling commerce was key, and the state that controlled commerce controlled not only its own destiny but that of others as well.15 In contrast, traditional land-​based imperial systems generally derived their wealth from agriculture, even until comparatively recent times, with the addition of a degree of commercial enterprise. Tsarist Russia is a classic example—​trade and international commerce there certainly were, and awareness of the need to invest in manufacturing and commerce likewise (the example of Peter the Great is a case in point) but they tended to focus on adjacent lands and societies, and thus had a more regionalized cross-​border character than the trans-​oceanic commerce of the western European colonizing powers. By the same token, accompanying this and depending also on period and context, there was sometimes also a degree of opportunistic tribute-​raising—​through attacks or threats of attack on neighboring states or societies, for example—​generally justified on grounds of defense or preemption: the expansion of the Russian Empire into Siberia and the Eurasian steppe is illustrative of this process, effectively turning Russia away from qualitative growth in terms of manufacturing and commercial enterprise and toward geographical and territorial expansion.16 The difference between “traditional agrarian” empires and more recent colonial systems is thus not simply a question of chronology, for traditional forms of continental empire survived into the twentieth century. The oceanic imperial colonial

13 Jacob and Stewart 2004; Reinert 2011. 14 From an extensive literature, see Loewe 1971; Whitehouse and Williamson 1973; and de la Vaissière 2005, 227–​232. 15 Hopkins 2013, 53–​75. For English and (probably earlier) Dutch appreciation of the centrality of manufacture and commerce, as opposed to agriculture, see Hartman and Westeijn 2013. 16 Sunderland 2004; Burbank, von Hagen and Remnev 2007.

The Political Economy of Empire  187 systems distinguished themselves through a great deal more than their relative extent, the methods through which they were acquired, or the military technologies and logistical infrastructures upon which they in part depended. Indeed, such imperial-​colonial systems are qualitatively so different from other forms of imperial hegemony that they can only usefully be compared at the broadest general comparative level, the more so since they are part of a new set of economic relations entailing the commodification of labor and the investment of wealth in production processes employing alienated labor to generate surplus value: capitalism. For these reasons, therefore, this chapter will be concerned chiefly with the “traditional” imperial systems, although comparisons will be drawn between the two types of empire, and with a focus on the four classic European colonizing empires already mentioned. For the latter, we can perceive two phases in the evolution of imperial political economy: an initial period of mercantile expansion based to a large degree on the exploitation of asymmetrical markets; followed by the qualitative transformation of trading stations and enclaves into colonial bridgeheads serving to facilitate the penetration of new lands and the establishment of monopolistic control of new resources. This is not a simple picture, however, complicated as it was by the movement of colonists seeking new lands for political and religious reasons, chiefly in North America. While the commercial opportunities offered by tobacco, for example, to late sixteenth-​century English and French colonists in the Americas were apparent, it is doubtful that the ruling elites of either kingdom fully grasped their potential until somewhat later; while in France for certain it was the luxury value of furs and other forest products acquired through the exploitation of indigenous economies in the colonies of North America that attracted attention and that determined royal policy for many decades, even if sugar production in the Caribbean soon rivaled this commerce and generated a very different type of economy. Again, we can see here very clearly the unintended consequences of two different forms of colonization—​religious exiles and emigrés from England seeking land and religious freedom rather than trade, on the one hand; commercial exploitation of hitherto untapped resources on the other, resulting in different settlement strategies with markedly different outcomes, even if the two patterns are by no means mutually exclusive.17 In contrast with the British and Dutch, however, whose governments played only a limited role in the establishment of either settler colonies or commercial bases and where private companies as well as individuals put up most of the investment in money and ships, the French crown was directly involved in exploiting colonial commerce, investing its own resources on the assumption of a solid and expanding return. There were points of contact, however. In the French Caribbean as in the British colonies of New England, conflict between the vested

17 See the classic account of Brenner 2003; Ormrod 2003; Miquelon 1988; Pritchard 2004; and for background and context, note also Bonney 1981. For a useful general survey, see also Burbank and Cooper 2010, 149–​178.

188  John Haldon interests of the colonists and their local economies, on the one hand, and the metropolitan interests of merchant companies (in the French case) or the government (in the British example) led to serious difficulties between the imperial core and its colonial outliers. While resolved in different ways, both examples point to the difficulties faced by the different interests involved in colonial exploitation.18 In the case of Portugal, on the other hand, the opening phases of exploration and the establishment of commercial bases was largely the result of royally funded merchants and soldiers seeking new resources for a beleaguered peninsular kingdom, in which the crown paid for the ships and invested in the purchase and sale of the goods that were traded, generating a system of “enclave” trading centers on the West African coast and then further afield, in East Africa and the Indian Ocean. The income derived from such enterprise was substantial and acted as a massive stimulus to further extension of the system, eventually expanding into a settlement colonialism in Brazil in which gold and slaves became key factors in royal income.19 The other Iberian colonizing power, Spain, in contrast, pursued what may have begun as a similar approach, although it evolved somewhat differently, again reflecting the politics of the home territory and its rulers’ needs for revenues with which to support military and defensive activities in their European possessions. Initial conquests in the Americas were made on the basis of private initiative rather than state sponsorship, although as soon as colonial settlements were being established, the government stepped in to make sure it received a portion of any winnings. Governance was managed at first through the so-​called audiencias (later partly replaced or supplemented by vice royalties), a system of appellate courts that possessed legislative and executive functions in addition to their judicial ones. They represented the rulers in their role as makers of laws and dispenser of justice, and at the same time were deployed to regulate settlement and economy in a way that had been impossible within the original European Habsburg territories.20

Resources, Control, and “Imperial Capital” The potential established by the existence of an empire for redefining the conditions (ideological as well as political and economic) under which surplus is appropriated, both in the core territories as well as in conquered regions, establishes the ground upon which “imperial capital” can be generated. Imperial capital in pre-​modern agrarian empires can be defined as the total cultural product of the complex interrelationship between central and local elites, through which the court or palace is assured of a certain quantity of resources (in cash, manpower, skills, produce, and elite acknowledgment) sufficient to defend the status quo to its own advantage, to secure 18 Cheney 2010; Marshall 2005. 19 Subrahmanyam 1993; Newitt 2005; general survey in Russell-​Wood 1992. 20 Perrotta 1993; Stein 2000. For a recent attempt to theorize different modalities of direct and indirect rule on the basis of examples from the early modern and modern period, see Gerring et al. 2011.

The Political Economy of Empire  189 its continued dominant position. Such capital consists of three prime elements: actual physical resources (people and things); the relationships and social networks through which they are appropriated, redistributed, and consumed; and the sets of ideas and concepts through which the first two elements are apprehended, understood, and manipulated or deployed. There are two further aspects to each of these:  the three-​way power relationship between court/​government, dominant (imperial) elites, and subordinate (conquered/​provincial) elites; and the construction of ideological legitimacy, in which subordinate elites may play a key role as local agents of the empire. Only the most successful empires are able to generate the sort of capital that includes all of these elements in a unitary fashion, and are thus able to reproduce themselves on a long-​term basis with only limited recourse to coercion, imperial systems which enjoy precisely the sort of systemic flexibility referred to earlier. By the same token, however, even where empires are able to redefine their conditions of existence (through conquest and the seizure of new resources), they paradoxically tend also to generate resistance and struggle over the distribution of such social wealth, both between exploiters and the exploited, and between different elements of the exploiting elite. For the classic European colonial empires of the sixteenth century on, “imperial capital” necessarily represents a somewhat more complex concatenation of elements—​those already noted, but in addition we need to consider the ways in which the private enterprise of merchant adventurers of all sorts could be accessed by governments, directly—​through investing in the infrastructure of trade (fitting-​ out of ships, hiring of crews, purchase of goods) to receive a cut of the proceeds, for example—​or indirectly, through the management of such activities and the imposition of customs dues or taxes, import duties, or by means of the occasional and temporary sequestering of ships and manpower, for example, for warfare on behalf of the state. Further, the complex relationship between colonies and the “home” territory generated resources which could be called upon in one form or another to promote the interests of the core territory, as reflected in the foregoing comments on the processes of colonial expansion. Resources can take many forms, and both material resources as well as ideological resources are equally important. Ideological resources consist primarily of the sets of ideas and beliefs which structure how individuals and groups understand and explain their world, as well as the narrower sets of legitimating ideologies through which empires and elites rationalize the world and maintain their power. Such resources can be manipulated—​in respect of communities of identity, for example—​ to support the politics of a state and its ruling elite in their relations with competitor states, as in the conflicts between the Crusader states in the medieval period and their Islamic neighbors, or perhaps more clearly between the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and its neighbors in both the Balkans and the Islamic world. Material resources in pre-​modern state or imperial systems are usually assessed and collected in one or more of three forms: taxation in kind, taxation in cash or some other common exchangeable medium, and various types of corvée labor or

190  John Haldon the conscription of particular skills from among specialist craftsmen and artisans for a specific purpose. All three may operate at the same time, and their field of operation may vary by geography or by conjuncture, depending—​for example—​on the availability or not of coinage or of markets. They are managed through one or a combination of two methods: the direct action of centrally appointed (or approved) officials or representatives of the central authority, who forward the revenues they collect to the center or otherwise distribute to support the activities of the state; or indirectly, through the allocation of revenue flows to state representatives, who in their turn fulfill a set of defined duties on behalf of the state or ruler. The first method is typified by those political systems which are able to evolve some centrally managed bureaucratic or administrative apparatus, ideally where the role of provincial elites is minimal and where central power to make or break its representatives remains strong, so that loyalty to the center outweighs other kin-​or territory-​ based allegiances. Many historical empires in the pre-​modern period have been able to achieve this situation for a short time, but only rarely for an extended period. The second method is typical of states and empires with a dispersed form of power, such as those polities that might traditionally be referred to as “feudal,” for example. Most imperial systems about which we have specific information, or about which we can deduce something from their archaeology, have occupied a position somewhere in between these two extremes, often moving along a curve between them as they evolve in one direction or the other. The actual mechanisms of surplus extraction vary enormously, but it is clearly the case that ultimately the possibility of actual physical coercion, or coercion embodied in legal institutions and the law, underlies all such relationships. By virtue of their power to extract surplus, states gain also the possibility of increasing the rate of exploitation (the amount of surplus demanded in relation to that necessary for the social and economic reproduction of the producers) and thereby of exerting a considerable degree of control over the lives of the producers themselves. Yet this is almost without exception mediated through those who represent the state or empire, whether members of the conquering power or of an indigenous elite. Empires as well as states thus create the possibility for an intensification of surplus appropriation, whether through the state apparatuses themselves or through the increased concentration of the powers of coercion in the hands of their elites. Not all empires (or states) necessarily realize these possibilities, and not all such arrangements work to the advantage of the center. In fact, even in the most successful conquest empires, after the first few post-​conquest generations the reverse is more often the case. In the case of early modern colonial empires, of course, we must add to these means of surplus extraction the exploitation of oceanic commercial networks and the revenues derived from the plantation economies of colonial settlements in the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Indian Ocean and China Sea—​as noted already, different governments found different ways of attaining this end, and with varied results depending upon conjuncture and the infrastructure of state finance.

The Political Economy of Empire  191

Genealogy The evolutionary trajectory or genealogy of an imperial system is important in the process of building up imperial capital. Conquest is always followed by the extraction of tribute in one form or another, and this inflects the ways in which such tribute evolves over the medium and longer term into forms of regularized taxation. But it also impacts upon the way in which we approach an “empire” and, more especially, the point in its history at which we approach it, since there are considerable differences inherent in dealing with young as opposed to older or “mature” imperial systems. For example, while the origins of the Roman Empire as an empire of conquest are clear (extracting wealth in the form of manpower as well as in tribute in various forms, human, animal, mineral, and agricultural), it had evolved by the second century CE an empire-​wide system of taxation which, while varying in institutional form according to preexisting arrangements within the conquered provinces, nevertheless provided a more or less predictable annual revenue, subject to seasonal fluctuations in the market value of agricultural output and, to a degree, in commercial activity. But the conquest origins of these revenue flows were gradually forgotten, and as Roman citizenship was universalized from the beginning of the third century, so the imperial conquest aspect of Rome also faded—​everyone was a Roman, the empire looked like a single extended territorial entity, and only on its fringes was there an echo of a conquest state. And just as the political crisis of the first half of the fifth century forced western provincial elites—​especially in Gaul and Britain—​to reassert a local (yet still “Roman”) identity as the imperial government at Rome became less and less able to defend provincial interests, so the political crisis of the seventh century forced the east Roman state to dramatically restructure its fiscal and administrative apparatus, a process that in fact promoted a much higher degree of court control, a centripetal development that enabled the state to survive against remarkable odds: paradoxically, the sudden—​and massive—​ collapse in resource availability directly impacted on administrative and institutional arrangements to the state’s advantage.21 These two very different results of similar fiscal and political crises reflect both the original pre-​conquest structures of society and economy in the two halves of the empire as well as the long-​term impact of Romanization and the ways in which indigenous cultures responded to it.

Geography Geography obviously plays a role in resource-​management strategies, although not necessarily negatively—​in the case of Rome, and in spite of the extent of the empire’s territories, it was only at the end a significant factor that interfered with imperial rule and the management of empire, in contrast to the early Islamic Caliphate. Here,

21 See Wickham 1984; 2005, 155–​203; and Haldon 2016a and 1997.

192  John Haldon even in its western provinces in Syria, Egypt, and North Africa alone, the Caliphate was immeasurably wealthier than the rump Byzantine state. But the geography of the new empire promoted geopolitical centrifugal tendencies after the first century of its existence, although the signs of this were present almost from the beginning. This meant decreasing central authority over revenues and resources of all kinds. Arab fiscal management institutions, initially simply taken over from the preceding political authority (East Rome or Sasanian Persia) depended largely on the provinces supporting themselves both fiscally and militarily, forwarding only a small portion of the revenue take to the capital, whether Mecca (before ca. 660), Damascus (until ca. 750), or Baghdad, thereafter. One of the consequences of this was that the resource-​rich but inefficient (because of its relatively loose internal administrative articulation) Arab Islamic Empire never evolved the permanent centralizing institutional arrangements that would have permitted it to develop resource-​efficient structures such as those of the East Roman Empire. In spite of occasional and massive efforts, it could never in fact command the total resources and institutional cohesion across several provincial territories, over a period of time, to carry through a concerted and long-​term challenge sufficient to achieve this end, so that the small and much poorer Byzantine state was able to survive with a more or less continuous administrative structure for several centuries longer than the wealthy but fragmented Caliphate. Yet while bearing in mind the possible negative impacts, these are not an inevitable consequence of geographical extent. The discussion about the advantages and disadvantages inhering in large territorial empires is old—​indeed, fourth-​century bce Greek writers commented on the damaging centrifugal effects to which they were subject, in this case referring to the Achaemenid Persian Empire. But administrative mechanisms, reinforced by a range of ideological supports such as kinship, oaths of loyalty based on notions of honor and respect, as well as vested interests in terms of military and economic power, can all combine to moderate geographical factors—​as the history of the Achaemenid Empire itself shows, until the conquests of Alexander in the later fourth century. A well-​maintained logistical infrastructure was a key element in this—​the empire’s main urban centers were connected by a network of so-​called royal roads along with a system of posting stations where official travelers could change horses and receive rations for men and animals. This road system served both to move administrators and officials as well as troops and supplies, linked to a network of garrisons, and built in part on a foundation inherited from the Neo-​Assyrian Empire.22 In a very different context, the Incas were able to use a more fractured landscape to their advantage, extending along the spine of the Andes to incrementally absorb under their suzerainty the smaller proto-​state-​like confederacies to the north and the south, and using distance as a means of binding liminal zones to the center in what seems in many respects more like a confederacy than a unified state (from an Old World perspective, Shang

22 Briant 2009.

The Political Economy of Empire  193 China seems to offer some useful possible comparisons). Yet the construction of a logistical infrastructure of roads and relay stations, along with the use of llamas as transport animals, meant that distance in the Inca Empire was both a tool of political dominance (divide and conquer, incorporate, and bestow advantages) as well as a threat to political control: marginal groups could by the same token exploit distance to build up local resistance to central power.23 It is worth noting that in both cases, massive ritual sacrifice and the symbolic as well as actual destruction of the political as well as cultic center of a competitor polity served as means of reinforcing subservience and cooperation. And finally, technological aspects play a key role. The geography of the steppe repeatedly regenerated empire-​like polities, polities which rarely lasted long but which contributed in crucial ways to connecting east and west. Steppe empires, most particularly that of the Mongols, short-​lived though it was in respect of its original unity, were undoubtedly made possible by the combination of geography with the techniques and technologies associated with mounted nomadism, with the Eurasian steppe functioning as a corridor and the horse as the means of moving through that corridor, permitting a succession of paramount nomad groups to draw on the resources of the surrounding sedentary societies, to generate a protectorate over the international commerce which flourished across it, to connect regions of Eurasia far more efficiently than had been the case hitherto, and thus also to transmit ideas and techniques. Geography is thus a key factor in determining access to and the distribution of resources, especially where important strategic sources of wealth lie at a distance from the imperial center, thus requiring special measures to maintain control. Egypt was a major source of grain for Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, as well as for its armies, and it had always been placed under special administration to ensure imperial control. The loss of Egypt to the Persians (albeit temporarily) in the early seventh century, and its permanent loss to the Arabs in the early 640s were serious challenges both to the imperial city itself, the outsize population of which depended on this source of supply, as well as to the government’s finances and military supplies. The possibility of losing such resources to conquest or to local resistance was not simply a major source of concern; it also entailed a substantial investment in maintaining control, an investment that could cause major budgetary problems for any ruler or government. Here the dialectic between “core” and “peripheral” regions is important in any consideration of the political economy of an imperial system, especially if it seems that areas that are central in respect of economic production may not necessarily be core areas politically, still less from the military point of view. The economic relationship between conquering core and subjugated periphery may be radically affected by conquest itself, particularly where the conquered regions are already involved in networks of trade, or possess a well-​established administrative and

23 See Murra 1986; Vaughn et al. 2004; Ogburn 2014.

194  John Haldon fiscal structure, so that the original core in fact becomes marginalized—​as with the Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century, for example. Indeed, in respect of nomadic “empires” it seems generally to have been the case that successful expansion and subjugation/​incorporation of conquered peoples promoted the transfer of power away from the original center to a set of “core peripheries”: most spectacularly with the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire in the course of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ce into its several “core” regions—​the Golden Horde in Muscovy/​Russia, the Ilkhanate in Iraq and Iran, China, and the “original” core on the eastern steppe. But the same phenomenon can be seen in the case of the Huns and later the Avars and Khazars on the central and western Eurasian steppe. And a not dissimilar process worked toward the fragmentation of the early Islamic caliphates of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, with an original political-​military core in the Hejaz losing ground across the first generations after the conquest to Syria (Damascus), in turn giving way to Baghdad in Iraq: the first shift a consequence of the enormous success of the conquest and the prominence of Byzantium as the key enemy, the second a result of civil war and the dynamism of Irano-​Islamic culture and power-​politics. Yet in all these cases it is important to note that the cultic centers associated with the original conquests (in the Tian Shan or other cultic locations on the steppe, in the first examples, or at Mecca, in the latter) remained key players in the ideological politics of the various imperial successor states. In some contexts the power-​politics of empire involve control over such cultic foci, either through incorporation and control or occasionally through the destruction or eradication of a religious center as a potential challenge to the hegemony of the new power: we see this in practice, particularly strongly, in pre-​ Columbian America, whereas in other contexts the subjugated territories subject to client-​ruler control, for example, retain their local religious foci so long as there is a general admission that the divinities of the conqueror are superior—​as with the Neo-​Assyrian Empire in the tenth to seventh centuries bce.24 Clearly, many of these constraints do not apply where the technology of communication and transport is sufficiently advanced to neutralize them. For land-​based polities, this really means the advent of the railway and the telegraph in the mid-​ nineteenth century, although the development of more sophisticated horse-​drawn carriages from the sixteenth century in Europe had a small incremental beneficial impact as the infrastructure of roads and highways was improved, particularly in Britain and France from the middle of the eighteenth century (introduction of paved turnpike highways, for example). For oceanic empires, however, the armed ocean sailing ship combined with the application of gunpowder artillery meant a dramatic increase in the potential to exploit technologically less complex cultures, as well as in the ability to exert force at a long distance and at a proportionately far lower cost in order to compete effectively with its competitors. This again represents a major qualitative difference between the two types of imperial systems, because it

24 Houston and Inomata 2009; Webster 2009; for Assyria: Bedford 2009, 30–​65.

The Political Economy of Empire  195 also gave the oceanic colonial powers much greater flexibility both militarily and in respect of fiscal management. Technological advance both stimulated and was in its turn promoted by colonial expansion, most clearly demonstrated with the advent of the agrarian and industrial revolutions of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Trade, Commerce, Power, and Control Trade and commerce are not always given due consideration in discussion of the traditional land empires, but they have been central to analysis of the oceanic colonial imperial systems, since it is evident that they were in many cases the original stimulus for exploration and conquest. To a degree, trade and commerce and the wealth deriving therefrom are less a resource than a relationship. On the other hand, commerce and trade can be regulated, limited, promoted, or disrupted; attitudes toward them can impact on social praxis and thus on the potential to exploit them as sources of revenue or investment. Where empires or those who are involved in such activities derive wealth from them, either through personal investment or via taxation, for example, they surely count as a resource to be exploited, not only in terms of the wealth or profits to be made, but also politically—​trade, or the absence of trade, can be used to put pressure on a neighbor or an enemy, to force concessions both economic and political, and so forth. The protection offered to international commerce by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the legacy of that protectorate, as reflected in the policies of the various successor khanates on the steppe as well as in China and Iran, offer a clear example of the ways in which empire has both served to promote international exchange and commerce and enriched the imperial elites under whose patronage it was permitted to flourish. By the same token, where trade and commerce were more than a purely private affair, they have had dramatic consequences for the power relations within a state or across an empire, and can impact in important ways on the configuration of social and political relations within a society. In this context we need only think of the ways in which the Italian commercial empires grew from the eleventh and especially the twelfth centuries ce, in contrast to the role played by commerce in the perspective of the Byzantine Empire to the east. In Venice, Genoa, and Pisa the cities were dominated by businessmen whose wealth and political power was generally dependent as much, if not more so, on commerce than on rents. The elites of these cities evolved a vested interest in the maintenance and promotion of as lucrative and advantageous a commerce as possible, so that the economic and political interests of the leading and middling elements were identical with the interests of the city as state, its political identity, and its independence of outside interference. The Byzantine government tried constantly to minimize the concessions it had to grant the Venetians (and later the Genoese and Pisans) in return for political (primarily naval) support, but it played no role in promoting indigenous enterprise,

196  John Haldon either for political or economic reasons, and viewed commerce as simply another (minor) source of state income. The subsequent political, economic, and military challenge from Venice and Genoa was grounded in a commercial and maritime activity, carrying trade and control of shipping, all rooted in a completely different and quite alien understanding of the value of commercial enterprise from that of Byzantium. The latter had no means with which to respond, and by the time it had learned from the experience, in the later thirteenth century, the political as well as the commercial situation had changed so dramatically that it was too late. But commercial activity can have a range of impacts on empires and their workings. In the Indian subcontinent, and long before the medieval period, the demands of local and supra-​local elites for luxuries, for the maintenance of retinues and armies, for buildings and other construction work, had been an important stimulus to trade and commerce. Coastal regions had attracted foreign traders and merchants from the earliest times, and had acted as channels for the export of a wide range of products, both in bulk terms and in respect of luxury goods. While the center of gravity may have moved over time from region to region, the subcontinent tended on the whole to absorb surplus wealth from outside, producing goods such as cotton and silk, dyes, spices, narcotics, timber ivory, pitch, and a number of other products, and importing relatively little—​certain ores, slaves, horses. This trade, through numerous localized merchant elites, was an integral, if also parasitic element of the relationship between urban and rural production. Merchant groups themselves, whether indigenous or foreign, acted as a mediating force between rulers and more distant centers of urban as well as rural production. In addition, the demands of local and intra-​regional commerce promoted the relatively high degree of monetization of Indian exchange relationships, although the form of the exchange medium varied enormously across time and from region to region, as well as according to the level at which transactions were conducted. In respect of the ways in which dominant elites and rulers were able to exploit resources and influence the ways in which wealth was distributed, as well as in respect of the degree of independence from local entrenched socioeconomic subsystems which the rulers of larger political formations were or were not able to achieve—​in short, in respect of the contouring of patterns of power—​merchant groups and the existence of well-​established trade routes and markets represented an important constitutive element. In some areas, external markets created demands sufficient to promote the development of flourishing long-​term cash-​crop economies, especially in respect of cotton and other textiles, or rice, for example, and later in respect of tea. Such factors could play an important role in respect of the formation, consolidation, and fragmentation of larger and smaller political systems. In the Mughal period, they functioned as both alternative and complementary sources of wealth and power to those which were founded solely on the appropriation of agrarian surpluses, and further intensified the highly regionalized nature of Indian economic structures. Not only merchant groups were involved. Wealthy mansabdars (provincial revenue-​ assignment holders) and members of royal households invested in trade for profit,

The Political Economy of Empire  197 some in shipping, others were involved in maritime trade on a considerable scale. It remains unclear as to what percentage of state income might derive, under different imperial regimes, from duties on trade; but private profit-​taking certainly contributed to the wealth at the disposal of those who invested in commerce of one sort or another. In addition, the redistribution of surplus wealth appropriated as tax by the Mughal state often followed preexisting commercial networks and was actually facilitated thereby; thus creating a degree of interdependence of the one upon the other such that, just as in the later Roman period, some trade may well also have been facilitated by the state’s own fiscal network and transportation system. Mughal authorities certainly showed an interest in the well-​being of traders and those involved in commerce, and in at least one official document encouraged its officials not to neglect their interests. From the fifteenth century there occurred an expansion of international commerce which played an important role in the ways in which the Mughal administration was able to conduct its fiscal affairs, and the ways in which other political centers could acquire wealth and either resist Mughal power or evolve structures not bound in to the Mughal system of surplus appropriation. Again, commerce played an important role both in the expansion of Mughal fiscal liquidity, as well as in the weakening of central control over local elites who could derive considerable independent wealth from it. The existence of an extended interregional commerce can also directly impact on fiscal arrangements and vice versa. This is nicely illustrated in the case of both the Mughal Empire and the later Roman Empire, the highly monetized economies of which reflected a number of key factors. In the Mughal case the vast imperial bureaucracy, the attendant services it demanded or stimulated, and the high level of demand for a wide range of luxury goods and services to maintain the ostentatious consumption and display of the ruling elite promoted the establishment and maintenance of reasonably stable precious-​metal as well as low-​denomination coinages. This was built upon a long-​standing tradition of monetized exchange and particularly by the considerable demand stimulated by increased contacts with European markets as a result of first Portuguese (and later Dutch, French, and English) merchant enterprise. As the world market for textiles, silks, spices, and other products expanded, so the import of both copper (which formed the basis of the coinages of much of North India until the introduction of the Mughal silver) as well as silver and gold increased.25 But long before direct European involvement, a widespread and very flourishing network of trading contacts existed across South Asia, linking Chinese, Japanese, Philippine, and Indian ports and centers of agricultural and industrial production with the Iranian, Arab, and East African regions.26 The extraction of surplus at all levels had been well-​integrated into a monetized system of exchange, using a wide variety of currency media—​copper, gold, cowries and a 25 See Vilar 1976, 96, 101; and on the use of copper, see Day 1978; Vilar 1976, 36–​37, 96; Moreland [1923] 1972, 183ff. 26 See, for a good survey, Abu-​Lughod 1989, 261ff.; the contributions in Tracy 1990; the introductory chapters in Furber 1976; and Perlin 1993, 291ff.

198  John Haldon range of other token currencies, entailing sets of overlapping pools of money-​use extending from the level of state activity via large-​scale commercial exchange and tax-​farming, right down to village economies.27 The existence of a well-​established silver currency worked to the advantage of local and long-​distance commerce and of Mughal fiscal management; fluctuations in the supply of silver had a direct effect upon both. And the central importance of a highly monetized economic life meant additionally that tax-​farming, the development of a market in the rights to agricultural produce and ultimately in land itself (by the early eighteenth century), as well as the development of fairly sophisticated structures for credit and loans, went hand in hand. It also meant that the relationship between the resource-​extracting class of local and regional notables in the empire and the commercial and urban markets, upon which the former depended for both luxury goods and services, diluted the political and fiscal link between the center and its resource base.28 In the case of the later Roman Empire, the fiscal structures of the state served both to promote and to set limits to commerce. Following the so-​called crisis of the third century, and from the early fourth century ce, a greatly reformed and more effective, centralized fiscal apparatus evolved, entailing in the medium term the closer tying-​in of regional elites to the imperial system at all levels. The stability that followed these changes, in the context of state demands to provision the armies of the empire, led to a flourishing trans-​Mediterranean commerce, with the result that the state and its fiscal apparatus began to act as never before as a key element in facilitating the economic recovery that archaeological and written evidence documents. It was not the state alone that generated the vast and highly commercialized market system of late Antiquity, but it certainly acted as the key stabilizing agent that facilitated commerce and production for a large, empire-​wide market of consumers at all social levels. Late imperial taxation was managed and extracted at the local and the regional level, but in many cases then redistributed over considerable distances to support Rome and Constantinople, or to support the military. Taxation supported and bolstered the strong central authority of the late Roman state, assisted through the annona—​the extraction of resources in kind (although sometimes commuted into cash) and their delivery to the army—​as well as other fiscal mechanisms in bringing together widely dispersed markets and production centers. The vast geographical extent of this system enabled the elites of the empire both at the center and in the provinces to deepen their economic and political reach within, and to extend it well beyond, their own province. The wealthier and more effective elites were at extracting resources, the greater the potential for long-​distance bulk commerce, and the greater the potential for the less wealthy to benefit from this fact. But when taxation was weakened and when integrative fiscal mechanisms broke down or were suborned by local elites, fragmentation of 27 See Richards 1983 for some general comments on the background; also the discussion in Richards 1981; with Perlin 1983, 60ff. 28 Tax-​farming and entrepreneurial activities: Brennig 1977; Subrahmanyam 1986 and 1990. For the currency, see the essays in Richards 1987; Perlin 1987; Prakash 1988.

The Political Economy of Empire  199 both the empire-​wide economy and its elite was a necessary result. In the Roman west in the course of the fifth century, taxation systems became localized, before often breaking down completely to be supplemented by, or completely replaced by, new forms of surplus extraction and redistribution, modes that reflected changed power relationships between political centers and elites or aristocracies. This impacted directly on patterns of exchange, since it was on the back of fiscal structures that a good proportion of the international and interregional exchange networks had been able to flourish. Thereafter and in many areas it was residual—​albeit substantial—​aristocratic demand which provided henceforth the main motor of longer-​distance commerce and exchange. While fragmentation of the empire-​wide economy was one outcome of these changes, the survival of strong elites, local and regionalized exchange, and the use of money on a grand scale remained the norm in many regions. Where elites lost their ability to extract resources on the scale that had been possible under the late Roman fiscal regime, so peasantries appear to have benefited, improving their position, and one result of this was that the elites of those areas with wealthier or more autonomous peasantries came to rely less on a more internationalized luxury commerce and more on humbler domestic or local production, just as their peasantries did—​with further consequences for the wider international pattern of exchange. Whether or not empires try to manage, tax, or control commerce, by its very nature it impacts directly on the ways in which an imperial system manages its fiscal affairs.29 Leaving to one side the varied possibilities for states of different political forms to intervene in order to exploit such commerce (customs, taxes, etc.),30 an important difference lies in the structural potential of such commerce. For traditional societies, while vast profits for individual merchants or joint contractors could be made, such wealth was generally recycled through forms of conspicuous consumption or invested in small-​or medium-​scale production, the wealth generated by which was generally consumed again without being further invested into the process of wealth production. The simple amassing of commercial capital, however spectacular some merchant fortunes may have been in either Rome or medieval European societies, and its investment in either conspicuous consumption, in finance (loans to governments at high rates of interest, for example), or in shipping, remained always within the sphere of circulation of wealth, rather than being employed in a way which would transform production processes either in rural agricultural or in urban manufacturing contexts. Of course, the investment of a slave’s labor power in producing goods for the market that are of greater value than the combined values of the capital invested in the slaves and in the materials on which they are set to work comes close to this; it nevertheless remains clearly distinct, only one element in a broader system of non-​capitalist production relations. 29 See the summary in Wickham 2005: 255–​258. 30 For an example from the ancient world of the ways in which technological advantages in transport and shipping can dramatically affect the power relations between competing groups of merchants (as, for example, between Indian and European traders from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ce), see Frankenstein 1979.

200  John Haldon Production for sale in a market context with the aim of maximizing profits (of which one can find many examples in the Roman world, to name but one instance), but in the context of an economy dominated by tributary relations, is not capitalism. A concentration of money, or wealth in other forms (such as credit instruments, for example), in the hands of merchants, together with petty commodity production in both villages and towns, and long-​distance trade, does not by itself lead to capitalist relations or indeed the breakup of feudal relations of production. This is apparent when we consider the situation in western Europe until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was only with the discovery of the New World and the opening up of the African and South Asian littorals and their hinterlands to European merchant activity, combined with qualitative and quantitative changes in agricultural productivity and technology, that a major discrepancy between the wealth generated by feudal production relations, and that produced by long-​distance mercantile exchange, developed. Even then, it is important to note that, up to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and later in many areas) long-​distance trade was itself of a highly traditional type, bringing into contact social formations that were mutually ignorant of one another, exchanging products the costs of production of which were not known in the society to which they were delivered.31 As noted earlier, where those social labor costs were unequal, one society was in effect benefiting from the transfer to it of surplus produced in the other. This asymmetrical relationship characterizes European trade with Asia and Africa in the later medieval and early modern periods.

Early Modern Commercial Imperialism The quest for new markets and new sources of exchangeable goods and materials, rather than for the control or management of the circulation of relatively fixed amounts of social wealth, evolved in the West out of the transformation of traditional feudal polities into absolutist or constitutionalist systems (to adopt Mann’s terms) and the competition among them. The search for ever greater resources with which to assert national or imperial political and ideological agendas meant a transformation of the relationship of commerce to state fiscal arrangements. With the growth of capitalist relations of production, the qualitative nature of imperial political economy changed, and along with it the nature of international commercial competition as well as the forms through which colonial exploitation was facilitated. One consequence was that states were compelled to involve themselves in the protection of their investment and their commercial enterprises, an involvement entailing increasingly burdensome military investment—​investment which only states could afford or support. Private investment in colonial and international commerce was increasingly framed by the interests of competing states. In the case 31 Amin 1976. For the exploitation of price differentials by monopolistic groups of merchants and traders, see Wolf 1982, 183–​184.

The Political Economy of Empire  201 of Britain, some of the wealth generated through colonial exploitation for home and foreign markets found its way into an industrializing production process, which meant both for government as well as entrepreneurs an exponential leap ahead of their European rivals, a leap that became particularly clear toward the end of the eighteenth century—​a process mirrored in the competitive wars between the major European colonizing powers in the eighteenth century in particular.32 The most striking example of this integration of state with private investment interests is the foundation in 1694 of the Bank of England, established on the basis of a mutual share issue with a guaranteed 8 percent return. Within a year it had raised over 1.5 million pounds sterling, enough to fund an impressive new program of warship construction. The demands of the navy stimulated at the same time over the following half-​century a vastly increased industrial output as well as a host of new industries, promoting both technological innovation as well as improved construction and production techniques—​a forerunner of the later “military-​industrial complex.” And within 10  years of the original share issue, the revived and re-​ equipped Royal Navy had confronted and defeated the French and had begun to transform the military-​political balance of power in western Europe and—​crucially for the next century of colonial expansion—​in the Atlantic world more broadly.33 One of the characteristics of the world of imperial colonial commerce is that it remained largely centered around national state/​empire networks—​the British traded with their own colonies and vice versa, the French struggled to impose controls on their colonies in the Caribbean trading with those outside the French sphere of influence, and all governments struggled to retain as much direct control over colonial economies as they could. But attempting to limit and control colonial commerce for the benefit of the imperial state alone meant that European rivalries were carried overseas along with European colonial and commercial ventures. Already in the later sixteenth century in Portuguese Brazil, royal garrisons and ships suffered competition from the Dutch and at the same time had to deal with increasingly autonomous settler elites who built their own autonomous trade networks, with Africa and the slave trade in particular. The picture is the same in the East Indies, where the Dutch soon became dominant. For the Spanish in the Americas, similar problems had to be dealt with. Its colonial incomes were essential to the Spanish monarchy, since without them it was not able to maintain control over its far more fractious European lands. But again control was massively compromised by the distances entailed and the various competing interests of local governors and administrators, settlers, merchant elites, and the church. And while the protection afforded by royal ships and armaments held the empire together as much as successful conflict with competitor powers such as the English and the Dutch, it reinforced the national identities of these competing colonial worlds.34



32 See the survey in Mann 1986a, 472–​475, 483–​495. 33 Roseveare 1991, 34; Roberts and Kynaston 1995.

34 See Mandelblatt 2013; Miquelon 1988; Butel 1990; Newitt 2005; Perrotta 1993; Elliott 2006.

202  John Haldon The growth of British international commerce contrasts with this model and evolved along somewhat different lines. The slow process of Anglo-​Scottish colonization in North America was allowed to develop under largely private auspices with only minimal intervention from the government, except in terms of the diplomatic and political support it could offer in cases of conflicting claims from France or Spain, in negotiations with the indigenous populations, and occasional military support. In the West Indies, the development of sugar production on a grand scale supported by slave and indentured labor followed in the footsteps of the initial Spanish colonization of the islands, generating both a market for foodstuffs in New England and a market for sugar in England and elsewhere, as well as supporting the slave trade itself. The East India Company, established in the last years of the sixteenth century to profit from trade with India and the East Indies, remained an entirely private operation, albeit with the advantage of a government monopoly on the trade, and negotiated on its own behalf with local rulers and potentates for trade rights, concessions, and stations. It intervened in local politics where its interests were affected, and gradually established a territorial hegemony rivaling that of any European state; the equivalent of the East India Company for Africa and the Caribbean, established somewhat later in 1663, was the Royal Africa Company, which operated along similar lines. In all these cases the government attempted to maintain a degree of supervision and the potential for intervention on its behalf, but found that both the trading companies and the settler populations were generally resistant. In spite of the need for military and naval action to defend these territories and the sea-​routes that linked them to one another and to Britain, relative autonomy remained the norm, except when, after the 1857 mutiny in India, the East India Company ceded administrative, judicial, and military authority to the crown. Yet at the same time, the revenues drawn from colonial economies, the private and public investment in colonial enterprises, the maintenance of a powerful fleet and ancillary industries, and the establishment of a common judicial system across all the imperial possessions meant that this “fiscal-​military” state retained a degree of fiscal and more broadly economic flexibility that gave it a substantial advantage over all its rivals.35

Empire and Ideological Resources While not usually considered part of any “economic” equation, I  would suggest that any consideration of the political economy of an imperial system must take into account and attribute equal value to the inherited political and theological systems through which the conquerors express themselves and understand the world, as well as those of the subject cultures. Imperial systems represent themselves by 35 These developments are neatly summarized in Burbank and Cooper 2010, 170–​182, with further literature. See esp. Brewer 1989; with Fieldhouse 1966.

The Political Economy of Empire  203 projecting a particular imperial political ideology that serves to legitimate (at least in respect of the distribution of power at any given moment) its existence and the rule of its governing elites. Such concepts and ideas should also be understood as a resource that can be managed, manipulated, inflected, and as a resource they count as “economic” in the wider sense. It is usually through such ideological systems that subject populations at large are attributed with a specific “imperial” identity and incorporated into the wider polity, although of course those identities vary according to perspective—​willing subjects of the empire from one viewpoint may be an oppressed subject population from another, or members of a wider religious community, and so on. And such ideologies are more often than not the key to understanding why an empire survives as long as it does. In many systems, efforts were made to create common ground between conquerors and conquered, by absorbing the deities of the conquered population into the pantheon of the conquerors, or at least by permitting sufficient ideological space for them to flourish on their home ground.36 With the advent of the major monotheistic religions, in contrast, conversion to the religion of the conquerors was sometimes a way to avoid heavy fiscal burdens or second-​class status, although this was not always something that was deliberately promoted by the conquerors; indeed, in the case of early Islam the failure of the Arab-​Islamic elite to acknowledge the status of newly converted non-​Arab elites led to civil war and the demise of the Umayyad dynasty. But the religion of the state and its elite could become equally a means of coercing acceptance and conformity, most particularly in empires dominated by Islam and Christianity, and this inflected in significant ways the relationship between dominant and subordinate elites. Yet until the advent of these soteriological systems, most empires made no attempt to push through any such incorporation, even though the duration of political control, the penetration of cultural values, and the incorporation of elites into the imperial elite more widely often achieved this end to some extent—​the ways in which “Roman” cultural identity gradually replaced those of the indigenous conquered populations of most of western Europe in the period from the first century ce to the fifth is illustrative and was barely influenced by the spread of Christianity. By the fifth and sixth centuries, the eastern Roman state was a mature established imperial system in which the various local and regional cultures—​in Egypt, Syria, the Aegean, or southern Balkans—​were fully integrated elements, whose elites were entirely subsumed within an imperial system of offices and precedent. Imperial orthodoxy certainly reinforced this, but it was certainly not its major cause. This does not mean, of course, that tensions between the vested interests of provinces and center did not exist and could not reassert themselves. Indeed, it was precisely the failure of the center at Rome to defend the interests (or to be seen to defend the interests) of the provincial elite of the Gallic and British provinces in the 36 The significance of ideological power was underlined by Weber, among others, and more recently by Mann 1986a, 22–​24, 301–​372, and built into his four-​dimensional model of social power.

204  John Haldon first half of the fifth century that generated the separatist tendencies of those provinces, the resistance to forwarding revenues to Rome or to the imperial administration, and the slow undermining of Roman imperial structures, processes that led to the transfer of the interests of these elites away from Rome, either to local polities that it was thought would do a better job, or to newly formed states created by “barbarian” incomers. By the same token, although on a different scale, the detaching of the eastern provinces of the empire from Constantinople in the course of the initial Arab conquests ca. 633–​641 ce was as much to do with the short-​term inability of the state to defend the interests of cities and elites as it was to do with any longer-​ term ideological disaffection (and although such disaffection also existed, it had had no centrifugal impact in terms of either political or fiscal organization until this time). But just as often, the self-​identity of the conquered, while it may evolve, is resistant to incorporation; “imperial” identities remain externally imposed, frequently by commentators who describe the social formation in question from their own, often very alien, point of view. Here, the role of indigenous elites becomes especially important. Where an imperial system is able to incorporate such elites, or key elements thereof, into its own empire-​wide elite (even if there remain degrees of difference), it has a better chance of maintaining its authority over the conquered regions and at the same time of penetrating deeper into local society and culture. Many empires have done this—​Rome’s incorporation of both the warrior elites of the western European provinces (Gaul, Spain, Britain) and the Hellenized elites of the eastern provinces worked enormously to its advantage in the initial stages of conquest. In contrast, and as noted already, the failure of the Arab conquerors of Iran to accept on equal terms former elites and notables who converted to Islam contributed considerably to the collapse of Umayyad authority in the 740s and resulted in the civil war which overthrew them and replaced them with the Abbasids. Ancient Athens failed signally to offer any such incorporation to the various members of its short-​ lived empire in the fifth century bce, thus promoting no loyalty among their elites whatsoever and resulting in a cycle of disintegration, forced re-​subjugation, and further fragmentation in the course of the Peloponnesian War. With the arrival of the major salvationist religious systems, furthermore, a religious/​devotional identity of interest could be established which could be deployed to bind conquerors and conquered together, particularly when faced by a challenge to the faith from a rival system—​as between Christianity and Islam in the medieval period, for example. But even here it must be noted that a range of other factors need to be taken into account, so that local identities, local cultic practices, nationalisms, or other markers of a local identity, often negated such commonalities. In some cases, imperial rulers may attempt to establish a religious ideology or political theology which more closely approximates and reflects their own conception of empire. In sixteenth-​century India, for example, the Mughal ruler Akbar dramatically modified orthodox Sunni Islam by introducing in 1581 the “Divine Faith” (Din-​i Ilahi), a novel, highly syncretistic system, in which Akbar was himself the prophet of the

The Political Economy of Empire  205 new faith. Rooted in Islam, it borrowed heavily from Hinduism and from Parsi (Zoroastrian) beliefs, as well as from Christianity. Predictably, the new faith never spread beyond a very limited circle at court, and there were in fact a number of rebellions on the part of Muslim lords and their followers. The Din-​i Ilahi seems to have been intended to promote loyalty to a cult of the ruler, which stood above the two main religions of the empire, an ideological device which would unify the disparate elements of the central and provincial elites. While it failed insofar as Akbar’s successors did not show much interest in its furtherance in their personal lives, it constitutes one among the many elements which imbued the Mughal throne with a degree of ideological permanence and respect similar in many ways to that attached to the Ottoman sultanate or the Byzantine imperial throne. The most successful imperial systems erected ideological and legitimating systems for themselves, generally embodied in concepts of divine or divinely inspired or supported rulership. Such concepts were in some cases the only unifying factors within highly diverse systems where provinces differed from one another and from the center in language, culture, and community identities. In the Chinese case, while an imperial administration tied the empire together at one level, and while the ideology of imperial rule served the purposes of the state and administration, the degree to which any notions of a shared imperial identity percolated downward was probably very limited, in contrast, it would seem, to the situation in the later Roman or early Islamic worlds, where Christianity and Islam served to cement such ideas, even if only partially. But the Chinese case suggests that the degree to which such penetrative ideologies worked was not necessarily dependent on the extent to which empires evolved modes of resource extraction that were relatively impersonalized and institutionalized. For although not a prerequisite for success, the longest-​lasting imperial systems usually moved away from administration based on kinship and lineage relationships and toward the establishment of a permanent and self-​regenerating body of administrators, which drew its recruits from either specific groups within the state (tribal groups, for example) or from those of a particular social or cultural background. Many, but by no means all, empires generally attempted to reproduce across their conquered territories the same arrangements as pertained in the “home” territory or territories. The evolution of an imperial administration or bureaucratic elite which had a sense of its own function within the state/​society, identified with a particular set of ideological and symbolic narratives, and could recruit and train its personnel into the institutional roles and behavioral patterns relevant to the maintenance and even expansion of these structures was a crucial factor. The relative success of the Roman and Byzantine, Chinese and Ottoman empires, and the relative failure of the Carolingian Empire (among many others) provide good illustrations.37

37 For the example of the Byzantine state bureaucracy in comparison with some neighboring states, see Haldon 2016b.

206  John Haldon Empires thus existed as imaginative constructs as well as actual institutional-​ administrative entities. They possessed an ideological life which may not necessarily have been tied to their actual political and institutional efficacy or power. Political ideologies and other belief systems, once in existence, are frequently able to adapt and to survive in conditions which have evolved well away from those within which they originally developed, provided the contradictions between the two are not too extreme or insurmountable in terms of social praxis and psychology. Political ideologies can be extremely flexible as well as powerful. Many empires were in reality little more than territories ruled over only nominally by an “emperor” or similarly titled ruler, in which actual power was exercised by an elite whose position in origin may well have depended upon the central ruler and/​or the conditions in which the state came into being (by conquest, for example) but who, because of their effective control over resources, together with other historical conditions, were really and in practical terms independent. Yet often in such cases the idea of an empire, together with the residual power of concepts such as loyalty, was enough to maintain at least a fictional unity of identity until some time after effective imperial power had waned. Ideological resources are thus also part of the “imperial capital” necessary to the sustenance of an imperial system beyond a very limited lifespan.

Centers and Elites There are fundamental constraints imposed upon imperial systems, generated in particular through the relations of surplus distribution between center and elites. Imperial systems have at their disposal a range of culturally determined and conjuncturally inflected options for managing their resources and for constructing their relationship with conquered or incorporated elites. Yet as noted already, these are not random. On the contrary, it seems clear that imperial forms evolve, and that within each major cultural zone, and determined by the level of technological sophistication, successive systems generate more effective means of extracting resources and of controlling their distribution and consumption, two primary determinants of how pre-​modern empires function. Given the context set by pre-​industrial levels of technology, imperial centers had to solve the problem of maintaining conquered peoples, both elites and the mass of the producing population, in subjection, and had at the same time to assure a surplus adequate to the maintenance of their apparatus of domination—​military and fiscal as well as judicial and ideological, depending on the context. By the same token, imperial centers had also to negotiate the structural contradiction between their interests and those of other factions of the ruling elites (both those belonging to the conquerors or imperialists, on the one hand, as well as those of conquered elites, on the other), particularly in respect of control over the appropriation of surplus and over its distribution. There have been many different variations on this

The Political Economy of Empire  207 theme as different imperial systems, different dominant or courtly elites and rulers, sought both to maintain their own authority over conquered regions and to incorporate, subordinate, or otherwise neutralize the elites as well as the ordinary populations of newly won regions. One model that has been frequently invoked is that of the “predatory state,” by which conquering elites live off tributary levies to the detriment of productive economic investment. But this model seems too simplistic, especially in view of the fact that empirical research into a number of historical empires shows that, even where fiscal levies were high, the mutual interrelationship of conquered and conquering elites and the ways in which the imperial center developed vested interests in the conquered regions make for a more complex interplay of the various elements from which an imperial system is composed. In the case of Achaemenid Persia, for example, investment in irrigation that was certainly beneficial—​in terms of tax revenue—​to the court was undertaken by local elites, in return for fiscal relief or concessions; indeed, the royal archives from Persepolis provide much information on several aspects of state economic management and investment in the provinces, such as the transfer of state-​managed labor from all the provinces of the empire, court investment in a range of artisanal activities and production centers, the transfer of workers from one site to another, as well as complex accounting systems for central storage facilities and the redistribution of provisions and supplies through a sophisticated bureaucracy. In short, such evidence demonstrates the complex intertwining of the court or “state” with the “private” interests of the royal household and especially with those of local elites. A different example is offered by the successor to the Persian Empire, the Seleucid Empire which arose on the fragmented eastern and middle eastern provinces of Alexander’s short-​lived empire. Here, because the Seleucid kings were distant from their original Greek homeland, they always represented a minority ethnic group that, while it could bring in both Greek settlers as well as mercenary soldiers and settlers, was never able to form a particularly numerous ethnic base of support, and in fact it was really only in the northern parts of Syria that a real process of Hellenization took place. Most opposition to Seleucid rule came from other Greeks, so that royal power, based on the vast income from estates directly subject to the kings’ household, and supported through the maintenance of a large mercenary army, had also to take into account the need to maintain a diplomatic alliance with the Greek population and elites, who were scattered across the territories of the empire in its major urban centers. This entailed a mutual exchange of gifts and goodwill, and included also key elements of the various indigenous populations, with the result that there never evolved any attempt to establish or impose a dominant religion, language, or culture. Paramount for the interests of the kings, however, was the need to maintain a monetized economy—​whereas Alexander’s empire as well as that of the Achaemenids had depended upon the extraction of taxes and rents largely in kind, a monetized economy was crucial for the maintenance of their largely professional mercenary army. This was promoted through the founding of

208  John Haldon new cities in the most fertile and productive regions of the empire, and the encouragement of market exchange to facilitate the movement of wealth. Elite support, whether regarding a court-​centered imperial elite or a provincial ruling elite or elites, was thus constantly under negotiation, offering an alternative model of the exercise of imperial power, in which the center was the focus of royal or imperial authority and the exercise of military control, and in which the provinces functioned more or less autonomously except where the return of tax and tribute to the court was concerned. An ideological identity of royal authority and the vested interests of provincial elites served to cement the relationship, while where the center was able to balance the vested interests of the different factions and play one element off against another to maintain such an equilibrium, central authority and access to resources could be preserved—​and in virtually every imperial system such an effort can be observed in the historical record. The Seleucid model represents, in consequence, an interesting variation on the equation of center—​ periphery/​control—​provincial autonomy; the later Sasanian kingdom offers another example, moving in the course of its history from the sort of negotiated elite support mentioned previously toward more absolute central control. The earlier Neo-​Assyrian Empire offers another, a conquest empire in which a “home” territory provided taxes, royal rents, and a core territorial base; more distant conquered provinces paid an annual tribute and were subject to a range of other demands; while other subjugated regions became clients—​in the last two cases, status was not necessarily tied to the way in which they had become part of the Assyrian king’s dominion, but was influenced by a series of other conjunctural factors, including ideological issues relating to the status of the local divinities in the conquered or defeated territory. But there was a clear tendency as time passed for many territories originally left relatively autonomous after their initial subjection to become incorporated into the “home” region as they were turned into provinces and administered directly. At the same time, the role of an Assyrian “identity” became important as a means of incorporating non-​Assyrian elites and communities. Yet in many ways—​and with hindsight, of course—​the Assyrian Empire remained an experiment. Following a period of civil war and then revolts and attacks by formerly subject or tributary groups (the Medes and Chaldaeans), its total and utter collapse in a period of just four years (614–​610 bce), including the razing of its major fortified centers to the ground (including Nineveh, its imperial metropolis, and Assur itself, its religious center), is indicative of the fragility of its ideological as well as its institutional hegemony.38 Center-​ elite relations, and the nature of the negotiations that had to be maintained to balance the interests of metropolis and provinces or more distant territories, were also inflected by imperial competition—​the implicit challenge set up by a rival imperial system with a common border has generally reinforced efforts on the part of an imperial center to emphasize ideological difference and to strengthen

38 Bedford 2009; Liverani 2011.

The Political Economy of Empire  209 the ties between the provinces and the imperial capital or the ruler. It also generates competition over access to resources, and thus to military conflict, cycles of either predatory or punitive raiding, as well as occasionally attempts at actual occupation and conquest. Imperial systems are inevitably more complex than “simple” states: where the ruler or government of a unitary state had to negotiate the relationship between center and elite, the ruler or ruling elite of an empire needed to negotiate both the relationship between themselves and the conquering elite in the home territory and in the conquered lands, as well as that between the center and the indigenous or conquered elites, where these survived. In the end, most empires had to work with a balance between the demands of the center and the interests of the provinces, so that when this balance was compromised, rebellion or at least substantial resistance to the demands of the center was usual. The total replacement of conquered elites was not unknown, but their replacements generally evolved over time both a regional identity and on occasion regional ideological and cultural sympathies. More usually, subjected elites were complemented by state-​appointed administrators whose function was to maintain central authority and ensure the rendering of surpluses in kind and in manpower to the center. Indeed, in the various Chinese states that evolved into imperial systems from the third-​century bce Qin onward, this process became part of state-​building itself, as also in many parts of the early Ottoman Empire.39 The relationship between the imperial center and those who actually appropriate surplus on their behalf is, in consequence, always contradictory and potentially antagonistic. The former must attempt to appropriate surplus itself, or ensure that it receives an adequate portion of such surplus, to be certain of its survival; the latter is interested in conserving and enhancing its social and economic position, even where it was a “state” or “service” elite with little in the way of landed resources, dependent wholly or largely on the state, as in the case of the Ottoman and Mughal elites, for a period at least, as well as others. Since pre-​modern elites and imperial states function at the same level of primary appropriation, inducing the creation of surplus through their monopoly of various forms of non-​economic coercion, the ability of the center to extract surplus depends entirely upon its power to limit the economic and political strength of competing elites or fractions of the ruling elite, either ideologically, or through various combinations of coercion and administrative control, or usually both. Empires generate new elites, or force the transformation of established elites. A key question to be asked about the dynamics of any empire is whether or not the imperial center, or the elites bound up with the perceived interests of a given imperial formation, can act independently of the interests of dominant socioeconomic classes in the home territory or in the provinces. Associated with this is the question of the extent to which empires choose to ignore—​or can survive if they do so—​traditional structures of kinship and lineage, in attempting to ensure their

39 See the brief account in Loewe 2011.

210  John Haldon long-​term survival and the creation or maintenance of conditions conducive to their political-​institutional reproduction. The Sasanian Persian example already alluded to (third–​seventh centuries ce) is interesting (see also later discussion), for here the kings eventually succeeded in freeing themselves to an extent from the great magnate families of whom they were primi inter pares, establishing a loyal middling provincial elite, yet in a period of political-​military crisis the abandonment of the imperial family by its self-​identifying peer magnate clans spelled disaster for the empire’s ability to resist the Arab invasions. For the most part, while it is clear that under given, short-​term conditions, it is perfectly possible for state elites or rulers to act against the majority vested interests of the leading social groups within a state, this strategy has little longer-​term success. The methods adopted by different empires for dealing with these issues have varied widely. Creating a more or less socially deracinated body of state servitors, whose existence depends entirely upon the ruler, who are not permitted to reproduce themselves as a class, who are rotated through office and function and who are thus not permitted to establish any hereditary claim to office or social position other than through state service, represents one path. In different ways and with different degrees of success, both the Ottoman and Mughal empires attempted to achieve this through the incorporation of converted slave soldiers and administrators at the highest as well as lower levels of bureaucratic and military authority; the Chinese Song state did the same, but without the strongly servile element; and to a degree its predecessors and successors moved in this direction in the establishment of their central administrative fiscal bureaucracies. Indeed, the history of successive Chinese empires offers almost the full range of permutations on this theme. The Zhou dynasty (eleventh–​eighth centuries bce) depended on a network of loyalties between center and local dynasts for its ability to command resources and military manpower; the various states which followed its collapse tried a range of alternative strategies to maintain central authority—​the removal of local princely elites and their replacement by centrally appointed officials, for example (the central plains Chu state), or by a combination of this with peasant population transfers and land settlements to create a solid tax basis. The Qin Empire, which succeeded in defeating all its rivals in the second half of the third century bce, was followed by the longer-​lasting Han Empire (202 bce–​220 ce), over the course of which there evolved a system of imperial administration based on a meritocratic bureaucracy (including the promotion to positions of political and administrative authority of the sons of middling provincial landowners), combined with delegation of power to provincial dynasts, a highly centralized legal system, and a focus on the emperor’s power as the source of all political legitimacy and power. Leaving aside the reasons for ultimate Han failure, these features, in different proportions, remained key elements in Chinese imperial governance thereafter, with the meritocratic form of “mandarin” government reaching its height during the Song (960–​1279 ce).40 The

40 Discussion in Loewe 2011; with the relevant chapters in Lewis 2007; Twitchett and Fairbank 2002.

The Political Economy of Empire  211 Mamluks, whose “empire” included both Egypt and parts of greater Syria until the sixteenth century, depended to a large extent on imported slaves to staff the central government and its provincial military governors, a system that contributed to the wider stability of the empire, yet also led to systemic in-​fighting at court between contestants for the sultanate. As a result of the particular circumstances of the seventh–​ninth centuries, Byzantine emperors were enabled to achieve similar ends, binding individuals selected for imperial service from a range of indigenous and foreign backgrounds to the person of the emperor, the imperial system of rank and precedence, and circumventing to a degree both kinship and hereditary wealth. And as already noted, in the course of some significant reforms introduced by the Persian Shahanshah Khusru I in the mid-​sixth century, a new stratum of middling rural notables was created out of the lower landowning nobility, some of whom were given court titles and financial rewards, others of whom formed a military component, both intended to help the state in the appropriation of fiscal resources as well as providing a military force independent of the great magnate families upon whom the kings had hitherto had to depend. Yet in the last analysis, all these systems were subverted by the individuals from whom they were constituted, and kinship was especially corrosive of central control. Even where it did not play a significant role in the establishment of a state or empire, it always resurfaces as a key factor in inflecting how state elites are recruited and how they reproduce themselves, and how the center relates to its provincial elite, whether indigenous and co-​opted into the imperial system, or imposed and evolved over time into a potentially independent rival for resources and political authority. In the Ottoman case, for example, the ruler’s power was founded in the first place upon conquests and wealth won for him by social groups still retaining many of the key traits of clan and tribal structure, however much they were being transformed, socially differentiated, and hierarchized or ranked through warfare and the formation of retinues; and even as the deracinated service elite was being expanded to drive out older lineage-​based elites, it was itself building associations which contained the germs of regional identities and new kin-​based loyalties. Many empires faced problems of both regional and lineage identities, such as tribal or clan solidarities that dramatically vitiated attempts by a central authority, even when supported by elements of a permanent civil or military bureaucracy, to maintain themselves over more than a few generations. Both the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates faced such difficulties, for the conflicts of interest between center, tribal military support fragmented by inherited ideological rivalries, underprivileged converts to Islam, and the remnants of traditional bureaucratic elites among the conquered urban populations, all further inflected by deep-​seated religious ideological factionalism, combined to produce a situation in which the ruling Arab family and its clan support proved unable to mobilize the resources to fend off serious and ideologically well-​motivated attack. In contrast, the Sasanian Empire which dominated Persia and neighboring lands from the third to the seventh century ce, whose Iranian element proved so powerful an influence

212  John Haldon in the development of Islamic culture and political structures, provides a good example of a remarkably successful dynasty. The power of the royal family depended very largely on the ideological commitment of a powerful group of regional clan or dynastic chiefs (the Parthian-​Sasanian “aristocracy,” from whom the royal house was itself drawn) to the legitimacy of the dominant dynasty (which claimed also a certain politico-​religious authority sanctioned both by a claim to ancient lineage and military leadership). As long as the results of Sasanid rule were not in contradiction to their own interests, viewed from the perspective of aristocratic dynastic and lineage politics, the elite supported the kings. This was not just a question of kinship and provincial elites in the abstract, of course—​access to local agricultural or commercial wealth played a key role, as is evident in the Chinese case, among others, where one of the major problems for Chinese imperial rule was the fact that distance combined with locally generated agrarian or commercial wealth to promote a high degree of local economic autonomy. Even where provincial elites were at origin generated from the imperial capital and through its bureaucracy, this proved a corrosive element in the fabric of imperial control over resources. Traditional agrarian empires must not necessarily fall or collapse because of internal tensions between the various elements of which they are comprised, however, particularly where there is factionalism and antagonism between elements of the dominant elites. For example, in spite of its fiscal problems and its defeats at the hands of European powers from the eighteenth century onward especially, the Ottoman state did in fact survive, providing a context for the evolution of social and economic relationships for over 300 years after the beginnings of the so-​called decline. It can thus be argued that the empire survived because it did not come into fundamental conflict with the structural changes within Ottoman state and society, and even enabled their further development: this was thus a process which in turn contributed directly to the survival of the state, both in respect of the relative internal stability of its relations of production, and the political distribution of power in respect of local and central access to resources. A degree of equilibrium was thus achieved between the various factions within the ruling elites (which comprised both the Ottoman elite and notables and others, whose origins lay in the conquered populations), who had effective possession of landed incomes or other sources of wealth. This view involves abandoning a liberal Eurocentric notion of the “strong” state which survives only if its interests coincide with those of the majority of its subjects, or only if it cruelly represses those “progressive” elements which seek its overthrow. Central state power in the Ottoman world did weaken from the early seventeenth century in a variety of ways, so that the existence of semi-​autonomous border lords in the nineteenth century give the impression of a state in name only. Yet the position of such local warlords was made possible, and could only be maintained within the context of, the Ottoman state. In general terms, it seems that where a state center is unable to impose a strict oversight or control over provincial elites, or where it loses such power, then elite behavior represents, more often than not, a compromise between central authority

The Political Economy of Empire  213 and obedience, on the one hand, and, on the other, local vested interests, in a balanced bundle of powers and rights. Provincial elites of what we might term mature empires tend to act in ways which—​in their perception at least—​either support or do not actively challenge the status quo, although the outcomes of their actions do not necessarily produce the hoped-​for results. And depending on how they identify those interests, they will oppose or support or remain neutral in respect of the efforts of the central imperial authority to retain its own control over resources. As in both the rule of the Ottoman dynasty and that of the Qing in China up to the early twentieth century, the combination of a well-​entrenched ideology of imperial rule with a balance between central and provincial elite vested interests, and the need to defend a status quo within which established elites can flourish, is a powerful recipe for imperial longevity, even where actual military and coercive power, whether to defend against external aggression or in respect of internal security, might be very substantially weakened. One of the most important points about this is that the very existence of state structures, with all their fiscal and institutional demands and effects, in turn both limits certain types of political and power relations while at the same time facilitating either the evolution of new forms, or alternatively attributing older structures with new possibilities for their further development—​and all this in turn must necessarily react back upon the ways in which the state itself can maintain itself and evolve. Even in the most politically centralized imperial systems, “public” politics is always underwritten and shadowed by less public sets of relationships—​ of kinship, patronage, local regulatory semi-​official or customary “law,” systems of notarial management of resources, and so forth. Indeed, an imperial administration provides a framework for the development of certain social and economic relationships, through its need to establish and then maintain a regular and predictable structure for extracting revenues and resources, thus also enabling or facilitating the evolution of new practices and relationships. This is clear in the way in which the East Roman/​Byzantine state transferred the focus of its attention in fiscal matters away from urban centers to village communities during the course of the seventh and eighth centuries, thereby radically altering the ways in which social relationships between landlords and tenants, on the one hand, and between peasant producers, the state, and towns, on the other, functioned.41 States also created spaces in which new developments could take place—​the role of tax-​farmers, for example, both as extractors of revenue and as potential stimulants to changed patterns of investment or consumption of wealth, to changed structures of money use on the part of both producers and state administrations, and so on. In some cases, the existence of a central fiscal administration may have given hitherto unimportant local leaders—​village headmen, small-​scale local landlords—​a more significant role in the process of fiscal extraction and accumulation, leading to shifts in the political order of power at the local level and ultimately reacting back on the state itself. The

41 See Haldon 1997, 132ff.

214  John Haldon reforms of the Sasanian king Khusru I in the mid-​sixth century ce to which we have already alluded, through which a whole class of formerly socially and politically insignificant lesser gentry—​the dehqans—​was given a new status, military and administrative role, and thus political importance, is a case in point. The role of village elites and rank attributions can have a significant influence on the ways the state was or was not able to intervene in landlord-​tenant relations, for example, just as the existence of centralized state apparatuses and their demands for revenue in turn affected the ways in which these local relationships worked, shaping the social space within which they could evolve.42 The point is that empires, by virtue of their very existence, are not simply impositions upon subject territories and societies; they can be seen also as promoting the evolution of new and sometimes alternative sets of economic and political relationships which must not necessarily threaten directly the state’s own institutional survival. While many of these points apply also to early modern and colonial imperial systems, there are some significant differences. First, distant colonial elites, whether from the core territory or indigenous and acting on its behalf, develop their own localized vested interests and ideological perspectives—​not a novel phenomenon, as we have seen, but distance and information lag could make such issues more problematic. As colonial economies and societies became more established, so they generally came to be more difficult to manage effectively from the home country, the more so since they had direct control or influence over the commercial and productive activities that generated revenues for themselves and the home elite or crown. They evolved sometimes differently nuanced versions of the home elite culture, on occasion even rejecting elements of the latter either because of issues of social identity and pride and/​or because this offered a means to assert themselves politically against the home government or elite. Many examples spring to mind, whether in the New England colonies of Britain in the 1750s onward or in Australia in the later nineteenth century (although such elements also appeared much earlier). In the case of the British colonists in both North America and Australasia, independence from London was aspired to because of what were seen in the colonies as restrictive attitudes to territorial expansion, on the one hand, and oppressive fiscal policies, on the other. Similar tensions can be seen in the French Caribbean colonies, already noted, and very clearly in the colonial cultures that evolved in the Spanish provinces of South and Central America. Such issues hardly need to be detailed here, since they have been well studied. But this issue was compounded by imperial competition, since it was more often than not the provincial and colonial elites who suffered economically, and sometimes physically, from warfare between rival empires. They thus found themselves in a difficult position, needing imperial military and naval support when threatened, yet often resenting the effects of conflict on their own economic interests. The fracturing of the ideological hegemony of the home country or state was one possible consequence, most dramatically

42 See, on these issues, albeit for the Indian context, the excellent discussion of Perlin 1993, 36ff., 51–​74.

The Political Economy of Empire  215 apparent in the American Revolution of 1776–​1783, but equally apparent in the various wars of independence waged in Central and South America, paradoxically often achieved through the use of former British naval and military personnel, as in the case of the first navies of both Argentina and Chile. This is not to say that the patterns were the same. On the contrary, in the British West Indies the planter elite rapidly came to dominate, managing the colonies through a bureaucracy staffed by estate owners and farmers who received their offices through a bidding process dominated by the interests of absentee landowners and a class of rich freeholders. The latter had their privileges guaranteed by government so long as they ensured the annual agreed returns to London, a situation which left royal governors in a relatively weak position. This contrasts with the situation in New Spain, at least until the later eighteenth century, since the Spanish elite of officers, estate owners, and bureaucrats remained bound to the kingdom of Spain and to the Catholic Church, and while local interests certainly acted to limit the effect of crown authority, the colonies continued to be administered relatively effectively from Spain itself. It was the impact of imperial competition in both Europe and more widely that disrupted and then destroyed this pattern. A second point relates to the qualitatively different nature of the generation of surplus in the developed colonial empires. For here the mechanisms of capitalist economics differentiated the colonial elites who invested in and controlled the production of cotton, sugar, tobacco, and related raw materials from their pre-​modern counterparts. Where the latter could profit on a massive scale as individuals from the seizure and exploitation of lands and revenue—​as in the case of the Roman conquest of many of its eastern provinces in the course of the first century bce—​this was a quantitative increase in wealth. In the case of the former, the operations of a globalizing capitalist market offered a qualitative increase in potential, ultimately leading to the movement of capitals around the world, and an increasing specialization of markets of production. An internationalized division of labor evolved: already pioneered in the development of sugar and tobacco production in the Caribbean (at first with indigenous or indentured labor, but soon and much more efficiently with slave labor imported across the Atlantic), or with the production of spices such as nutmeg, and later of rubber in the East Indies under Dutch colonial rule, the multifaceted local industrial production of the colonies was directed toward specialist production demands in England with, for example, the development of monocultural agrarian production—​cotton, tea, and other raw materials—​ to support industrial processes and production in England:  cotton from India went to England, while finished goods from the mills of Lancashire dominated the markets of Europe. The profits thus generated affected both the indigenous societies in which colonial systems of exploitation had taken root, and impacted on the configuration of the home culture—​from the later eighteenth century the speeding up of the process of proletarianization of rural populations, the transformation of social class relations in Britain, the parallel rise of an industrial elite, the limiting of older aristocratic systems of power and patronage, and the move toward more

216  John Haldon representative forms of democracy were all part of the picture. And as urbanization and industrialization grew apace in Britain, so the demand for raw materials and increasing specialization of production in the colonies exacerbated the dependency of the latter on distant markets and rendered the centers of production extremely vulnerable economically. Colonial elites, especially indigenous elites, thus became further differentiated from their metropolitan peers in respect of the sources of their wealth and power, generating both heightened social class tensions within the colonies and at the same time making the economic position of the colonial elites more vulnerable.

Some Concluding Observations The chief ingredients for the successful building up of imperial capital, and thus for the longevity of an empire, seem to have been a combination of ideological hegemony, effective resource-​ extraction mechanisms, and effective means of managing provincial elites. The purpose of this chapter has been simply to draw attention to some of the more obvious characteristics that empires share or that distinguish them one from another. More importantly, it has been to suggest a few specific points of entry into the comparison of imperial systems that might furnish some heuristic common ground and enable us to draw out common themes and issues that have informed the ways in which imperial elites and rulers have been able to respond to the challenges of imperial rule. I hope that this will facilitate a better appreciation of the enormous range of historical forms of imperial rule and empire in the historical accounts which follow in the second part of this exercise, and at the same time underline the crucial qualitative differences between pre-​modern imperial systems and those that have evolved in the course of the evolution of a capitalist world economy.

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6 Imperial Monumentalism, Ceremony, and Forms of Pageantry The Inter-​Imperial Obelisk in Istanbul Cecily J. Hilsdale

When the emperor of Byzantium ascended the imperial box or kathisma of the hippodrome in Constantinople, the people welcomed him by chanting the anateilon (Rise up!), a formalized hymn linking his appearance to the arrival of the sun illuminating the day.1 The chanting began before the emperor started his ascent and continued as he came into view. The ritual summons of the crowd thus culminated in and was completed by the imperial epiphany. Our evidence for this imperial rising comes from the Book of Ceremonies, a tenth-​century amalgamation of source materials from previous eras that constitutes a handbook for solemn ceremonies, more than a description of particular ritual events.2 Among the many similarly attested ceremonial acclamations that invested the emperor with divine and cosmic symbolism, the anateilon at the hippodrome was especially significant because this site was the nexus of ceremonial life in the early Byzantine capital. It was in the hippodrome that the Roman people encountered their emperor directly, where they saw him in all his majesty with their own eyes. The setting for this encounter was adorned with an array of celebrated antique monuments such as the bronze horses now at San Marco in Venice and the victory tripod from the Temple of Apollo in Delphi known today as the serpent column.3 Unlike most of the lost or damaged objects that once adorned this site, the most commanding monument of the hippodrome still stands there largely intact:  the red granite obelisk originally installed at the Theban temple of Karnak to celebrate 1 Cross-​field comparative studies such as this are only possible with brilliant and generous interlocutors. I am extremely thankful for the following readers who all offered comments on the full draft in advance (needless to say, mistakes and gross generalizations remain my own): Jonathan Sachs, Sinem Arcak Casale, Giancarlo Casale, John Hall, Anthony Kaldellis, and Peter Fibiger Bang. 2 Moffatt and Tall 2012 follows the pagination and chapter numbering of Reiske 1829, which is included alongside the English translation, but also cross references the sequencing of Vogt 1935–​1939. In Dagron’s words [1996] 2003, 54, it “synthesiz[es] various protocols and, according to the rules of the genre, removing the proper names and dates in order to transform a historical document into a model.” Most scholars acknowledge the difficulties of relying on this kind of text as an accurate historical mirror. On the anateilon, see Dagron, 2003, 180–​181; Kantorowicz 1963, 158f; Treitinger 1938, 112f. 3 In addition to Bassett 2007, see the essays in Pitarakis 2010, and, most recently, Stephenson 2016. Cecily J. Hilsdale, Imperial Monumentalism, Ceremony, and Forms of Pageantry  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire.  Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0006.

224  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.1.  Obelisk of Thutmose III installed on the base of Emperor Theodosios in the Hippodrome of Constantinople (Istanbul). Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale.

the renewal of Thutmose III’s rule (Figure 6.1). In Constantinople, this enormous Egyptian monolith rests on a Byzantine marble base that evokes the culmination of anateilon in visual terms: all four sides depict Emperor Theodosios I (r. 379–396), who has risen to the kathisma: surrounded by members of his household, he is shown presiding over the games and festivities of the hippodrome and receiving obeisance and tribute from vanquished enemies (Figures 6.2, 6.12–13, and 6.19–20). Presented with the utmost hieratic austerity, each figure stands frontally, erect and immobile, staring out from the imperial loge, above and in contrast to the more dynamically rendered activities of racing, dancing, offering, and even obelisk raising carved on the lower portions of the base. The solemn, symmetrical, and hierarchical tone of the obelisk base encapsulates the Byzantine conception of taxis or “order,” a foundational term for imperial ideology.4 In his seminal study of the emperor in Byzantine art, André Grabar compared the imagery of the Theodosian base to the later Byzantine Last Judgment 4 Ahrweiler 1975.

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  225

Figure 6.2.  Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), Southwest Face. Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale.

scene in the parekklesion of the Church of the Chora (the Kariye Camii).5 Despite radically different iconographies and ritual and historical contexts, they both, he argued, convey the ideology of taxis. As a theophany of the heavenly court, the Last Judgment fresco displays the strict hierarchy and symmetry that defined Byzantine ideas of order, and the base presents its epiphany of the imperial court in formal terms analogous to its celestial counterpart. That same argument extends beyond these two images: visual precedence informed by the conception of taxis emerges as the defining formal language or register for official Byzantine imperial imagery. The entrenched system of precedence predicated on the ideology of taxis constituted the organizing principle for the imperial hierarchy in reflection of the heavenly kingdom. It thus rendered earthly vicissitudes part of an immutable and eternal divine plan. Such a hierarchy provides the framework for Byzantine worlds of state, court, and divinity, in which taxis contrasted with ataxia, chaos or disorder. In the opening of the Book of Ceremonies, again our primary compilation of imperial ceremonial, these concepts are mapped onto the body Byzantine: “for just as when a body is not harmoniously fashioned, but has its limbs set in a contorted and ill-​coordinated way, one would describe this as a disorder, so too when the imperial administration is not led and governed by order, it will differ in no way from an 5 Grabar 1936.

226  Cecily J. Hilsdale ignorant and servile way of life.”6 Furthermore, imperial ceremonial is situated as fundamental to empire building. The prologue explicitly states that imperial rule, well ordered by praiseworthy ceremonial, strikes wonder in “both foreigners and our own people.”7 By preserving and prescribing the choreography of such ritual, the Book of Ceremonies transmits them strategically for future generations. The Ottomans, who conquered Constantinople in 1453 and made it their own capital city, had their own prescriptive book of imperial protocol. The Ottoman dynastic law codes known as the kanunname codified a policy of imperial seclusion, curtailing the public appearance of the sultan who participated in the public life of the city only on principal religious holidays and special occasions such as imperial weddings and circumcision festivals, which were celebrated in the public space of the hippodrome and set amidst the antiquities set up there by their Byzantine predecessors.8 Aside from those select and infrequent public celebrations, the sultan was mostly inaccessible and invisible inside the Topkapı palace, according to one source, like a pearl hidden deep in an oyster shell.9 The architecture of the Topkapı palace itself expresses this system of imperial seclusion, with its distinct but interlocking courtyards and grilled windows from which the sultan could survey court activities such as processions without being seen directly. These windows further implied his sovereign omniscience even in his physical absence, an especially important message since he administered the empire in seclusion by delegating his authority to his administration.10 If Byzantine imperium and the imperial city that was laid out as its architectural stage were governed by the ideology of taxis, the urban fabric of the city as the Ottoman capital later came to be understood by the unwritten rules of “decorum”—​the concept of visual distinction or precedence that Gülru Necipoğlu sees as the primary motivating factor for architectural patronage in sixteenth-​century Constantinople.11 According to the system of decorum that structured the highly centralized Ottoman imperial system, gradations of precedence were governed by the relative proximity to the increasingly secluded sultan. The corporate identity of the imperial court was reinforced through personal bonds such as marriage,12 and was made manifest on a grand scale through monumental architectural projects that transformed the skyline and the city. For example, the nearly 80 Friday mosque complexes associated with the architect Sinan exhibit a variety of finely-​tuned 6 Moffatt and Tall 2012, 3–​4. 7 Moffatt and Tall 2012, 3. 8 Necipoğlu 1991, 3–​30. 9 Necipoğlu 1993, 304 (the oyster shell reference is from Mustafa Ali, cited at 319 n4). 10 While originally dating to the late 1470s, through further refinements in concordance with the Shari‘a throughout the sixteenth century, the dynastic code came to stipulate the sultan’s exercise of power in seclusion; Necipoğlu 1993, 305. 11 Necipoğlu 2004. To be clear, this Ottoman dispensation gradually evolved over time, especially during the long sixteenth-​century reign of Sultan Süleyman; it was not in any sense a direct translation of Byzantine taxis. 12 Necipoğlu 2004, 38–​41, discusses how Süleyman extended the metaphorical familial system to an actual one by associating vizierial posts with his sons-​in-​law. By the sixteenth century, marriages were less about consolidating the provinces than about fortifying the corporate identity of his court.

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  227 formal distinctions—​not just site and size but elaboration of minaret or courtyard—​ that correspond to the social rank, gender, and accomplishment of the patron as a palpable expression of the codified system of decorum. Taxis for the Byzantines and decorum for the Ottomans constituted different versions of hierarchical schemas that orchestrated the performance of empire. While distinct and fully imbricated in the politics of their own moments, hierarchical coding has been a central debate in the modern arena as well. These ideas resonate particularly strongly with David Cannadine’s reading of “ornamentalism” deployed in the peripheries of the British Empire. Cannadine shows that British imperial elites sought to duplicate in the various arenas of their rule the hierarchies of home and that central to the agenda was the enlistment and co-​optation of existing native hierarchies. As he suggests in illustrating the neologism that stands as his central concept: ornamentalism was hierarchy made visible, immanent and actual. And since the British conceived and understood their metropolis hierarchically, it was scarcely surprising that they conceived and understood their periphery in the same way, and that chivalry and ceremony, monarchy and majesty, were the means by which this vast world was brought together, interconnected, unified, and sacralized.13

Cannadine has drawn considerable fire for his single-​minded insistence on the importance of class over race. For the present purposes, however, the distinction is less important; indeed, it distracts from the central issue in his argument: how the ornamental and ceremonial forms used to project imperial power and establish order amidst potential conflict are fundamental to those forms of power themselves. Order, in other words, creates order—​in the sense that the “trappings” of empire establish and reinforce a political and social mandate that enables the empire to disseminate its power to others and to endure through time. In the British case, the most important features were the use of pageantry and costume alongside formal and intricate rituals of precedence. There were, for example, 77 ranks in the “warrant of precedence” that established such problems as who should be placed where at a dinner party. It is this central claim about the importance of ceremony, whether allied to class or race, that allows us to compare empires disparate in both time and place. The significance of imperial ceremonial for making manifest the prevailing ideology of empire emerges with particular clarity in the ceremonial pageantry of Victoria’s proclamation (in absentia) as Empress of India in 1877. In the days leading up to the proclamation, for example, Lord Lytton received the 63 ruling princes of India in order of strict etiquette. As each prince was conducted to Lytton, an appropriate salute was fired, and upon arrival the prince was seated to



13 Cannadine 2002, 122.

228  Cecily J. Hilsdale Lytton’s right beneath a full-​length portrait of Victoria, after which, as described by Field Marshall Lord Roberts, A satin banner, richly embroidered with the chief ’s armorial bearings surmounted by the imperial crown, was next brought in by Highland soldiers and planted in front of the throne, when the Viceroy, leading the particular chief towards it, thus addressed him: “I present Your Highness with this banner as a personal gift from Her Majesty the Queen, in commemoration of her assumption of the title of Empress of India.”14

The pageantry on display here reveals an elaborate system of social precedence and deference. It has also been called a “grand historicist extravaganza” in its ceremonial anachronism that drew on Roman, feudal, and Indian symbolism.15 Empires build identities from variegated pasts, their own and as well as others’, but they typically cast those histories as singular despite the heterogeneity of the sources, in the process obscuring their cultural and ideological borrowings. The pretense of imperial singularity, more often than not, draws upon a lexicon of the plural and the serial to construct and project ascendency. Scholars today are increasingly invested in comparative interpretive frameworks for exposing the cacophony of ceremonial voices curated historically in the service of empire building. As Peter Fibiger Bang and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk make clear, the work of empire before colonialism is at its core a pursuit for precedence over and against other empires. As a struggle for “hegemonic pre-​eminence,” the notion of universal empire was a contest across Eurasia from the Persians to the Qing dynasty. Sanjay Subrahmanyam traces transhemispheric “connected histories” from the Tagus to the Ganges, the Mughals and the Franks.16 Laura Doyle offers a framework of “inter-​ imperiality” for thinking about imperial formations as inextricably entangled over time. In order “to capture the dialectics of empires more fully,” she stresses accretion and sedimentation alongside innovation in the “long accruing interactions of empires.”17 Barbara Fuchs similarly emphasizes inter-​imperial imbrication and competition as fundamental to the modern notion of national exceptionalism, which arises from “the crucible of imperial rivalries.”18 And the cultural fields—​ literary, visual, and performative—​constitute the arenas for these entanglements. As these and other studies of empire have shown in considerable detail, the ideological deployment of royal pomp and circumstance is hardly unique and is consolidated in the built environment as well. Stephen Blake, for example, in his analysis of Shahjahanabad, the Mughal capital of Old Delhi, shows how what he describes as the patrimonial-​bureaucratic state drew its force and order from the

14 Tappan 1914, vol. II, 184–​190.

15 Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2012, 1 (with bibliography at note 1). 16 Subrahmanyam 2004a, 2004b. 17 Doyle 2014, 2015. 18 Fuchs 2014.

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  229 layout of the imperial city, with the palace-​fortress and the great mansions of the nobility at its center. These spaces established the norms of etiquette among elites who were bound through rituals and ceremonials, in turn molding them “into a great extended family whose members were the urban population and whose mansions was the city itself.”19 The urban layout of the capital, in other words, was more than a mere setting for the performance of the imperial city but was integral to the very production and maintenance of power—​the city lent form to the entire patrimonial-​ bureaucratic principle on which the empire was based. Furthermore, for Blake, defining the principles of the sovereign city is a comparative enterprise: the dynamics of authority at the capital of Mughal India comes into clearer focus when seen in relation to Istanbul, Isfahan, Beijing, and Edo, that is, the capitals of the Ottoman, Safavid, Ming, and Tokugawa empires, respectively. It is not that the cities share the same physical layout, but that in each case the palace, city, and by extension empire are modeled to a degree on the imperial household. Gülru Necipoğlu has taken another comparative approach to the sovereign cities of the three rival “gunpowder” empires by focusing on ocular politics. The Ottoman policy of imperial seclusion was distinct from the exercise of power by contemporary Safavid and Mughal rulers, and the palaces of these three rival empires serve as architectural metaphors for the framing and staging of imperium. The architectural layout of and ceremonial performances of Ottoman Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace, Isfahan’s Safavid Palace, and the Red Fort in Mughal Delhi, according to Necipoğlu, visually framed and staged their rulers so as to naturalize distinctive social hierarchies predicated on the discourse of absolutism.20 Collectively, this scholarship asks us to take seriously the “trappings” of empire, that is, the spaces, monuments, ceremonials, and styles of comportment and decorum that have been instrumental to empires cross-​culturally throughout history. The role of ceremony to empire over time—​that is, its temporal dimension—​is of particular concern here. David Cannadine notes the ephemeral quality of royal ritual: “Power is like the wind: we cannot see it, but we feel its force. . . . Ceremonial is like the snow: an insubstantial pageant, soon melted into thin air.”21 The force of power is felt, whereas pageant is seen and fleeting. But is the ceremonial facet of imperium entirely ephemeral? Royal performances are anchored, amplified, and commemorated by monuments that were designed to stand the test of time. The discussion that follows tracks the relationship between repeated yet transitory performances of empire—​the snow that bolstered the force of power even as it melted—​and their concrete, permanent articulations that endure as imposing testaments to power, both as felt and as seen. Motivated by the dynamic performative and commemorative aspects of empire, in other words, this chapter traces the relationship between imperial ritual, as 19 Blake 1991, 103. He continues: “the patron-​client relationship between the emperor and the great men and between them and the members of their households bound the entire city together in a kind of vast extended family.” 20 Necipoğlu 1993, 318. 21 Cannadine and Price 1987, 1.

230  Cecily J. Hilsdale performed in time and over time, and its persistent monumental articulations that structured and often memorialized those performances. The touchstone for this discussion is the obelisk and base installed in Constantinople’s hippodrome where the Byzantine emperor appeared to the Roman people as a living icon of imperium. The potency of this monument lies not only in its performative setting—​again, the hippodrome was among the most important ceremonial spaces of the capital, a civic and public pendant to Hagia Sophia in terms of defining the contours of the imperial office in ceremonial terms—​but also in its composite nature, as an ancient Egyptian dedication put to the service of a Byzantine imperial agenda. Raised by an Egyptian pharaoh for the great temple of Amun at Karnak, dismantled by a Roman emperor to legitimize his vast Mediterranean empire, erected in one of the most highly visible public arenas of New Rome for the performance of Byzantine imperial power, and preserved as the city became the early modern capital of the Ottoman Empire, this is a monument of distinct inter-​imperial resonance. This chapter does not aim to provide a comprehensive study of the monument itself nor a history of obelisks more generally and their significance in other cultural contexts—​excellent studies of all these topics exist.22 The goal, by contrast, is to consider a diverse range of ceremonial worlds marked by obelisks in order to generate a set of labile diachronic and cross-​ cultural insights about imperial ceremonial and monumentalism. What is of particular interest is the relationship between the imperial projection of permanence expressed in stone and the equally important yet transient ceremonial qualities of imperium. On the most basic level, an obelisk was an imposing marker that defined its terrain as exalted, and, more specifically, imperially sponsored as such. In defining a site, the obelisk asserts dominance in a manner immediately recognizable and even visceral in that its scale dwarfs the human body and elicits awe. The profound dissonance of scales between the enormity of the monument and the relative minuteness of the human body is especially evident in aerial views of an obelisk that was abandoned unfinished and still lies in its quarry bed in Aswan (Figure 6.3). The view also makes plain the daunting technical challenges associated with mastering such a large quantity of stone, the height of which commanded views from great distances, while its traditionally monolithic construction proclaimed economic and technical prowess on account of its obdurate forcefulness. As a commemorative strategy, the obelisk has assumed primacy as the visual icon of authority par excellence from the ancient world to the present day. In the modern era, the obelisk ranks among the most recognizable commemorative monuments, subsumed within the modern architectural vernacular for commemoration, as testified by the 1884 Washington monument celebrating America’s first president (Figure 6.4). At over 100 meters tall, it exceeds the height of ancient 22 Key bibliography on obelisks and their transportation includes Curran et al. 2009; Alföldy 1990; Habachi 1977; Dondelinger 1977; D’Onofrio 1962. See also Hassan 2003; Parker 2007, 2014.

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Figure 6.3.  Unfinished obelisk, Aswan, Egypt. Photo: Shutterstock

Figure 6.4.  Washington Monument, Washington, DC. Photo: Shutterstock

Egyptian obelisks. Although it is not a true monolithic obelisk (indeed its interior can be scaled by elevator), it anchors the ceremonial space of the mall in the nation’s capital as a modern secular parallel to the sacred sites marked by obelisks in ancient Egypt.23 23 The original plan for the monument aimed to bring marble from all of the states so as to localize the material diversity of the country in one single monument: “Its material is intended to be wholly American, and to be of marble and granite brought from each state, that each state may participate in the glory of contributing material as well as in funds to its construction.” September 23, 1835 (National Park Service website).

232  Cecily J. Hilsdale Intimately tied to the conception of royal renewal in ancient Egypt, obelisks underscored a conception of rejuvenation and cyclicality—​ or empire as process—​by commemorating the renewal of rule and marking the ceremonial spaces in which that sacral aura was reinvested. Over time and in other contexts, obelisks served as markers of imperial ascendency over and against the past. All of this helps to explain why such immense and seemingly permanent monuments traveled so widely throughout the Mediterranean, both in antiquity as spoils of war in the consolidation of empires and more recently as artifacts of cultural diplomacy in the service of modern imperialism. Dominating the space in which they are installed then and now, obelisks are commemorative even as they move. Itinerant obelisks merge networks of historically specific events:  created and inscribed for particular occasions of triumph, their movement reinscribes other agendas of dominance and in the process puts that previous history into the service of their own narrative. In this sense, obelisks illuminate how empires incorporate diverse histories in the service of singular teleologies, thus exemplifying the processes of inter-​imperial rivalry and historical accretion over time and across cultures.

Monolithic Renewal in Ancient Egypt While the history of the monolithic obelisk goes back to the third millennium bce, it is with the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasty pharaohs of the New Kingdom of Egypt in the fifteenth century bce that we associate the proliferation of these commemorative monuments.24 They were often, but not exclusively, set up in pairs at temples where they marked out the sacred topography of the site, offering, along with an array of great statuary and pylons, punctuation for processional routes and the ritual life of temple precincts. The approach to the temple of Luxor, for example, consisted of an avenue lined with ram-​headed sphinxes leading to the first pylon that featured colossal sculptures of Ramses II, both seated and standing, and two great obelisks piercing the skyline (Figure 6.5). While one of his obelisks is today in Paris at the Place de la Concorde, the other still stands at Luxor, dominating the ruins of the complex and reminding visitors of the central role played by obelisks in the structuring of experience of sacred topographies. Indeed, the Theban complexes of Luxor and Karnak—​both amalgamations of construction campaigns enlarged by successive pharaohs from Senusret I to Ptolemy VIII—​are interlocked architecturally and ritually and are structured by the rhythmic interplay of arresting pylons, statues, and obelisks. These enduring monuments—​some in situ and others collected and displayed as part of later imperial agendas—​anchored the ceremonial renewal of royal charisma

24 Curran et al. 2009, 13–​14, provides a concise description of the development of the form of the obelisk.

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Figure 6.5.  Luxor, first pylon with obelisk and statues of Ramses II. Photo: Saskia Ltd. Cultural Documentation

in ancient Egypt. They lent unmistakable permanence to performances that were ultimately transitory in nature despite being repeated at regular daily, annual, and anniversary intervals. Karnak was the site of daily rituals as well as the center of the larger festive calendar, all of which underscored the cyclical regeneration of divine kingship and, in turn, the renewal of divine favor more broadly.25 The Daily Ritual was centered on maintaining divine approval and patronage by providing for the cult statues. More specifically, 36 separate daily ritual actions and incantations are described in papyri and depicted in temple reliefs.26 The eastern interior walls of Karnak’s Hypostyle Hall, for example, represent Sety I performing these rites: he is shown breaking the seal and drawing open the door to Amun-​Ra’s shrine, encountering the divine cult statue face to face, then kneeling to prepare offerings and pour libations. Although priests performed these ceremonies on a daily basis, the temple reliefs depict the pharaoh himself personally engaged in the daily ritual maintenance of his divine father. In this sense the images are less documentary than prescriptive in their idealization of the close and personal bond between the two, stressing the pharaoh as the son of Ra. 25 Frandsen 2008. Note that this collection of essays revisits Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the canonic comparative study of the sacral dimensions of kingship. 26 These encompass opening rituals, offering roast meats and other food and drink, pouring libations, burning fragrant spices for purification, and closing rituals. Much of the documentary evidence has been compiled by Moret 1902. For an overview of the Daily Ritual, including video clips of the reliefs of the hypostyle hall, see the Digital Karnak project, specifically Elaine Sullivan, “Daily Ritual,” http://​dlib.etc.ucla.edu/​ projects/​Karnak (2008).

234  Cecily J. Hilsdale The Daily Ritual of Karnak, in turn, inflected the ceremonial life elaborated throughout the year, especially the Opet festival celebrated annually and the Sed festival or jubilee that marked the renewal of the king’s potency, traditionally after 30 years of rule. Whereas the Daily Ritual involved entering Amun-​Ra’s shrine to tend to his cult statue, the Opet festival featured a procession, and consequently took on a significantly more pronounced public role, proclaiming divine legitimacy through more attenuated ceremonial movement. This annual festival featured the procession on a gilded bark of the cult statues of the Theban triad from their temples in Karnak south to Luxor.27 In the time of Hatshepsut (r. 1478–1438 BCE), the festival began in the bark chamber known as the “red chapel,” then moved through the hypostyle hall and the successive monumental pylons, whose liminal monumentality was accented by obelisks, reliefs, and statues, to the sphinx-​lined avenue leading to Luxor. At the conclusion of the ceremonies in Luxor, the barks returned home to Karnak by the Nile. The festival constituted, in essence, a sacred marriage of Amun and Mut and a commune of Amun and the pharaoh as a ritual confirmation of the transmission of the royal ka or life force.28 It was a ceremony of union and reinvigoration aimed at ensuring order, or maat, the perfect harmony of the world essential for the survival and flourishing of sovereignty. The timing of the festival coincided with the end of the inundation period, when planting began as the Nile waters receded. In this way, the renewal of kingship was tied to the renewal of the land and people, crops and livelihoods. From the heart of Karnak along the north-​south axis to Luxor, the Opet festival passed through monumental pylons anchored by statues and obelisks. Moreover, obelisks were also commissioned to commemorate the anniversary celebrations of the pharaoh’s rule, that is, the Sed festival, arguably the most elaborately staged ceremony that involved processions, investiture with ritually charged objects and garments, thrones referencing Upper and Lower Egypt, and ritual running to display the renewed dynamism of the ruler. Collectively, these ceremonies stress the importance of successive ritual performance across timescales—​daily, annually, on jubilee years—​for the continual reaffirmation of divine rule and maat. The physical spaces for the ephemeral performance of ritual were structured by obdurate reliefs, pylons, statues, and obelisks, which, again, serve as punctuation for these symbolically charged liminal spaces, and they were occasioned by the royal ritual performed there, at least in the case of obelisks raised on the occasion of Sed festivals. Ritual, as performed repeatedly in time and over time, in other words, was commemorated by singular monuments that were designed to endure throughout time. The close correspondence between ritual performance (designed for reinvigoration) and monumental commemoration (designed to preserve and project memory) is signaled by the pictorial program of Hatshepsut’s red shrine at Karnak

27 The festival may have begun earlier, but most of the evidence is from the time of Hatshepsut, both at Karnak and at her mortuary temple across the Nile at Deir el-​Bahri. 28 Darnell 2010.

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  235 and at Deir el-​Bahri, both of which feature detailed depictions of royal rituals such as coronation alongside the transport and elevation of obelisks, thereby placing monumental commemoration as among the pharaoh’s great deeds. While obelisks punctuate ceremonial spaces more generally, they are fundamentally historical monuments, tied by iconography and hieroglyphic inscriptions to specific rulers and moments in their rule. The dedication of obelisks served as one of many means of proclaiming and competing for royal genealogy. Thutmose I is credited with dedicating the first pair of obelisks “to his father Amun-​Ra” in the Festival Hall at Karnak, one of which still stands there today, just shy of 20 meters in height.29 Thutmose II followed suit, dedicating a pair to the west of his father’s; these were completed by his wife and sister Hatshepsut, who continued the tradition when as pharaoh she similarly installed two obelisk pairs at Karnak, one of which on the occasion of her Sed festival (Figure 6.6).30 Testifying to the significance of the dedication, again, it is visualized on the walls of her red quartzite shrine, the sumptuous shrine built for the bark in the central court of the temple of Amun (Figure 6.7), as well as at her valley temple across the Nile at Deir el-​Bahri.31 The inscription on Hatshepsut’s obelisk itself, as scholars have stressed, serves to legitimize her rule by underscoring succession and sacral rule—​more specifically her devotion to the memory of her earthly father Thutmose I and to her divine father Amun: “I am his excellent [heir] beloved of His Majesty (Amun-​Ra) who placed the kingship of Egypt, the deserts and all foreign lands under my sandals.”32 The inscription continues to elaborate that land under her sandals, delimiting its border in the region of Punt to the south, “at the marshes of Asia” to the east, and “at the edge of the horizon” to the west. The expansive terrain of her rule is mapped on the obelisk that was installed as a visual statement of her divinely sanctioned authority in the great temple to Amun-​Ra where her father’s obelisks also stood. Raised to celebrate her Sed festival, its base voices the purpose and effect of raising “these two great obelisks”: Wrought with electrum by my majesty for my father Amun, In order that my name may endure in temples, For eternity and everlastingness, They are each of one block of hard granite, Without seam, without joining together!

29 Habachi 1977, 46–​50. The pair once stood to the west of pylon IV:  http://​dlib.etc.ucla.edu/​projects/​ Karnak/​feature/​ObelisksOfFestivalHallEastPair 30 In addition to completing the obelisks of Thutmose II, Hatshepsut dedicated two pairs of obelisks, one on the eastern section of Karnak early in her reign (the bases are now at the Contra Temple and the pyramidion is at the Cairo Museum) and then a second pair on the occasion of her jubilee (originally in the Wadjet hall, the north one is still there: http://​dlib.etc.ucla.edu/​projects/​Karnak/​feature/​ObelisksOfWadjetHall). 31 See discussion in the final section on this theme. On the red chapel, see Larché and Burgos 2006. 32 Habachi 1977, 66, and Lichtheim [1976] 2000.

236  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.6.  Hatshepsut’s obelisk at Karnak. Photo: Shutterstock

The inscriptions link material properties with sovereignty explicitly. They specify that hard granite comes from the south and that the glimmering electrum sheathing was “the best of all foreign lands” and was measured “by the gallon like sacks of grain.”33 They also stress the feat of monolithic facture, boasting that the one single seamless block took “seven months of quarry work.” In addition to these hieroglyphs, Hatshepsut is pictured making offerings to the gods and kneeling at the feet of Amun-​Ra, receiving his blessing on the pyramidion at its summit. Thutmose III (r. 1481–1425 BCE) surpassed his grandfather and Hatshepsut when he rose to power:  he raised seven obelisks at Karnak, three pairs and a single obelisk, and two further as a pair at Heliopolis.34 Collectively these index his larger building program, which aimed to assert his royal legitimacy and, over

33 Lichtheim [1976] 2000, 27–​28. 34 Lipinska 2001.

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Figure 6.7.  Hatshepsut with obelisks at Karnak, from red quartzite shine (now in the Luxor Museum). Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

time, to commemorate that legitimacy. At Karnak he expanded the area around the main bark temple and thus aligned himself through patronage with Thutmose I, just as Hatshepsut had before him. In addition to rebuilding the hypostyle hall of Thutmose, he completed Hatshepsut’s red bark shrine, the very monument that represented the dedication of her two obelisks on the occasion of her Sed festival, only to disassemble it piece by piece 25 years later as part of a systematic effort to erase the memory of his stepmother and regent. Relief images and inscriptions celebrating Thutmose III’s accomplishments line the temple walls and pylons at Karnak. They adumbrate the names of the cities he subjugated, the tribute he received, and the obelisks he dedicated. On his third jubilee, an especially significant achievement as many pharaohs did not live to celebrate a single Sed, he raised a pair of obelisks at the seventh pylon of the Karnak complex, which marked the edge of the extension of hypostyle hall, adding further monumental emphasis to the north-​south processional route through which the annual Opet festival passed. The foundations of both still exist, as well as portions of the eastern one, while the western obelisk is now in Istanbul, set upon Byzantine emperor Theodosios’s marble base (Figure 6.1). Embodying the conception of royal renewal tied to conquest, the inscription hails him as “a king who conquers all the lands, long of life and lord of Jubilees”35 and further elaborates his many titles and military accomplishments, notably his victorious crossing of the Euphrates. Thutmose III also commissioned a single obelisk just east of the central Amun-​Ra temple. This was tallest obelisk in Karnak, rising to a height of just over 33 meters,

35 Habachi 1977, 9, with the continuation of the inscription at 145–​146.

238  Cecily J. Hilsdale and is presently in Rome.36 In 1901 James Henry Breasted lamented the “surprising spectacle” that not a single obelisk of Thutmose III survives “in the land he ruled,” while “the modern world possesses a line of them reaching from Constantinople to New York.”37 The travels of Thutmose III’s obelisks from Thebes to Rome and New York was part of a much broader campaign of empire building that harnessed the symbolic capital of commemorative monoliths from Egypt.

Monumental Temporality and the Consolidation of Empire in Augustan Rome While the obelisk of Thutmose III now standing in Istanbul was transferred there directly from Egypt, the conception of its movement was motivated by obelisks in Rome and the previous emperors who went to great lengths to transport such impressive monoliths across the Mediterranean. Despite its unmistakable hieroglyphs and Theban provenance, the obelisk’s significance and the ceremonial life it came to anchor in Constantinople were understood in relationship to Rome and the consolidation of its Mediterranean-​wide empire. The fact that the first Egyptian obelisk to travel to Rome was occasioned by the subjugation of Egypt to Rome testifies to the symbolic resonance of obelisks within narratives of imperial ascendency and dominion. Augustus celebrated the annexation of Egypt and the establishment of the principate with the dedication of an Egyptian obelisk at the center of the Circus Maximus (Figure 6.8).38 Pliny the Elder tells us that the obelisk in question, originally quarried by Pharaoh Seti I and completed by Ramses II for dedication in Heliopolis, was transported first to Alexandria and then to Rome, where it was installed on the spina of the circus in 10 bce. There it was set on a base faced with a Latin inscription outlining the circumstances of its arrival: “. . . Imperator Augustus, son of divine Caesar, dedicated this obelisk to the sun, when Egypt had been brought under the sway of the Roman people.”39 At the same time as it stresses Roman dominion over Egypt, the inscription echoes the original purpose of its dedication in ancient Egypt, that is, to commemorate on an awe-​inspiring scale divine royal genealogy linked to conquest. Furthermore, in both contexts the dedications are associated with the sun. Originally installed at the sanctuary of Re at Heliopolis, the obelisk was understood, like others, as the physical embodiment of the sun’s rays. 36 On this obelisk, which was later moved to the Piazza S. Giovanni in Laterano, where it stands today, see Iversen 1962, vol. I, 55. 37 Breasted 1901, 55. To be clear, of the seven obelisks of Thutmose III, four survive but none still stand in Egypt. The two raised in Heliopolis are in New York and London; the single Karnak obelisk is in Rome (Lateran); and one of the pairs from Karnak is in Istanbul. 38 In the late sixteenth century the Circus Maximus obelisk was excavated and was re-​erected in the Piazza del Popolo, where it stands today; see Iversen 1962, vol. I, 65–​75. Even before this, Augustus moved Thutmose III’s obelisks from Heliopolis to Alexandria and installed them at the Caesarium; see Curran et al. 2009, 36, who describe “the fine bit of irony” that these later became known as Cleopatra’s needles. 39 Iversen 1962, vol. I, 65.

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Figure 6.8.  Obelisk once installed at the Circus Maximus, now at the Piazza del Popolo. Photo: Shutterstock.

In Rome, its dedication to the sun contributed to the wider heavenly analogy of the circus: its central position on the spina mirrored the position of the sun, with heavenly chariots and celestial bodies racing cyclically around both.40 These solar and cosmic associations are especially significant in light of a second obelisk that was dedicated by Augustus in the very same year and adorned with the same inscription on its base. With this second obelisk we see how Egyptian monumentalism came to mark the construction of a Roman imperial future. Smaller than the one at the Circus Maximus, this obelisk, which was one of a pair dedicated in the Late Egyptian Period by Psametik II in Heliopolis, figured prominently in Augustus’s larger renovations of the Campus Martius, an area with rich foundational symbolism going back to Romulus and Remus as well as the city’s last Etruscan king

40 Curran et al. 2009, 40, and Pitarakis 2010.

240  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.9.  Obelisk once installed at the Campus Martius, now at the Piazza Montecitorio. Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale.

(Figure 6.9).41 This obelisk was installed as the gnomon, or pointer, of a massive solar meridian whose shadow charted the sun’s progress from solstice to solstice. By measuring the shadow cast daily at noon, the meridian line could mark the local time of noon, indicate true north, and check the congruence of the civic and solar calendar.42 This later function illuminates the sacerdotal dimension of the emperor and the cosmic scale of the Augustan imperial agenda. Upon assuming the position of Pontifex Maximus in 12 bce, Augustus took official responsibility for the Roman calendar and had it recalibrated after it had been determined to be in error.43 The large-​scale solar meridian installed in the northern Campus Martius displayed to 41 It was later moved to the Piazza Montecitorio, where it stands today. See Iversen 1962, vol. I, 142–​160, and Swetnam-​Burland 2010. On the afterlife and significance of this area for fascist politics, see Kostof 1978. 42 Heslin 2007, 5. 43 See Heslin 2007 for the full details.

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  241 all of Rome in clearly legible terms that the civic calendar was “in harmony with the progress of the sun through the year,”44 and it thus showcased Augustus’s priestly role as symbolic time-​keeper and order-​maker for the empire. Using a visually arresting monument from the past—​and one with particular associations of Roman and Augustan ascendency—​this imperial monument was not just about marking place, but setting time. Empires rise and fall, but monuments endure; and monuments from fallen empires serve as particularly poignant foils for imperial ascendency. These rather general points find concrete expression in the Augustan building project of the northern Campus Martius, which featured the solar meridian with its ancient Egyptian obelisk at its center, as well as the Ara Pacis, the altar of peace dedicated to Augustus 13–​9 bce, and the Mausoleum of Augustus of 28 bce. This trio instantiated in monumental form an imperial project to separate the present historic moment from what went before—​that is, to set Augustus’s rule apart as a turning point in history.45 The earliest of these monuments was the mausoleum. Conceived in the immediate wake of the civil war, it rooted Octavian and his family in Rome and underscored his Romanness, an especially important message given that Mark Antony had expressed his desire to be buried in Alexandria alongside Cleopatra. As the largest monument on the open terrain of the northern Campus Martius, the massive circular mausoleum, faced with marble and covered with cypress trees, dominated the landscape and displayed his authority on an unprecedented scale in visual, verbal, and symbolic terms: his bronze effigy stood at the apex, and the entrance was flanked by pillars engraved with his Res Gestae as well as two plain obelisks of red granite.46 Built nearly 20 years later, the Ara Pacis and solar meridian were likely designed in tandem with the mausoleum. The three monuments are as close thematically as they are physically.47 They were originally positioned as a right triangle, with the obelisk’s northern and eastern sides facing the mausoleum and the altar, respectively, and were experienced on the ground as a group. Turning off the Via Flaminia, heading north from the city center, one would encounter head-​on the entrance to the Ara Pacis with the obelisk rising above, directly behind it; proceeding beyond the altar to the meridian, the dominant axis of the obelisk directed attention to the mausoleum. By its position and alignment, therefore, the obelisk mediated the altar and mausoleum experientially. Beyond this, on a more symbolic level, as Peter Heslin elaborates, it also measured the temporal distance from the young Octavian of the mausoleum, who returned to Rome triumphant and blood stained from the east, to the Augustus of the altar who as Pontifex Maximus brought about the Pax Augusta. The solar meridian with its 44 Heslin 2007, 6. 45 Zanker 1988, 101. 46 These obelisks now are in the Piazza del Quirinale and in front of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. 47 Heslin 2007 has systematically shown that the obelisk-​gnomon of the solar meridian did not cast its shadow at the exact center of the Ara Pacis on the autumnal equinox (Augustus’s birthday). Yet this does not diminish in the slightest the rhetorical sophistication of their alignment and combined symbolism. See ­figure 12 of Heslin’s study for the alignment of the monuments.

242  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.10.  Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, exterior. Photo: Shutterstock

Egyptian obelisk-​gnomon, in other words, not only served to chart the progress of the sun through the year, but also Augustus’s progress from a man of war to a man of peace.48 The obelisk itself, taken from Heliopolis as a visible and tangible sign of his victory, became the measure of the noontime sun and also of the transformation of the emperor and of the empire. The obelisk-​solar meridian imbricates a singular historical trajectory—​of Actium and the emergence of Augustus—​within an eternally recurring visualization of time to promote imperial ascendency and the Pax Romana. The resonance of this message is amplified when read in conjunction with the imagery of the Ara Pacis, described by Peter Holliday as “a metaphor for the nature of the transitory moment in relation to larger cycles of time.”49 The pictorial program of the Ara Pacis comingles contemporary civic ritual life with the eternal mythic realm of legend (Figure 6.10). The exterior frieze depicts the procession that accompanied the founding of the altar to celebrate Augustus’s return to Rome and the peace it inaugurated. Here the imperial family and senators, with life-​size legible portraits lending specificity to the program, process toward the altar’s entrance, which is marked by allusions to the legendary foundations of Rome.50 While the exterior foregrounds the specific and the singular—​both in the realm of legend and contemporary Rome—​the inner walls 48 Heslin 2007, 16. 49 Holliday 1990, 554. 50 The eastern and western panels allude to the foundations of Rome and the Julian line, that is, legendary events from the distant past which were understood to culminate in the Augustan present.

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Figure 6.11.  Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, interior detail. Photo: Shutterstock

stress the cyclicality of ritual renewal. Here, along with the smaller-​scale relief of the annual sacrifice, the walls are lined with garlands of fruits from different seasons, all in bloom simultaneously, as well as sacrificial plates and bucrania (decorative reliefs of ox skulls) (Figure 6.11). Collectively these motifs underscore the recurring seasons and the sacrifices performed repeatedly to maintain the Pax Romana, the peace that was brought on by Augustus, who is depicted on the exterior as the pater familias leading the procession. As with the obelisk of the solar meridian, the Ara Pacis situates the singularity of the imperial event and identity within the recurring cyclical order of the world and the ideology of peace that defined it. Having found Rome a city of brick, Augustus famously boasted of having left it a city of marble.51 The newness of the Augustan era was indeed expressed in marble, but he also left Rome with a thicker monumental texture of history by anchoring primary symbolic nodes of the city with obelisks taken from Egypt.52 If we understand the monuments discussed here as key to the Augustan promotion of his era as a turning point, we must also recognize the performative dimension of this campaign. The most spectacular ceremonial marking of the new from the old were the ludi saeculares of 17 bce.53 Conceptualized as atonement for the

51 Suetonius, Augustus 28.3. 52 The incorporation of Egyptian monoliths and the Egyptian influence on Roman culture more broadly are easily contextualized. Zanker’s reading of the Augustan aesthetic as ideological is relevant: “it is clear that if the outcome of the civil war had been other than it was, classicism would not have become the dominant style that it did, and instead Roman art would have remained essentially Hellenistic” (Zanker 1988, 65). 53 On Augustus’s sacred games, see Beard et al. 1998, vol. I, 201–​206, and vol. II, 139–​144.

244  Cecily J. Hilsdale excesses of the previous epoch, three days of citywide sacrifices were performed on the Capitoline and Palatine hills with nocturnal sacrifices at the Campus Martius as well as theatrical performances, games, and processions. While renewing the traditional republican festival, the rituals were transformed to stress the rebirth of the city under Augustus—​the old came to sanction the new.54 In preparation for the rituals of purification, sulfur, asphalt, and torches were distributed to the people, and the princeps himself actively participated in the ceremonial expiation. Coins minted in conjunction with this festival represent Augustus personally distributing the suffimenta for purification.55 Such coinage disseminates on a wide scale a new image of the emperor as instrumental to the ritual propitiation that set the stage for the new era ushered in by his rule.

Imperial Modeling in Byzantine Constantinople In early imperial Rome, Egyptian obelisks were mobilized as remnants of the conquered foreign past in the service of promoting an empire distinct from what went before. Subsequent emperors also capitalized on the symbolic potency of obelisks to create their own lineages of succession.56 Even as imperial power shifted to the eastern Mediterranean after the tetrarchy, Constantine I  and his immediate successors continued to invest in obelisks as part of the symbolic building program for the establishment of Constantinople, and in this context the obelisk underscored the capital as New Rome. The histories of the two extant Theban obelisks of Thutmose III elucidate this close relationship between old and new imperial cities. Under Constantine I, the largest extant obelisk was dismantled from the temple precinct of Karnak and shipped down the Nile to Alexandria to await the construction of special transport. Constantine died before the obelisk reached its intended destination in Constantinople.57 Two decades later, Constantius II, his son and successor, had it transported to Rome instead to commemorate his month-​long triumphal visit there in 357. While it now stands in the Piazza Laterano, when it arrived in Rome it was installed on the spina of the Circus Maximus next to the obelisk brought by Augustus in 10 bce. Its position there signaled imperial emulation, drawing Constantius of New Rome into alignment with the great emperors 54 Apparently, by subtly manipulating the calendar, Augustus orchestrated the festival to coincide with the expected arrival of a comet so as to convey in clear cosmic terms the supernatural character of the event. This point is especially relevant for Holliday 1990. 55 Zanker 1988, 168–​169. 56 Obelisks are associated with Caligula, Domitian, Hadrian; see Curran et al. 2009. Domitian refurbished and expanded Augustus’s solar meridian with its obelisk-​gnomon. The Flavian ideology behind this is elaborated by Heslin 2007, 16–​19. 57 There is some debate about the intended destination of this obelisk. Fowden argues that Constantine intended the obelisk for Rome, not Constantinople, whereas Bardill, in Pitarakis 2010, 151–​155, insists that it was meant for New Rome, and, further, that the masonry obelisk was constructed as compensation for not obtaining the Theban one. While circumstantial, this argument is compelling.

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  245 of Rome’s past. The inscription on its base also situates Constantius’s dedication as a continuation of his father’s agenda: “Safe on the throne of the world august Constantius gave Thee, Roma, a gift of his father’s which truly was worthy of the triumph won by the son in his fight, and world fame of his father.”58 The second of the two surviving Theban obelisks of Thutmose III was placed at the center of the circus of New Rome, that is, the hippodrome of Constantinople, and it remains standing there today, even as the terrain around it has been transformed in the two millennia since then (Figure 6.1). Such an echo of Roman imperial precedent is part of a larger and well-​known narrative in which the ceremonial layout and embellishment of Constantinople draws upon the more ancient example of Rome. More relevant to the present discussion, however, this obelisk gestures toward another dimension of imperial modeling, a prescriptive dimension that inflects successive ceremonial activities for the Byzantines and beyond. The obelisk was raised in the hippodrome to commemorate a single event, the defeat of Theodosius’s rivals, and yet it continued to exert influence in the recurrent ritual life of the civic space over time, acting as a monumental stage for the public performance of imperium in both Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople. The precise circumstances of the transport and arrival of the obelisk remain unclear, but we do know that when it was installed in the hippodrome by 390 ce it had been in Constantinople already for some time.59 Despite this later date, and the fact that the hippodrome itself took on its more complete form during the Theodosian era, the obelisk should also be considered “a Constantinian project” in conception, even if not in execution.60 St. Jerome famously declared that Constantine’s city “was dedicated by denuding almost all other cities,” and the movement of an ancient Egyptian obelisk to early Byzantine Constantinople corresponds to Constantine’s wider program of using antiquities to provide a hallowed and prestigious veneer for his relatively new capital city. The hippodrome, which had been begun by Septimius Severus, assumed primary importance as part of Constantine’s “appeal to romanitas,” which prioritized the magnificence of Rome and its institutions.61 Constantinople’s hippodrome was built in clear emulation of the Circus Maximus of Rome: both public spaces were situated next to the palace, graced with an imperial box, and anchored by impressive monuments on their central axes. Accommodating up to 100,000 people, the hippodrome was the primary civic space of the capital. Beyond the chariot races themselves, which followed Roman tradition, the hippodrome served as the site for imperial coronations of the early Byzantine period; it was here that the city’s populace encountered the emperor face 58 Iversen 1962, vol. I, 57–​58. 59 Its presence in Alexandria in the 360s is attested by a letter in which Emperor Julian the Apostate offers to send a monumental effigy of himself to the Alexandrians in exchange for sending the obelisk to Constantinople. See Curran et al. 2009, 55–​58. 60 Bassett 2007, 220, and various essays in Pitarakis 2010. 61 The development of the urban and ceremonial node consisting of the hippodrome, Baths of Zeuxippos, and Great Palace was key in this regard: each of these institutions, as Sarah Bassett 2007, 27, points out, manifests “a singularly Roman mentality” with thermal foundations expressing imperial beneficence and the circus and palace conceptualized in tandem.

246  Cecily J. Hilsdale to face and where he was acclaimed.62 As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the emperor’s appearance at the hippodrome was likened to the rising of the sun, with the crowd chanting the anateilon as he ascended to the kathisma. With its direct connection to the imperial palace by circular staircase, the kathisma should be understood as the extension, even the public face, of the palace. Because of these imperial associations, the hippodrome provided the optimal venue for military triumphs and spectacles performed for foreign embassies and receptions. The hippodrome thus emerges as the principal site not only to proclaim power, but also to test it. Most famously in 532, the violent uprisings known as the Nika Riots, which destroyed much of the ceremonial center of the city including an earlier Hagia Sophia, started at the hippodrome and were brutally suppressed there. The hippodrome also served as the site for ritual humiliations and executions, where its monuments provided an especially vibrant visual backdrop for these gruesome events. In the twelfth-​century account of her father’s rule known as the Alexiad, Anna Komnene describes the spectacle of one execution by fire with “flames rising and shooting out fiery sparks with a noise like thunder, sparks which leapt high in the air to the top of the stone obelisk which stands in the centre of the Hippodrome.”63 The Theodosian obelisk base alludes to these different associations, while ultimately stressing the spectacular quality of the imperial encounter above all else.64 All four faces of its upper portion depict the emperor solemnly staring out from the kathisma, flanked by members of the imperial household, administration, and the military (Figures 6.2, 6.12, and 6.13). In an exclusive space marked off from the rest of the civic arena, the kathisma sets the framework for this lithic epiphany: its architecture frames the emperor literally and presents him symbolically as the embodiment of the imperial palace. On the southeast face, breaking the frame of the low railing, the emperor holds a victory wreath to signify his status as granter of victory (Figures 6.12). In this way, the scene offers a visualization of the verbal acclamation that took place in the hippodrome. Despite compositional variations among the four sides, the reliefs of the upper portion of the Theodosian base project in every direction a stilled and hieratic tableau of imperial sovereignty. The lower zones of the upper portion of the base exhibit a contrast between the southeast and the northwest faces, which were directed to the kathisma and the people, respectively. The language of the dedicatory epigrams on the lower block of the obelisk base clarifies this distinction. The Latin inscription, which was the language of the court, bureaucratic, and military spheres in late antiquity, appears 62 On the hippodrome, see Guilland 1969, vol. I, 371–​395; MacCormack 1981, 79–​80; McCormick 1987; Dagron 1984, 161–​190; Pitarakis 2010. On the ceremonial life in particular, see Guilland 1966; Vespignani 2001; Dagron 1985; among others. 63 Alexiad, 15.10.2, lines 2–​6. Further examples are discussed in Boeck 2009, 298 n73. 64 The base of the obelisk consists of two separate blocks of different dimensions. The lower portion is larger and corresponds to the dimensions of the original obelisk, which was accidentally broken before being erected. In order to compensate for the different sizes, the upper portion of the base was added. Bardill in Pitarakis 2010, 161, notes the irony that “the existence of this sculpture is owed to an accident.” Sustained treatments of the Byzantine base include Bruns 1935; Safran 1993; Kiilerich 1998. See also Iversen 1962; Sodini 1994; and Bassett 2007, 219–​222 (no. 138).

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Figure 6.12.  Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), southeast face. Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale.

on the southeast, or kathisma-​facing side of the base, whereas Greek, the “lingua franca” of the people that complemented the polyglot culture of Constantinople, appeared on the northwest side, facing the people.65 The pictorial program of the official/​Latin/​kathisma-​facing southeastern relief depicts the ludic celebration of the hippodrome below the standing emperor holding the wreath of victory. Compressed into the foreground, performers animate the solemn festivities with dancing and music provided by water organs and pipes. Opposite this, on the unofficial/​Greek/​demes northwestern face, vanquished barbarians kneel before the seated emperor and offer tribute, a stock theme in the iconographic repertoire of victory (Figure 6.13). Compositionally and conceptually, the active ludic performers and vassals kneeling in supplication serve to contrast the solemn stasis of the emperor and his entourage above them. In this sense, the obelisk base offers a visual counterpart to the Book of Ceremonies’ definition of taxis invoked at the beginning of this chapter. 65 Safran 1993, 419, describes Latin as “the language of power, the language used in the fourth century only by the court, the bureaucracy, and the army, also the language of the law.” It is not a bilingual account of the same text however: the first-​person speech of the Latin inscriptions contrasts the straightforward third-​ person pentameter of the Greek text. The translation of Bardill in Pitarakis 2010, 156 is followed here. The Latin inscription reads: “Difficult once, I was ordered to be obedient to the serene master(s) and, after the tyrant(s) had been extinguished, to carry the palm. All things cede to Theodosius and his undying issue. Thus I, defeated and tamed in thirty days, when Proclus was judge was raised to the skies above.” The Greek reads: “Only the emperor Theodosius daring to upraise the four-​sided pillar, ever lying a burden on the earth, called Proclus to his aid, and so huge a pillar stood up in thirty-​two days.”

248  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.13.  Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), northwest face. Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale.

And indeed the ceremonial dimension of the monument is entirely apposite given the context of the hippodrome and the rituals enacted there over time. Just as the Book of Ceremonies established an idealized protocol with a distinct prescriptive motivation, the Theodosian monument too sets a model of and for imperium.66 In this sense, while the erection of the monument was occasioned by a set of particular political circumstances, its resonance is not tied to those specifics. Beyond depicting a particular emperor, the monument celebrates the epiphanic potency of the presence of subsequent Byzantine emperors. The reliefs, in other words, exceed their documentary value and offer a more prescriptive element that came to inflect ceremonial life far beyond fourth-​century Constantinople. In addition to the more general hieratic vision of imperial authority, two specific aspects of the reliefs, as we shall see, resonated particularly strongly over time in later contexts: gift-​giving and the technology associated with the hippodrome festivities. The supplicatory position of the barbarians on the northwestern or populace-​ facing side of the base suggests the importance of gestural and diplomatic protocol, a central component of which was the display of gifts. Primary sources testify 66 This idea of model for and model of is from Geertz 1973, 87–​125. According to Canepa 2009, 113: “Since Theodosius’s imagery was at the symbolic core of the space and provided the rituals’ context, all subsequent games in effect reenacted the events portrayed on the obelisk base, and Theodosius became the archetypal emperor, celebrated whenever any subsequent emperor held the games.”

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  249 to the importance of such gift-​giving, and they outline in detail the protocol for enumerating, appraising, and displaying diplomatic gifts, which were often paraded through the hippodrome. In light of this ceremonial performance, the positioning of the kneeling gift-​bearing barbarians takes on additional ceremonial significance over time. When in the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor hosted a Sassanian delegation, this lithic image of subjugation, according to Matthew Canepa, would have appeared as an “encrypted” image of triumph.67 This is because the kneeling barbarians on the obelisk base were positioned such that they would have been seen by the people of the hippodrome with the kathisma beyond, but would not have been visible from the kathisma itself, where the visiting Sassanian delegates sat. In this way, the reliefs stressed the power and dominance of the Byzantines over and against diplomatic supplicants far beyond the context of their original creation—​ their significance was coded and interwoven with diplomatic ritual over time. If the northwestern face of the obelisk base played into the projection of Byzantine imperium as one of subjugation through the rhetoric of the gift, its southeastern face, with its celebratory festivities, helped to shape later instantiations of empire further to the East, in Kiev, through a rhetoric of specialized technological knowledge. While the architectural layout and mosaic decorative program of the eleventh-​century church of St. Sophia in Kiev draws on Byzantine prototypes more generally, its princely turrets reveal a more specific visual dialogue with the hippodrome in Constantinople, a dialogue hinging on political power and the technology of its trappings, as argued by Elena Boeck.68 The frescoes there depict aspects of ceremonial life in imperial Constantinople, specifically in the hippodrome. Following scenes of the races themselves—​the starting gates, factions, and kathisma—​the program terminates with performances featuring the golden organ that was displayed on special occasions in the hippodrome (Figure 6.14). This detail in Kiev echoes the southeastern face of the base of hippodrome obelisk and, further, bears diplomatic significance, as the organ represented a technology protected by the Byzantines and not widely available. In depicting with such precision the spectacles of the hippodrome—​its games and coveted technologies like the organ—​the frescoes in Kiev showcase an intimate and direct knowledge of the distant capital on the Bosphorus. Moreover, the relationship between the two ceremonial sites of authority is expressed not merely in pictorial terms but in their spatial organizations. According to Boeck, the movement from the palace to the hippodrome is simulated in the Kievan church. Recall that at the hippodrome in Constantinople, a spiral staircase reserved for imperial use offered the emperor access to an upper story and a privileged view from the kathisma. In Kiev the hippodrome frescoes line the interior of a circular staircase whose access was restricted to and granted by the prince. As the Kievan prince ascended the stairs and viewed the unfolding of the fresco races, he mirrored the

67 Canepa 2009, 168ff. 68 Boeck 2009, 286.

250  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.14.  Detail of the frescoes in the southwestern turret of the Church of St. Sophia, Kiev. Photo: Andrea Jerole/Scala / Art Resource, NY.

emperor’s ritual ascent to the kathisma in Constantinople. This parallel ritual action is clear: following a similar ascent, rulers in both Constantinople and Kiev emerged into a privileged space to see and be seen.69

Imperial Pageantry in Ottoman Kostantiniyye Even after the city’s sacking and occupation by the Crusaders (1204–​1261) and its conquest by the Ottomans (1453), the hippodrome and its remaining monuments continued to exert symbolic power as the principal arena for publicly displaying the imperial authority of the sultan in his new capital Kostantiniyye. The ceremonial life of the Ottoman city featured a set cycle of imperial processions for Friday prayers and religious holidays, movable celebrations associated with victories, and the more occasional weddings and circumcision festivals. The latter two were arguably the most lavish, and the hippodrome (At Meydanı or “Horse Square”) served as their primary venue. On the occasion of circumcision festivals, the imperial entourage,

69 Again, this is Boeck’s argument.

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  251 consisting of the sultan, his sons, and representatives of his janissary and military corps, processed from the Topkapı Palace to the hippodrome, where, according to contemporary accounts, silence and order prevailed until the sultan arrived. His appearance then transformed the mood to festive as he was acclaimed by the troops and hailed with music.70 As noted at the beginning of the chapter, the Ottomans adopted a policy of imperial seclusion that limited the sultan’s physical participation in the public life of the city. This restricted access, in turn, served to heighten his physical presence at those select public celebrations in the hippodrome, where the festivities were carefully choreographed to proclaim his supremacy and, by extension, that of the Ottoman Empire.71 The rich textual and visual evidence for circumcision festivals focuses less on the prince and the circumcision itself, which took place in the privacy of the Topkapı palace, than on the public celebrations prompted by the rite of passage. The circumcisions themselves, in other words, were mere pretexts for the lavish displays that ultimately showcased the sultan’s largesse.72 With over 50 days of receptions, banquets, processions, and performances, the 1582 circumcision festival of Murad III’s son Mehmed was unparalleled in terms of expense and impact. No one could mistake this festival for a mere family affair. Its significance was political and its intended message was global in scope: the festival showcased to a decidedly international audience the supremacy of the Ottoman Empire—​the diversity of its people and its products, and the sophistication of its military and technological expertise. In terms of its people, the empire’s multi-​confessional constituency was fully integrated into the festivities. On the third day of the festival, religious leaders processed to the sultan to pay their respects. First, Muslim dignitaries holding the Qur’an and pilgrims who had been to Mecca bestowed blessings upon the sultan and his son, then came Christian representatives of the Greek and Armenian communities, namely the patriarch of Constantinople and Antioch, respectively, who soberly offered gold and silver vases as gifts.73 Later in the festivities, there was a grand processional masquerade of Jews, many refugees from Spain after 1492, and later still, Greek performers from Pera enacted an elaborate wedding procession.74 The diverse ethnic makeup of the performers more generally is a consistent trope in the descriptions of the festivities.75 The material diversity of Ottoman dominion was expressed in clear ceremonial terms by the procession of more than 150 guild representatives, each showcasing abundant furs, textiles, spices, and more so as to make clear the impressively vast 70 Yelçe 2014, 92. 71 Necipoğlu 1991, 16–​30; Kafescioğlu 2010, 53–​109. Under Sultan Süleyman, with the guidance of Ibrahim Pasha, the imperial palace and its ceremonies were redesigned, in Pinar Emiralioğlu’s words 2014, 42, “to heighten the Ottoman’s military victories and, more importantly, the magnificent persona of the sultan and the universality of his empire.” 72 In the words of Fetvacı 2013, 273: “his princely prerogative of courtly entertainment.” 73 Stout 1966, 95–​96. 74 Stout 1966, 213–​218. 75 Yelçe 2014.

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Figure 6.15.  Peştamal-​makers at the 1582 Circumcision Festival, Ottoman Imperial Festival Book, Surname-​i hümayun, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi library H 1344 (338b–​339a). Photo: Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi.

market controlled by the sultan. Unlike traditional European guild pageantry, in which skills and crafts competed with each other but were unified in a larger allegorical or religious purpose, Ottoman guild pageantry was designed to please the sultan and his guests by boasting the expertise of the imperial capital across all strata of society.76 The illustrated manuscript commemorating the 1582 circumcision ceremony known as the Surname-​i hümayun in the Topkapı museum clarifies the entertainment value of this guild parade. 77 In the miniature of the textile merchants or Peştamal workers (that is, those who made the textiles for the hamman), for example, we see the procession of cloths hung on poles both as flags and also in the form of oversized magnificent birds, which by means of mechanical devices on their interior, we are told, could flap their wings to the delight and awe of the audience (Figure 6.15). The procession of the sugar makers too exhibited the wealth of the empire’s sumptuous products with impressive artistry. In the corresponding Surname-​i hümayun illustration, a variety of sculptural confections are 76 Stout 1966, 248. In his romanticized take on the guild pageantry, Stout sees the procession of the guilds as an opportunity “for all classes of Ottoman society to participate in one official function sponsored by the imperial court, so that even the poorest of the workers could have a sense of belonging and recognition”; Stout 1966, 268. Even further, it “symbolized the social cohesion and mutual respect which made Ottoman Turkey, for its day, a state with an appreciable degree of democratic spirit.” I see the incorporation of the different classes more as a projection of power than a statement of relative democracy. 77 On Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi H 1344, see Atasoy 1997.

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Figure 6.16.  Night spectacles of the 1582 Circumcision Festival (launching of fireworks and mock battle), Ottoman Imperial Festival Book, Surname-​i hümayun, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi library H 1344 (28b). Photo: Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi.

carried through the hippodrome: life size geese, an immense elephant, and mythological figures such as the harpy and the phoenix-​like simurg.78 Beyond the processions themselves, the list of festivities that similarly extolled imperial supremacy through ceremonial means is virtually inexhaustible. Elaborate feasts for both esteemed guests and ordinary people showcased the sultan’s hospitality and command of seemingly infinite resources. Sweet deserts were served in abundance, even as the price of sugar was 20 times more than that of meat.79 A menagerie of confectionary animals was paraded at a banquet as the night sky was lit by elaborate fireworks displays (Figure 6.16). Especially impressive for their beauty, fireworks also showcased the military technology that earned the Ottomans prominence in the age of gunpowder empires.80 In addition to displays of “real” military



78 Atasoy 1997; and Pitarakis 2010, 122.

79 Yelçe 2014, 96 (prices from Yerasimos).

80 The concept of gunpowder empires goes back to Hodgson 1974.

254  Cecily J. Hilsdale and athletic prowess in the form of wrestling matches, archery contests, equestrian performances, and others, mock battles added a theatrical evocation of empire. On a stage in the hippodrome, Ottoman forces won spectacular mock battles over Persians, Hungarians, Germans, French, and other Christian infidels. A series of miniatures in the Topkapı surname elaborate these tournaments:  using artillery fire, Ottoman forces storm Christian castles, then replace the battle standards, and even display severed heads of the vanquished.81 The fiction of these war games was thin, as some of the “performances” re-​enacted were relatively recent, real Ottoman victories. Overall, the lavish scale and ambitious scope of the 1582 celebration and its not-​so-​subtle subtext of dominion must be understood as a clear demonstration of Ottoman power bolstered by a posture of intimidation.82 All of these events were staged directly before the sultan, who watched from an imperial kiosk above. His elevated exclusive space and privileged vantage point was analogous to the kathisma of the former Byzantine emperor. The sultan’s imperial box, despite being situated across the hippodrome from the former kathisma (rather than in its place), can be seen as an appropriation of Byzantine imperial precedent.83 Both Ottoman and Byzantine boxes were understood as extensions of their respective palaces and sites for the spectacular framing of imperial presence. Of the vast literature on Ottoman-​Byzantine cultural connections, Gülru Necipoğlu has offered key insights into the Ottoman cultural negotiation of the Byzantine past in tandem with the European and Islamic present.84 For the purposes of this chapter, however, a more local framework is in order: the space of the hippodrome. Throughout the pages of the Topkapı Surname-​i hümayun the 1582 festivities are anchored by the hippodrome’s monuments.85 The games, banquets, receptions, and processions, that is to say, are all pictured among the three monuments of the Byzantine hippodrome—​the masonry obelisk, the serpent column, and the Egyptian obelisk on its Theodosian base. The foreground of virtually every miniature of the manuscript includes reference to at least one of these monuments, which serve to localize the activity. The pre-​Ottoman monuments were woven into the Ottoman festivities of the hippodrome seamlessly. The celebrations of the 1530 circumcision festival featured an acrobat walking across a rope tied between two of the hippodrome’s ancient columns.86 The illustrated history commemorating that earlier festival depicts 81 Stout 1966, 218–​231, notes that there were many variations to this basic plot, including one with Christian defenders sending out a procession led by the patriarch, another with espionage between camps, others with comic relief. For one battle, which corresponded the actual capture of Cyprus in 1571, an enormous model of the island, with the Christian stronghold of Famagusta, was rolled into the hippodrome (Stout 1966, 229–​230). Safavid defeat was also very much a part of the message, while presented in less obvious terms. Terzioğlu 1995. 82 One that held particular potency in a time of crisis, as argued by Terzioğlu 1995. 83 It was set up in the palace of Ibrahim Pasha, who served as grand vizier for Sultan Süleyman. See Atasoy in Yelçe 2014, 90. 84 Necipoğlu 2010, 2012, 1989. 85 Atasoy 1997. 86 Yelçe 2014; Stout 1966, 178–​179, notes that at the 1582 celebrations the ropes were rigged to wooden masts rather than monuments.

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Figure 6.17.  Circumcision Festival of 1530 (scramble and acrobats), Hünername II, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi library H 1524. Photo: Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi

a figure scaling the Egyptian monolith (Figure 6.17).87 Diagonally in the upper left corner of the page, the sultan, enclosed within his imperial box, is shown surveying this feat. Climbing the tallest monuments of the hippodrome was an especially daring challenge for which acrobats were rewarded by the sultan; at least one such attempt, during the 1582 festival, resulted in death.88 Curiously, the depictions of hippodrome’s monuments in Ottoman miniatures consistently reproduce the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian obelisk itself, while leaving the pictorial program of its Byzantine base entirely blank. Some have explained this discrepancy as an Ottoman representational preference for schematization over the relative naturalism and modeling of the reliefs.89 But the omission of the Byzantine imagery may also signal a more ideologically charged message: the city’s ceremonial 87 Hünername II, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi H 1524, reproduced by Nuktu in Pitarakis 2010. See also Fetvacı 2013. 88 Stout 1966, 178. 89 Tükel in Pitarakis 2010.

256  Cecily J. Hilsdale nexus was no longer the Byzantine hippodrome but the Ottoman At Meydanı, an important component of which was the past embodied by the monuments of previous emperors; but they were just that—​the past. And this point raises a critical distinction between the pageantry performed there and its permanent visual commemoration. The elaborately painted Ottoman miniatures stand as the permanent commemorative component of the lavish but fleeting imperial festivities. By preserving the hieroglyphs but omitting the visual effigies, the miniatures’ designers were not privileging Egyptian over Byzantine history, but choosing how to most effectively commemorate current authority in permanent pictorial terms. In the real ceremonial space of the hippodrome, there was no ambiguity surrounding imperial authority: with every aspect of the festivities underscoring the sultan’s authority, the lithic emperor of the past was no competition for the living authority ensconced in his imperial kiosk surveying the action. Moving into the realm of representation, however, there was only room for one imperial effigy, the sultan who constituted the cause and source of the ceremonial program.

Conclusions: Monumentality, Technology, and the Inter-​Imperial Ideal Mary Helms’s argument that the power of distance endows objects with aura in the crafting of the kingly ideal resonates especially strongly with this chapter’s exploration of the itinerant obelisk and the negotiation of inter-​imperiality.90 Dominion is implicit in the movement of obelisks and the new ceremonial arenas they come to anchor. This dominion is tied to the very monumentality of the obelisk itself and the technology surrounding its facture, a point that finds compelling evidence in diverse cultural contexts. Above Cuzco, enormous polygonal limestone blocks, some exceeding 200 tons, were fitted together with the precision that characterized imperial Inca masonry and has impressed visitors for centuries.91 In Mycenaean Greece, megalithic construction was once described as cyclopean because of the assumption that it could only have been accomplished by beings larger than life. Because monumentality fundamentally signals mastery, the very existence of obelisks testifies to the superior engineering of their makers and movers. In this way, obelisks’ construction, transport, and erection are all essential to their projection of power. Returning briefly to the ancient Egyptian context, we should recall that Hatshepsut is depicted in her red shrine with the two great obelisks she dedicated at Karnak (Figure 6.7). As part of a larger pictorial program of royal rituals, mostly concerning coronations and the investment of power, the obelisks here serve as metonyms for her might by indexing the labor of thousands in the service of the pharaoh. Further underscoring this point, it was not merely their dedication

90 Helms 1993. In the Byzantine context, see Trilling 1997. 91 Protzen 1993.

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Figure 6.18.  Drawing of the relief from Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el Bahri, after Edouard Naville, The Temple of Deir el Bahari (London, 1908)

that was celebrated, but their transport too. At her mortuary temple across the Nile at Deir el-​Bahri, reliefs depict the monoliths being shipped down the Nile from Aswan to Thebes on barges manned by a multitude of orderly oarsmen in such detail that modern scholars of nautical archaeology have relied on the representations to reconstruct the technology of ancient transportation (Figure 6.18). These scenes were integrated into the larger pictorial cycle celebrating Hatshepsut’s great deeds, including the expedition to the land of Punt, and in this way the mastery of monumental masonry ranks alongside military exploits. These images of dominion—​ over obdurate blocks of granite and also foreign people—​together underscore her sovereignty. Egypt is not an isolated case. Ancient Assyrians too depicted such feats of technical mastery, though not of obelisks. The reliefs of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh depict the transport of the great lamassu from quarry to palace, all under the watchful eye of the ruler, who sits in a shaded chariot above the well-​organized phalanx of workers. Other less-​well preserved reliefs from the palace depict the more common Assyrian themes of warfare, thus reminding us that these themes operated in tandem as expressions of his authority. The technical prowess associated with erecting obelisks in their original setting is matched if not exceeded by the expertise necessary to move them great distances and to raise them in new spaces.92 Narratives surrounding the Egyptian obelisks in Rome center on the technical achievement of transporting them over long distances across the Mediterranean. Pliny, our main source for the earliest arrival of obelisks in Rome, stresses that the most difficult enterprise was transporting them by sea in vessels

92 See note 22.

258  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.19.  Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), lower portion of the northeast face. Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale.

that “excited the greatest admiration.” Augustus consecrated the very ship carrying the first obelisk “as a lasting memorial of this marvelous undertaking.” While it was destroyed by fire, Pliny tells us that the vessel carrying an obelisk for Caligula endured “for some years and [was] looked upon as the most wonderful construction ever beheld upon the seas” before being sunk for the construction Ostia’s harbor.93 For the obelisk in Constantinople, we know nothing about how it arrived, but its installation on the hippodrome was immortalized on the lowest portion of the Theodosian base itself. Two faces of the base’s lowest zone represent the circumstances surrounding the raising of the obelisk. One face depicts the obelisk being raised: it lies on its side harnessed as animated workers manipulate its ropes and levers at the command of engineers (Figure 6.19). The other face depicts the races in which that technological achievement culminated (Figure 6.20). These reliefs are marked by a particularly strong attention to detail and sense of precision. There is a close correspondence, for example, between the sequence of the hieroglyphs depicted on the obelisk lying on its side on the marble base and the actual incised face of the red granite monolith itself.94 The Constantinopolitan obelisk is exceptional because it remained where 93 Pliny N ­ atural History 36.14, 69–72; Curran et al. 2009, 42. 94 This helps establish that the obelisk was damaged already when it was installed in the hippodrome. What stands today is two-​thirds of its original height. See note 64 and Pitarakis 2010 more broadly.

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Figure 6.20.  Obelisk base, Hippodrome, Constantinople (Istanbul), lower portion of the southwest face. Photo: Cecily J. Hilsdale.

it was initially set up after its removal from Egypt. All the obelisks of Rome were rearranged as part of early modern urban renovations. As these were excavated and reinstalled throughout the city in the early modern era, the technical apparatuses for their manipulation became sources of wonder.95 In using obelisks as the anchor for this chapter, I have stressed the relationship between the monumental commemorative form and the ephemeral ceremonial actions surrounding them over time. In light of the dominance associated with the obelisk, we should not be surprised that it continues to do the work of empire in post-​imperial contexts. Indeed, obelisks have featured in more contemporary efforts to monumentalize empire and even to instantiate post-​imperial demonstrations of national sovereignty if not imperial ambition.96 Emblematic in this regard is the obelisk installed at the Place de la Concorde in 1831. Originally set up as a pair by Ramses II at the entrance to Luxor, where its other half still stands, it was shipped to Paris on a vessel custom built for the occasion (the “Louqsor”) (Figure 6.21). A diagram of the mechanics of its transport adorns its base in glistening gold, celebrating France’s ingenuity and maritime power. But its location in the city is even more significant. At the Place de la Concorde, the obelisk was installed where the guillotine

95 Curran et al. 2009. 96 Hassan 2003.

260  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.21.  Obelisk and base, Place de la Concorde, Paris. Photo: Shutterstock.

had once stood, thus rendering the ancient monument an antidote to the former bloodstained Place de la Revolution, as elucidated by Todd Porterfield.97 Breaking with traditional commemorative strategies of the past, the obelisk was proposed as a monument devoid of politics and thus capable of erasing the historical memories of the site.98 Of course, the obelisk was far from apolitical: although it may have provided a monumental commemorative solution for a site mired in the politics of the revolution and counterrevolution in France, its acquisition and installation indexed imperialist aspirations in the East.99 97 Porterfield 1998. 98 Commemorative strategies such as the equestrian statue, or the allegory of Liberty, or other heroic modes of portraiture. As Porterfield 1998, 23, eloquently put it, “Of all the arts, sculptural monuments had been the most politically authoritarian and artistically conservative.” See also Curran et al. 2009, 250–​255. 99 In brief, according to Porterfield 1998, 40, it asserted “the rational for a real, historical, ongoing, and potentially future imperial role.”

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Figure 6.22.  Obelisk in Coronation Park, Delhi. Photo: Sunil Kumar.

Although one debate in the contemporary discussion of empire turns on the relationship between antique and early modern forms of imperial sway and modern colonialist regimes, a properly thorough engagement with these issues would exceed the parameters of this already long chapter. Nonetheless, it should be stressed that the obelisk as a form and figure, as a monument and symbol, persists in both contexts, marking it as a resonant heuristic for those invested in the debate. If for Cannadine ornamentalism conveyed colonial hierarchies in palpable performative terms, I have here presented monumentalism as equally significant. The obelisk in colonial rule in India thus serves as an apt closing for this chapter. The coronation memorial in Delhi celebrates the lavish 1911 coronation of King George V, whose visit to India during the Raj was celebrated with extravagant pageantry.100 The site itself, which served as the setting for three successive imperial durbars (1877, 1903, 1911), was commemorated with an obelisk (Figure 6.22). The accompanying plaque makes its occasion clear: Here on the 12th day of December 1911, his Imperial Majesty King George V, Emperor of India accompanied by the Queen Empress, in solemn Durbar, announced in person to the Governors, Princes and Peoples of India his Coronation celebrated in England on the 22nd day of June 1911 and received from them their dutiful homage and allegiance.101

100 101

Cannadine 2002. Coronation Park guide.

262  Cecily J. Hilsdale

Figure 6.23.  Coronation Park, Delhi. Photo: Sunil Kumar.

Unlike Victoria’s 1877 proclamation in absentia invoked in the chapter’s introduction, this ruler, the text stresses, was present in person. This third and final durbar also marked the establishment of Delhi as the capital of New India, and the site, anchored by the sandstone obelisk, later served as a repository for marble statues of former British kings and officials that had once adorned the city. After Independence, Coronation Park became a graveyard for monuments of India’s colonial past, where the obelisk was surrounded by a forest of untended or empty plinths (Figure 6.23). Empire at this contested site became marked by absence. Just as empires rise and fall, monumental forms of commemoration endure and in many cases are abandoned.

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264  Cecily J. Hilsdale Kiilerich, B. 1998. The Obelisk Base in Constantinople: Court Art and Imperial Ideology. Roma. Kostof, S. 1978. “The Emperor and the Duce: The Planning of the Piazzale Augusto Imperatore in Rome.” In H. A. Millon and L. Nochlin, eds., Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, 270–​325. Cambridge. Larché, F., and F. Burgos 2006. La chapelle Rouge: Le sanctuaire de barque d’Hatshepsout. Paris. Lichtheim, M. [1976] 2000. Ancient Egyptian Literature, VII: The New Kingdom. Berkeley, CA. Lipinska, J. 2001. “Thutmose III.” In D. Redford, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, vol. 3, 401–​403. Oxford. MacCormack, S., 1981. Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity. Berkeley, CA. McCormick, M. 1987. Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West. Cambridge. Moffatt, A., and M. Tall, eds. 2012. Constantine Porphyrogennetos, The Book of Ceremonies: With the Greek edition of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Bonn, 1829). Canberra. Moret, A. 1902. Le rituel du culte divin journalier en Egypte. Paris. Necipoğlu, G. 1989. “Süleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Context of Ottoman-​Hapsburg-​Papal Rivalry.” Art Bulletin 71: 401–​427. Necipoğlu, G. 1991. Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA. Necipoğlu, G. 1993. “Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Palaces.” Ars Orientalis 23: 303–​342. Necipoğlu, G. 2004. The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton, NJ. Necipoğlu, G.  2010. “From Byzantine Constantinople to Ottoman Kostantiniyye:  Creation of a Cosmopolitan Capital and Visual Culture under Sultan Mehmed II.” In From Byzantion to Istanbul: 8000 Years of a Capital, June 5–​Sept. 4, 2010, 262–​278. Istanbul. Necipoğlu, G. 2012. “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Translation: Artistic Conversations with Renaissance Italy in Mehmed II’s Constantinople.” Muqarnas 29: 1–​81. Parker, G.  2007. “Obelisks Still in Exile:  Monuments Made to Measure?” In L.  Bricault, M.  J. Versluys, and P. G. P. Meyboom, eds., Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World, 209–​222. Leiden. Parker, G. 2014. “Mobile Monumentality: The Case of Obelisks.” In J. F. Osborne, ed., Approaching Monumentality in Archaeology, 273–​287. Albany, NY. Pitarakis, B., ed. 2010. Hippodrom/​Atmeydanı. Istanbul. Porterfield, T. 1998. The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–​1836. Princeton, NJ. Protzen, J.-​P. 1993. Architecture and Construction at Ollantaytambo. New York and Oxford. Reiske, J. J., ed. 1829. De Cerimoniis Aulae Byzantinae. Bonn. Safran, L. 1993. “Points of View: The Theodosian Obelisk Base in Context.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 34, no. 4: 409–​435. Sodini, J.-​P. 1994. “Images sculptées et propagande impériale du IVe au VIe siècles: Recherches récentes sur les colonnes honorifiques et les reliefs politiques à Byzance.” In J. Durand and A. Guillou, eds., Byzance et les images, 43–​94. Paris. Stephenson, P. 2016. The Serpent Column: A Cultural Biography. Oxford Stout, R.  E. 1966. “The Sûr-​í-​Hümâyun of Murad III:  A Study of Ottoman Pageantry and Entertainment.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Subrahmanyam, S. 2004a. Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges. Oxford. Subrahmanyam, S. 2004b. Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks. Oxford. Swetnam-​Burland, M. 2010. “ ‘Aegyptus Redacta’: The Egyptian Obelisk in the Augustan Campus Martius.” Art Bulletin 92, no. 3: 135–​153. Tappan, E. M., ed. 1914. The World’s Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art. Vol. II: India, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. Boston and New York. Terzioğlu, D. 1995. “The Imperial Circumcision Festival of 1582: An Interpretation.” Muqarnas 12: 84–​100. Treitinger, O.  1938. Die oströmische Kaiser-​und Reichsidee nach ihrer Gestaltung im höfischen Zeremoniell. Jena.

IMPERIAL MONUMENTALISM, CEREMONY, AND FORMS OF PAGEANTRY  265 Trilling, J. 1997. “Daedalus and the Nightingale: Art and Technology in the Myth of the Byzantine Court.” In H. Maguire, ed., Byzantine Court Culture from 829–​1204, 217–​231. Washington, DC. Vespignani, G. 2001. Il circo di Costantinopoli nuova Roma. Rome. Vogt, A., ed. 1935–​1939. Le Livre des Cérémonies. Paris. Yelçe, Z.  2014. “Evaluating Three Imperial Festivals:  1524, 1530 and 1539.” In S.  Faroqhi and A. Öztürkmen, eds., Celebration, Entertainment and Theater in the Ottoman World, 72–​109. London. Zanker, P. 1988. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Ann Arbor, MI.

7 Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule Caroline Humfress

1.  Introduction: Reframing “Law and Empire” Law is an instrument for civilizing the peoples of the world.1

In 1964 Emperor Haile Selassie I—​“the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of the Kings, Elect of God”—​provided the “Inaugural Statement” for the first issue of the Journal of Ethiopian Law. Published in English, the statement begins by tracing Ethiopia’s rich, multilingual legal heritage back to the Fetha Negast, or “Law of the Kings,” a legal code which included authoritative (canonical) Christian writings, probably written in Arabic by a thirteenth-​century Coptic Christian in Egypt, then translated into Ge’ ez—​the written language of the ancient Aksumite and medieval Abyssinian empires and the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church—​ and adapted by Ethiopian (Amhara) kings in the mid-​ fifteenth century. Having situated Ethiopian law within a specific—​but at the same time universalizing—​Christian context, the “Inaugural Statement” then turns to enumerating the legal developments effected under Haile Selassie’s own imperial rule (1930–​1974):  the promulgation and implementation of a written constitution (1931, revised 1955), alongside other legal codes; the “modernization of the legal system”; the establishment of a Faculty of law (in 1963) “. . . to educate persons capable of ensuring the effective application of the law”; and the creation of the Journal of Ethiopian Law itself, which would contain “. . . reports of the decisions of Our courts and commentary on the law of Ethiopia.”2 Each of these four elements—​ a set of codified (state) laws; a modernized system of courts; an institutionalized law school to train Ethiopian lawyers in Ethiopian laws; and the publication of an official Journal of Ethiopian Law—​were to constitute a single “Ethiopian” legal system. If doubt existed as to the meaning of the provisions of the (state) law, or a question arose that was not covered by the law, then the courts had to interpret the law and decide upon its application—​and one of the functions of the Journal of Ethiopian Law was to make these court judgements known “. . . to all engaged in the 1 Haile Selassie I 1964, v. 2 Haile Selassie I 1964, v. Caroline Humfress, Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire.  Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0007.

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  267 administration of justice and the study of the law.” “Law,” continues Haile Selassie I, “is a unifying force in a nation.” As emperor of Africa’s oldest independent country and its second largest in terms of population (almost 25 million people in 1964), with a territory encompassing around 80 spoken languages, 17  “ethnic” groups, a mixture of cultures and religions (including various forms of Christianity and Islam) and “. . . memories of diversity and autonomous rule (19th-​century kingdoms or chiefdoms from Maale to Kafa, from Jimma to Gojjam) . . . ,” Haile Selassie I did not simply seek to “modernize” law, bureaucracy, and the practice of government according to a Western script. He strove to create a specific, Ethiopian, narrative of “unity in diversity.”3 “Unity in diversity” is a hallmark of imperial rule, from the multiethnic empires of the ancient Near East and China to the city-​state empires of the Classical Mediterranean and the early medieval empires of the Guptas (South Asia) and the Mayans (Central America). The same dialectic, played out in different ways and to differing effects, is evident in the early modern empires of the Songhai (western Africa) and Incas (South America); the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid empires of Eurasia; and the nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century “historical bureaucratic empires” of Russia, Japan, and Iran.4 Empire-​states differ, in this respect, from nation-​states: Empires are large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people. The nation-​state, in contrast, is based on the idea of a single people in a single territory constituting itself as a unique political community. The nation-​state proclaims the commonality of its people—​even if the reality is more complicated—​while the empire-​state declares the non-​equivalence of multiple populations. Both kinds of state are incorporative—​they insist that people be ruled by their institutions—​but the nation-​state tends to homogenize those inside its borders and exclude those who do not belong, while the empire reaches outward and draws, usually coercively, peoples whose difference is made explicit under its rule.5

Burbank and Cooper’s distinction between empires and nation-​states implies a basic contrast between plurality (associated with empire-​states) and monism (the “one state—​one society—​one law model” associated with nation-​states). Situating this contrast within the dominant Western historical narrative—​according to which empires, from the nineteenth century onward, gradually gave way to

3 Arbink 1997, 164. Arbink’s focus is on Ethiopia after the 1974 revolution, in particular the complex topic of the “explicit re-​instatement of ethnicity in law,” constitutionalism, and the practice of government and rule in the context of the (Ethiopian) Federal Constitution of December 1994. 4 On the classic Weberian distinction between “patrimonial” and “historical bureaucratic empires,” see Eisenstadt 1963; Scheidel 2013, 29; and Barkey 2016, 105–​106. 5 Burbank and Cooper 2010, 8.

268  Caroline Humfress nation-​states—​has led, in turn, to a seductive developmental model in which the legal pluralities of empire are seen to gradually, but inevitably, give way to a “modernizing,” nation-​state mono-​legalism. Historical reality, however, is much more layered and complex. Haile Selassie I’s centralizing legal, bureaucratic, and administrative reforms should not be understood simply as a staging post along (African) Ethiopia’s (Western) path to nation-​state modernity. As we shall see, the “Ethiopian law” of Haile Selassie I was a tool of empire, adapted and reshaped from Anglo-​American materials in the context of multiple state, non-​state, and supra-​ state inter-​legalities and conflicts. Ethiopia’s revised 1955 constitution states that the emperor is “supreme co-​ legislator,” “supreme judge,” and “head of both the administration and the judiciary.”6 Article 36 specified that that the emperor himself was the supreme sovereign guardian of the people’s constitutional rights and liberties; rights and liberties that were defined by subsequent articles in the constitution (Articles 37–​ 62). Article 63 placed these constitutional guarantees within a striking imperial framework which stretches all the way back to the first multiethnic empires of the Ancient Near East: “In these and other matters, everyone has the traditional right to present petitions to the Emperor.”7 The constitutional enshrinement of this “traditional right to present petitions to the Emperor” points us toward the diversity of Ethiopia’s institutional forms, relationships, and legal orderings—​beyond the state-​law codifications of the late 1950s and 1960s.8 Prior to 1855 and the establishment of a centralized bureaucratic Empire, Ethiopia “. . . was split into numerous sub-​divisions which were administered either by military officers and nobility appointed by Emperor, or by traditional leaders indigenous to a given area who agreed to co-​operate with their conquerors. The administrators collected taxes and tribute in labor and kind, keeping designated portions for themselves and forwarding the remainder to the Crown.”9 After 1855, Ethiopian emperors pursued a centralizing strategy—​including the use of violent state force—​comparable to that seen in the Tanzimat era of the Ottoman Empire and Tsarist Russia. The power bases of local kings and nobles were fragmented by the reconstitution of regional administrative units, with officials appointed directly by imperial power. In Ethiopia, this bureaucratizing process was intensified by the creation of a professional, salaried army recruited from across the empire, independent from local lordship structures. On the ground, however, and especially outside the major cities, local and regional customary laws and dispute practices continued (until 1974)—​most crucially in relation to slavery and systems of rural land ownership and tenure. Shari‘a courts and dispute resolution by Christian, Jewish, and other non-​state officials further

6 Krzeczunowicz 1964, 116. 7 Article 63 of the Ethiopian 1955 Constitution, quoted from Krzeczunowicz 1964, 113. On “petitioning” as a technique of imperial rule, see sections 2 and 3. 8 Ethiopia’s legal codification project: Penal Code (1957); Civil Code (1960); Commercial and Maritime Code (1961); Civil Procedure Code (1967) (see Tuori 2015, 163; 2010, 49). 9 Keller 1981, 311.

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  269 added to the diversity of the legal landscape. The 1955 guarantee of a “traditional right” to petition the emperor was thus intended to reinforce imperial rule and authority, at the same time as making space—​beyond the constitution—​for diverse non-​state customs and laws. Imperial rule could invoke multiple legal orders and orderings, while at the same time pursuing a strategy of “nation-​building through legal reform.”10 Aside from five years (1936–​1941) during which Ethiopia was occupied by Italian forces and annexed as part of the newly created Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa)—​an administrative division that was deliberately intended to evoke the imperial glories of ancient Rome—​the Ethiopian Empire was never subject to direct colonial rule. The legal pluralities of the mid-​twentieth-​century Ethiopian Empire thus differed, in important respects, from the situation of “legal pluralism” identified—​and theorized—​by lawyers, social scientists, anthropologists, and historians with respect to (former) imperial colonies.11 Under some forms of modern European colonial rule the concept of “customary law” or “native law and custom”—​a term used in British colonies—​played a highly specific role in imperial governance: [“Customary Law”] was assumed to be a body of law existing before and independently of colonial state. But not all of “native law and custom” received such “recognition” and was treated as “law.” Generally, for example, this did not occur in the area of criminal law, nor (depending on the extent to which “indirect rule” was adopted as the technique of colonial administration) too much of public law. “Native law and custom” was also not recognized as “law” if it was “repugnant” to European legal values.12

French and British colonial administrators, especially those involved in nineteenth-​century African and Indian territories, also set out to codify (usable) “native” rules, fundamentally altering their nature in the process.13 From the colonists’ perspective, putting “native law” into writing made it “reproducible”—​ and hence governable. It was this “colonial legal pluralism” that underpinned the work of postcolonial legal planners in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, particularly in postcolonial Africa: “Pluralism provided postcolonial planners with a diagnostic label, a way to identify a problem in need of a solution. The problem was that different sorts of people had different sorts of law.”14 Western-​trained socio-​legal engineers (as Halliday terms them) involved in postcolonial reconstruction projects tended to view legal

10 Quotation from Halliday 2013, 263. 11 Shahar 2008 provides a critical review of the concept of “legal pluralism.” 12 Griffiths 1999, viii. 13 On “customary law” in colonial and postcolonial Southern, Central, and East Africa, see Chanock 1985, 2001; and Shadle 1999. 14 Halliday 2013, 263.

270  Caroline Humfress pluralism as an obstacle to “modernization” and (nation-​state) “development.” The fact that Western-​trained socio-​legal engineers were also at work in Ethiopia during the 1950s and 1960s—​drafting the national codes and the 1955 constitution, in addition to pursuing other legal “restatement projects”—​is an important reminder that “entangled legalities” and relations of dominance are by no means limited to the forced imposition of colonial governance.15 The Ethiopian Law School mentioned in Haile Selassie I’s “Inaugural Statement” had in fact been founded with help from the Ford Foundation—​a New York–​based, “globally oriented,” private organization, funded by profits from the Ford Motor Company. The Law School’s initial curriculum was taken from American law schools, as were many of its professors. British, European, and American involvement in Ethiopia’s constitutional, administrative, and military affairs was by no means a new phenomenon. Hence Haile Selassie I’s insistence in his “Inaugural Statement” for the Journal of Ethiopian Law—​published in the same year as he took office as the first “Chairperson of the Organisation of African Unity”—​that “[t]‌he foundation of the [Ethiopian] codes lies in the feeling of the people as to what is just.” Ethiopia’s codes drew on foreign sources, but Ethiopian “. . . courts and judges cannot rely exclusively on foreign sources in interpreting the codes.”16 Nonetheless, the involvement of private, global (capitalist) organizations—​such as the Ford Foundation—​in modern, “neo-​colonial” law and development projects is a reminder of the imperialism of (Western) law itself17—​an imperialism that, as we shall see in section 3, had always worked through, beyond, and—​to a certain extent—​aside from state structures. Haile Selassie I was well aware of multiple legal, administrative, and bureaucratic orderings in operation above and beyond the Ethiopian state. In 1932 Ethiopia joined the League of Nations (later the United Nations). Speaking in Amharic, Haile Selassie I addressed the General Assembly twice: first, in Geneva, as an emperor in exile, to seek aid against Mussolini’s invading forces (1936), and second, in New York, in 1963. On this second occasion, Haile Selassie I appealed to the General Assembly as a “maker and enforcer of the international law,” listing the aims of the United Nations from its founding Charter: “the abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states,” “the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinctions as to race, sex, language or religion,” and “the safeguarding of international peace and security”: The goal of the equality of man which we seek is the antithesis of the exploitation of one people by another with which the pages of history and in particular those

15 On twentieth-​century foreign, in particular American, involvement in Ethiopia, see Tuori 2010; 2015, 162–​164. It is worth noting in this context that -​according to Krzeczunowicz -​Article 122 of the 1955 Ethiopian Constitution implies that all acts inconsistent with the United States Constitution shall be void (Krzeczunowicz 1964, 111). 16 Haile Selassie I 1964, vi. 17 See Fitzpatrick 2001; Smandych 2005; and Esmeir 2015.

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  271 written of the African and Asian continents, speak at such length. Exploitation, thus viewed, has many faces. But whatever guise it assumes, this evil is to be shunned where it does not exist and crushed where it does. It is the sacred duty of this Organization to ensure that the dream of equality is finally realized for all men to whom it is still denied, to guarantee that exploitation is not reincarnated in other forms in places whence it has already been banished.18

Recent scholarship has begun to emphasize the fundamental role that imperialism—​encompassing both rivalries between imperial powers and colonial exploitation founded on violence, slavery, and racial subjugation—​played in the development of international law itself from the sixteenth century to the present.19 Haile Selassie I’s 1963 “Address to the United Nations General Assembly” famously ends with the invocation that “[w]‌e must look, first, to Almighty God . . . We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.” This explicitly religious form of universalism also underpins Haile Selassie I’s 1964 “Inaugural Statement” for the Journal of Ethiopian Law: When he stated, in the concluding paragraph, that “[l]aw is an instrument for civi­ lizing the peoples of the world,” Haile Selassie I—​“the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of the Kings, Elect of God” (an imperial title first created by the late nineteenth-​century Ethiopian emperor Menelik II)—​was primarily invoking a Judeo-​Christian concept, not a modern, Western, rationalizing project of extending “the rule of law” across the globe. Civilizing missions take many different forms. Exploring the “logic of empire” in relation to law, bureaucracy, and the practice of government and rule thus forces us to break out from what William Twining has termed “the Country and Western tradition”: a tradition that has, until recently, dominated mainstream Western legal scholarship with its almost exclusive focus on “the positive laws and ‘official’ legal systems of nation-​states.”20 Section 2 of this chapter explores how different empires have fostered different “repertoires of rule”—​at the same time as making space for multiple “ad hoc” administrative regimes (for example, martial law, “emergency regulations,” and “special jurisdic­ tions”), in addition to sanctioning numerous forms of violence and abuse (for example, indentured servitude in the colonies; galley slavery; forced military conscription). Section 3 surveys some of the numerous ways in which empires put law “to work,” facilitating the development of multiple, normative orders and institutions far beyond the jurisdiction of their own imperial officials. Finally,

18 Recording of Haile Selassie I, United Nations Address (1963), with simultaneous English translation: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=MDscnpF4RsI (accessed July 26, 2018). Segments of this speech were used by Bob Marley and the Wailers in the song “War,” from their 1976 album Rastaman Vibration. 19 Anghie 2005, 2006, 2016; Benton and Ford 2016; and Koskenniemi 2017. 20 Twining 2000, 25. As Whimster 2016, 441, states: “Empires . . . have no inherent narrative driving them towards nation-​state modernity.”

272  Caroline Humfress in section 4, we briefly turn to postcolonial legal scholarship and the concept of “legalism from below”:  the practice of citizens invoking state legal norms and structures, and in the process transforming them. As we shall see, the study of colonial courtroom archives is beginning to transform our understanding of how law’s empire shifted and changed through time, “out there” in the provinces and colonies, but also, crucially, “at home” in the imperial heartlands.

2.  Repertoires of Rule What was said by Homer, “The earth was common to you all,” you have made a reality, by surveying the whole inhabited world (the oikoumené), by bridging the rivers in various ways, by cutting carriage roads through the mountains, by filling desert places with post stations, and by civilizing everything with your way of life and good order. . . . And now, indeed, there is no need to write a description of the world, nor to enumerate the laws of each people, but you have become universal geographers for all.21

The world of Roman (civil) law was fashioned and shaped by imperial expansion, just as the world of Anglo-​American common law was later “built through the global spread of colonialism and capitalism”; both “. . . carried a story of delivering law as [their] gift, bringing order to chaos, light to darkness.”22 Speaking in praise of Rome during the second century ce, the Greek orator Aelius Aristides described Rome’s universal “civilizing mission” as extending over multiple peoples, their (local) laws, and even the natural world itself. The “justness” of this domination, according to Aristides, did not lie in military force or right of conquest, but in Rome’s superiority over all others in the art of governing: “For you alone are rulers according to nature, so to speak . . . Since you were free right from the start and had immediately become rulers, you equipped yourselves with all that was helpful for this position, and you invented a constitution such as no one ever had before, and prescribed for all men rules and fixed arrangements.”23 As Peter Fitzpatrick has argued with respect to modern empires and colonialism: To the imperial eye, law was pre-​eminent among the “gifts” of an expansive civilisation, one which could extend in its abounding generosity to the entire globe . . . Law, that is, had not only to extend into new found worlds but had also

21 Aelius Aristides, Oration 26. 101–​102, trans. Behr 1981, 78. 22 Quotations from Geary, Morrison and Iago 2013, 85. 23 Aelius Aristides, Oration 26.91, quoted from Fontanella 2008, 209. Compare the opening words of the preface to the sixth-​century Roman emperor Justinian’s Institutes:  “Imperial majesty should not only be graced with arms but also armed with laws, so that good government may prevail in time of war and peace alike.”

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  273 forcefully to bring them into a determined order. The supreme justification of imperial rule was that it brought order to chaos, reined in “archaic instincts,” and all this aptly enough through subjection to “laws.”24

Islamic imperial rulers also framed “subjection to [their] laws” as a civilizing gift, bestowed through the practice of an ordered, rational, “art of governing.”25 “According to Islamic and Turkic theories of state, the primary duty of the sultan to his subjects (reaya: literally, ‘flock’) was the provision of justice, especially against the harassment of the local ruling authorities or of illegal taxation.”26 The mazalim institutions of medieval Islam—​involving the adjudication of complaints relating to “injustices”—​were “usually regarded as an expression of the sovereign’s direct justice,” distinct from the dispensation of justice by qadis.27 Similarly, according to Baldwin: “The key component of Ottoman legitimation, alongside the claim to defend and expand Islam, was the provision of justice. This involved providing security for people and property by suppressing crime, and providing facilities that enabled subjects to resolve their disputes.”28 In ancient and modern empires alike, the “art of governing” was used to legitimate imperial rule, at the same time as defining it.29 Empires put “law” to work in numerous different contexts. Arguments from law were employed in the acquisition and the ordering of imperial space:  from the “piling up” of multiple and layered claims to sovereignty to the negotiation of treaties, coalitions, and trade charters in early modern colonial empires; from the development of modern juridical tools to “justify” the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples from land newly designated as “property,” to the cumulative elaboration of legalistic concepts such as “territorial jurisdiction” and “extraterritoriality.”30 “Legal rules also localize people’s rights and obligations in space.”31 One fundamental obligation of imperial subjects across ancient and Asian land empires, as well as modern commercial and colonial empires, was the payment of taxation (and other tribute) to the imperial center. The assessment of land for taxation underpinned the development of innumerable juridical tools related to the imperial “art of governing”—​each concretely situated in time and space. Early modern Ottoman rulers developed numerous categories for use in land 24 Fitzpatrick 2000. 25 On empires and Islamic law in practice, see Stilt 2012 and Ingalis 2017 [Mamluk]; Pirbhai 2016 [Mughal]; Gerber 1994, 2015, and Barker 2017 [Ottoman]; Abisaab 2017 [Safavid Iran]; and more generally, Darling 2013. 26 Barker 2016, 108. 27 Tillier 2015. 28 Baldwin 2017, 32. 29 Mattei and Nader 2008, 2, argue that contemporary “rule of law” ideology is itself imperial and functions as an “illegal” justification for plunder: “the often violent extraction by stronger international political actors victimizing weaker ones.” 30 Sovereignty claims: Benton 2007, 2002; and Benton and Straumann 2010; treaties and trade: Benton and Ross 2013 and Stern 2013; dispossession: Kedar 2014; “extraterritoriality”: Kayaoğlu 2010, with reference to the Japanese, Ottoman, and Chinese empires. 31 Benda-​Beckmann and Benda-​Beckmann 2014, 33.

274  Caroline Humfress administration, implying “different forms of rule and levels of bureaucratization.”32 “In India,” moreover, “the first act of English officials was to survey native land laws and to try to organise a system of taxation based on land ownership. They subsequently invented the modern techniques of land survey in order to rule the Indian subcontinent.”33 Arguments from law were also put to work in the juridical ordering of people (see section 1). The “Ottoman desire to rule diversity,” for example, led to the development of a highly specific form of non-​territorial rule, namely what came to be termed the “millet system” (in operation from 1453 to the nineteenth century): The Ottoman rulers recognized the diversity of religious and ethnic communities that made up the empire and also understood that this diversity could not and should not be assimilated into an overarching principle of sameness. Instead, they organized a series of ad-​hoc negotiations with the heads of religious communities, resulting in what became known as the millet system. Under these arrangements Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities organized their existence in the empire and survived through a generalized system of imperial toleration and intense negotiation.34

The millet system was a “. . . form of indirect rule based on religious difference,” through which “[t]‌he state gave up its control of the internal dynamics of the [Jewish, Greek Orthodox or Armenian] community in return for regular taxation and cohesive and obedient administration.”35 The Ottomans also permitted non-​ Muslims to litigate personal matters in Shari‘a courts, if they chose to do so.36 Different imperial aims underpinned the adaptation and development of different kinds of “repertoires of rule.”37 As Christopher Tomlins states with respect to early modern European colonialism: To colonize means, fundamentally, to appropriate, to take possession. What is appropriated varies. In the Americas, the Spanish appropriated both metallic wealth and an indigenous population to extract it. The Dutch appropriated routes, connections, to sustain commerce. The English appropriated territory, which required that they find ways either of sharing it with a pre-​existing population or of depopulating it—​mostly the latter.38 32 Barkey 2016, 121. For a more detailed discussion of the “Ottoman millet system,” see Barkey and Gavrilis 2016. For detailed studies of “legal pluralism” under the Ottomans, see Gerber 1994; Peirce 2003; and Baldwin 2017. 33 Seed 1993, 128. 34 Barkey and Gavrilis 2016, 24. 35 Barkey and Gavrilis 2016, 26. 36 al-​Qattan 1999. Baldwin 2017, 6–​7, gives the following summary of the complexity of one “provincial” Ottoman legal system: “. . . Ottoman Cairo’s legal system was a complex network of judicial forums and practices with poorly-​defined and therefore overlapping jurisdictions: the sharī’a court, the governor’s tribunal, the imperial council which received petitions from Egypt and across the Empire, several military officials who shared responsibility for policing and market regulation, and political notables who offered justice as part of their cultivation of client networks” (see also Baldwin 2017, 54–​71 and 117–​135). 37 Burbank and Cooper 2010, 3. 38 Tomlins 2001, 26.

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  275 English colonizers, like ancient Roman lawyers and imperial bureaucrats, differentiated between “citizens” and “subjects”—​a distinction that does not, necessarily, map directly onto (metropolitan) “core” and (colonized) “periphery.”39 In juridical terms, citizenship tended to be a well-​defined status, even if its application in practice was frequently fuzzy and contested. The juridical category of “subject,” however, was relatively ill-​defined. Across the British Empire, before 1780, the term “subjects of the crown” was a “. . . term without precise legal meaning, connoting nothing more than residency in territories claimed or, in the case of India, administered by Britain.”40 The juridical definition of “unfree,” as opposed to “free,” status likewise varied widely across time and space, from the “chattel slavery” of ancient Rome and the New World (recast into a different, racialized, form), to the indentured servitude of Colonial English America and the “serfdom” of Tsarist Russia. For the leaders of Imperial Russia, “. . . governance was about control over resources—​territory and labor—​and the social order required to secure them. Administration, rather than law, was the primary imperative of Russian rulers, but law entered the picture as soon as the imperial state asserted its claim to define the rights and obligations of people living on its terrain.”41 Hence, as Burbank, explains: Over time, the [Russian] empire produced a series of regulations and decrees that asserted the particular rights and obligations of whole groups of people, defined by territory, confession, ethnicity, or work. This cumulative kind of legalism corresponded to real differences in social norms and legal practices throughout the empire. The multiplicity of legal regimes legitimated within the empire both asserted the superior authority of Russian rule and allowed populations to do a great deal of governance themselves. Drawing “customs” in under the umbrella of law expressed an imperial social contract: the empire enforced local judicial practices—​a cheap way to keep the peace—​in return for tribute and taxes.42

The phenomenon of serfdom, moreover, meant that roughly half of Imperial Russia’s peasant population were classed as citizens—​under the legal authority of landlords who were not necessarily Russian—​with their own local courts and governance practices. As citizens, serfs had the right to present petitions to the emperor—​creating a “rights regime” in which the citizenry related to the imperial state “as petitioners.”43 As Kollman has argued in relation to the earlier Muscovite court system, the right to petition the emperor also had a crucial ideological function: it “mitigated” the imperial authorities’ own use of judicial violence through 39 Early modern English (American) colonial rule can be divided into three different constitutional forms: crown or state “provinces”; proprietary rule (“fiefdoms”); and “charter” or corporate rule (Stern 2013, 30). On “charter” rule, see section 3. 40 Greene 2016, 320. 41 Burbank 2006, 401. 42 Burbank 2006, 402. 43 Burbank 2006, 431. Burbank 2004 uses the archives of “peasant” courts to reconstruct local legal practices and governance.

276  Caroline Humfress the tsar’s capacity to grant mercy.44 The right to petition the emperor was, in other words, used as a tool of governance. “Bureaucracy was an essential component of imperial rule.”45 As we have already seen however, not all empires are alike. During the Tang dynasty (618–​907 ce), China developed a sophisticated system of administrative and penal law. The Tang (penal) code covered aspects of what Western scholars would term “family law” and the “law of property, contract, and succession,” in addition to setting penalties for “deviant” conduct: “The emperor’s subjects are instructed to behave in certain ways; should they fail to comply, punishments are to be imposed.”46 Bureaucratic rule was here intended to function as a counterbalance to local elites:  “Rule by officials helped Chinese emperors avoid dependence on local lords, making China’s imperial trajectory different from that of Rome and post-​Roman polities in western Europe.”47 As the example of the Tang Code suggests, the codification of law was an important technique of the “art of governing,” but it was by no means ubiquitous or even essential to imperial rule. Chinggis Khan’s thirteenth-​century ce Eurasian conquests led to the creation of the largest land empire of all time, yet neither he, nor his direct descendants, promulgated a “Mongol” code of law.48 The state codification of law under the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, was part of a much broader program of imperial legal and bureaucratic reform undertaken during the Tanzimat era (1839–​1876). The Ottoman civil code, the Mecelle-​i Ahkam-​i Adliye—​in force from 1869 onward—​was derived from Hanafi jurisprudence and covered contracts, torts, and (some) civil procedure. It was applied in both Shari’a (“religious”) courts and the new Nizamiye (“secular”) courts; the former were presided over by qadis and the latter by imperial bureaucrats, overseen by the Ottoman Ministry of Justice. The Mecelle was just one aspect of “the remarkable growth of the civil bureaucracy” during the Tanzimat era: In the nineteenth century, activities and institutions that had traditionally been the purview of religious groups or communities—​education, forms of tax collection, orphanages, hospitals, policing—​were assumed by the state. In instituting these reforms, the bureaucracy and the imperial administration battled older institutions of the empire: tribes, religious groups, guilds, the janissary corps, provincial rulers and recalcitrant subjects, to mention nothing of the external military threats and financial woes.49

The processes of state bureaucratization seen in the nineteenth-​century Ottoman Empire can be compared directly to processes of centralization and “modernization” 44 Kollmann 2006, 7. For comparison with other imperial regimes see section 1. 45 Crooks and Parsons 2016, 7. 46 MacCormack 1996, xiv. 47 Burbank and Cooper 2010, 444. 48 Pochekaev 2016 reviews the complex historiography relating to the nature of the “Great Yasa” (or “Great Zasag Law”) of Chinggis Khan. 49 Barkey 2016, 125.

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  277 associated with modern European colonialism:  “Colonial authorities ruled over colonized populations by imposing modern law’s doctrines, institutions and practices. Positive law and jurisprudence, comprehensive codes, judicial autonomy, rule of law, and other liberal legal ideologies were but a few aspects of the modernizing juridical transformation through which colonial states endeavored to colonize countries and to govern subjects.”50 And yet, as legal pluralist studies have shown, “. . . systems of law crafted from afar cannot simply be imposed in toto on different social contexts. Instead, imported legal institutions and codes get significantly reshaped to fit the local reality.”51 The on-​the-​ground development of modern European colonial legal institutions—​ the complex networks of martial law and other kinds of “exceptional” powers, state courts, police, prisons, and penal colonies—​all testify to the fundamental role that legal and bureaucratic techniques played in imperial, hegemonic, domination. As we have already seen, however, the development of imperial “repertories of rule” tends to rely on a “cumulative kind of legalism”—​which, in turn, suggests “. . . the incompleteness of imperial control through the instrument of law.”52 As we shall see in section 3, the “complex and contingent configuration of imperial law” needs to be understood “not as a structure of command, but as a set of fluid institutional and cultural practices.”53

3. Practiced Empires We sit there to administer Buddhist law, or Hindu law, or Mohammedan law, one after the other. We administer Roman-​Dutch law from South Africa or from Ceylon, or French law from Quebec, or the common law of England from Ontario, or curious mixtures of law which prevail in various colonies, sometimes Italian law, sometimes Roman law. We sit there and we do our best.54

Viscount Haldane’s description of the work of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was given as an after-​dinner speech to the Cambridge University Law Society in 1921, almost a century after the 1833 Judicial Committee Act provided for the structured hearing of appeals against court decisions originating from every far-​ flung corner of the British Empire.55 Having warned his audience that “. . . we who sit 50 Esmeir 2015, 19. For a specific example, see Comaroff and Comaroff 1997 on the European imposition of colonial-​capitalist rights of private property, together with the concepts of contract, debt, and wage-​labor, in colonial South Africa. 51 Calavita 2010, 92. 52 Quotation from Sahadeo 2003, 952. 53 Benton and Ross 2013, 2. 54 Haldane 1922, 148. 55 Haldane’s speech was made in the same year as “British Imperial Justice reached a milestone” with the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’s landmark judgment in the “Amodu Tijani” case, an appeal lodged “. . . by an African Chief, Chief Oluwa, against the colonial government in Nigeria demanding compensation for the ‘illegal’ expropriation of his ancestral lands” (Ibbawoh 2014, 1).

278  Caroline Humfress on the Judicial Committee have taken a tremendous oath not to disclose any of the secrets that come to the fore there,” Haldane went on to describe the physical experience of walking into the Judicial Office, just off Downing Street in London: You will not think that it looks like a Court, particularly as you will see one or two gloomy officials glancing enquiringly at you. Brush them aside. This is the Supreme tribunal of the Empire, and every subject of the King-​Emperor is entitled to go in there. You will see to your right a rather dilapidated-​looking red-​covered stair. Go up it—​which you will do in company with white men, some of whom look as if they had come from the far West, and may be of American appearance; yellow men, some of whom come from Hong Kong; Burmese, who come from Burma; Hindus and Mohammedans from India; Dutch from South Africa; a mixed race from Ceylon—​all sorts of people may be straying in there, and you will feel yourself in good imperial company.56

The members of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council were accordingly expected to administer and decide upon multiple, different, kinds of law: Buddhist, Hindu, Mohammedan (Islamic), Roman-​Dutch, French, the “common law of England from Ontario,” alongside what Haldane refers to as “curious mixtures of law which prevail in various colonies.” In an article published over 20 years earlier, in The Juridical Review, Haldane had described “the administration of justice on its Imperial Side”—​along with religion and education—​as constituting “. . . a real and most important portion of the silken bands which, with so little friction, hold our great Empire together.”57 In his 1921 address to the Cambridge law students, Haldane elaborated on how these “silken bands” were woven: “You cannot learn much about [the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council] from documents . . . Its constitution is mainly unwritten, and its conventions are unwritten; so that, unless you have lived in it and in the atmosphere, you do not know what happens there.”58 Imperial “repertoires of rule” were constituted and shaped by the shared thought-​ worlds and situated practices of specific groups of legal, judicial, and administrative actors. As we shall see in section 4, these actors included the colonized—​as well as the colonizers. Much of the existing scholarship on law and empire focuses on rulers, state officials, and state-​backed military violence as the architects of imperial power. Yet legal practices and governance regimes were also spread via religious and commercial networks:  “Churches, colleges and merchants no less than imperial administrative structures provided points of entry for law created or ratified in the metropolis.”59 These religious and commercial networks should not be understood 56 Haldane 1922, 144. 57 Haldane 1900, 2. 58 Haldane 1922, 146. 59 Benton and Ross 2013, 12—​with specific reference to the early modern, trans-​Atlantic empires of the French, Spanish, and English.

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  279 as mere “transmitters” of state law and patterns of government; they had their own customs, laws, procedures, and practices. The corporations that developed in Tudor and Stuart England for the purposes of overseas trade and imperial expansion were “not simply commercial firms but forms of political and social association”; they developed their own regimes of corporate government, including corporate courts, within the parameters specified by the royal charters which established their existence as legal entities.60 The royal charter, as Tomlins puts it, was “an exercise in the creation of jurisdictions.”61 According to Halliday, the chartered company—​“whether Dutch, French or British”—​was the “archetypal form of imperial expansion” in the modern period: “Like kings, the Dutch and English East India Companies made treaties with Asian sovereigns. They created courts, regulated property, collected taxes, and hired armies. From St Helena to Bengkulu, they built fortresses as well as factories.”62 Radhika Singha’s classic 1998 study, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, reveals the extent to which the British East India Company was in the business of developing its own, highly complex, “cumulative kind of legalism,” specifically in the fields of criminal law and administration. Early Company rule in India produced numerous “.  .  .  artefacts and images of colonial civil authority, the permanent gallows, phansitola [gallows quarter], phansichauk [gallows crossing], and the jailroad left their mark on the municipal map”; while, at the same time, “[t]‌he baleful figure of the police darogha [constable] in popular skits, the jail sentence parodied as a festival journey to one’s sasural [father-​in-​law’s residence] and the punishment of hard labor as sarkar ki naukari [employees of government, used in ironical self-​reference by prisoners], indicate that the imagination of power was being re-​shaped at various social levels.”63 The East India Company worked through and around indigenous “cultural norms” and “codes of sexual and social conduct,” in order to develop new ideological and practical conceptions of “sovereign right.”64 Chartered companies, colonial proprietors, and settler-​directed plantations all made use of private contracts, adapted commercial laws, and developed private property rights, in their own interests.65 The phenomenon of “settler sovereignty” and its impact on gender and family law, race, class, labor, and property, in particular, is an expanding field of research.66 As an entrenched structure of oppression, settler colonialism could pose a greater threat to native and indigenous 60 Stern 2013, 28 and 32–​37. See also Greene 2016. 61 Tomlins 2001, 32. 62 Halliday 2013, 269. Also Heath 2016, 369:  “Up to 1858, the colonial bureaucracy in India served a trading company: the East India company, founded by royal charter in 1600—​whose primary interest was to maximise profits.” As Heath goes on to explain, the East India Company “assumed authority for the civil administration of Bengal” in 1765, opening the way for “an age of plunder.” 63 Singha 1998, xi–​xii. See also Kolsky 2010 and Heath 2016. 64 See further Singha 1998 and more generally, Benton 2007. 65 “The relations of public law and private law—​or sovereignty and property as I have elsewhere put this—​ are much closer than standard histories of the role of law in imperial expansion suggest” (Koskenniemi 2017, 12). 66 Tomlins 2001, 2010 [English colonies in America]; Ford 2010 [America and Australia]; Sahadeo 2003 [Imperial Russia]; Barclay, Chopin and Evans 2018 [French Algeria].

280  Caroline Humfress populations than the distant laws and “silken bands” of (some) imperial governing institutions. In any case, thinking through law, bureaucracy, and the practice of government and rule with reference to chartered companies and “settler sovereignties” forces us to exchange a monolithic, top-​down, nation-​state, model of law for a more nuanced picture of multiple, intersecting, and entangled socio-​ legal practices and jurisdictions.

4.  Legalism from Below In many cases, if we wish to understand the history, structure, and functioning of the legal system, we should focus much more attention on the actions of the members of the subject society than on those of the imperialists.67

One corollary of the deep-​rooted (Western) ideology of law’s “civilizing mission”—​ in which subjection to imperial power brings with it the gift of justice and social order—​is the myth that indigenous people are “lawless”, or else are “primitives” with “savage customs” as opposed to legal ideas and doctrines of their own.68 Early work on law and administration in modern colonial settings—​in particular India and Southern Africa—​tended to frame law first and foremost as the emissary of imperialism. As Brown wrote in 1995: “. . . while previous scholars have noted the various ways in which imperialism could affect law, what is most surprising is the extent to which most writers have viewed law in imperial and post imperial settings as largely, and even exclusively, a product and even a tool of imperialism.”69 Law was framed as a “core instrument of colonial control.”70 In seeking to unmask the pervasive brutality of (“liberal”) legal regimes, early studies on modern colonial law thus tended to present native/​indigenous populations as subjects of colonial power—​ rather than as (justice-​seeking) agents in their own right. From the 1980s onward, however, broad developments within the field of postcolonial studies led to a new emphasis on the agency of local, native elites. Brown’s comparative research across the Middle East, for example, revealed that: the areas least penetrated by Europe (including much of the Arabian peninsula) saw the least comprehensive attempts to adopt Western-​style legal systems. Yet the initial—​and often the most comprehensive attempts to recast local legal systems along Western lines were taken not by regimes under direct control of Europe but 67 Brown 1995, 104. 68 Myth of lawlessness: Napoleon and Friedland 2014, 227; primitivism: Chandra 2013. As Geertz 1983, 208, argues: “The mischief done by the word ‘custom’ in anthropology, where it reduced thought to habit, is perhaps only exceeded by that which it has done in legal history, where it reduced thought to practice.” 69 Brown 1995, 104. 70 Kolsky 2010, 973. On the technical topic of colonial (and postcolonial) “repugnancy clauses” and their relationship to “customary (indigenous) law,” see Demian 2014.

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  281 by ambitious, centralizing elites (in Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt) who often worked to stave off further Western penetration.71

Native resistance to imperial hegemony was not limited to overt rebellion and protest, but could also take the form of powerful native elites looking to consolidate their own power by reframing their own laws and institutions. Recent archival and ethnographic research by lawyers, anthropologists, and legal historians, working on (post)colonial courtroom records and the interactions of “everyday law” has reframed scholarly interest in indigenous agency, beyond the study of native elites. Beginning in the 1960s, Marc Galanter’s work on legal pluralism in (post)colonial India has focused explicitly on access to justice for “backward classes”; “oppressed,” “vulnerable,” and “disadvantaged” groups, including “untouchables”; and other questions relating to (remade) “indigenous” legal traditions, religions, and castes.72 Galanter describes a long and gradual process—​ from 1858, when the British crown supplanted the administration of the East India Company, onward—​whereby dispute-​settlement shifted “. . . from local tribunals (and local notables) to the government’s courts”: The common law courts undertook to deal with the merits of a single transaction or offense, isolated from the related disputes among the parties and their supporters. The “fireside equities” and qualifying circumstances known to the indigenous tribunal were excluded from the court’s consideration. In accordance with the precept of “equality before the law,” the status and ties of the parties, matters of moment to an indigenous tribunal, were deliberately ignored. And unlike the indigenous tribunals which sought compromise or face-​saving solutions acceptable to all parties, the government’s courts dispensed clear-​cut “all or none” decisions. Decrees were enforced by extra-​local force and were not subject to the delays and protracted negotiations which abounded when decisions were enforced by informal pressures. Thus “larger prizes” were available to successful litigants and these winnings might be grasped independently of the assent of local opinion.73

The colonial courts of British India, in others words, were attractive to ordinary native litigants. Comparative research on litigation conducted in colonial courts in the Spanish Americas reveals a comparable situation: “In the sixteenth century, some suits were brought against Spaniards by Indians, but most of the litigation in the Indian General Court in New Spain involved Indian groups suing other Indian groups over access or rights to resources like land and water.”74 As Calavita 71 Brown 1995, 106. Compare Merry 2000 on colonial Hawai’i. 72 For example, Galanter 1984 and Galanter 1989. 73 Galanter 1968, 70. On India post-​independence—​and attempts to revive “an indigenous legal system”—​ see Galanter and Krishnan 2003, especially 104–​127. 74 Benton 2011, 60–​61.

282  Caroline Humfress states: “Women in Hawaii used colonial law to contest the violence that was part of traditional patriarchal relations; colonial law was also central to the politics of slave resistance in the British West Indies in the eighteenth century; and women in sixteenth century Istanbul went to the courthouse, an affront to customary gender practices, to challenge their subordination by local and colonial male authorities.”75 Galanter’s point, however, is that these local actors, and their legal representatives, effectively shaped and changed (post)colonial legal cultures through their repeated interactions with (post)colonial government agents and structures:  “Traditional society is not passively regulated by the modern system; it uses the system for its own ends. Traditional interests and groupings now find expression in litigation, in pressure-​group activity and through voluntary organization.”76 Or, as a young “slum dweller” from Delhi put it: “The powerful break the law. We also have rights in law. Law makes us illegal, but the business that others make from us being illegal is even more illegal. We want to use the law against them.”77 Within any given legal order, some litigants may “. . . have power to manage, to exploit, to manipulate, avoid, or evade the existing order for their own ends; for others law is a manifestation of other people’s power that confronts them; and, of course, there are many gradations in between.”78 Research on (post)colonial courtroom records suggest that some local agents, working within specific historical contexts, played an active role in shaping colonial legal cultures through their repeated everyday interactions with legal structures and officials. “Postcolonial critics remind us that the colonies were sites of legal experimentation in which European powers invented new forms of sovereignty and rights of contract and property, spatial orders and regulated intimacies, racialized communities and subjects for management and control.”79 Socio-​legal categories, bureaucratic practices, and technologies invented and practiced in the colonies did not remain confined to the colonies.80 Legal experimentation in the colonies also shaped and changed the legal culture of the “homeland” (as we saw with the example of Viscount Haldane and the work of the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in section 3). Detailed archival research, moreover, reveals these colonial “sites of legal experimentation” as—​sometimes arbitrary, illogical, and inchoate—​jurisdictional arenas, rather than sites where colonial powers simply attempted to impose and extend their command: In the eighteenth century, colonial women, natives, and slaves sued their ­social superiors before royal judges in increasing numbers. Both the content and the 75 Calavita 2010, 89. Baldwin 2017, 3, notes: “New scholarship on the Ottoman sharī‘a court records, often referred to as sijills after the name for the registers in which they were kept, has transformed our understanding of Muslim legal practice.” 76 Galanter 1968, 83. 77 Quoted from Eckert 2006, 54. 78 Twining 2003, 247–​248. 79 Munshi 2017, 232, citing Cohn 1996. See also Skuy 1998. 80 Munshi 2017, 232, gives the concrete example of practices of biometric identification, including the fingerprint, which were invented in colonial India, but “. . . would become a routine part of criminal investigation in Europe and eventually everywhere.”

Law, Bureaucracy, and the Practice of Government and Rule  283 quantity of their civil lawsuits against husbands, native lords, and masters are evidence that the Spanish colonial courts served not as receiving houses for Enlightenment legal concepts as much as their proving grounds. Increasingly as the eighteenth century progressed, colonial Spanish Americans used the civil courts with a zeal that their Spanish counterparts on the peninsula did not match, challenging a traditional legal culture long rooted in notions of justice with a new culture oriented in modern notions of law.81

Ordinary litigants, native and colonial, shaped and recast “hegemonic” imperial cultures as they sought to vindicate (new) “rights in law,” negotiating and maneuvering their way through colonial courtrooms. As we have seen, the history of law’s empire stretches back to the ancient and medieval eras, at the same time as it extends far beyond any (twentieth-​century) narrative of imperial decline and the “rise of the nation state.” It incorporates the study of—​ideological and practical—​imperial “repertoires of rule,” while simultaneously revealing how imperial and colonial governance was repeatedly shaped and reshaped by the thought-​worlds and situated practices of both ruling and ruled. “In modernity, the paradigm location of the juridical has been the nation-​state, a location necessarily matching the constituted and constituent dimensions of the juridical.”82 And yet: Imperialism . . . is an ancient form of rule that, over the centuries, has operated through ideological, social, political, and legal means. It has developed a formidable arsenal of technologies of governance. Indeed, new mechanisms of governance, such as international institutions, often reproduce and serve the logic of Empire and the “civilizing mission,” whether through the Mandate System of the League of Nations, the United Nations itself, or the International Financial Institutions. Not only do new technologies of governance reproduce colonial relations, but very old forms of management, suppression, and control persist.83

Thinking through empire opens up multiple, new, “locations of the juridical”—​ challenging and reframing ideas about law, bureaucracy, and the practice of government and rule that “we” might otherwise tend to take for granted.

Acknowledgments With thanks to Akhila Yechury and Dimitri Kastritsis for bibliographical help and advice—​and to Peter Fitzpatrick for the inspiration to think “beyond the box.”



81 Premo 2017, 3. Ibhawoh 2014 develops a comparable argument for colonial-​era (British) Africa. 82 Fitzpatrick 2004, 44. 83 Anghie 2016, 171.

284  Caroline Humfress

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286  Caroline Humfress Ibhawoh, B. 2014. Imperial Justice: Africans in Empire’s Court. Oxford. Ingalis, M.  B. 2017. “The Historiography of Islamic Law during the Mamluk Sultanate.” In A.  E. Emon and R.  Ahmed, The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law. Oxford. http://​www. oxfordhandbooks.com/​ v iew/​ 1 0.1093/​ oxfordhb/ ​ 9 780199679010.001.0001/ ​ oxfordhb-​ 9780199679010-​e-​66 (accessed July 29, 2018). Kayaoğlu, T. 2010. Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire and China. Cambridge. Kedar, A. 2014. “Expanding Legal Geographies: A Call for a Critical Comparative Approach.” In I. Braverman, N. Blomley, D. Delaney, and A. Kedar, eds., The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, 95–​119. Stanford, Ca. Keller, E.  J. 1981. “The Revolutionary Transformation of Ethiopia’s Twentieth-​ Century Bureaucratic Empire.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 19, no. 2: 307–​335. Kollmann, N. 2006. “The Quality of Mercy in Early Modern Legal Practice.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 1 2006: 5–​22. Kolsky, E. 2010. “Introduction.” Law and History Review 28, no. 4: 973–​978. Koskenniemi, M. 2017. “Introduction: International Law and Empire—​Aspects and Approaches.” In M. Koskenniemi, W. Rech, and M. J. Fonseca, eds., International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations, 1–​18. Oxford. Krzeczunowicz, G.  1964. “Hierarchy of Laws in Ethiopia.” Journal of Ethiopian Law 1, no.  1: 111–​134. Mattei, U., and L. Nader. 2008. Plunder: When the Rule of Law Is Illegal. Malden, MA, Oxford, and Victoria. MacCormack, G. 1996. The Spirit of Traditional Chinese Law. Athens and London. Merry, S. E. 2000. Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton, NJ. Munshi, S. 2017. “Comparative Law and Decolonizing Critique.” American Journal of Comparative Law 65, no. 1: 207–​235. Napoleon, V., and H. Friedland. 2014. “Indigenous Legal Traditions: Roots to Renaissance.” In M. Dubber and T. Hörnle, eds., Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law, 225–​447. Oxford. Peirce, L. 2003. Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab. Berkeley, CA. Pirbhai, M. R. 2016. “A Historiography of Islamic Law in the Mughal Empire.” In A. E. Emon and R. Ahmed, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law. Oxford. http://​www.oxfordhandbooks. com/​v iew/​ 1 0.1093/​ oxfordhb/​ 9 780199679010.001.0001/ ​oxfordhb-​9780199679010-​e -​65 (accessed July 29, 2018). Pochekaev, R. Y. 2016. “Chinggis Khan’s Great Yasa in the Mongol Empire and Chinggisid States of the 13th and 14th Centuries: Legal Code or Ideal ‘Law and Order’?” Golden Horde Review 4, no. 4: 724–​732. Sahadeo, J.  2003. “Conquest, Colonialism, and Nomadism on the Eurasian Steppe.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 4: 942–​954. Scheidel, W. 2013. “Studying the State.” In P. F. Bang and W. Scheidel, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean, 5–​60. Oxford. Seed, P.  1993. “Taking Possession and Reading Texts:  Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires.” In J. M. Williams and R. E. Lewis, eds., Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention, 111–​147. Tucson, AZ, and London. Shadle, B. 1999. “Changing Traditions to Meet Current Altering Conditions: Customary Law, African Courts and the Rejection of Codification in Kenya 1930–​60.” The Journal of African History 40, no. 1: 411–​431. Shahar, I. 2008. “State, Society and the Relations between Them: Implications for the Study of Legal Pluralism.” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9, no. 2: 417–​441. Singha, R. 1998. A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. Dehli. Skuy, D.  1998. “Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862:  The Myth of the Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System Compared to India’s Legal System in the Nineteenth Century.” Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 3: 513–​557. Smandych, R. 2005. “The Cultural Imperialism of Law.” In B. Hamm and R. Smandych, eds., Cultural Imperialism. Essays on the Political Economy of Cultural Domination, 267–​289. Peterborough, Canada.

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8 Mapping, Registering, and Ordering Time, Space, and Knowledge Laura Hostetler

Introduction In creating unified polities, empires set the standards for the ways that time, space, and knowledge were ordered under their rule. They made calendars, mapped territory, registered peoples, and patronized a learned elite. Control over the calendar conceptually tied earthly power to the heavens. Maps and registration played pragmatic roles in relation to conquest, administration, and taxation. Together, these practices contributed to imperial self-​definition and its propagation by locating the lands and peoples of the empire in relation both to those who controlled them, and into the temporal dimension in which they resided. Patronage of scholarship, often of a religious nature, defined the knowledge base whereby empires were ruled and imperial legitimacy maintained.1 While empire is a term we use to include polities from ancient Rome and early dynastic China to the much more recent British Empire, it is useful when discussing the use of measurement and quantification as tools of empire to draw a distinction between early, or pre-​modern, tributary empires and those of the early modern and late imperial, or modern, periods. Within pre-​modern tributary empires the realm was universal in the sense that whatever came under its umbrella lived in the same orbit. The point of reference was always the imperial center. While distant kingdoms were not unknown, they were very much on the periphery of any imperial map—​conceptual or otherwise—​ that might allude to their existence. Relationships with these distant kingdoms were hierarchical and tributary, but not necessarily exclusive; a small polity could be tributary to more than one larger kingdom or empire and, as in the case of Korea, it was possible for the same kingdom to both offer tribute and to accept it from smaller states. In China, tributaries were expected to observe the imperial calendar.2 Despite these unifying parameters, even within tributary empires different regions often experienced a significant degree of autonomy in terms of local practices.

1 I would like to thank the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco, and The Newberry Library, Chicago, for the support that allowed me time to draft and revise this chapter. 2 Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2012. Laura Hostetler, Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0008.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  289 As described by Karen Barkey, pre-​modern empires have “a crucially negotiated character, where different negotiations emerge from sets of relations in which state actors and elite groups are engaged.”3 Early empires could rarely be thoroughly autocratic. Rather they were characterized by a certain amount of accommodation and power sharing between central and regional interests, and between the imperial household and other elites. This relationship between imperial power and the regional knowledge systems that supported it is reflected in the nature of early imperial technologies of representation and registration. In the words of Jim Akerman, although the “connection between cartography and the exercise of imperial power is an ancient one . . . before the modern era, there is no consistent pattern of map use by polities to assert and consolidate mastery over populations or landscapes at a distance.”4 While time, space, and knowledge have been variously represented and regulated from within different world cultures, the attempt to achieve one standard across the globe is a relatively recent development. During the early modern period we begin to see the global integration of space, a common matrix in which not only space, but also time and other systems for ordering information began to be integrated globally with common referents around the world.5 Beginning in the Renaissance, Mediterranean states started to experiment with direct sponsorship of science in ways that would enhance their ability to navigate farther afield, and thus allow them to benefit economically from wider networks of trade, exchange, and conquest. As European countries broke into established trade networks abroad, their emissaries interacted with knowledge systems and scholars around the world, gathering information about the globe and its inhabitants. Jesuit scholars, who often worked in the employ of foreign courts, played a key role in the formation of global networks of communication and the advancement of science. Observatories in Jaipur, Delhi, London, Paris, Peking, and St. Petersburg, all active in the first half of the eighteenth century, constitute just one example of the way that a global culture of measurement produced mutually intelligible representations of the world from a variety of different centers. Despite obvious historical and cultural differences, significant parallels existed within the ways that politics and patronage worked in these early modern centers. In various courts we see the interplay of existing and emerging epistemic models in relation to imperial self-​definition across the globe. The divine—​of whatever specific nature—​is still important in legitimizing imperial authority. Awe and wonder are very much alive, both in the meeting with other cultures and as tools of the imperial person to induce submission and garner allegiance. Beginning in Europe, where cartographic change was initially more thoroughgoing, the global integration of space, as represented on globes and through other

3 Barkey 2008, 10. 4 Akerman 2009, 1. 5 The term is from Parker 2010.

290  Laura Hostetler types of coordinate mapping based on astronomical calculations, was paralleled by a roughly simultaneous process of national integration in which techniques of legibility—​scaled mapping, uniform map symbols, standard systems of measurement, and standardization of print languages—​introduced new assumptions about what it meant to be, say, French, British, Russian, Thai, Chinese, or Indian. As greater similarities, or at least similar referents, came to be shared within and among national populations, the logics of how polities were constituted gradually began to shift. Emphasis on the territorial extent and shape of individual countries, as well as the identification of their people as a people would become more important to political self-​definition than other forms of legitimacy and personal prestige that had earlier undergirded their rulers. And yet, each of these centers also retained its own form of indigenous mapping, calendrical systems, and forms of registration.6 During the modern period, in the course of European imperial expansion these interrelated and increasingly uniform logics of space, time, and methods of ordering information came to dominate scholarship—​which became increasingly tied to empirical method—​as well as the routines of everyday life. As Europeans gradually embraced these new ways of being in and observing the world, they became increasingly defined by them, viz. the common usage of the term “European science.” In their quest for imperial expansion, European powers applied the same methods of understanding the world around them onto territories abroad, often creating considerable conflict and economic disparity when displacing indigenous cultural systems with the new exigencies based on logics of legibility and “efficiency.” Thus, Barkey, for example, distinguishes the nature of early imperial practices that have “one center with many differing political authority relationships between the center and the pieces of the imperial domain” from other, later, formations in which “standardized relations apply to all segments of imperial society,” describing them rather as “an alternative political formation, perhaps on the way to the nation-​state.”7 During the modern period, authority was increasingly derived from the production and accumulation of knowledge via scientific techniques that relied on abstraction to extract and produce knowledge at home and abroad. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this relationship between epistemic and political values was particularly characteristic of those European powers most affected by Enlightenment thinking and the political repercussions and philosophical implications of the French Revolution. Relatively “godless” in its orientation, political legitimacy was increasingly derived through the achievement of men and “rational” thought in contradistinction to the “savagery” projected onto others abroad who did not share these values and practices. These empires equated 6 Thongchai 1994; Anderson 1991, 163–​178. 7 Barkey 2009, 10.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  291 their newfound knowledge with legitimacy for mastery both at home and abroad, logics exemplified in Napoleon’s Egyptian expeditions, the European scramble for Africa, and Captain Cook’s explorations in the Pacific, all of which were the subject of extensive documentation.8 At the same time, these late imperial European empires functioned within a context that forced them to cope domestically with the changing parameters of legitimacy, increasingly dictated by the emerging logic of the nation-​state. The political shifts that Barkey describes as in-​between empire and nation-​state largely characterize the period of European imperial dominance. They coincide precisely with the introduction of a globalizing science into the political equation that transformed the way that those who operate within its networks see their relationship to space, to time, and even to knowledge. Prior to the early modern and late imperial periods, empirical geographic data were valued in mapmaking in a wide variety of geographic settings; however, their use tended to be quite specific and disparate rather than integrated into the “information order” that Christopher Bayly describes, or the networks that Bruno Latour elaborates.9 The “general matrix of information”10 that emerged with the privileged place of early modern science was made possible through the global integration of space, which was facilitated through the widespread adoption of coordinate mapping, and standardization of time. During the modern period, these standardizations were forcefully imposed, primarily by European imperial powers, on parts of the world that had not already engaged in their co-​creation. Late imperial empires in other parts of the world that had earlier interacted and competed with European monarchies—​perhaps seeing the threat of the rise of secularism and bourgeois capitalism to their own authority—​chose other paths to maintain their legitimacy. Unable ultimately to compete in circumstances where science was wedded to capital and commercial interests originating outside the court, and religious authority for rule was undercut, these empires would eventually see their power wane. As a result, many of them were broken up and either came under European colonial rule or were replaced by new indigenous polities undergirded by new epistemic logics (see further Bang, vol. 2, part VII). Although there is a strong relationship between state power and mapping of various kinds, as described in this chapter, it is important also to recognize that maps and census are not always the unique domain of the state. Just as empires themselves are contested and need to balance the interests of a variety of constituencies, mapping of territory and those who inhabit it creates a vision or discourse that both individuals and groups can tap into to assert their rights to land, resources, and a legal identity vis-​à-​vis the state—​at least in instances when the language and logic

8 Mitchell 1991; Joppien and Smith 1985–​1988; Nordyke and Mattison 2008.

9 Harley and Woodward 1987; Bayly 1996, 4–​5; Latour 1987, 229, 232, 247–​252. See also Crosby 1997.

10 Bayly 1996, 21–​22; Burbank and Cooper 2010, 110; Yan et al. 1998.

292  Laura Hostetler of the map or census are legible to them.11 Postcolonial societies have since also embraced these techniques for their own use.

Overview This chapter addresses mapping, registering, and ordering as they are situated within the broader context of space, time, and knowledge. It takes as its particular focus the emergence of coordinate mapping as a tool of imperial expansion and control from the Renaissance through the mid-​twentieth century. The work of James C. Scott on legibility in modern state building underlies the basic premise of the chapter.12 As Scott describes it, “Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step—​and often several steps—​removed from the society they are charged with governing.” For this reason they need to “assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture.”13 This distance and the abstract nature of assessment were intensified in instances where imperial officials imposed policies born of considerations of legibility on their colonial others. “Typifications” required standard units in which to conceptualize and record the details necessary to administration. This included not only maps, but also weights, measures, forms of land ownership, and even the categorization of peoples—​initially according to ethnic or caste categories, and later by race. This information was subsequently recorded on maps and in charts and other forms of documents. Knowledge became increasingly defined by the ability to measure, count, and quantify. The resulting documents not only recorded, but also shaped the land and peoples that they described. Whether within the nation, or on the imperial frontier, the legal and conceptual categories shaped by the requirement of legibility shaped the landscape and the possibilities of imperial subjects both at home and abroad. Recent literature in the increasingly interdisciplinary field of the history of cartography has been especially helpful in conceptualizing and compiling the substance of this chapter. Beginning with the work of J. B. Harley, the field of the history of cartography has come to recognize that mapping—​whether of territories, peoples, or knowledge systems—​is a way of conceptualizing and representing information for specific purposes. Maps do not have to be cartographic, but can be literary, pictorial, or conceptual.14 They are also emblematic of the late imperial European gaze, and so will receive a fair amount of attention here as a form of knowledge that orders the world. Whatever form they take, they are always persuasive documents. Maps are never “neutral, or value-​free.”15 They have been used to delimit territory,

11 Breckenridge, Derek, and Szreter 2012; Etherington 2007, 79–​101. 12 Scott 1999; Cf. Mitchell 1991. 13 Scott 1999, 76.

14 Padrón 2004; Yee 1992.

15 Harley 2001e, 37; Monmonier and de Blij 1996; Wood and Fels 1986.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  293 facilitate the movement of troops and of goods, collect revenue, repair water works, support mercantile pursuits, make records of exploration, protect individual property rights, and of course mark out routes for individual travelers.16 They are also often objects of beauty, and as such are both admired and collected, thus extending and perpetuating their claims.17 Maps do not exist in a vacuum, but are a product of the forces in society that they serve and the work of individual mapmakers. As such, they are also “part and parcel of the continual renegotiation of status and authority between representatives of a polity, local vested interests, and perhaps other power structures such as religious institutions.”18 Because of the primacy of their role in representing—​and also creating—​the realities that their commissioners want to see represented, maps employ rhetorical codes and stylistic features most conducive to the arts of persuasion. Today this usually means using scientific techniques of scaled measurement by which we measure accuracy. However, the shift from literary and other maps of empire to cartographic representations tied closely to measurement and quantitative analysis occurred gradually. Scientific mapping did not supplant other forms of geographic knowing and representation overnight, whether in Europe or elsewhere. And, even scientific imperial maps often included significant iconographic symbolism in their decorative cartouches well into the nineteenth century. Even today, non-​scientific, or non-​cartographic forms of representation such as literature can augment, supplement, or contest the view that cartographic maps represent. J. B.  Harley further cracked open the field of the history of cartography by insisting that maps could be read as texts, and with the same tools of critical analysis. Understanding that modern scientific maps are fundamentally rhetorical or persuasive documents has been extremely helpful to historians of cartography in deepening their analysis. Late imperial scientific maps simply rely on accuracy in measurement as the most persuasive map language available to them, and thus the most effective way to gain the confidence of their constituencies. Reading and even deconstructing cartographic maps as texts allow us to reveal the techniques of persuasive argument used in the creation and perpetuation of empire, and later of nation-​states, and also to think fruitfully about what is not represented, but rather silenced, on those maps.19 As Bernard Cohn has demonstrated, similar critiques can be applied to schematic representations of populations.20 In The Colonizer’s Model of the World, James Blaut argues that European colonial ascendancy during the early modern period has often been misconstrued or misrepresented in Euro-​American historiography as evidence of a unique and inherent superiority—​whether racial, environmental, or cultural—​and one that was supposed, moreover, to be permanent.21 Informed by his critique, this chapter

16 Atkinson 1995; Bassett 1994; Craib 2004; Mundy 2000. 17 Woodward 1987; Ramaswamy 2010. 18 Edney 2009, 31.

19 Harley 2001a; 2001d, 83–​107. 20 Cohn 1996.

21 Blaut 1993, 1.

294  Laura Hostetler seeks to document the contingent and interactive nature of events through which a number of early modern empires gradually emerged through the interplay of international competition for trade and state patronage of science that ultimately resulted in the global integration of space. It then further explores the means by which an epistemologically “scientific” outlook rooted in measurement came, by the early nineteenth century, to dominate other forms of knowing in Europe. The assumed superiority of this model justified the suppression of local knowledge systems and indigenous ways of doing things both at home and abroad, resulting in massive restructuring of what constituted knowledge. State involvement in the determination of how knowledge is constituted and what constitutes truth was by no means unique to European imperial practices. However, the way in which what it meant to be “modern” was redefined and cast as a positive moral value originated within the European political context and sanctified the marriage of science and capital.22 Its invocation as a positive moral value supporting change has, however, long since transcended the “West”; the ability to bring “modernity,” and along with it the (often elusive) promise of economic prosperity, is used as a mantle to legitimize authority and garner support for capital projects throughout the far reaches of the world. The remainder of this chapter is divided into four sections. Because it is not possible to be comprehensive, I have chosen to focus on a number of specific case studies that explore specific aspects of imperial mapping, registering, and ordering. The following section, “The Early Modern Search for Geographic Knowledge,” explores the diverse and shifting mapping practices used within the Italian city-​ states, imperial Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Romanov Russia, and Ming-​Qing China. “Silences on Imperial Maps” draws primarily on examples from British and Portuguese maps. “Standardization of Measures, Triangulation, and Registration” examines practices used by France and Britain. The conclusion serves as a synthetic summary statement that also addresses different ways of knowing.

The Early Modern Search for Geographic Knowledge The early modern search for geographic knowledge was fueled by economic competition between commercial centers. As Mediterranean countries learned more about the lucrative spice trade and existing merchant networks in Asia, they wanted to tap into the commercial opportunities they offered. From the Italian city-​states the desire for geographical knowledge and more accurate mapping technology spread to Portugal, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire, each of which was eager for a share of the international spice trade. Yet, other conditions also had to be right. All learning stems from the combination of mastering a foundation of existing knowledge, openness to new ideas—​often from outside—​and innovation

22 Williams 1983, 208–​209.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  295

Figure 8.1.  T and O map, 1472. From Isidori Iunioris, Epistola. Source: The Newberry Library.

based on observations, new insights, and experimentation. These conditions would be met when over the course of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, a number of developments occurred that would form the foundation for fundamental shifts in geographical knowledge and cartographic representation in the Mediterranean basin. Roger II of Sicily (1095–​1154), a Norman king descended from the conquest, fostered an environment at his court that combined the best that the Norman, Mediterranean, and Islamic worlds had to offer. At his court, a twelfth-​century Muslim scholar by the name of Al-​Idrîsî composed what has been described as “a vast geographic panorama of the entire habitable world . . . accompanied by detailed maps founded on Ptolemy’s works, the geographic tradition of Baghdad and new information provided by merchants and voyagers.”23 The innovative ideas he shared led to a new way of visualizing the world that would come to challenge, and eventually replace, the conceptions prevalent in medieval Europe’s “T and O” maps (see Figure 8.1). At roughly the same time, portolan charts (Figure 8.2) gradually came into use. Navigational maps based on compass bearings that emphasize coastal shapes and place names, the origins of portolani remain obscure, but the earliest extant examples center on the Mediterranean world. Portolan charts allowed sailors, who had once relied primarily on familiar-​looking coastal configurations to keep their

23 Vagnon 2013, 198.

296  Laura Hostetler

Figure 8.2.  Portolan Chart, ca. 1550. Source: Library of Congress. https://​www.loc.gov/​item/​2010588182/​

Figure 8.3.  Ptolemy, “Map of the World,” 1513 edition. Source: Library of Congress. https://​www.loc.gov/​resource/​g3200m.gct00262/​?sp=77

bearings, to venture further from the shores into open seas. Over the course of several centuries the area they charted would gradually grow to include both the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans and their coastal areas. Finally, the (re-​)introduction of the Greek geographer Ptolemy’s work into the Mediterranean world changed the way that space was conceptualized (see Figure 8.3). In 1409 a Greek-​language manuscript that had been held in Constantinople (now

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  297 Istanbul) was translated into Latin, introducing notions of latitude and longitude to select readers in the Mediterranean world. The work was also translated into Ottoman in 1465. After initially circulating only in manuscript form, its 1477 publication allowed broader circulation of the conceptualization of the earth as a sphere onto which specific locations could be pinpointed according to coordinate points. This global grid made it conceptually possible for the Vatican to “draw a line” that would distinguish separate jurisdictions for Spanish and Portuguese exploration and conversion overseas with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Ptolemy’s vision, as adopted in Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1570, encouraged a conceptualization of every part of the world, no matter how remote, as connected with every other. Although the coordinate system would not be a reliable means of maritime navigation until the invention of the marine chronometer by John Harrison in the eighteenth century, cosmographers started to incorporate it into even marine maps before that time. However, chorographic, or regional, maps not linked into the global network continued to be significant in the form of cadastral maps, cityscapes, and maps of individual kingdoms for some time. The maps in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and the Vatican’s Gallery of Maps, commissioned in 1580, are just two examples of the way in which political entities increasingly used maps to project their own power through a variety of types of representation of territorial knowledge and control. The still prevalent portolans were, however, neither strictly scaled, nor part of the coordinate system of mapping based on latitude and longitude. As the importance of geographic knowledge moved west into Portugal and Spain, these powers set up institutions that would attempt to advance and to standardize mapmaking and to control the dissemination of geographical knowledge. The Casa de Contratación was established in 1503 in Seville, Spain, and its counterpart, the Casa da India, from the merger of several existing trading organizations in 1504 in Lisbon, Portugal. These institutions, which regulated imports, also worked with navigators and a variety of field agents to obtain geographical information in order to generate and subsequently continually update master maps based on a coordinate grid. This master plan was designed to assure the accumulation of the latest knowledge for the crown, which also did its best to preserve a monopoly over that knowledge. Not everyone recognized the importance of the project or was eager to comply. Tensions between sea captains and cosmographers paralleled those between individual entrepreneurs and the state. As geographic information was consistently leaked to other countries, Spain and Portugal’s quests for control of geographic knowledge ultimately had to be given up as a lost cause, and the master pattern maps fell into disuse by circa 1560.24 Other countries would eclipse their geographic efforts, with France becoming a major player under Louis XIV, Russia expanding its cartographic capacities during the mid-​eighteenth century, and Britain coming into its own in the second half of the same century.

24 Turnbull 1996, 7–​9.

298  Laura Hostetler European empires were not the only ones actively working to expand their base of geographic knowledge during the early modern period. The Ottoman Empire fostered its own mapmaking centers and kept pace with recent discoveries, spurred on by competition from Portugal. As Giancarlo Casale has described it, “Ottomans and Europeans were part of a larger interactive process, in which each side formulated ambitious plans for global expansion that followed the same underlying logic, even as the particulars of their respective imperial projects diverged in important ways.”25 As was true also for Europe, the Indian Ocean was already known to the Ottomans before the early modern period but became an object of greater interest during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Sultan Mehmed (d. 1481)  was a great patron of geographic knowledge. He commissioned a translation of Ptolemy’s Geographia in 1465, and also collected Italian reproductions of the work. His grandson Selim I (r. 1512–​1520) continued the pursuit of geographical knowledge through both engagement with Europe and sponsorship of original Ottoman works. These included a 1516 Book of Cathay documenting a voyage from Iran to China, and a travel narrative of southern Europe dating from the same year. Most famous, however, was a 1513 map by the navigator and cartographer Piri Reis. Based on Ptolemaic maps, Portuguese sea charts, a chart of India from Arabic sources, “an original sketch map of the Americas from Columbus’s third voyage,” and an interview with a crew member of one of Columbus’s voyages, it was unprecedented in world history in its scope and content. Extant portions of the map (Figure 8.4) show the Atlantic with recent discoveries in the New World, but its main focus centered on the Indian Ocean.26 Piri Reis also authored a complete Book of Navigation, the Kitab I bahriyye, that was first completed in 1525.27 A revised edition dating from the late seventeenth century is held by the Walters Art Museum. One year after the appearance of Piri Reis’s 1516 portolan, the Ottoman conquest of Egypt would be complete. The seizure, not only of Egypt, but also of Syria and Arabia gave the Ottomans vast resources and leadership in the Muslim world.28 It also provided the Ottoman Empire with access to the Indian Ocean unparalleled among Mediterranean states. As a result, the Ottoman Empire replaced the Mamluks as Portugal’s primary competitor in the Indian Ocean. In subsequent years, Sultan Suleiman’s vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, continued the pursuit of geographical knowledge and more accurate maps. Most notably he commissioned Piri Reis to undertake the Book of the Sea, which “[i]‌n its final form, as presented to the Sultan in 1526 . . . constituted the single greatest masterpiece of Ottoman geography and cartography ever produced.”29 Ibrahim Pasha also managed to obtain



25 Casale 2011, 11.

26 Casale 2011, 20–​23. 27 Reis 2010.

28 Hess 1973, 55.

29 Casale 2011, 37. See also Soucek 1996.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  299

Figure 8.4.  Piri Reis, Portolan. Source: Topkapi Library. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Piri_​reis_​world_​map_​01.jpg

from Portugal a chart of Magellan’s discoveries done by Pedro Reinel. Concerned as the Portuguese were with the confidentiality of their geographic discoveries, the transmission of the map to Istanbul, where it remains in the Topkapi Library, was a real coup, the details of which remain a mystery.30

30 Casale 2011, 37.

300  Laura Hostetler The development of maps went hand in hand with the extension of Ottoman overseas commercial and territorial empire in Egypt and parts of the Indian Ocean. In geographical knowledge and in extending their empire, the Ottomans were competing with the Portuguese, and of course competition is only possible when playing the same game. Although the Ottoman court may also have experienced its own discussions and struggles over what constituted the most appropriate mapping techniques, it is instructive to recognize that in many ways similarities characterized the unfolding of early modern cartographic production in Portugal and the Ottoman Empire, including the fact that there was little uniformity within the mapping idioms of either empire during the early sixteenth century. A variety of ways of seeing and conceptualizing territory easily coexisted within imperial centers at this time. Even though scaled maps were being created and closely guarded by imperial Spain to assist in navigation abroad, the visual images created for Charles V in explorer Hernán Cortés’ s “Second Letter from Mexico,” drafted in 1520, take the form of a verbal map. Cortés used the letter as an opportunity to use words to create visual images of the lands into which he traveled for his king. As Ricardo Padrón describes it, for the narrative thread to follow the route traveled, as did Marco Polo’s early travel narrative, was only natural. For his audience, discourse was “the primary means of figuring space.”31 A pictorial or cartographic map was unnecessary. The various types of pictorial and cartographic representations that Philip II (r. 1556–​1598) commissioned of Spain in subsequent decades provide us with a good example of divergent but contemporaneous ways of experiencing and conceptualizing territory. Cityscapes painted by the Flemish artist Anton van den Wyngaerde depicted various cities of Spain, each with their own architectural particularities and other uniquely defining characteristics. The cityscapes are done from a perspective that the eye would have had if the viewer enjoyed a vantage point from a neighboring peak just above the region depicted. Each view, while comprising an important part of Spain, differed significantly from every other. The initial impetus for the cityscapes may have stemmed from the king’s desire to see, as well as to assert his authority over, an array of the famous sites of his realm. For, seeing and the ability to represent a scene on paper constitute a kind of ownership, just as familiarity with the particulars of a local landscape gives one a special connection to that place.32 Yet, this type of particularity of place would soon be superseded by a preference for uniformity of scale and of iconography in the representation of space. As his kingdom grew, it was no longer feasible for Philip II to travel to each of these locations, as his great-​grandparents had done. Under the logic that prized particularity and direct experience, seeing and being seen still had reciprocal roles in the establishment of ties between rulers and ruled. Thus, when he could no

31 Padrón 2004, 97. 32 Mundy 2000, 9.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  301 longer travel the entire realm, Philip II not only commissioned landscape paintings for his own perusal, but also “gave as gifts copies of his portrait, so that his subjects and relatives would at least have an image” to gaze upon if they could not see him in person.33 As technologies allowing surveillance from a distance emerged, familiarity with local particularities would become less important to the monarch, and a need for a bird’s eye view of the realm, made legible through the use of uniform symbols, more desirable, thus undercutting the importance of local difference and particularity of place. At roughly the same time these paintings were being done, Pedro de Esquivel was busy working on a different kind of atlas, one based on survey maps of the Iberian Peninsula, for the same Spanish monarch. The Escorial Atlas, which was completed after de Esquivel’s death but to which his labors contributed, “contains by far the largest European maps of their day to be based on a detailed ground survey.”34 The atlas maps took the principle of allowing territory to be surveyed (quite literally) from afar several steps further. Whereas the van den Wyngaerde’s cityscapes had allowed for particularity in their representation of place, appealing no doubt to nobles who would have had strong local identifications due to the role of their families in the history of these localities, the atlas allowed for a diminishment of attention to local particularities and for Philip to synthesize the entire scope of his domains into a coherent whole.35 In the atlas maps, particularity of place and history are exchanged for uniformity. The regions portrayed become part of history-​ in-​the-​making in the emerging power of Spain, rather than unique in their own right. In other words, the atlas emphasized Philip II’s realms “as a continuous and politically undifferentiated geographic expanse”36 while diminishing the visibility of its divergent and constituent parts and undercutting the power and position of local lords - just as still the many maps drawn for these volumes. As Spain incorporated colonies abroad into its reach, this kind of envisioning from afar, especially without particularities of place and history—​which were in any case more difficult to document and to understand from a distance—​would become even more imperative. In 1579 Philip II decided to extend his cartographic gaze into the New World. He commissioned a project designed to map the territory and describe the peoples of New Spain. The Relaciones Geográficas, as the resulting reports were called, provide another example of a contest of legibilities, so to speak. Presided over by Juan López de Velasco, as chronicler-​cosmographer of the Indies, the hope was, with the help of Spanish colonists on the ground in the New World, to obtain accurate maps of the territory and detailed descriptions of its inhabitants in separate documents. The Spanish colonists, however, valuing pictorial and graphic images lightly in comparison to textual description, delegated the cartographic tasks to indigenous artists who mapped not lands so much as communities replete

33 Mundy 2000, 9.

34 Parker 1992, 130. 35 Mundy 2000, 3. 36 Mundy 2000, 7.

302  Laura Hostetler with histories and emblems of powerful local families and indigenous knowledge. Furthermore, the lines of demarcation between different genres to be produced were either disregarded or not understood. Ironically, the resulting maps were fully legible to almost no one. In Spain no one could read the Nahuatl script. The locals could not read the Spanish that was added to the maps before being sent to Spain, and the majority of the indigenous people could not read (or speak) Nahuatl, the language of their earlier Aztec conquerors, in which the maps were primarily written. This attempt at imperial mapping included so many voices that the result was something of a cacophony, fully comprehensible to almost no one. The documents, eventually returned to Spain, were deemed thoroughly unusable and the project dropped. Philip’s attempt to impose uniform legibility on the colony was foiled by local interests and complicated by other points of view. In the seventeenth century, under the expanding Romanov Empire, Russian mapping also reveals an interplay of local interests and centralizing power. Maps of localities were commissioned by the state, but based on the reports of local people. Often invoked in the resolution of land disputes, the iconography on these maps includes houses of worship, natural landmarks, and humble peasant dwellings. Valerie Kivelson finds that the maps empowered the humble people of the land. “Being bound to the land,” the serfs “could rightfully assert that the land was equally bound to them.”37 The maps represent the interdependent relationship between the people and the centralizing authority of the state. As the Romanov Empire began to extend its reach into Siberia, mapping was extended into these farther reaches of territory. Prior to the introduction of modern scaled mapping, initiated by and carried out during the reign of Peter the Great (d. 1725) and subsequent monarchs, these imperial maps display an iconography that embodies the Orthodox Church as bestowing legitimacy on the imperial project. Russian settlements were demarcated by the presence of a cross on top of a stile. The lush iconographic symbolism of green leafy trees “depicted the Muscovite countryside as . . . a distant echo of a lost Eden, . . . and a prefiguration of the paradise to come.”38 The colonists’ role then became to “advance Russian settlement and conquest to tip the scales and transform the land from vacant barrenness to fruitful bounty.”39 The Tsar’s sponsorship of orthodoxy in turn provided him with a blessing to transform the frontier. In the iconography of early Romanov imperial expansion there was a place for the native inhabitants on the maps. Semon Remezov, for example, recorded the presence of “indigenous peoples, fixing their mobility and diversity in set locations with ethnographic markers.”40 Instructions from the court to frontier administrators included a strict injunction to “[c]‌onvert no natives against their will.”41 In the logic of

37 Kivelson 2006, 84.

38 Kivelson 2006, 115. 39 Kivelson 2006, 146. 40 Kivelson 2006,189.

41 Kivelson 2006, 161.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  303 the pre-​modern Russian Empire, as in the neighboring Qing Empire, the presence of diverse groups of peoples within the empire redounded to its glory. Nor did their customs and beliefs need to be made uniform with those of the imperial power who was now to rule over them and the territories that they occupied. The later atlases of Ivan Kirilov (1734) and Joseph Nicolas Delisle (1745), would, however, wipe evidence of habitation off the land, representing strictly territory and significant landscape features, but not evidence of the inhabitants. Their habits and customs were recorded in separate ethnographic genres that arose at the same time.42 Once again, map standardization would eventually prove the more useful tool for the unifying purposes of early modern empire. In Ming-​Qing China, the Romanov’s neighbor to the south, we see an example of empire strong enough in both its indigenous mapping traditions and its patronage of early modern science—​and wise enough in its cultivation of various strong internal constituencies—​to sponsor a variety of styles of imperial mapping simultaneously for a period of several centuries. The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci introduced concepts of latitude and longitude into China in the late sixteenth century. The Ming court (1368–​1644) propagated this knowledge through an imperially sponsored world map in Chinese made by Ricci and his Chinese colleague Li Zhizao, published in 1602. Just over a century later, under the Qing (1644–​1911), we see court sponsorship of scaled mapping projects of the entire empire under the Kangxi emperor, undertaken with significant Jesuit participation (Figure 8.5).43 The resulting surveys were completed before those of France or Russia, and circulated to important centers in Europe. Through their publication abroad, a cartographic image of China, Chinese Tartary (Manchuria), and Tibet was formed and fixed in the eyes of Europe. These maps were also revised and updated circa 1730 and 1760 by succeeding Qing emperors,44 but those revisions were kept tightly guarded at the court in a way reminiscent of, but more successful than, earlier Portuguese and Spanish attempts to control geographical knowledge. At the same time these surveys were made and then updated, the Qing court invested significant resources in mapping the empire in more time-​honored types of mapping styles that were less closely tied to scale. The Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors in particular chose to display the expanding scope and administrative changes in the empire in ways more attuned with expectations of a classically, rather than specifically scientifically, trained literati audience.45 The Qing adroitly cultivated a variety of different ways of knowing and cartographically representing the empire, including ethnographic albums of frontier peoples, and a major compendium of all of the tributary peoples both within and beyond the empire.46

42 Hostetler 2015, 313–​317. 43 Foss 1988; Cams 2016. 44 Hostetler 2013, 2001. 45 Pegg 2014, 18–​27.

46 Hostetler 2001, 2014; Deal and Hostetler 2006; Teng 2004.

304  Laura Hostetler

Figure 8.5.  Kangxi Atlas, 1721. Map of Guangxi Province. Photo: The British Library. https://​www.loc.gov/​resource/​g7821fm.gct00232/​?sp=11

It thus managed during the long eighteenth century simultaneously to engage with early modern mapping practices globally and to avoid alienating key imperial constituencies rooted in Chinese geographical traditions.

Silences on Imperial Maps By contrast, the emergence and dominance of a new mapping style happened relatively quickly in Britain’s mapping of the New World. A combination of representing land overseas of which nothing was formerly known, initial total ignorance of the landscape and of its inhabitants, and a less pressing need to patronize local forms of knowledge for political legitimacy may account at least in part for this difference. As a result, early British maps of the New World fail to indicate, whether through stylistic or other features, that the geographic information on these maps was largely based on indigenous sources of knowledge. These maps perpetuate silences in other ways as well. The place names inscribed were often borrowed from familiar locations at home, or named for the king under whom they were established (i.e., Jamestown), rather than reflecting indigenous nomenclature. Native inhabitants were not represented as occupying the land. Rather they made their appearances, if at all, on the cartouches, or as single representative figures embodying the attributes

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  305 that Europeans ascribed to them.47 By contrast, those who appeared in the decorative iconography of British maps of England typically enjoyed the social status that entitled them (often quite literally) to the land, i.e., those who had “the right to wear a crown or a mitre or to bear a coat of arms or a crozier.”48 Commoners of any sort did not appear. There is no denying that for colonial interests in Britain it was more convenient not to think about the presence of native inhabitants. But other factors may also have contributed to the selection of what to represent on the maps, and what to leave off. In his pioneering work on the topic, J. B. Harley invokes Foucault’s idea of an episteme, a kind of structure or way of thinking that leads the brain to process information in ways that are already familiar and understood. Episteme may account for assumptions about land use, for example that land is not occupied unless it is tilled,49 or permanently inhabited unless hedgerows have been planted.50 Episteme can also account for the framing of Portuguese accounts of their colonial efforts in the Americas “as simulacra of the Andalusian cities reconquered from Islam during the Middle Ages thereby creating the possibility of wealth cloaked in the legitimating auspices of a holy crusade.”51 What we see and recreate on a map, whether visual or verbal, is often as much a measure of what is in our minds as what is reflected in the actual landscape. The phenomenon of map silences can also be seen in eighteenth-​century Spanish and Portuguese maps of Japura, an area of the Amazon basin through which the artificial line created by the Treaty of Tordesillas passed. Although home to the Mura people, a group with whom the European colonists came into repeated conflict, Neil Safier notes, “it is nearly impossible to find elements of the Muras’ presence on European maps of the region, despite their being omnipresent in other forms of administrative documentation.”52 He further documents that while early eighteenth-​century maps would sometimes include ethnonyms of indigenous groups, by 1789 these names disappear entirely from the latest Portuguese map of the region, as do other local geographic points of interest53—​this despite efforts by the Portuguese crown during that same period to obtain fuller control of the region through recognizing the native peoples by granting them full rights as “the newest ‘subjects’ of the crown.”54 The silences of the map regarding the region’s inhabitants were not a reflection of Portuguese knowledge—​or even acknowledgment—​of the region’s inhabitants. Rather, they reflected a bifurcation in the ways in which information on different aspects of the region were compiled.

47 Harley 1988, 70. 48 Harley 1988, 68.

49 Kivelson 2006, 68; Harley 2001, 190. 50 Seed 1995.

51 Padrón 2004, 103–​104. 52 Safier 2009, 136–​138. 53 Safier 2009, 155.

54 Safier 2009, 144–​145, 156.

306  Laura Hostetler The growing silences on the maps were contemporary with the emergence of population maps that began to include information on population figures with a level of detail that would have been difficult to include on a territorial map.55 The presence of the Muras, who long defied Portuguese control, was eventually reflected not on a map but in a population chart, but to learn more of their story one needs to look to yet another genre, poetic verse. A Portuguese military officer recorded their story of displacement in an epic poem.56 The question, however, remains: Is the disappearance of people from territorial maps mitigated by their appearance in population charts and epic verse? The effect of silence regarding the inhabitants and local geographical variation can be chilling, whether on British maps of North America, Portuguese maps of South America, or in other examples of cartographic representation.57 The uniformity of symbol and measurement necessary to scaled scientific mapmaking obliterates not only the inhabitants, but also tends to obscure unique qualities of the landscape, and anything either not quantifiable or not validated through measurement, quantification, and representation. At times, faith in “objective” reports and distrust of local knowledge have also resulted in egregious invention, as Thomas Bassett and Philip Porter show in regard to the “Mountains of Kong,” which in fact never existed but were nonetheless labeled on late imperial European maps of West Africa for over a century beginning in 1798.58 When regional and local distinctiveness is denied through the standardization of terms through which the landscape can be read, lands are represented as space rather than as place. That the same icon is used, for example, to represent any town communicates a generic quality of sameness, or at most an indication of that municipality’s place in the administrative hierarchy, rather than any indication of unique qualities that might differentiate one town or locality from another. If we further take the map to represent reality, land becomes a “socially-​empty commodity, a geometrical landscape of cold, non-​human facts.”59 The move from manuscript to printed maps only exacerbated standardization, with every map of a place looking exactly like every other map of that place in the same print run. Geographic education that relied on these maps propagated the view of land as empty. Although those who peopled the land might have been described in other genres such as population maps or in literature, the new maps kept that knowledge cordoned off, thus making it easier to ignore the human aspects of the landscape and the implications for repurposing land use. Furthermore, when the inhabitants did receive attention under the new information order, their existence was described in terms divorced from the land rather than grounded in place. They tended to be compared with other groups through similar standardized frameworks, or

55 Safier 2009, 157. 56 Safier 2009, 160.

57 Etherington 2007a, 79–​101. 58 Bassett and Porter 1991. 59 Harley 1988, 66.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  307 described according to lists of traits, rather than understood as part of the local economy (in its broadest sense)—​which, in the imperial context, was undergoing rapid change in any case. Central to the imperial enterprise and taken to its extreme, maps that represent only space—​and not the unique and potentially sacred qualities of place, let alone the people who inhabit it—​can facilitate the degradation of the land, and a disregard for those who draw their sustenance from it. Their value to the colonizing power comes not only through reconnaissance and the increased precision their accuracy allows for targeting or artillery, but also as an education and propaganda tool; the inevitable toll in human life, emotional suffering, annihilation of crops, homes, and historic buildings and works of art that are part of warfare is unacknowledged on the map, which ignores these living aspects of the land and what it contains.60 Furthermore, the only way in which such maps differ after the devastation of warfare is the potential shift in boundary lines, or of those who appear in the cartouches. They show no damage, no loss of life, no degradation of the human spirit, but only territorial gains. This “erasure” of suffering is required not only by the narrative of imperial progress, but also by narrative of the co-​emergent nation-​ state, which attempts to create a semblance of unity and belonging. Somehow the vanquished must become part of “us,” even if this means making them—​as well as their continuing subjection—​largely invisible on the map.

Standardization of Measures, Triangulation, and Registration In the transition from early modern to modern mapping, changes born of standardization in cartographic style are seen not only in mapping of territories abroad, but also in emergent national cartographies. In fact, domestic and imperial cartographies are closely linked through changes in the conceptualization of space. Cartographic changes in France make an informative case study. Efforts to map the globe on a giant planisphere in the Paris observatory occurred contemporaneously with the national mapping of France. In both instances, representational genres privileging standardization of measurement with their accompanying erasure of local distinctiveness, regional variation, and references to distinct populations prevailed. The cartographic integration of France took some time and was closely linked to standardization of other forms of measure.61 Measurement is always about power. The fundamental question is who has the authority to impose their standard, for a profit is always to be made by “tipping the scale,” or selling someone “short.” When local or regional authorities demanded payment of taxes and peasants felt that the measures used to calculate their share were unfair, to whom could they turn for protection? By the eighteenth century they turned as a group to the Estates General,

60 Cf. Harley 2001b, 60.

61 Konvitz 1987; Petto 2007.

308  Laura Hostetler including a petition for the standardization of weights and measures, along with other grievances, expressing “a most sincere desire for but one king, one law, one weight, and one measure.”62 They saw standardization as a means of protection of their own interests, guaranteeing fairness in local transactions including the collection of taxes.63 Even as the Third Estate was feeling the need for standardization of weights and measures, the crown began to feel the need for standardization of distances and map uniformity in cartographic representation of the realm. Local maps, like local measures, had functioned well enough within individual established communities for centuries, but with their various scales and styles they were of somewhat limited use for carrying out projects nationally. The challenge arose under Louis XIV to integrate the disparate maps made according to various styles and measures. Not ev­eryone was immediately on board:  “provincial administrators had to be persuaded to cooperate in a national project which they saw as a way of organizing their resources for the benefit of the king.”64 The task was overseen by his minister Colbert and solved through the imposition of a system of triangles that would knit together the realm according to the reading of coordinate points. The geographic integration of France corresponded closely with France’s transition from a monarchy dependent on the cooperation of its locally based nobility and clergy into a nation independent of even a king, and in which there were theoretically no distinctions among Frenchmen. The Carte de Cassini was completed in 1789, the very year of the French Revolution.65 In France we see how scaled mapping served to help integrate the nation. If commoners had looked to a higher authority for standardization of weights, measures, and even laws, it was ultimately found not in the person of the king, but in the adoption of standardization born of science and rationality. In fact, the resulting national integration was so effective that the person of the king was no longer needed to serve the purpose. A similar faith in science was emerging also in Britain, facilitating the joint task of bringing French and British time and space into the same system, which was accomplished by linking the measurements taken by the Paris and Greenwich observatories into “one homogeneous space,” or we might say into one and the same scientific network, in 1787.66 British geographical interests were also international, and became increasingly imperial in nature. Convinced of the superiority of science, and in the pursuit of profits—​the desire for which had sponsored the search for and spread of geographic knowledge in the first place—​Britain gradually extended its cartographic reach in Asia from the maritime world onto land. Since the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Britain’s interests and role in India had shifted from being mercantile to being territorial,

62 As quoted in Kula 1986, 204. 63 Scott 1999, 27–​31.

64 Turnbull 1996, 16. 65 Turnbull 1996, 18. 66 Turnbull 1996, 19.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  309 as evidenced by its new role as tax collector from this time forward. As the company prospered, it needed both to justify its role to the home audience in Britain, which was dubious of its integrity, and to better demonstrate its familiarity with conditions on the ground in India. In cartography both ends were served. This process was, however, multifaceted, and did not initially stem from a top-​down initiative from London. James Rennell’s map of Bengal and Bihar (1776) was made to impress audiences at home with the company’s worthiness as a sponsor of scientific endeavors, to project the company’s legitimacy through analogy with the established British model of the landlord, and for the maps’ potential utility in the colonization project itself.67 The endeavor to map all of India “accurately” by using the technology of triangulation both employed Indian surveyors eager to be part of a modern scientific project, and encountered resistance from local people who feared what the technology might bring and found the surveys invasive.68 As in earlier British efforts to map the New World, native informants and other systems of cartographic knowledge were heavily relied on, but not credited or directly reflected in the resulting maps. As Christopher Bayly has recognized and articulated, one of the great challenges for British rule in India was the dual nature of knowledge that they relied on to govern. Whether in map or census form, information came largely from native informants but was translated into categories of legibility that the East India Company, and later the British state, could recognize and record. Yet, prior to 1850 the difference between British and Indian census methods was surprisingly small. In each instance, categories of people tabulated varied widely and numbers were only roughly estimated. However, beginning in the 1850s, “[f]‌ollowing the lead of the new statistical Society of London,”69 the categories of information expanded in order to provide information to guide new policies ranging from public health to morality to education, and attempts were made “to secure an accurate count of the actual population.”70 The census categories eventually not only reflected British attempts to categorize the Indian population, but were also adopted and internalized by Indians who, arguably, began to see caste categories as more fixed and socially significant than they had been considered in previous decades.71 Interestingly, like maps of France prior to their integration under Colbert, “there seems to have been very little effort made to make the provincial censuses comparable to each other” in terms of categories of reporting and actual information collected.72 The integration of census data followed that of territorial representation but, at least in India, was less thoroughgoing.



67 Barrow 2003, 17, 49.

68 Edney 1997; Raj 2007, 1–​26, 23–​54. 69 Bayly 1996, 220–​221. 70 Bayly 1996, 220–​221.

71 Cohn 1987, 230–​238. See also Cohn 1996. 72 Cohn 1987, 238–​239.

310  Laura Hostetler Although emerging over a fairly short period of time, differences in British and Indian systems of information gathering were significant and a cause for much distrust. The colonial assumption in the nineteenth century appears to have been that British agencies would operate according to “British” (i.e., “modern, scientific”) logics and Indian agencies would operate according to local (“unscientific,” and presumably unchanging) models. But of course, without an interface between these agencies and their forms of knowing, there would be no point to their existence, no communication, and ultimately no political power. As Bayly describes it, “The meeting between British and Indian agencies was riven by suspicion, distortion and violence. For here, at the point of intersection between political intelligence and indigenous knowledge, colonial rule was at its most vulnerable”73—​vulnerable perhaps because these conflicts went to the heart of the question of what sustained British rule and gave it power. The information itself did not give the British the upper hand, nor did the distinctive, “scientific” way in which the information was conceived and organized. Rather, only exclusive British control over the resulting knowledge and its deployment could sustain Britain’s colonial power in India. Such a monopoly was, however, impossible because of the need for Indian collaboration. Furthermore, attitudes that connected certain knowledge positions with Britishness and with intellectual superiority were based entirely on hubris, as revealed along with the system’s vulnerability, for “knowledgeable Indians which used the colonial state’s communications and ideologies independently of it, or against it, began to emerge even in the early nineteenth century.”74 The British response circa 1800 was to introduce a variety of laws to limit opportunities for career advancement and social mixing on the part of Indians as well as mixed-​race children of British officers in an attempt to exploit race in order to fix and to perpetuate British superiority. As a result, the power divide became increasingly enacted along racial lines.

Conclusion The shifts we see beginning in the early modern period, which began with commercial demand for better geographical knowledge for navigational purposes, became fully formed under state sponsorship of technologies that produce a kind of legibility that allows both territory and peoples to be tallied in ways that rely on standardization of measurement useful to representing and regulating territory from a distance.75 With the advent of latitude and longitude to represent specific coordinates on the globe, space became globally integrated; individual countries, empires



73 Bayly 1996, 1–​2. 74 Bayly 1996, 1–​2.

75 Latour 1987, 229, 232, 254.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  311 even, could no longer maintain separate conceptual centers in the same way. Rather, they came to occupy a fixed amount of territory in finite space, along with other polities, in relationships that were defined either according to national sovereignty or imperial exploitation. Time came to be measured on maps not in human terms, such as the needs of the traveler’s body for rest76 or the distance that could reasonably be covered by an army on foot in a day, but was marked out in minutes and seconds according to the same system of latitudinal measure that corresponded with the movement of the earth in space and distance on the ground. The precision of clocks developed to measure distance accurately in this way, when turned to regulate human activity, functioned independently of whether bodies were tired or rested, hungry or well nourished, and whether operating in daylight or darkness. Compensated labor could be measured in numbers of hours worked, other considerations aside. In other words, administration came increasingly to require that one standard or uniform view prevail. These same techniques are ill suited to capturing, or demonstrating, regional specificities and variation in local terms whether in the metropole, or abroad. This transition to what we might call scientific mapping took several centuries to unfold, and indeed, while measurement-​based scientific methods of representation are now quite pervasive, they are not entirely hegemonic in their reach. Nor will they ever be, as no representation can ever perfectly mimic the object it represents. Although increasing value placed on direct observation, on precise measurement, and scientifically accurate representation that began to emerge during the early modern period has long been described as “Western” or “European,” and was certainly used by Western powers in their quest for power, the emergence of these forms of knowledge and their identification with precise measurement are better understood as products of state sponsorship of scientific advancement rather than as “European” per se. The mutual accommodation between science and the state had repercussions for both state wealth and power and for the advancement of science as an actor in its own right. While the mutually beneficial relationship between state power and science was indeed characteristic of the strongest nations of Europe during the early modern period—​viz. the development of the Academies of Science—​state patronage of early modern cartographic methods and ethnographic efforts to order people was not limited to Europe.77 A  variety of early modern empires used scientific map technology and/​or catalogued the various groups who peopled their empires, including the Mongol, Ottoman, Mughal, Russian, and Qing empires, and at times partook in connections to the same information network. During the late imperial period in Europe, however, with the increasing economic and imperial ascendancy of individual European imperial powers, shifting relationships between politics and capital, and the increasing tendency to privilege what could be measured and catalogued over other forms of knowing, the

76 Mundy 2000, 12.

77 Hostetler 2000, 2001, 2006, 2015.

312  Laura Hostetler association between “Europe” and “science” became entrenched, not least as part of Europe’s own self-​definition. Even as new cartographic practices began to shift associations with the heavens from the divine to the scientific, separate genres also emerged to accommodate other fields of knowledge. Early maps of discovery had often depicted both land and peoples on the same map, a phenomenon we see in both early European maps of exploration and in frontier maps of the Qing dynasty during the eighteenth century. However, as maps became more cartographic and knowledge of peoples more thoroughly documented, distinct cartographic and ethnographic genres emerged. Scientific method and its need to quantify information numerically, to form “immutable mobiles”—​that is to say, fixed units of information that could then easily be transported around the globe to be interpreted at a distance and combined with other bits of information represented in like manner—​required the separation of cartographic and ethnographic information.78 Censuses and other forms of registration were, like maps, by no means unique to the early modern and modern periods, but nonetheless they often followed in the wake of imperial cartography and were dictated by similar logics. Modern European imperialism is in many ways about the forceful introduction of different ways of seeing and knowing. These were not only abstract ways of conceptualizing territory and peoples from afar. Rather, ways of identifying and defining the land and its inhabitants had concrete consequences for those who peopled it. As James Scott has written, state simplifications were “not just maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade.”79 This process is seen through the imposition of cadastral mapping on lands once held commonly. In New Spain, Spanish colonists “converted once-​indigenous land into their personal property” so effectively that indigenous artists began to make maps reflecting these changes to the landscape.80 Sometimes the changes even began with the map itself. John Smith described in 1623 how a map he had made of New England was cut into pieces to divide the land by lots as a means of allocating it to “a group of twenty prominent colonial speculators.”81 By 1641 the Massachusetts Bay Colony required each town “within its jurisdiction to have its boundaries surveyed and recorded in a plan” which would then become part of a larger set of documentary evidence “sanctioning the taking of the lands of the Indians.”82 In Europe, too, in rural areas “former commons were . . . subdivided and allotted, with the help of maps” which “entered the law, were attached to ordinances, acquired an aureole of science, and helped create an ethic and virtue of ever more precise definition.”83 In the scramble for ownership and control, the wealth of the land that had supported

78 Latour 1987, 229–​230. 79 Scott 1999, 3.

80 Mundy 2000, 182–​183.

81 Harley 2001c, 191. Harley cites John Smith’s Complete Works, vol. 3, 222, 286. 82 Harley 2001c, 188. 83 Harley 2001b, 62.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  313 whole communities for generation upon generation was at once rendered invisible and wrested from those who had previously stewarded it, becoming a new type of commodity in the process. The 1884–​1885 Berlin Conference, at which a group of Europeans agreed upon and drew up maps of “their” respective lands and interests in Africa, has the same flavor.84 The resulting maps came to create a reality on the ground that transformed the very relationship between the land and the people who lived on and drew their livelihood from it.85 Yet, this type of imperial practice did not remain confined to Europe. Similar processes would later play out with other, non-​Western, actors as when, in the mid-​twentieth century, the government of the People’s Republic of China took over the administration of and redefined land use in Qinghai and Tibet.86 Whether in the context of Siberia, Virginia, New Spain, India, South America, or Africa, European imperial cartography—​and censuses when they were carried out—​prioritized and imposed categories through which to define, to “know,” and to represent the world differently from the indigenous ways of knowing those places and their inhabitants. A similar gaze had already been adopted at home in the context of national formation. Literacy in the new ways of knowing and seeing were broadly introduced and propagated within the nation, while this kind of work was not undertaken among populations abroad. Rather, at best, it was assumed that indigenous peoples would not understand the technology involved. The nation distinguished itself from the colony by its modern embrace of the new knowledge systems, whereas it excluded those in the colony—​and its own internal others—​ from initiation, thus rendering them illiterate. Domestically, the rhetorical and legal creation of communities of inclusion within the nation provided a sense of solidarity and belonging, as well as a sense of buy-​in to the imperial project abroad. Exclusion of indigenous peoples in imperial colonies from positions of wealth and privilege through the invention of race, and the legal and social mechanisms encoding it, perpetuated privilege among the domestic agents of empire abroad while limiting opportunities for indigenous peoples. Introducing new patterns of land use and foreign systems of law to back them up provides one example of how mechanisms were often actively created to keep indigenous peoples in subservient positions, locked outside of the benefits that could accrue from adopting new ways of knowing. Imperial subjects abroad were to be the objects of the new forms of knowledge, rather than their beneficiaries, as if the practice of science could somehow be inextricably or permanently linked to what it meant to be European. The iconography on Victor Levasseur’s 1845 French map of Africa, a softer or “friendlier” colonialism than that portrayed on many imperial maps, nonetheless encapsulates the promises and perils of the imperial introduction of new knowledge systems.87 In the cartouche, a young French soldier holds up for an older local

84 Bassett 1994, 316–​335. 85 Scott 1999, 24. 86 Rohlf 2016.

87 Bassett 1994, 330–​332.

314  Laura Hostetler turbaned man an image of this man’s homeland mapped. Doubtless, the man was in many ways more familiar with his homeland than the foreign interloper, yet as the young man points to the map he seems to be inviting his elder to see these lands in a new way, and as if for the first time. The implicit alternative was to be consigned forever to darkness. An unchanged existence was not an option; should the older man continue to live according to the vision his previous life afforded, he would be forever consigned to servitude, without the benefit of the light. Change, whether welcome or not, was inevitable. Once those in the colonies began to master the new technologies, they typically rejected not the new ways of seeing and governing, but rather the outsiders who introduced them, ousting the foreign powers even as they adopted the new techniques in order to establish their own autonomous nations. Yinka Shonibare captures the continuity between imperial and postcolonial relationships to Africa’s land in a powerful piece of contemporary art. In Scramble for Africa (2003), he has placed a group of headless manikins dressed in suits made of bright African fabrics around a large wooden table. Gathered around a map of Africa, their postures and gestures invoke the 1884–​1885 Berlin Conference; the activities of dividing, claiming, and justifying continue under a new guise (see Figure 8.6).88

Figure 8.6.  Yinka Shonibare, The Scramble for Africa (2003). Source:© Yinka Shonibare MBE. All Rights Reserved, DACS/​ARS, NY 2018.



88 Shonibare 2003. I am grateful to Mariam Usmani for this reference.

Mapping, Registering, and Ordering  315 In other words, even as individual polities strive to fit themselves into the legacy of the global system of time and space inherited from the contests of the late imperial period, they impose on their own realms the same kind of order by creating or adopting standard forms of measure. At the same time, the adoption of these new techniques often goes hand in hand with patronage of symbols of national identity and cultural heritage in order to bolster national identity, the very preservation of which provides legitimacy to the new government and serves to distinguish it from the former colonizers, even as it serves to minimize various forms of difference within the nation itself.89

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9 Empire and Religion Amira K. Bennison

Introduction From earliest historical times, belief that power has a divine aspect of some kind has been more or less universal. Consequently, religion and empire have tended to function as partners, from ancient Near Eastern notions of the king as a god to the civilizing missions of the French and British in the nineteenth century, predicated on a superior culture derived from Christianity. From the imperial or political point of view, the underlying objective of the relationship has always been instrumental, to legitimize and authorize power structures while also giving them a certain mystique. However, not all forms of belief or all religions are equally supportive of imperial ambition: while the Semitic monotheisms have proven to have a rising imperial trajectory, Buddhism, though far from marginal, has offered relatively less grist to the imperial mill. Similarly, political and religious partnerships have been articulated in radically different ways. Moreover, even when particular religions have inspired or supported empires, variations of those self-​same religions have functioned in equal measure as forces for opposition to and contestation of imperial systems. History indicates that most belief systems and religions have the potential to either support the political status quo or to promote revolutions and opposition to it, and it is this ambiguity or contradiction which gives the analysis of the relationship between religion and empire over the longue durée its fascination. This chapter explores some of the myriad dimensions of the relationship between religion and empire with particular focus on the empires of the Islamic world, while also alluding to their predecessors, neighbors, and rivals: Sasanian Persia, the Byzantine Empire, Latin Christendom, and finally the European colonial empires which moved into the same geographic space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After briefly exploring the notions of “empire” and “religion,” it will consider first perennial associations between power and the sacred, expressed in many societies by means of cosmologies in which rulers were assumed to play a pivotal role in maintaining a harmonious social order. Such idealized visions of society and the position of rulers within it were usually theorized by literate and educated—​and thus often religious—​personnel who willingly or unwillingly bridged the gap between the political and religious spheres. On occasion they were co-​opted by rulers to formulate appropriate statements about the latter; sometimes they themselves wrote to encourage rulers to view themselves Amira K. Bennison, Empire and Religion  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0009.

Empire and Religion  319 in a particular manner; they could also offer pointed “advice” and constructive criticism; or roundly denounce breaches in the perceived ideal relationship between the ruler and the gods or God. This two-​way literature encompasses history writing, tracts on political philosophy and legal theory, and advice literature of the ubiquitous “Mirrors for Princes” genre. The chapter then considers how rulers made manifest their theoretical connection to the sacred in the concentric circles of power in which they operated. It will look first at the status rulers held in relation to dominant beliefs or confessional faiths, ranging from headship of a religious community to divine rights to rule, and the material support offered to them. A particularly powerful form of support was the construction of monumental religious buildings, designed to convey messages of power as well as piety in conjunction with the imperial rituals and ceremonies which sometimes took place within them. However, since the interplay between empire and religion was not just exercised in urban settings, where most major religious buildings clustered, but also over the vast terrains of empire itself, it will also explore how rulers demonstrated their religio-​political legitimacy by the delineation of sacred routes and the modification of the religious landscape across their domains. At this point, a consideration of the religious justifications used to legitimize warfare, that quintessential feature of empire “on the ground,” is in order. The movement of troops to theaters of war and their recruitment were one of the most potent manifestations of empire for many subject populations, and thus the extent to which such activities were framed within religious discourses is another important aspect of the lived relationship between empire and religion. After considering these imperial uses of religion, the chapter concludes with a brief look at religious movements as a form of resistance to such hegemonic imperial structures through the overlapping modalities of sectarianism, messianism, heterodoxy, and heresy. In pre-​modern times, when the existence of the divine was not questioned, most forms of opposition made some appeal to religion. Consequently, religio-​political resistance was more common than opposition couched in solely political terms, especially when imperial personnel consciously deployed religion for their own ends. Despite the rise of secularism, this can be as true today as in the past and underlines the continued appeal of religion not simply as the adjunct to empire, but also its fiercest opponent.

Definitions Neither “empire” nor “religion” are entirely self-​evident terms, and the connections between belief and power cannot easily be categorized into those applicable to empires rather than to other forms of polity. In fact, in many areas the distinction between empires and other state formations is wholly artificial. For the purposes of this chapter, I shall consider an empire to be a political structure which covers a large geographic area inhabited by a diverse assortment of peoples with different

320  Amira K. Bennison languages, cultures, and belief systems. The ruling elite may be formed through the acculturation of some individuals from its subject peoples to a normative imperial grouping, such as Roman citizens or the Ottoman askeri elite, or by the elevation of a particular ethnic group, such as the Aryans, Parthians, or Arabs. It should be noted that such categories were never fixed or impermeable, and in many cases their power lay precisely in the ability of subjects to aspire to (and achieve) elite status by means of education, affiliation, or indeed religious conversion. In the predominantly Western historiography related to the pre-​modern non-​ European world, “empires” are often defined as such without analytical rigor in terms of their supposedly “despotic” structures of government in comparison to modern “democratic” nation-​states. Consequently, the term “empire” is loosely applied to myriad political structures ranging from the Achaemenid polity to the universal Islamic caliphate and much smaller entities such as the early modern sultanate of Morocco. This is an obviously flawed taxonomy rooted in the European historical experience in which the Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, and national dynastic monarchies vied for power from the medieval period onward, with victory ultimately going to the latter. Across North Africa and Asia, rule by “outsiders” often of tribal origin was as common in what might loosely be called “city-​states” as it was in medium-​sized “kingdoms” and much larger “imperial” political formations. It is therefore important to signal some other distinctions between political forms which could impact on the dynamic between power and religion. In discussing the Parthian and Sasanian “empires,” Pourshariati introduces Toumanoff ’s distinction between feudal and dynastic polities which he applied to Caucasia.1 According to this model, the crucial difference lies between centralized regimes (feudal) which function in terms of lord and vassal as well as ruler and subject, and federal regimes (dynastic) which co-​opt regional dynasts who remain largely independent in their territories, a system expressed by the Persian imperial title shahanshah (king of kings). The history of the Near and Middle East can be seen as a struggle between these two forms due to the repeated expansion and contraction of central power from pre-​Islamic times to the Ottoman era with permutations in the political-​religious dynamic following suit. Imperial regimes in India often had to interact with similar local dynasts, and central power experienced similar fluctuations. In the Islamic world, this federal versus centralized model subsisted with another paradigm of particular relevance in a discussion of empire and religion, the classical Islamic taxonomy which distinguished between religio-​political and temporal forms of rule. On the one hand there was the caliphate (khilafa) and/​or imamate (imama), a universalist religio-​political formation, and, on the other, Muslim sultanates and non-​Muslim “tyrannies” (in this sense, “tyrant” (taghiya) is a technical term which does not imply good or bad rule, but rather the absence of Islamic foundations for it). Although sultanates such as the eleventh-​to thirteenth-​century 1 Pourshariati 2008, 53–​56.

Empire and Religion  321 Saljuq sultanate could control vast domains and diverse populations and were thus “empires” in the generic sense of the word, they rested on fundamentally different bases from the classical caliphates.2 In contrast to the caliphate, the sultanate soon lost all universalist aspects and became a plural, temporal institution. As numerous small medieval sultanates emerged, many such as the Hafsids in Tunis or the Marinids and their successors in Morocco more closely resembled dynastic proto-​ national monarchies than empires and struggled to assert their religious legitimacy (see further Tullberg in vol. 2, chap. 21). In the early modern era, however, the concepts of caliphate and sultanate became conflated in the Ottoman and Mughal empires, both of which laid claims to religious as well as political leadership, creating a hybrid form which had to accommodate significant, sometimes majority, non-​Muslim populations of Christians and Hindus, respectively. Both empires became increasingly enmeshed with modern European imperial claims and ambitions, which destabilized such relationships and meta-​narratives of Muslim global power. It is noteworthy that the Ottomans only became concerned with asserting their caliphal status on the international stage in response to increasingly assertive Russian claims to defend and protect Slavic Orthodox Christians in Ottoman territories. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire is the Islamic example which fits best with European understandings of the term, evoking both Rome and the European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alongside older Islamic examples. The definition of religion is as complex as that of empire. In their discussion of state and religion in India, a handful of scholars list 12 categories of approach to the study of religion, illustrating the contested hermeneutics of religion. These categories range from seeing religion as an “autonomous agent defining the thought world of a civilization,” an “artificial category,” a moral code, spirituality of some form, law, local customs, or the worship of one or many gods.3 In the ancient world, there was a tendency for religion to be a matter of praxis in the form of rites and rituals often involving sacrifices to gods, the spirits, or ancestors. The contemporary Western perception of what constitutes religion dates to the shift in meaning of the Latin term religio engineered by early Christian writers in the Roman imperial environment and the subsequent development of the concept to denote a system of faith and worship in the nineteenth century as new European colonial empires emerged.4 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to investigate the different ways of looking at religion, it is important to recognize their diversity and to remain aware that the contemporary Western definition of religion is not the only way in which humans, rulers included, have grappled with the metaphysical realm. By way of example, western Asia, an area of ancient civilization at the confluence of Old World trade routes, produced a varied range of beliefs and deities and exported many of 2 See Crone 2004, paperback ed. 2005; Lambton 1981. 3 Copland, Mabbett, Roy, Brittlebank, and Bowles 2012, 40–​43. 4 Schott 2008, 105–​106.

322  Amira K. Bennison them to other regions. These included the Vedic gods of the Aryan warrior elite which implanted itself in the Indian subcontinent; the ancient Iranian pantheon headed by Ahura Mazda, which also included Mithra, who was worshipped not only across the great swathe of territory from Afghanistan to Armenia but also into the Roman Empire where Mithraism became a popular mystery cult, especially among soldiers; and, most distinctively, a long string of prophets bearing revelatory messages, often in “book” form, including Moses, Zoroaster (Zarathustra), Mani, Jesus, and Muhammad, foundational figures in Judaism, Mazdaism/​ Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Christianity, and Islam, respectively. Within this spectrum, two major shifts in the meaning of religion can be perceived. First, a shift from polytheism to monotheism, and second, a shift from perceiving gods and goddesses primarily as local patrons who had to be cultivated to achieve stability and prosperity in this world to the view that religion was a matter of truth versus falsehood and that following the correct God’s prescribed code of conduct was an individual responsibility with consequences for one’s personal salvation. Within Europe and western Asia, such confessional monotheistic religions came to dominate, and a broadly shared understanding of religion emerged which intersected with the political sphere in comparable ways. Further east, in the Indian subcontinent and the Chinese zone, such shifts did not occur in the same manner. In India, monotheistic, polytheistic, and philosophical strands entwined, while in China a more ritualistic and philosophical approach dominated at least at the interface between the political and religio-​ethical spheres. In discussing the interplay between empire and religion, however defined, it is essential to bear in mind the latter’s abstract nature and therefore the crucial role played by its interpreters, religious professionals, in delineating its relations with (temporal) power. As holders of power themselves, religious personnel could support or thwart the pretensions of political and/​or military authorities by their application and interpretation of divine signs or scriptures, they could wage struggles with them for social precedence and control of resources, and they often generated the texts through which we perceive how the political and religious intersected. Moreover, rulers who needed the ideological support offered by priests or religious scholars might have to make significant concessions to them. Such considerations generated a dialogue which could be irenic or agonistic depending on circumstances. Rulers also needed the practical skills of religious professionals, the foremost of which was literacy in a particular sacred language. The religious cachet of such languages made them ideal for use as imperial linguae francae in the governmental, judicial, and cultural domains.

The Circle of Equity and Its Variations At the very heart of the pre-​modern relationship between temporal and religious power lay belief in a normative, divinely ordained social order with rulers at the apex

Empire and Religion  323 as guarantors of the system in its entirety. Whether that order was conceptualized in terms of hierarchies and castes, justice and law, or peace and prosperity, it functioned as a measure of political success and failure, as a rhetorical discourse, and as the implicit justification for government itself. In a world in which the existence of gods or God was taken for granted, the achievement of an ideal social order was intimately connected to divine approbation and, although this may originally have been secured by priests, rulers assumed a key role as pivots of the universe—​a Persian formulation—​supported by religious professionals. One of the most powerful and enduring expressions of this cosmic model is what is often called the circle of equity or justice (see also Bang, vol. 2, chap. 9).5 Variations upon this theme appear in Aristotle’s Politics, Vedic sources, and pre-​ Islamic Persian political theory, as well as in medieval European, classical Islamic, and Ottoman works. Commonly cited in “Mirrors for Princes,” the circle of equity both empowers the ruler and reminds him of his responsibilities toward the component parts of society, which change from version to version according to the norms of each author’s sociocultural environment. In its Ottoman form the circle of equity stated: There can be no royal authority without the military. There can be no military without wealth. The subjects produce the wealth. Justice preserves the subjects’ loyalty to the sovereign. Justice requires harmony in the world. The world is a garden, its walls are the state. The Shari‘a orders the state. There is no support for the Shari‘a except through royal authority.6

In its ancient Mazdaean (Persian) and Vedic (Indian) forms, the “good” society over which the ruler presided was one characterized by an immutable social hierarchy of four estates: religious functionaries; the military; scribes (including scholars of various kinds); artisans, farmers, and traders.7 In these cases, the ruler’s cosmic or divinely mandated role was to maintain order and avert chaos by preserving the distinctions between these estates, or the variations of them that appeared over time. This foundational idea provided the Sasanian Persians with the framework of their imperial ideology, which is expressed in two texts that survive in Arabic translations, the Letter of Tansar and the Testament of Ardashir. Although both purport to come from the reign of the first Sasanian emperor, Ardashir I (r. 224–​240), the scholarly consensus is that they probably date to the sixth century ce and were probably also modified in the process of translation from Persian to Arabic. The Letter of Tansar purports to be a missive from the chief 5 Azmeh 1997, 129. 6 Fleischer 1984, 49. 7 Boyce 1968, 38.

324  Amira K. Bennison priest (herbad) of Ardashir I, to a provincial prince, Gushnasp, answering various criticisms the latter has posed to avoid offering allegiance to the new Sasanian shahanshah. In the course of the letter, Tansar states that the ruler is the linchpin and restorer of the social order, “The king of kings through his pure intelligence and surpassing excellence caused these four estates, which had fallen away, to be restored.”8 Prior to this, the Letter stresses the religious dimension to this process, stating that Sasanian state and religion “were born of one womb, joined together.”9 In fact, part of Ardashir’s reconstructive task is to save the Mazdaean faith, also known as Zoroastrianism, from the chaos into which it has fallen. Similarly, the Testament of Ardashir states: Know that kingship and religion are twin brothers, there is no strength to either without its companion, because religion is the foundation and support of kingship and kingship is henceforth the guardian of religion.10

Both texts clarify this alliance by reference to the circle of equity, which expresses the point that the ruler can only maintain the justice beloved of the Mazdaean gods with an army, which he can only support by taxing the fruits of agriculture and crafts, while the productive subject population can only flourish if the ruler maintains justice. While such constructs may have had little real impact on social systems, they did play an important role as a legitimating discourse within Sasanian imperial ideology.11 The difficulties faced by rival Persian lineages in dislodging the Sasanian line in the years around the Arab conquest (late 620s–​630s ce) is a measure of their success.12 However, between the lines of these bold assertions of a strong emperor (shahanshah), who is the guarantor of Zoroastrianism and thus a just society, runs a contrary historical and ideological thread in the form of the criticisms of the provincial prince, Gushnasp, the supposed heresies which abound, and the pitfalls which the heirs of Ardashir must strive to avoid. Moreover, the circle of equity itself was inherently reciprocal and implied that the ruler had duties to his subjects as well as rights over them; it could therefore provide fuel to the fires of rebellion if such duties were unfulfilled.13 This kind of religiously inflected counter-​discourse, discussed in the following section, was as enduring as the statist model. The circle of equity was probably conveyed to Islamic audiences by means of translated Greek texts and via the many Persians who converted to the new faith and played an important political role from the ‘Abbasid caliphate onward. Assisted by Arabic translations of texts such as the Letter of Tansar and the Testament of



8 Boyce 1968, 39. 9 Boyce 1968, 33.

10 ‘Abbas 1967, 53.

11 Marlow 1997, 69.

12 Pourshariati 2008, 161ff.

13 Pourshariati 2008, 342–​343.

Empire and Religion  325 Ardashir, Muslims of “the pen” cast the circle of equity or justice in a new Islamic guise which interposed God’s revealed law, the Shari‘a, as the measure of justice, thereby rendering the ruler both the servant of the Shari‘a and its ultimate guarantor.14 Although the static social structure upon which the Sasanian circle of equity was predicated conflicted to an extent with the egalitarian and meritocratic impulses of early Islam, within a couple of centuries these impulses had been “tamed”15 and a new Islamic imperial synthesis emerged, along with a cosmology which placed Islam at the center of the divinely appointed social order. The Islamized circle of equity and associated quadripartite divisions of society appear in many works with a moral or political dimension, including those of the Persian Nasir al-​Din Tusi (1201–​1279) and the North African Ibn Khaldun (1332–​ 1406), but the model flowered particularly in the seventeenth-​century Ottoman Empire alongside the works of Ibn Khaldun, discussed in the following section, as the Ottomans sought to bolster their power.16 This flags up the fact that such explanatory modes had particular value for rulers and/​or ruling elites when their power was either weak or contested and, ironically, testify to the absence of the ideals which they propounded and the inability of imperial powers to impose their will upon resistant subjects. In such cases, religion functioned more as a repair kit for the mechanism of government than as a cog within it. Closely connected to the circle of equity and the social estates which it delineated was the notion of the body politic, which also had Aristotelian origins.17 This was another way of conceptualizing the pivotal role of a ruler and giving the institution of monarchy an organic and thus unquestioned position. Although not explicitly religious, like the circle of equity, conceptions of the body politic which made the ruler either its head or heart also assumed that this hierarchy was divinely ordained and situated religious personnel within it, thereby creating an ideal relationship not only between power and the sacred, but also between king and clergy. From the medieval Latin perspective the “mystical body of the church was complemented by a political body” in which “the clergy functions as the body’s soul, the prince its head with the various ‘organs’ of his government making up the senses and the viscera, the knighthood and lesser royal officials the hands, and peasants and others of servile condition the feet.”18 While one might consider such constructs as fictive and distanced from social reality, they nonetheless provided a template, a discursive tradition, which was widely accepted as valid, by literate sections of the population at least, and which gave a sacred and normative status to the realities of power. As a result, models of society which conceptualized the ruler as the head or the heart of the body politic and as the pivotal point in the circle of equity tended to

14 Marlow 1997, 85–​86. 15 Marlow 1997, 141.

16 See Fleischer 1984.

17 Azmeh 1997, 119–​120. 18 Briggs 2011, 37.

326  Amira K. Bennison coincide with beliefs concerning the divine right of rulers and the importance of “signs” to indicate that an individual or lineage possessed that right. Such signs included military victories, prosperity, and general benefits, or more specific miracles of healing. The Achaemenid Persian ruler Cyrus boasted that his entry into Babylon indicated the preference of its ruling god, Marduk, for him.19 The mark of a Chinese ruler who possessed royal virtue (de) entrusted by heaven was his attention to rites, the gifts he distributed, and the prosperity and stability of his reign.20 The Chinese notion of de finds a loose analog in the Arabo-​Islamic concept of baraka, the beneficence that both sultans and saints could convey to others.21 Although Ferhat has argued that Muslim sultans were seen as corrupted by power and did not possess the divine right enjoyed by medieval Christian monarchs,22 the evidence points more to a field of contestation with sultans and saints vying to demonstrate their baraka to the population. Divine rights could also be inherited: the Ottomans, for instance, bolstered their claim to Islamic, as opposed to solely Turkic empire, by saying that the caliphate has been willed to them by the last member of the ‘Abbasid house in Cairo in 1517. Religion could also function to explain the rise and fall of empires. The historical evidence for the cyclical nature of empire often conflicted with more linear religious models predicated either on the imminent end of days or a steady decline from a revelatory high point, but from an instrumental rather than theological perspective the aspiration for religious renewal could have empire-​building potential. One well-​known exponent of this kind of analysis is the fourteenth-​century Muslim intellectual, courtier, and political player, Ibn Khaldun (1332–​1406), who analyzed the interplay between empire-​building and religion in the introduction (Muqaddima) to his universal history, the Kitab al-​‘Ibar (Book of Examples), translated by Franz Rosenthal.23 What has intrigued Western commentators particularly is Ibn Khaldun’s apparently “modern” instrumental view of religion as the force that enables tribes to overcome the internal feuds and divisions of the tribal environment and channel their natural kin-​based esprit de corps or group solidarity (‘asabiyya) into capturing sedentary areas and urban settlements to create new empires on the ruins of the old.24 As Ernest Gellner, who greatly admired Ibn Khaldun, notes, his theory does not work for all societies, but it is a brilliant exposé of the society he knew best, the medieval tribal Maghrib and beyond that the Islamic world in general.25 Interestingly, Ibn Khaldun does not see religion as essential to state formation per se, but he does see it as crucial to the creation of empires. His fourth proposition 19 Axworthy 2007, 13–​14. 20 Nivison 2008, 750. 21 Azmeh 1997, 157–​158. 22 Ferhat 1996, 375–​376. 23 Ibn Khaldun 1958. 24 See Mahdi 1957; Fischel 1952, 1967; Azmeh 1982; Brett 1999; Cheddadi 2006; Fromherz 2010; among others. 25 Gellner 1981, 18.

Empire and Religion  327 on dynasties, royal authority, the caliphate, and other forms of government is that “dynasties of wide power and large royal authority have their origin in religion based either on prophethood or truthful propaganda.”26 He elaborates by saying that political authority depends on superior numbers and this can only be secured by the extensive group solidarity generated by common commitment to truth and a rejection of the world. This observation forms a bridge between Ibn Khaldun’s pragmatic analysis of the role of religion as a unifying force and one that distinguishes a group from its rivals, and the argument he also makes for the moral superiority of states founded on religious precepts, a common Islamic proposition, albeit more honored in the breach than the practice.

Power and Religion beyond Theory and Text The divine authority or sacred status enjoyed by the ruler and religion’s role as an ideology of empire represented in literary, historical, and religio-​juridical discourses had limited traction before literacy became more widespread. For the majority of the population, the synergies between empire and religion required other more suggestive and pervasive manifestations in the concentric urban, rural, and military spheres of power. In many cases, the interface between empire and religion was signaled by the ruler’s status as head of the dominant religious community ex officio and his particular care for the practitioners of the religion in question. This involved a pragmatic distribution of resources to religious professionals in the form of stipends, gifts, and positions, and other more dispersed forms of charity on the occasion of religious festivals, for instance. It could also involve the dispensing of justice, which, while not necessarily overtly religious, nevertheless fell under the rubric of moral virtue in most societies. The Byzantine emperor functioned as the paterfamilias of the empire’s peoples, as an active participant in church councils, and as the promulgator of numerous laws related to religion. Indeed, it was at the emperor Theodosius’s behest that Orthodox Christianity became the faith of empire in 381 CE. As the code states: It is our will that all the peoples who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans, as the religion which he introduced makes clear even unto this day.27

The classical Islamic caliphs aspired to a similar role but in the absence of an institutionalized clerical hierarchy over which they could preside, they were ultimately forced to cede it to the amorphous body of scholars known as the ‘ulama’. When the

26 Ibn Khaldun 1958, vol. 1, 319.

27 Pharr 1952, 440 (Codex Theodosianus XVI, 1, 2, pr.).

328  Amira K. Bennison Isma‘ili Shi‘a established the Fatimid caliphate in North Africa, it appeared initially as if the caliph-​imam might retain full religious leadership but, with the passage of time, the Shi‘i ‘ulama’ in Cairo took control: the caliph most famous for asserting not just his religious leadership but also his divine status, al-​Hakim bi-​Amr Allah (r. 996–​1021), mysteriously disappeared while out walking, quite likely assassinated by his sister, and his followers fled to Syria to become the Druze sect.28 It was only in the early modern era that a Muslim regime managed to create a state clerical hierarchy which was dominated by religious officials appointed by the sultan in the form of the Ottoman ilmiye, a class of religious scholars who were state employees and filled the most important juridical and educational posts in the empire. This model also appeared in attenuated form in Safavid Iran and Morocco. Rulers and their supporters also used an array of ceremonies, monuments, and other public demonstrations of power to persuade their subjects of their religious legitimacy. One of the advantages of such forms is the possibility of using analogies, hyperbole, and hints, rather than spelling things out in a manner that could be deemed inappropriate. A rock relief or mosaic may depict a ruler in the same manner as a god without actually stating the ruler is a god; verses recited at ceremonies may describe the ruler with a high degree of hyperbole acceptable as poetic license; and sacred ceremonial objects such as crowns, thrones, and weapons may generate important associations with the divine without directly invoking that link.29 The enduring association of kingship with divine order and justice was often physically implanted in the form of pillars inscribed with law codes in the ruler’s name. The most famous such stele are those of Hammurabi (r. ca. 1792–​1750 bce) in Mesopotamia and Ashoka (r. ca. 269–​232 bce) in India, but the value of the symbol was such that Firuz Tughluq, a much later Muslim ruler in India, inscribed Shari‘a law on a tower to visually remind his subjects of his adherence to a particular tradition in a familiar way.30 More surprisingly perhaps, a nineteenth-​century British judge of Fatehpur adopted the same local idiom by placing four pillars engraved with the ten commandments at the city gates.31 Depictions of rulers in rock, mosaic, or paint carefully linked them to the divine and enhanced the aura around them. The Sasanian Ardashir I (r. 224–​240) had his clientage to Ahura Mazda visually represented in rock carvings at Naqs-​i Rustam near the ancient Achaemenid capital, Persepolis. They depict him trampling his Arsacid predecessor under his horse’s hooves, opposite Ahura Mazda trampling Ahriman in the same way, while also reaching for the symbol of kingship Ahura Mazda proffers. Constantine had himself depicted on coins and in statuary with a corona of rays which evoked both pagan and Christian associations with the sun. Meanwhile the famous image of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–​1627)

28 See Canard 2013.

29 Azmeh 1997, 11–​18, 132. 30 Copland et al. 2012, 93.

31 Copland et al. 2012, 177.

Empire and Religion  329 embracing his fellow monarch, Shah ‘Abbas of Iran (r. 1587–​1629), positioned on the globe with a huge corona behind him, neatly expresses the Mughal position. The relative power of the two monarchs is emphasized by the fact that the larger figure of Jahangir stands upon a lion and the smaller figure of Shah ‘Abbas on a lamb. From this perspective, the strongly aniconic tendency of classical Islam stands out but accounts of court gatherings indicate careful attention to creating temporary tableaux in which the caliph’s religious status was signaled by sacred items—​Qur’ans often attributed to the third caliph ‘Uthman; the staff of the prophet; ceremonial swords to defend the faith, and so on.32 The famous medieval mystic from Iberia, Ibn al-​‘Arabi, described the Umayyad caliph of Cordoba, ʿAbd al-​Rahman III (r. 912–​961) meeting Frankish delegates dressed in simple white robes with a Qur’an, a sword, and a brazier in front of him to signify his piety, his God-​given authority, and the hell-​fire awaiting his opponents.33 In general, court gatherings and ceremonies were a highly effective way of conjuring up the god-​like nature of kingship. This could take widely divergent forms, including demonstrations of magnificent luxury, complicated court protocols, the immobility or rare visibility of the monarch, and sometimes his use of theatrical violence, power over life and death being indubitably god-​like.34 Mawlay Isma‘il, ruler of Morocco from 1672 to 1727, was infamous among Europeans of the time for killing Christian captives and slaves for minor infractions in order to demonstrate his power.35 One of the most effective ways for a ruler to demonstrate his attitude toward a religion or religions was by the proffering or withdrawal of patronage to religious sites. Again, while the general point can be made for almost all empires, the specifics varied greatly. Moreover, it was rarely a homogeneous phenomenon given the myriad types of religiosity represented within a single faith, the inevitable fluctuations experienced by imperial powers, and the varied political and personal preferences of rulers themselves. Ibn Khaldun clearly links the construction of monuments to imperial power and a significant proportion of such buildings were religious, although palaces and public utilities were also prominent.36 As Hillenbrand points out, the first generation of mosques were extremely simple spaces, often delineated by no more than a stockade or a line of stones.37 This phase coincided with a period in which the character of the Islamic state remained close to its Arabian tribal origins and an ethos of empire had not yet developed. However, with the maturing of the Umayyad Empire in the early eighth century ce, several monumental religious buildings were founded, including the Dome of the Rock and the great mosque of Damascus. Using Byzantine prototypes and often craftsmen, they were designed to assert Islamic religious but also imperial dominance, and to



32 Sourdel 1960.

33 Zadeh 2008, 329.

34 See Azmeh 1997, 131–​153. 35 Mercer 1977, 540–​541.

36 Ibn Khaldun 1958, vol. 1, 356. 37 Hillenbrand 2000, 34.

330  Amira K. Bennison give the frail Muslim ruling elite religious buildings to be proud of that could be compared favorably with Christian churches.38 Transfers of power from one imperium to another, and from one religious idiom to another, often required physical alterations to the landscape, sometimes violent but sometimes self-​consciously “legal” and respectful, depending on the message to be conveyed. In the empires of Antiquity where multiethnicity went hand in hand with polytheism, the need to desecrate religious sites was limited and new temples could be constructed alongside the old. For the Sasanians, the construction of new dynastic fire temples celebrating their kingship in a Mazdaean idiom went hand in hand with subtle attempts to diminish the prestige of other temples representing other deities and communities within their empire. In India, the third-​century bce Mauryan rulers did not replace Brahmanical orthodoxy or its temples, but they did find it expedient to also favor other sects whose wandering monks (sramanas) were much closer to the lived experience of the population than the Brahmans.39 In particular, Ashoka patronized Buddhist monasteries and sponsored the construction of Buddhist shrines.40 The purported replacement of pagan temples in Jerusalem with churches attributed to Constantine (r. 306–​337) and his mother, Helena, in the 320s and 330s, stands in contrast to the accounts of early Muslims sharing churches with Christians prior to the caliph buying the property from its Christian owners in order to construct the first generation of monumental great mosques. While the historicity of the account of the Umayyad caliph al-​Walid (r. 705–​715 ce) purchasing the basilica of St. John in Damascus41 in order to build the great mosque and the almost identical account of the Umayyad purchase of the church of St. Vincent in Cordoba are open to question, the point is that Muslim chroniclers wished to convey this image of fraternal coexistence and legality in the emergence of a new Muslim sacred landscape.42 The Ottomans reacted in a similar way after their conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The circumstances of Constantinople’s transformation into Istanbul are well known, but what remains most intriguing is the fact that the great Ottoman architect Sinan, himself of Christian origin, chose a Byzantine basilica, Hagia Sophia, as the starting point for Ottoman architecture in its imperial form. Thus at the same time as the great Ottoman religious complexes along the ridge of the city proclaimed the arrival of a new imperial order, they also constantly evoked the imperial order which had been replaced, in a way reminiscent of Umayyad adaption of Byzantine architecture in Syria, three-​quarters of a millennium before.43 European colonial empires also involved themselves in religious building projects, particularly the construction of disproportionately large cathedrals and



38 Bennison 2009, 65.

39 Copland et al. 2012, 39.

40 Copland et al. 2012, 55–​56.

41 The Basilica of St. John was itself built on the site of the Temple of Jupiter-​Haddad. 42 Bennison 2007, 67.

43 See Necipoglu 2005 and the analysis of Hilsdale in chap. 6 of this volume.

Empire and Religion  331 churches to serve minority expatriate Christian congregations in non-​Christian territories. One such construction was the French-​built Cathedral of Notre Dame d’Afrique, consecrated by Bishop Lavigerie in 1872, on a high point dominating the Bay of Algiers. It was deeply resented by Algerians at the time as part of the French mission civilisatrice, which included the physical insertion of Catholicism into the Muslim environment, alongside attempts to weaken the population’s attachment to Islam and pave the way to conversion. This was based on the idea that Algeria had been the home of early Christianity and that its Berber inhabitants were thus Christian at heart, unlike the Arabs who were considered to be Oriental Muslim interlopers! An often forgotten aspect of the construction of monuments and the many other religious buildings sponsored by imperial rulers is the socioeconomic impact they had, which could significantly ameliorate relations between rulers and ruled by providing employment, or conversely strain them in the case of high taxation and corvée labor. The Mamluk Empire in Egypt and Syria (1260–​1517) provides an example of sustained investment in the religious infrastructure which gave a warrior elite of non-​Islamic origins religious credentials while also contributing significantly to the efflorescence of urban culture in Egypt and Syria. The high number of complexes composed of a mausoleum and a theological college (madrasa) constructed during Mamluk rule generated steady employment for master craftsmen, for religious personnel, and even for ancillary workers such as cleaners, even though the actual construction was often carried out by prisoners of war and corvée labor.44 In addition to the construction of major urban monuments, many rulers also created sacred itineraries and patronized pilgrimage routes, thereby linking the political and the sacred by their own passage along sanctified routes and their amelioration of the experience of other pilgrims. Constantine’s mother, Helena, played a major role in linking the new emperor to Christianity by means of her pilgrimage through the Holy Land to find holy relics in 326–​328, which also involved the construction of several churches and shrines. Several ‘Abbasid caliphs had wells and pilgrim facilities built along the desert routes from Baghdad to Mecca as a mark of their piety and, on occasion, traveled these routes themselves as pilgrims. The Ottomans also invested heavily in the pilgrim route,45 a form of patronage that culminated with the construction of the Hijaz railway from 1900 to 1914. For the Shi‘i Safavids in Iran, access to Mecca was often impossible due to military hostilities with the Ottomans, therefore Shah ‘Abbas (r. 1587–​1629) created an alternative Shi‘i pilgrim route to Mashhad, burial place of the eighth imam ‘Ali al-​ Rida, to which he himself then walked on foot in 1601. Textual accounts compared this to a purported walk by Heraclius from Constantinople to Jerusalem, but it also

44

Behrens-​Abouseif 2007,  43–​45.

45 See Faroqhi 1994.

332  Amira K. Bennison echoed the renowned contemporary pilgrimages of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–​1605) to the Chishti shrine at Ajmir in the 1560s and 1570s,46 indicating the persistence of this form of religio-​political performance. On a smaller scale, from 1514 the accession of each Ottoman sultan came to include a visit to the shrine of Eyüp in the suburbs of Istanbul, the purported burial place of Ayyub, a companion of the Prophet who fell during an attack on Constantinople. While at the shrine, the new sultan was girded with a sword, thereby signaling the dynasty’s supreme religious and military achievement—​the capture of Constantinople—​an act both desired and envisaged by the Prophet himself.47 Another potent display of imperial and religious synergies occurred in the theory and practice of war, which entailed placing huge stresses on any subject population in terms of mobilization, taxation, and the requisitioning of supplies for passing armies. It was therefore helpful for rulers to adduce religious as well as practical justifications for military campaigns. The preaching of the Crusades was a papal initiative at the outset but over time it proved very useful to the Christian monarchies of the Iberian Peninsula and became an important strand in early modern Spanish imperialism. During the so-​called Reconquista, a term which invested territorial rivalry in the Iberian Peninsula with a religious color, mobilization of the local population, who were used to intermingling with Muslims in march areas, was often difficult. The fortuitous discovery of the body of Saint James, the development of the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, and his reinterpretation as “Matamoros” (Muslim-​killer) helped to attract outside Crusader settlement and to cultivate a war ethos along the frontier. Subsequently, declaring a Crusade gave the crown significant advantages by endowing military activity and associated tax collection with papal authority and by attracting outsiders more disposed to see Muslims as enemies to fight. In Islamic lands, jihad or ghaza played an equally powerful role in legitimating a wide range of military activities from empire formation along Khaldunian lines to the quelling of rebellion, and even anti-​colonial resistance and self-​strengthening in the nineteenth century. All these modes were linked by the underlying meaning of the term jihad (striving) with the adjunct phrase “in the path of God” assumed. Particularly in frontier zones such as the early Islamic-​Byzantine frontier in Syria and Asia Minor, the Muslim-​Christian frontier in Iberia and North Africa, or the Ottoman-​Christian frontier in Anatolia and the Balkans, the notion of the ruler as a holy warrior (mujahid, ghazi) had heightened significance, and rulers tended to justify military activity as jihad or as necessary to unify the community for jihad. In Umayyad Iberia, for instance, the caliph or an important family member rode out from Cordoba for an annual summer expedition of raiding into Christian territory conceptualized as jihad. As he progressed, local lords had to offer their allegiance

46 Melville 1996, 192–​193. 47 Imber 2002, 116–​118.

Empire and Religion  333 and supply extra troops and those who refused could be accused of religious as well as political disobedience. In the Ottoman case, the idea that the sultan was a holy warrior (ghazi) and the descendant of generations of such warriors was a significant mobilizing tactic regardless of later debates about the ghazi origins of the Ottoman Empire.48

Managing Religious Difference in an Imperial Framework While one religion dominated in most empires, either through the numerical preponderance of its followers or through their position as a ruling elite, no empire ruled over a religiously homogeneous population, making the management of religious difference crucial to stability (see Burbank and Cooper, chap. 11). This took the form of recognition of other deities within carefully constructed hierarchies, the protection of certain religions in return for political loyalty, campaigns of proselytization, and, less positively, persecution of various types when assimilation within an imperial framework failed. A  range of social, financial, and political considerations dictated the choice of a particular policy, but its framing was invariably religious. In the Near East a long imperial tradition of measured toleration for religious minorities existed. In the ancient world, when polytheism was the norm, the beliefs and deities of subject peoples were accepted as analogues to the dominant pantheon. The polytheistic Greco-​Roman and Persian empires of the ancient Mediterranean and western Asia accepted culturally specific deities, customs, and beliefs as essential to the Greco-​Roman imperial project: a mature, sophisticated. and ecumenical imperial structure which ruled over diverse “barbarian” peoples characterized by their own local practices which signaled their inferiority and thus the legitimacy of rule over them.49 From this standpoint, the deification of the Roman emperor provided, above all, for a cult through which citizens could show their loyalty rather than belief. As is well known, the most politically challenging religion from the Greco-​Roman point of view was Judaism because of the Jews’ outright rejection of all gods other than their own, which they made public by their refusal to offer sacrifices. The rise of imperial monotheisms in the place of the polytheism of the classical Roman Empire threatened pluralism, but space nonetheless remained for shows of imperial magnanimity toward religious minorities. While Book 16 of the fifth-​ century Theodosian Code, which made Christianity the state religion, contained numerous articles that vehemently opposed Christian sects that failed to toe the orthodox Byzantine line, it allowed the practice of Judaism, the exemption of Jews from public duties on the Sabbath, and the maintenance of their places of worship,

48 See Kafadar 1996, 47–​59. 49 Schott 2008, 98.

334  Amira K. Bennison as long as Christianity was not compromised.50 The neighboring Sasanian Empire went further and tolerated Jews and Christians. Despite erroneous impressions of widespread conversion to Islam by the sword, Islam’s developmental trajectory combined religious and political elements from the outset and, perhaps unexpectedly, this generated a pragmatic attitude among Muslims toward proselytizing and conversion which drew on Late Antique provisions of toleration, both Byzantine and Sasanian. While polytheists were indeed to be fought until they submitted (islam) to the new religion and empire, other monotheists could submit politically while retaining the right to practice their religion by covenant (dhimma). As Islam spread into Central Asia and later India, religions covered by the dhimma could include Buddhism and Hinduism, a politically rather than religiously motivated stance since it was politic not to alienate new subject populations who vastly outnumbered their Muslim masters and expedient to tax them as dhimmis liable to a special poll tax. In many ways, the Islamic obligation of toleration according to the dhimma was an ideal blueprint for imperial systems since it simultaneously asserted Muslim superiority, religious and political, while also recognizing religious differences and allowing for diversity. In this, it evoked not only the preceding Byzantine and Sasanian examples but also the older, pagan toleration of the ancestral beliefs and practices of different “peoples.” The early Muslim preference for the dhimma was enhanced by the Arabs’ self-​ perception that they were a chosen people and Islam was theirs alone, and that it was appropriate to maintain a religio-​political distinction between Muslim tax-​exempt rulers and non-​Muslim tax-​paying subjects. This reticence toward proselytizing outside the Arabs was, however, eroded by the steady conversion of non-​Arabs to Islam, which brought the hegemonic universal strand within it to the forefront. Rising numbers of Muslims tipped the demographic balance and fostered a stronger emphasis on the inferior place of protected religious communities and the superiority of Islam to other religions. Rulers could find themselves faced by popular uprisings and violence if they allowed Jews and Christians to hold positions that their Muslim subjects perceived as inappropriate. However, the other side of the coin was always the fact that the caliph or sultan had a religious responsibility to protect loyal and obedient religious minorities and a failure to do so imperiled his immortal soul. The importance of the religious dimension of the dhimma is clearly shown by its steady demise in Iberia when Muslim areas were conquered by Catholic monarchs. Although the rulers of Castile and Aragon initially offered Jewish and Muslim populations protections similar to those enshrined in the Muslim dhimma, such protections had no support in Canon law, and with the emergence of Spain, a new imperial religious ethos emerged predicated solely on Catholicism and the concomitant outlawing of Jewish and Islamic religious and cultural practices. Toleration had no place in late medieval and early modern Spain, now conceptualized as a “fortress

50 Pharr 1952, 467–​470.

Empire and Religion  335 of faith.”51 The first community to suffer were the Jews, who were forcibly converted from the 1390s and finally expelled in 1492. As the Spanish began to colonize the New World and consolidate their position in Europe through the amalgamation of Habsburg and Hispanic domains, they moved also against the Muslims under their rule, who were forcibly converted to Catholicism over the first few decades of the sixteenth century. These reluctant converts and their descendants were known as the Moriscos and, like the Jews, they too ultimately faced expulsion in an environment which considered religious pluralism a cultural and political challenge to the Catholic Spanish Empire in Europe and overseas.52 The majority of those expelled, both Jewish and Morisco, chose to resettle in Muslim lands—​the Ottoman Empire and North Africa—​where Moriscos returned to their ancestral faith and Jews were accorded the religiously mandated protection of the dhimma. With the Ottomans, the dhimma became an organizing principle of imperial administration in the form of the millet system. The term millet is the Turkish form of the Arabic word milla, meaning a religious community or sect. Under the Ottomans each religious community became a millet liable for the payment of taxes via a designated representative who acted as an intermediary between government and the community in question.53 This defined each community’s interaction with authority in religious terms. Whether it was a deeply held conviction or not, European diplomats and commentators of the nineteenth century made much of the supposedly despotic and Islamic characteristics of the Ottoman Empire in contrast to the more “enlightened” modern European imperial model. In line with this construction, European colonial powers understood the millet system as oppressive because it distinguished people by faith, which went against Enlightenment secularism. The Ottomans responded to European critiques of the millet system and “oriental despotism” in general by the famous reform movement known as the Tanzimat.54 However, the Hatt-​i Sharif of Gulhane (1839) and the Hatt-​i Humayun (1856) edicts granting all Ottoman subjects equality before the law were not only resented by Muslims as an attack on the religious structure of the empire, and thus its raison d’être, but by the Christians they were supposed to assist. For the latter, their identification as millets had enabled them to avoid conscription and other blanket obligations which a secular state demanded, but an empire structured by religion and the notion of the dhimma did not. From the Muslim perspective, furthermore, the Russian, French, and British empires all used religion in their ideologies of empire and instrumentalized it for political gain, rendering their critique somewhat hypocritical. The well-​known competition among these powers to “protect” Christian minorities and even remove them from Ottoman jurisdiction was one example of this. The Ottoman response was to assert the sultan’s caliphal role, now understood to mean global protector of

51 See Echevarria 1999. 52 See Ingram 2009.

53 See Braude and Lewis 1982. 54 See Zürcher 1997, 52–​74.

336  Amira K. Bennison all Muslims, including those in Russian, French, and British territories, in an effort to level the playing field. This was of particular concern to the British in India, who saw such appeals to transnational Muslim sentiment as highly subversive. The religious dimension of European imperial ideologies can very clearly be seen in French policies in Algeria, where Muslims in particular were denied the possibility of becoming citizens rather than subjects by virtue of their religion. Although Christian settlers from across the Mediterranean and eventually Algerian Jews were granted French citizenship, a Muslim could only gain citizenship by renouncing his/​her adherence to the Shari‘a, a step most were unwilling to take.55 The ambivalent stance of European colonial empires toward religion is further shown in their relationship with missionaries active in the nineteenth century. As Makdisi points out, one cannot draw a simple connection between the activities of missionaries and imperial ambition.56 Missionaries could often be reluctant and critical adjutants of empire who sought to protect their new “flocks” from exploitation. However, European and American missionaries of the nineteenth century did generally assume that they were culturally as well as morally superior to those among whom they proselytized, and their “conversionist” goal existed in tandem with “civilizational” aims.57 Ironically, they were rarely able to make significant numbers of converts but, through the provision of schooling and other social services, they did contribute to the formation of indigenous groups who bridged the cultural gap between their own society and that of the emerging modern imperial West and sometimes acted as “brokers” between the two. In the case of the Middle East, its identification as the Holy Land generated a unique overlap between religious and political objectives manifested not only during the nineteenth century but also during the Crusades. However, rivalries between different Christian denominations (and empires)—​Roman Catholic, Anglican, American Protestant, and Russian Orthodox—​proved as damaging to the missionary cause as the opposition of indigenous churches and the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, while missionaries were viewed by the Ottomans as the vanguard of a Christian imperial offensive akin to the Crusades, many of those educated in mission schools used their command of modern political and social idioms to assert their right to independence from imperial control, be it Muslim Ottoman or Christian European.

Religion as a Discourse of Opposition and an Inspiration for Rebellion Any discussion of empire and religion is primarily about how particular ruling elites have instrumentalized the latter to justify the former. That is not to question the religious sincerity of ruling elites, but rather to stress that we are concerned here

55 Christelow 1985, 14. 56 Makdisi 2008, 9–​11.

57 Murre-​van den Berg 2006, 3.

Empire and Religion  337 with ideological and public manifestations of faith as a support for imperial government rather than private personal beliefs. In response to such manipulation of religion by imperial regimes, political dissension and sometimes outright rebellion often took sectarian or heterodox form. Conversely, heresy was rarely a purely religious affair and frequently asserted local identities at odds with the hegemonic political and economic as well as religio-​ideological impulses of empire (see further Wagner, chap. 12). Again, this does not imply that religious opposition was not genuinely religious at some level, but rather that many kinds of opposition naturally sought their legitimation in religion and gained emotive power from it, a phenomenon still in evidence today. Generally, imperial discursive traditions depended upon sacralizing a hierarchy which was inherently unequal, while resistance was articulated through appeals to egalitarianism or a counter-​hierarchy. In addition to intra-​religious contestation, inter-​religious rivalry could also cause or legitimize opposition to imperial structures, or create local disturbances which imperial administrators had to resolve. Just as the imperial use of religion tended to become more hegemonic as universal monotheism gained sway, so too did competing universalist visions. Christianity itself began life as a subversive creed which destabilized traditional Greco-​Roman beliefs in the distinction between rulers and ruled, Greco-​Romans and barbarians, and posited a new dispensation in which the dichotomy lay between Christian and non-​Christian. It also, of course, subverted the distinction between Jew and Gentile, giving it the universal appeal that Judaism could not have. However, once Christianity had become the religion of the later Roman Empire and the Byzantines sought to impose a state orthodoxy, rival Christian sects resisted Orthodox Christology and by the same token Byzantine imperial hegemony. The most obvious manifestation of this was the deep division between the Orthodox Diophysite state church and the many Monophysite communities of the Near East, including the Armenians, Nestorians, and Copts. These communities represented regional churches, and their flocks who had no wish to accept Byzantine Orthodoxy as well as suzerainty and expressed their resistance through armed rebellion on occasion. Many Nestorians migrated to Sasanian territories to avoid the implacable logic of the Byzantine Empire, that all Christians had to subscribe to the same theology. Similar resistance movements occurred within the Sasanian Empire as a result of the steady codification of Zoroastrianism by the Sasanians and their chief priests, notably Kidir in the late third century ce, but also the political centralization and marginalization of regional Parthian dynasties that this implied. One result of this was the development of a rival strand of Mazdaean religiosity which challenged the static social hierarchy of four estates with the privileges it enshrined and inspired the militant reform movement of Mazdak which flourished in the sixth century ce. Mazdak has traditionally been interpreted as a rather anarchic religious reformer who espoused communal ownership of property and women to avoid the

338  Amira K. Bennison jealousy created by inequalities in wealth and marriage. However, the rebellion also had political implications for the position of the aristocracy, leading the Sasanian emperors to vacillate between exploiting and suppressing it.58 The early history of Shi‘ism provides another example of entwined religious and political resistance to a dominant imperial idiom, in this case that of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphates. The Partisans of ‘Ali or Shi‘at ‘Ali rebelled numerous times against the ruling caliphs on the grounds that the religio-​political succession to the Prophet Muhammad should be the possession of his lineal descendants, starting with his cousin and son-​in-​law ‘Ali. As Crone points out, this struggle was “religious” from the outset since following the right caliph or imam was essential for a believer’s salvation.59 Over the centuries, however, it also became theological and, in its Isma‘ili form, Shi‘ism inspired a new series of religio-​political revolutions in the ninth-​tenth centuries ce which gained most of their grassroots support from marginalized groups in the ‘Abbasid Empire, such as the Arab tribes of Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula and the Kutama Berbers in North Africa. The revolutionaries successfully established the Shi‘i Fatimid caliphate, but subsequent political fractures within the ruling cohort could only be understood as religious schisms. The best-​known religious opposition movement created in this way was the infamous “Assassin” sect.60 In addition to sectarianism, mysticism has also functioned as an idiom of subversion and rebellion from mendicant monks or holy men who challenged hierarchies of wealth and power to activist religious orders operating across the boundaries of empire. Although Islamic mysticism or Sufism faced considerable criticism in the nationalist era as quietist, or worse as collaborationist with European imperial powers, its history provides examples of a more varied nature. The ‘Abbasids considered early ecstatic Sufis a major threat to social order as the execution of the wildly popular ecstatic al-​Hallaj in 922 shows. Sufism subsequently functioned as an aid to government in the non-​imperial political environment occasioned by the rise of small military states, and also in the new imperial context of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal age. However, its subversive potential remained and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was Sufi brotherhoods that launched a series of rebellions against irreligious rulers across North Africa. These rebellions were articulated in a religious idiom but a key aspect of the “irreligiosity” of the rulers in question was heavy taxation and other financial and political demands.61 It was these same brotherhoods who led early anti-​colonial resistance to the French and Italians in the Maghrib,62 successfully undermining the new boundaries of empire through their networks and asserting that Muslims had an obligation to resist the “infidel.”

58 Pourshariati 2008, 82–​94. 59 Crone 2005, 21. 60 Daftary 1998.

61 Bennison 2002, 43–​44.

62 See Clancy-​Smith 1994.

Empire and Religion  339 Closely associated with this type of rebellion against the perceived injustice, corruption, and irreligiosity of existing empires are messianic and millenarian uprisings, the most radical form of religiously inspired revolt, designed not simply to oppose an empire but to overthrow an entire system. Such uprisings may call for the restoration of a religion’s true, usually more egalitarian, tenets, or may be inspired by a revolutionary new religious message formed in the crucible of social and economic change and dislocation. In the Islamic world there was a recurrent identification of individuals as the mahdi, the Muslim equivalent of the messiah, who will appear at a time of corruption (fasad) to restore justice in the form of the true Islamic order. One notable example is the twelfth-​century Almohad revolution centered in what is now Morocco whose leader and mahdi, Ibn Tumart, asserted that his syncretic blend of Sunnism and Shi‘ism was the true and final monotheistic dispensation to which all Muslims, Christians, and Jews should subscribe. He and his successor (caliph), ‘Abd al-​Mu’min, mobilized his fellow Masmuda Berber tribesmen and a growing number of other Berber and Arab tribes for a massive jihad which swept away its political predecessors in the Maghrib and Iberia.63 In later times, the onset of European colonial empire in its myriad forms generated numerous moments in which new religious and ideological forces combined with severe phases of social and economic upheaval to generate revolutionary and often syncretic movements. One of the most dramatic of these movements was the Taiping rebellion (1851–​1864) against the Manchu dynasty in southern China. Inspired by an idiosyncratic Chinese Protestant tract, Liang’s Good Words, and Confucian moral utopianism, the Taiping movement’s leader, Hung Hsiu-​ch’üan, came to see himself as the second son of Jehovah, sent to institute a new moral and social order in place of the corrupt, rapacious, and violent society he saw around him. He and his associates recruited members of their own Hakka ethnic group into a God-​worshipping society which went on the military offensive to create a new Heavenly Kingdom. Rapacious landlords, widespread banditry, famine, and the destabilization caused by the growing European commercial presence in Shanghai enabled the Taipings to broaden their support base considerably, to capture the important city of Nanking, and seriously threaten the Manchu imperial order for a decade.64 Crucial to Taiping success was the revolutionary religious framework within which they operated which enabled them to transcend, albeit temporarily, the socioeconomic and ethno-​linguistic divisions within the population. However, millenarian movements tended to falter despite their great initial appeal: either they were politically successful and became a new routinized “establishment,” often characterized by similar flaws to the regime that they had ousted, or the apocalyptic new order never came to be, its leaders were exterminated and their teachings classified as heresy. The Almohads could not replace earlier forms of Islam or persuade Christian and Jewish minorities of the validity of their new monotheistic vision, and

63 See Fierro 2012; García-​Arenal 2006. 64 Kuhn 1978, 264–​317.

340  Amira K. Bennison in 1228 an Almohad caliph publicly denied that Ibn Tumart had been the mahdi. In the case of the Taiping revolutionaries, intense rivalry among the small circle around “Jehovah’s son,” Hung Hsiu-​ch’üan, led to successive purges and massacres which fatally undermined the movement, and Taiping teachings were denounced by both Europeans and the Chinese ruling elite.

Conclusion This is a necessarily cursory and incomplete glance at the complex relationship between empire and religion over time. However, it does identify some parameters of the relationship. The examples can be multiplied and many variations on the themes added, signaling the enduring importance of religion to empire from ancient times to the present. In the pre-​modern world, legitimation without any reference to religion, morality, or heaven was inconceivable, and all the many dimensions of power were infused with a religious dimension from theories of rule, to government, patronage, and the practice of war. Whether such constructs and activities were convincing is a moot point, but the equally regular enlistment of religion in discourses of opposition and rebellion suggests that the underlying premises were widely accepted. Even in the secular age, religion has been and continues to be evoked as a justification for empire and also to oppose it. Although its power was subdued and masked during the twentieth century when nationalism and other ideologies including Communism stepped into religion’s “space,” in the Islamic domain in particular religion has returned to the forefront to explain, legitimize, and popularize political action.

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10 Literature of Empire Difference, Creativity, and Cosmopolitanism Javed Majeed

In the last five decades, a growing body of work has focused on “the imagery, literary representations, beliefs, and ideologies which empire builders, and their opponents, produced.”1,2 Empire is no longer seen in terms of political and economic relationships alone, but also as a cultural process, in which colonial cultures are “not simply ideologies that mask, mystify or rationalize forms of oppression that are external to them” but are “also expressive and constitutive of colonial relationships in themselves.”3 In these approaches to empire, literary texts are seen as symbolic vehicles of colonial authority, albeit often unstable and contradictory ones.4 Imperial literatures exist in reciprocal interaction with empire; they reflect empire as a composite and multiethnic political body while also playing a role in its constitution and expansion, expressing and shaping the attitudes and perceptions which create and uphold it as a composite entity.5 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference outlines a global framework in which to understand empires in terms of their “politics of difference,” ranging from recognizing the multiplicity of peoples and their customs as an ordinary fact of life, to drawing a boundary between civilized insiders and barbarian outsiders. Empires relied on varying degrees of incorporation and differentiation, and they could “mix, match, and transform their ways of rule” accordingly.6 As other historians have pointed out, empires were organized to administer and exploit diversity; they were comfortable with and even thrived on it, and were “marked by heterogeneity and shifting frontiers.”7 This chapter draws on these approaches to the diversity within empires. It considers imperial and anti-​imperial literatures in terms of the representation and dramatization of difference, as well as its subversion and interrogation. The first section considers literature’s key role in the education of imperial elites in Rome, China, the Middle East, and the Persianate world in the pre-​ modern era. In these empires, conceptions of civilization, ideas of polite literature,

1 I am indebted to Peter Fibiger Bang for his many useful comments on this chapter. 2 Howe 2002, 123.

3 Ballantyne 2008, 2.

4 Boehmer 1995, 13, 50; see also Ballantyne 2008, passim.

5 Here I draw on Howe’s definition of empire in Howe 2002, 30.

6 Burbank and Cooper 2010, 11–​13 and chapter 11 in this volume. 7 D’Altroy 2001, 125; Barfield 2001, 29.

Javed Majeed, Literature of Empire  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0010.

Literature of Empire  343 and notions of governance went hand in hand. While in the modern era the novel had a pivotal role in spreading world languages like English, French, and Spanish, in the pre-​modern age poetry had a more important place in the training of imperial elites. The second section discusses how imperial literatures imagined the boundaries between the civilized self and the barbarian other, but it also shows how they illustrated the porosity of those boundaries. Post-​imperial texts like Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) explore these permeable boundaries, and show how imperial subjects made psychic and symbolic investments in the figure of the barbarian. In doing so, they dramatize how imperial epic narratives give way to romance narratives of dissent and resistance. In the third section I examine how the idea of the “classical” was important to imperial literatures and civilizations, and how in the modern era Greek and Latin classics were appropriated by Asian and American writers and thinkers for their own political and cultural purposes. These appropriations signal how empires were sites for intellectual, linguistic, cultural, and literary exchange and hybridization, albeit in contexts of racial and gendered oppression. The second half of the chapter considers how the multilingualism of empires created linguistic choices for writers. In these multilingual environments, lexicography was a key genre that negotiated the relationships between imperial and local languages. In the modern epoch, both colonial and anti-​colonial novelists mixed languages and combined cultural frames when they represented their societies and their narrators. By bringing together cultures, languages, and literatures, empires also produced distinctive cosmopolitanisms, which straddled the colonial-​ nationalist divide, and led to the authoring of texts that were simultaneously nationalist and cosmopolitan in orientation. These cosmopolitan nationalisms are indicative of how the shaping of political imaginations within and against empires were more complex than simply a move from empire to the nation-​state. Indeed, for some writers, becoming national was a burdensome process, sometimes intolerably so, and they give expression to the messiness of becoming national in their novels and short stories. One form of cosmopolitan politics was communism; the political imagination of socialist-​inspired anti-​colonial writers was formed within and against empires and by its very nature this imagination was transregional and internationalist, as was the literature it produced. Thus, while empires were politically and economically oppressive, they also expanded the range of literary traditions, aesthetic possibilities, linguistic choices, and creative opportunities for authors and poets, both imperial and colonized, for whom the dramatization of difference and its subversion became significant components in their writing.

Literature and the Training of Imperial Elites The genre of the novel dominates the literary historiography of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century imperialism and anti-​ colonialism. Franco Moretti, Edward

344  Javed Majeed Said, and Benedict Anderson examine the dominance of the novel after 1750, its amenability to both imperial and nationalist ideologies, its tie with newspapers as part of print capitalism, and the distinguishing features of its aesthetic form which enabled its rise to global dominance.8 Cosmopolitan world languages such as English, French, and Spanish have been mainly carried by the novel in the modern age. As a global form, the modern novel arose as a compromise between European formal influence, local materials, and local forms, with the encounter between these producing differently shaped texts in different regions.9 Other literary genres continued to flourish, but as Bayly has emphasized, in the modern era novels and short stories embodied the sense of the nation and its essential characteristics. The reading matter of educated people across the world converged in style, while becoming more distant from traditions of popular literature, drama, music, and storytelling, which existed in most societies until the onset of mass television broadcasting in the later twentieth century.10 However, in the ancient world forms of poetry were especially influential in the education of imperial elites. In ancient Rome, Greek and Latin poets had a prominent place in the curricula from the primary level through to the Grammaticus and Rhetoric schools. Pupils first studied Homer, and the Iliad and the Odyssey were pivotal in their education. After their initiation in Homer, they studied the Aeneid, which remained the Latin school text par excellence for centuries as the national epic that invited comparison with the Odyssey and Iliad.11 It was the genre of the epic, then, which was of first importance in literary education. After the epic, pupils came to tragedy, which was seen as a suitable combination with the epic because of their perceived common basis in legend.12 Latin and Greek odes were also studied, as were a range of prose writings.13 The exegesis of texts involved teaching the basic tropes associated with the reading of the poets, and it was from the emulation of classical models and their teachers’ corrections that pupils learned the details of style and composition.14 Pupils also gained from a more rhetorical approach toward literature, focusing on structure, characterization, literary embellishment, and sententiae. This rhetorical training was crucial to effective public speaking and the acquisition of oratorical skill, both of which were highly prized under the Republic and then the Empire.15 The focus of interest, then, in the Grammatici in both Greece and Rome was literature, and the main field of study was poetry.16 Literature was also central to the way the ancient Romans presented themselves as a world power. By creating a literature of their own, that invited comparisons with the Greeks and expressed its differences

8 Anderson 1983; and Said 1993. 9 Moretti 2000.

10 Bayly 2004, 389.

11 Bonner 1977, 213. 12 Ibid., 215. 13 Ibid., 220. 14

Ibid., 227–​238, 275–​276.

15 Ibid., 331–​332, 288–​308 on learning the art of the advocate. 16 Ibid., 48.

Literature of Empire  345 from them, the Romans presented their achievements as unique and unprecedented. Cosmological perspectives and a sense of divine favor underpinned their notion of an imperial and civilizing mission.17 The “supreme example of imperial poetry” which transformed the epic into a genre that was overtly political was Virgil’s Aeneid.18 This articulated a specific collective history and an idea of world domination, and as a celebration of Augustus’s power it was tied to a system of monarchy. As Quint has argued, the Virgilian tradition of imperial domination is the defining tradition of the Western epic, and future epic poets seeking to articulate imperial values and missions would emulate it, while those opposed to imperialism or on its losing side would contest and resist it.19 The Aeneid shaped an idea of history as linear teleology, linking disparate events across time in a meaningful narrative of imperial conquest. In contrast, Lucan’s (39–​65 ce) Pharsalia, “the epic of the lost Roman Republic,”20 inaugurated the tradition of the epic of the defeated. Quint outlines how anti-​imperial poets would imitate Lucan’s model, forming an alternative tradition within epic poetry that created its own continuity as a mirror of the Virgilian tradition it sought to displace.21 This tradition included Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–​1589) on the violent conquest of Chile and Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques (1616) on the Huguenot resistance during the wars of religion in Europe.22 In the bureaucracy of pre-​modern China, literature had a key role in the training of the imperial elite. During the Han Dynasty (202 bce–​220 ce), Confucians entered officialdom through a state college and competitive examination system. Young men of means and ability in pre-​modern China aspired to succeed in the civil service examinations, with the pinnacle of achievement being the jinshi degree, current from the seventh century onward. This certified that the candidate had mastered the sinographic script and could write literary compositions in it.23 Central to the education of the imperial elite was the “doctrine of the literati” (rujiao) and the ethos of wen signifying both writing (literature, belles-​lettres) and culture.24 From the first century bce the Confucian Five Classics were the main object of study for the educated elite. This included the Classic of Odes, an anthology of approximately 300 poems, consisting mainly of ceremonial hymns and folk songs, some of which celebrated ideal models of governance and the perceived moral order holding the Chinese empire together.25 It was Kong Qiu/​Confucius (551–​ 479 bce) who framed this body of ancient literature, gearing it toward the political, moral, and cosmic dimensions of imperial governance.26 He also outlined how the



17 Woolf 2001, 315–​320. 18 Pollock 2011, 266.

19 Quint 1993, 23–​30. 20 Ibid., 133. 21

Ibid.,  8–​9.

22 Ibid., ch. 4.

23 Mair 2012, 393–​394. 24

Ibid., 392–​393

26

Ibid.,  28–​29.

25 Bary and Bloom 1999, 25–​27, 37–​39.

346  Javed Majeed styles and manners of the noble person, strategies of good rule, and personal cultivation combined with each other to form an imperial ethos of culture and civilization. Confucius was partly responding to what he saw as the crisis of civilization caused by the decline of the Zhou dynasty in the mid-​sixth century bce. Similarly, Dong Zhongshu’s (195?–​105? bce) focus on renewed kingship during the Warring States and Han period underpinned his interpretations of the Confucian texts, and enabled him and other scholars under Emperor Wu (r. 141–​87 bce) to establish a text-​based ideology grounded in the canonization of the Confucian texts, which was to play a major role in the doctrinal and political life of the state. The designation of the official posts known as the “Erudites of the Five Classics” and the foundation in 124 bce of the Imperial College where these texts were taught further institutionalized this canon. Confucianism was thus the philosophy of scholar-​ officials, and it reflected how the literati were indispensable to imperial governance as men who were trained to handle the edicts, regulations, and documents necessary to the smooth running of a centralized government.27 While the exact place of poetry and belles-​lettres in the Chinese imperial civil service curriculum and examinations fluctuated over this long period of time, literary composition, a command over the different styles of poetry, essay writing, and prose, and penmanship remained crucial. The emphasis on calligraphic excellence reflected the role of the writing system in China as a powerful instrument of bureaucracy and the importance of fine writing in its operation.28 During the Sui dynasty (581–​618 ce) literary composition became a key feature of the civil service examinations. In the Tang period (618–​906 ce) the test essays for “advanced scholars” included bureaucratic and poetic writings, but by the mid-​ eighth century the third part of the test consisted exclusively of composing poetic writings. During the reign of the first two emperors of the Tang period, 618–​649, literary anthologies, legal texts, and classical learning were codified. The literary anthology Wen Xuan compiled by Xiao Tong (501–​531 ce), consisting of more than 700 literary pieces, ranging from poems to prose, funeral essays, and correspondence, defined belles-​lettres as a category of knowledge. This anthology and commentaries on it, together with Literary material by category, attributed to Ouyang Xun (557–​641 ce, issued in 624), became especially important for the education of the imperial elite and the state civil service examinations.29 Students consulted the Wen Xuan as the primary work on literary styles, and its importance in preparing candidates is borne out by the many references to it in relation to the exams. It reinforced the role of literary skills at a time when the exams laid stress on poetic writings for the advanced scholar degree, and the anthology remained popular throughout the Tang and Song periods.30 While by the thirteenth century the great age of poetry in the exams had declined, the exams continued to 27 Bary and Bloom 1999, 294, 314–​317. See further the chapters by Lewis, Robinson and Crossley (8, 13, 19 and 29) in volume 2. 28 Mair 2012, 391–​392, 395. 29 Lee 2000, 241, 244, 250. 30 Ibid., 373–​374.

Literature of Empire  347 stress the proper use of couplets, the importance of form, and different styles and modes of argumentation. Candidates were expected to employ stylized arguments at designated places in their essays, with eight pairs of paragraphs echoing each other—​this evolved into the so-​called eight-​legged essays in the Ming and Qing examinations, and it held sway as the standard form of exam answer from the mid-​fifteenth century until the demise of the entire system in the early twentieth century.31 Belles-​lettres and penmanship, then, remained an important part of the imperial elite’s sense of civilization and governance, irrespective of the exact place that poetry played in the exams. The connections between notions of civilization, writing, polite literature, and imperial governance were also evident in other empires. The expansion of Arabian peninsular forces over a wide area in the seventh century brought Islam into contact with a variety of cultures, and in 697, during the reign of the Caliph ‘Abd al-​Malik, Arabic was designated as the official language of administration, replacing the Greek and Persian of the numerous functionaries who continued to work in many areas of the caliph’s chancery. During this period a class of bureaucrats speaking and writing Arabic began to administer the affairs of the caliphate. As the functions of this class of administrators, secretaries, and scribes grew in complexity, they developed codes of conduct and models of style that facilitated the transfer and exchange of information, ideas, and goods at various levels of authority within the Islamic dominions. As Roger Allen has argued, in this era of new cultural complexities the emergence of adab, encompassing belles-​lettres, penmanship, and social etiquette, reflected the educational needs and cultural tastes of the urbane class of kuttāb or secretaries in chancelleries (see also Marsham, chap. 22 in vol. 2).32 Writers and secretaries from a Persian cultural background made a significant contribution to the development of adab. After the Arab conquest of Iran in 651, the cultural heritage of the Sasanian Empire and the religious value of the text of the Quran in Islamic civilization merged to secure the status of the literate class of the Persianate world, most of whom were professional administrators.33 Within a century of the Arab-​Islamic conquest, Persian (now in the Arabic script) resumed its administrative role, incorporating an extensive Arabic-​Islamic vocabulary.34 By the ninth century, New Persian supplanted Arabic, reducing it to a status in the Persianate world comparable to Latin in later medieval Europe. From this time until the nineteenth century, Persian was the high language of culture over a vast area of Eurasia, spanning the Iranian plateau from the South Caucasus to the Indus, Central Asia from Khiva to Kashgar, and the northern Indian subcontinent.35 Epistles in Arabic of the “Mirror of Princes” genre also reflected a mixture of Arabic and Persian cultural influences, as in the case of the manuals



31 Ibid., 143–​144, 159–​161; Mair 2012, 396.

32 Allen 1998, 220–​221, 228–​229; for the literary writings encompassed by the term adab, see 237–​247. 33 Spooner and Hanaway 2012, 5. 34 Ibid., 3.

35 Ibid., 2, 4, 15.

348  Javed Majeed written by ‘Abd al-​Hamid ‘al-​Katib (d. 750) and Ruzbih (d. 757).36 In the Persianate world, adab was honed as a behavioral model for public interaction and a literary model of correct usage, infused with pre-​Islamic influences and memories of the Sasanian class system.37 Both secretaries and poets contributed to the development of courtly and formal Persian in the medieval period. A number of prominent secretaries wrote poetry, and some manuals for secretaries, such as the mid-​fourteenth-​century manual by Hindushah Nakhjavani, included a section on what poets and writers of the past had said about the tools of writing. Both secretaries and poets also wrote manuals of prosody.38 The role of munshis as secretaries and professional writers highlights the close relation between governance and fine writing. The word munshi derives from an Arabic root meaning to compose something in writing, and munshis were writers of insha, that is, belletristic writings that covered prose composition, letters, documents, state papers, manuals of prosody, mirrors for princes, and books of ethics.39 Secretaries developed prose styles to meet the diplomatic and administrative needs of government; writing a good hand, correctness of reference and address, line length, spacing, and the correct folding of documents were all important and were covered in manuals.40 A significant factor in the spread of Persian as a koine was its secular character. While the Quran ultimately provided authority for Arabic usage, there was no such primary text for Persian.41 When Islam replaced Zoroastrianism and Arabic replaced Pahlavi as a scriptural and liturgical language, the Iranian vernacular Dari, which was free from religious associations, became the domain of literature in Iran. In part, this explains the inclusivity of the Persianate linguistic and cultural world.42 The achievement of Ferdowsi’s epic Shahnama (ca. 1010) as a secular celebration of Persianness and the expression of a royal and heroic tradition of a pre-​Islamic Iranian legend also played a key role in this inclusivity, as well as in determining the role of written Persian.43

The Imperial Self and the Barbarian Other Mair points out that in the “concatenation of writing, authority, and empire” the Persian and Chinese realms were “uncannily similar.”44 As noted earlier, the doctrine of wen signified the imbrication of culture, civilization, and literature for the Chinese imperial elite. Not surprisingly, then, literary and symbolic practices



36 Allen 1998, 230–​231

37 Spooner and Hanaway 2012, 24–​25.

38 Hanaway 2012, 95, 99, 109–​110, 112–​114. 39

Ibid.,  95–​96.

40 Spooner and Hanaway 2012, 21–​22; Hanaway 212, 102, 103, 108ff. 41 Spooner and Hanaway 2012, 14. 42 For which, see Perry 2012. 43 Ibid., 75ff, 86.

44 Mair 2012, 391–​392.

Literature of Empire  349 in China were intertwined with the imperial politics of difference and strategies of incorporation and exclusion. The transformation of Taiwan from a savage island beyond the seas into an integral part of the Chinese Empire with its annexation in 1684 is an instructive case of how the politics of difference was articulated in a range of literary and other texts. Chinese travel writing on Taiwan as a frontier region utilized a range of human differences (physical, cultural, intellectual, and moral) while locating such differences in terms of degrees along a spectrum of human universals.45 The category of gender was used in order to signify relations of power, with deviations from patriarchal norms deemed to be signs of barbarism:  the “savage” woman’s body was contrasted to the “proper” Chinese female’s body, and indigenous men were feminized to express the subordinate status of the colonized subject. These gendered representations were imbricated with anxieties about the improper crossing of the ethnic divide by Han Chinese men and the dangers of “going native,” as a result of which intermarriage between Han Chinese and indigenes was prohibited.46 Notions of physical, cultural, and moral differences intersected in visual representations of Taiwan as a frontier region.47 Literature and practices of writing also played a key role in reconfiguring the boundaries of civilization when China confronted the changing place of Japan in the global geopolitics of the late nineteenth century. Until then Japan was viewed as a minor island kingdom at the eastern edge of Chinese civilization, but in the changing world of the 1870s and 1880s defining the borders between what was Chinese and Japanese became an urgent question about the validity of the Chinese worldview and its notion of civilization.48 The new world order meant that the choice was between continuing to view Japan as part of the Chinese civilizational and linguistic zone, or as now alien and closer to the West.49 Since writing was seen as integral to civilization, this bookish conception of civilization and its textual model structured the worldview of the majority of Chinese scholars who traveled to and wrote about Japan in the late nineteenth century, grounding their belief that China and Japan shared the same cultural identity as tong wen or shared writing, which included practices like “brush talking.” Tong wen also referred to the standardization and unification of the writing system in the third century bce, brought about by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China; it therefore evoked the authoritative regularizing of language and the unifying of Chinese civilization around a common set of written texts and shared patterns of communication central to the imbrication of writing, authority, and empire.50 As Mair has noted, a key factor in the perpetuation of the “stunningly complex and politically pervasive bureaucratic



45 Teng 2004, 5, 14. 46 Ibid., ch. 7. 47 Ibid., 6.

48 Howland 1996, 1–​2. 49

Ibid.,  6–​8.

50 Ibid., 13, 15, 54.

350  Javed Majeed structure” of pre-​modern China was proficiency in this writing system.51 Howland discusses the “brush talks” of the 1870s and 1880s, showing how they reflected the cultural priorities of a Chinese imperial elite, with the participation of Japanese scholars in the ritualized play of civilized sociability and occasional poetry reinforcing this sense of a shared civilization.52 But the new “Western” elements in Japan during the 1870s and 1880 also destabilized this framework.53 One approach to this new state of affairs was Huang Zunxian’s Poems on Divers Japanese Affairs (1880) which assumed that ancient Chinese ways and texts were the origins of observed Japanese practices; this was expanded to argue that Western learning itself originated in China.54 At the same time, Huang Zunxian introduced a new set of terms giving Chinese readers the vocabulary for describing this new world and cultural order.55 Ultimately, though, the Sino-​Japanese War of 1894 showed that as a world order Chinese civilization was under threat, and it could only be restored through redefinition.56 However, the dramatization of the politics of difference in imperial literatures often revealed the boundaries between the civilized self and the barbaric other to be fragile and porous. Ancient Greek literature employed a complex set of signifiers evoking the “otherness” of the barbarian in ethnic, psychological, and political terms. Many tragedies from the Athenian theater of the fifth century bce portrayed barbarian characters and refer to barbarian customs.57 This polarization can be partly explained by the military conflict with Persia in the early fifth century bce, with the image of an external enemy helping to forge a sense of community among allied states, while reinforcing a Greek self-​perception of democracy and egalitarianism in contrast to Persian and “Oriental” despotism and hierarchy. Details about the Persian administration and the representation of its excessive protocol created an antithesis between Greeks and non-​Greeks predicated on a political psychology in which a despotic Persian administration is the opposite of the Athenian democratic system and the accountability of Athenian magistrates.58 However, in ancient Greek literature the barbarian world was not just the home of tyrants and savages; it was also the place where those who retained an intimacy with mystical knowledge that civilized Greeks had lost enjoyed harmonious relations with the heavens. Several barbarian characters in Greek tragedy have Hellenic virtues equaling or surpassing their Greek counterparts, and the tension between the deviant acts of ancient heroes in Greek myths and the practices of contemporary barbarians undercut the opposition between Greeks and barbarians in some texts.59

51 Mair 2012, 393–​394, 405 note 6. 52 Howland 1996, ch. 2. 53

Ibid., 197–​199. Ibid., 203–​206. 55 Ibid., 227–​233. 56 Ibid., 241. 57 Hall 1989, 1, chs. 2–​3. 58 Ibid., 1, 2, 9, 16, 93–​98. 59 Hall 1989, 149, 211. 54

Literature of Empire  351 The porosity of the civilized-​barbarian distinction also reflects the practices of the politics of difference on the edges of empires, and the complex relationships between primary empires and the “shadow empires” which were structurally linked to them.60 The interaction between the Xiongnu Empire’s confederation of nomadic clans (second century BCE -​first century CE) and the Chinese empire shaped China’s statecraft and ideology. The empires on the Eurasian steppes came into existence with the unification of China and disappeared when it collapsed, and the contact zones between the two were characterized by coercion and conflict as well as negotiation and accommodation.61 Teng has discussed the redrawing of the “savage boundary” within Taiwan in terms of frontier management on a par with the Great Wall and other Qing projects that worked with the civilized-​barbarian distinction. Maps reinforced the distinction between imperial civilization and the realm beyond the pale, but in practice the distinction was more of a continuum than a clear line.62 Frontier regions like Taiwan were not always characterized by a binary opposition between colonizer and colonized: they were home to a multilevel hierarchy of colonial officials, both Manchu and Han, along with Han Chinese settlers and a variety of indigenous peoples.63 The shift from conceptualizing Taiwan as a wilderness to a “hedgerow” captures the ambiguous nature of the boundaries between imperial civilizations and barbarism. Taiwan occupied a liminal position neither fully inside nor fully outside the Chinese domain; “rather, it was itself the boundary between the inner and the outer.”64 Moreover, while Chinese frontier literature was often preoccupied with “savages,” it also reflected on Chinese culture itself and this sometimes led to a questioning of the latter’s universality.65 These tensions between difference and sameness, distance and union, and the exotic and the familiar, were evident in Taiwan’s move from savage island to Chinese province in Qing literature and maps.66 Post-​imperial literary texts have dramatized the psychic and emotive investment in the figure of the “barbarian” as a precarious process of self-​definition. In her study of the collision between Chinese and British notions of civilization and barbarism in the nineteenth century, and the British efforts to ban the Chinese character they took to represent “barbarian” from the Anglo-​Chinese Treaty of 1858, Lydia Liu argues that the sovereign and imperial British subject tried to root out the ghost of the barbarian from itself so that it could become whole, positive, and real.67 J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) explores the porosity of these boundaries, and the psychic and symbolic investments imperial subjects make in the figure of the barbarian. Set in the frontier town of a crumbling empire, its first-​person narrator, an aging magistrate with a libertine past who struggles with his sexual desires for a tortured and 60 Barfield 2001,  29–​40. 61 Burbank and Cooper 2010, 4, 45, 52–​53; Barfield 2001, 22, 24; Teng 2004, 117–​125. 62 Teng 2004, 117–​125. For the cosmological structure of meaning framing the Great Wall and other barriers built to mark the limits of empire from barbarians, see Yates 2001, 353–​366. 63 Teng 2004, 11. 64 Ibid., 59. 65 Ibid.,  19–​20. 66 Teng 2004, 17. 67 Liu 2004, 104.

352  Javed Majeed semi-​blinded “barbarian” girl, is increasingly drawn to the barbarians the “empire” sets itself up against. The novel chronicles the reversals between the terms “civilization” and “barbarianism” in an atmosphere of extreme imperial violence and torture, and plots the magistrate’s slide into “treachery” as he confronts the extra-​legal military powers that aim to shore up the empire’s frontiers. The “barbarians” are a spectral presence in the book, embedded in the paranoid logic of an empire that keeps its civilized population in a constant state of fear. They rarely appear qua barbarians, and when they do, they disaggregate into distinct individuals with specific cultural and linguistic identities, and as a range of different groups from “fisher folk” to “nomads.” In the novel “barbarians” tend to be a continually receding horizon that the “empire” can never reach. Far from the sovereign subject becoming whole by rooting out the ghost of the barbarian, here that ghost is embraced and the magistrate is left feeling “like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.”68 He is confronted with the disintegration of the epic shape of imperial world history that Quint argues was inaugurated by Virgil’s Aeneid: What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged end of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.69

Romance narrative, with its random or circular wandering and stress on contingency and change, was the “other” of the teleological plot of this epic linear narrative.70 In Coetzee’s novel, the disintegration of the epic shape of world history and the protagonist’s consequent sense of aimlessness marks the return of romance. It is also a sign of the magistrate’s dissenting voice within the empire; as Quint puts it, “in opposition to a linear teleology that disguises power as reason and universalizes imperial conquest as the imposition of unity upon the flow of history, the dissenting narrative becomes deliberately disconnected and aimless.”71 This experience of disconnection and aimlessness marks the end of Waiting for the Barbarians. Romance as a genre of writing also evokes appetites or desires as part of being human, in opposition to imperial narratives of reason that want to “straighten out” human



68 Coetzee 2004, 170. 69 Ibid. 146.

70 Quint 1993, 9.

71 Ibid. 41; see also 9, 30, 34, 34–​37.

Literature of Empire  353 experience.72 Throughout the novel, the magistrate struggles with the ebb and flow of his own sexuality, in contrast to the military officer stationed at the frontier to bring order to chaos, who is “the kind of man who drives his body like a machine . . . ignorant that it has its own rhythms.”73

Classics and Empires of Nostalgia The narrator in Waiting for the Barbarians dreams of the life he could have had as a colonial magistrate: living in a villa on a quiet street, “going hunting every morning, occupying my evenings in the classics.”74 At one point, he is able to return briefly to his “old recreations”: “I read the classics; I continue to catalogue my various collections; I collate what maps we have.”75 Ideas of the classical, and texts canonized as “classics,” played an influential role in “empires of nostalgia.”76 The “potent afterlife” of empires took a variety of forms, from emulation and memorializing to rejection (see also Vasunia, chap. 15 in vol. 1).77 The Roman Empire was used as a model of empire from the Middle Ages into the early modern period in Europe and the Middle East.78 The emulation of Rome played a role in Spanish imperial traditions in the Americas too.79 Roman antecedents framed Spanish understanding of Inca administration, urbanization, and religion80 and both sides in “the Controversy of the Indies” in the 1550s drew on classical philosophy and the Roman Empire as historical precedent when they addressed the rights and treatment of the Amerindians by the colonizers.81 Spaniards compared the Inca capital to the city of Rome in antiquity, and likened Inca social and religious organization to Roman counterparts. This included comparing Inca deities to the deities of the ancient Mediterranean world and Roman domestic worship.82 Similarly, in the early part of established British rule in India, the famous linguist and legal scholar Sir William Jones (1746–​1794), compared the deities of ancient Rome and Greece to those of contemporary India, and in the context of his proposed digest of Indian laws described himself as the “Justinian of India.”83 His comparative mythology was underpinned by his emphasis on the relationship between Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.84 Jones also played a key role in the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784; this society was pivotal in establishing empirical historical research into India’s past, one strand of which was the mapping of

72 Ibid., 34–​37, for a discussion of this in Ariosto’s Furioso. 73 Coetzee 2004, 84. 74 Ibid., 22. 75 Ibid., 41.

76 Barfield 2001, 34, 38–​40. 77 Alcock 2001.

78 Woolf 2001, 312; Burbank and Cooper 2010, 15.

79 Burbank and Cooper 201, 41–​42; Moreland 2001. 80 MacCormack 2001. 81 Laird 2006, 9, 10.

82 MacCormack 2001; Laird 2006, 9–​10. 83 Majeed 1992, ch. 1. 84 Ibid., ch. 1.

354  Javed Majeed “classics” onto India. The resulting periodization of Indian culture was analogous to that of Greece and Rome in contemporary Europe, leading to the formulation of “classical” India as a category in its own right, with Sanskrit texts and Brahmanical Hinduism acquiring the prestige of “classics” and the “classical.”85 Comparisons with the Roman Empire, some of them anxious, were an important part of British imperial self-​definitions.86 European classical learning had a prominent place in the syllabi for the Indian Civil Service examinations, where the scheme of marking and the reading lists reflected the importance given to this learning in shaping the class and gender identities of imperial administrators for India.87 Virgil tended to be popular with British officials in India, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, as indicated by the many references to him and the Aeneid as an imperial epic in their books, diaries, journal articles, memoirs, and official reports.88 The idea of the Roman Empire as a providential vehicle for the dissemination of Christianity further enhanced Virgil’s appeal to British officials.89 Both colonizers and the colonized in British India engaged with ideas of Greco-​ Roman antiquity in order to make cross-​cultural connections and to reflect upon the conditions and historical experiences they were grappling with.90 Indian authors and scholars turned to Homer rather than Virgil because the Homeric poems and Sanskrit epics were part of debates about the early sources of language, religion, and culture.91 In the wake of the Indo-​European hypothesis, Greek history had become the “antique twin” of Indian history. By the 1850s, Indian and other Asian intellectuals’ understanding of the ancient history of southern Asia included comparisons of ancient India with Greece and Rome in their writings.92 Urdu poets such as Altaf Husain Hali (1837–​1914) and Muhammad Iqbal (1877–​1938) used ancient Greece and Rome as tropes for a variety of purposes in their poems, calling upon a long history of Islamic Hellenism,93 while both Gandhi and Nehru re-​ presented Plato and Socrates (and ancient Greece as whole) within their differing versions of Indian nationalism.94 A patriotic and competitive antiquity with Greece and Rome was also evident in Nehru’s autobiographies, where it framed his handling of time and the shaping of temporality in his narratives.95 In the political and historical works of Indian liberal thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comparisons between ancient India, Rome, and Greece were a prominent strand in their “classicism of anti-​imperial modernity.”96



85 Vasunia 2013, 10–​11. 86 Majeed 1999.

87 Majeed 1999; Vasunia 2013, ch. 5. 88 Vasunia 2013, ch. 6. 89 Ibid., 153, 270. 90

Ibid.,  27–​28.

91 Ibid., 239–​240, 251, chs. 6, 7. 92 Bayly 2011, 47, 163ff.

93 For which see Rosenthal 1975; and Fakhry 1994.

94 Majeed 2007b, ch. 7; 2006a; Vasunia 2013, 335–​349. 95 Majeed 2007a, 174–​185, 103–​104.

96 Bayly 2011, 180, 189; Vasunia 2013, 122.

Literature of Empire  355 The engagement with and appropriation of Graeco-​Roman classical literature was also evident in the Spanish Americas. With the establishment of two colleges in 1527 and 1536 by Franciscans in colonial Mexico to recruit indigenous intermediaries for the conversion of the native population, Indians began to read and write Latin. The colleges’ legacy influenced the evolution of humanism and the classical tradition in New Spain, and Latin as a language adopted fresh meanings and new expressions as a result of its transplantation.97 Multivalent connections were forged between the Greco-​Roman tradition and the ethnically complex Hispanic American heritage.98 Epic poems in Latin, such as Rafael Landívar’s (1731–​1793) Rusticatio Mexicano (1781), were patriotic assertions of the wonders, beauty, and wealth of the author’s American homeland. Its complex formal techniques point to a rich literary cosmopolitanism in the Americas as the poem draws on a wide range of Greek and Roman authors to represent the geography, wildlife, traditions, and forms of production in the American countryside.99 Other Latin epics from this region were also triumphs in “patriotic syncretism.”100

Multilingualism and Hybridity Thus, empires created syncretistic possibilities for writers. Some of the Latin works in the Spanish Americas combine Latin with words from Amerindian languages such as Nahuatl.101 The earliest example of Latin produced by a native author in New Spain in 1541 uses Nahuatl terms for some commodities, and an illustrated herbal of 1552 uses Mexican vocabulary where there were no European names. In texts like these, the writers provided Latin glosses or explanations of words they incorporated from their own languages, and Latin expression was itself sometimes determined by Nahuatl formulae and protocols.102 Empires opened up creative possibilities and choices for writers and thinkers, not least in the choice of language to write in. The parameters of such a choice depended on the imperium in question. In his “sociolinguistic biography” of Sanskrit, Sheldon Pollock has shown how Sanskrit’s relationship to local speech types was hyperglossic. Local languages achieved written expression through the mediation of Sanskrit and, as a result, developed in ways that led to its supersession. Across the Sanskrit cosmopolis, scripts asserted a regional individuality to the extent that in the eighth century ce the same language was written in a range of alphabets that were distinct from each other.103 Sanskrit was not dependent on a military-​political project as such for its dissemination, although as Romila

97

Laird 2006, 11–​13; 2014a, 151–​152. Laird 2006, 5. 99 Ibid., 45–​59, 67; for other patriotic assertions in Mexican Latin texts, ibid., 21–​22. 100 Ibid., 19–​30, Laird 2014b, 826. 101 Laird 2006, 13. 102 Laird 2014a, 152–​155, 163–​165. 103 Pollock 2011, ch. 7 98

356  Javed Majeed Thapar has stressed, it was an elite language, and its political and cultural hegemony often led to sharp distinctions between high and popular culture. As a language of power, inscriptions in Sanskrit often listed conquests and the epics glorified kingship. Moreover, as in the case of the term barbaros and ‘ajam, used by the Greeks and Arabs, respectively, to refer to barbarians who could not speak Greek and Arabic properly, the term mlechcha originally referred to those who were unable to speak Sanskrit properly, and later to those who were outside the pale of caste society and therefore impure.104 Similarly, within the Persian cosmopolis in India from the eleventh century onward, Persian coexisted as a trans-​local idiom with a uniformity of register alongside locally rooted and sacerdotal languages. India was one region among many in Persian’s spread as an international literary language from the ninth century onward. In part, its inclusivity can be attributed to its direct ancestor at the time of the Arab Muslim conquest being a language devoid of immediate religious associations.105 Its “nonsectarian catholicity” made it amenable to the demands of Mughal kingship in the Indian context, hence its choice as the administrative language in the Emperor Akbar’s reign (1556–​1605).106 A substantial part of the administration was carried out by Hindu communities who adopted Persian and whose literary achievements in it were considerable. The development of a complex Indo-​Persian literary culture is just one example of the inclusivity of Persian as a transnational literary language, although this inclusivity was also dependent on a complex, learned form of the language, which distinguished its users from the rest of the population (analyzed by Kinra in chap. 27, vol. 2).107 Latin, too, was not imposed by force or through law as an official language, and the Romans did not make an “aggressive attempt to impose their language in any part of the Empire,” nor was there an explicit policy that subject peoples should learn Latin.108 The Roman Republic and Roman Empire were bicultural and bilingual creations from the start, and the Romans were not monolingual in the administration of empire because they operated in two languages, namely Greek and Latin.109 Greek had a prominent place in the upper-​class Roman education system (as outlined earlier) and had prestige because of its literature. Mullen discusses elite and non-​elite Greek and Latin bilingualism,110 and there is evidence for other forms of bilingualism too, such as the graffiti uncovered at the site of La Graufesenque in southwest France, mostly of firing lists inscribed into pottery, where there are inscriptions in Gaulish, Latin, and a mixture of the two, analyzed at length by Adams.111 Just as Vedic Sanskrit was affected by borrowings from other languages, including those of

104

Thapar 2002, 114–​115, 217, 312. Perry 2012. Alam 2003, 162ff, 188. 107 Perry 2012, 87–​91; Alam 2003, passim. 108 Adams 2003, 545, 758. 109 Mullen 2011, 527; Adams 2003, 757. 110 Mullen 2003, 529, 532. 111 Adams 2003, 687–​724. 105 106

Literature of Empire  357 groups who were designated mlechcha,112 so too there is evidence of the influence of languages other than Greek on Latin in provincial areas of Italy and further afield in the west. Languages in outlying parts of the Empire made more of a contribution to the Latin lexicon, with examples evident from Africa, the Germanic regions, Spain, and Egypt.113 In Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, local languages receded before Latin and eventually died, but it was the esteem in which Latin was held and the need for self-​advancement which determined this language shift, not an imperial language policy or a military-​bureaucratic project as such. This is not to say that Latin was not used at times to assert the power of Rome symbolically; the connection between Latin and citizenship came to the fore in Egypt, where certain types of legal documents had to be in Latin even if the citizens concerned did not know the language. However, this also led to complicated mixed-​language texts rather than monolingual Latin texts alone (see further Bang, chap. 9, vol. 2).114 Within the modern English-​speaking world, the issue of which language to write in and the colonial associations of English have been a source of contention among writers. The differing positions of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on writing in English exemplify this. Achebe acknowledged that writing in English can feel like a “dreadful betrayal [of one’s mother-​tongue] and produces a guilty feeling,” but he adds, “I have been given this language and I intend to use it.” The English language can, he argued, “carry the weight of my African experience,” and it will therefore be a “new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings,” without losing its value as a “medium of international exchange.” The very existence of English as a world language means it is amenable to different kinds of use.115 In response to Achebe, Ngũgĩ stressed the linguistic and epistemic dimensions of colonial violence; as he puts it, when referring to the Berlin conference of 1884, “the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.”116 He emphasizes, as some historians have done, that colonialism is not a political or economic process alone, but also involves cultural domination, and the “domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.”117 In his view, this domination was especially evident in the cultural identity of a comprador bourgeoisie who were intermediaries between the European metropolis and the peasantry and working classes.118 This multilingual dimension to the politics of difference in empire, and the predicament it creates, are the subject matter of R. K. Narayan’s novel The English Teacher (1945). 112 Emeneau 1980, ch. 5. 113 Adams 2003, 284–​285; for Oscan, Umbrian, Venetic, and Messapic, see 112–​159; for Etruscan, 159–​184; Celtic/​Gaulish, 184–​200. 114 Adams 2003, 558–​561, 562, 564–​570, 570–​571. There is no space here to consider the multilingualism of the Spanish American empire, for which see Echávez-​Solano and Dworkin Méndez 2007; and Errington 2007; among others. 115 Achebe 1975, 61–​62. 116 Ngũgĩ 1986, 11. 117 Ibid., 16. 118 Ibid.,  20–​22.

358  Javed Majeed Here the angst-​ridden linguistic and pedagogical choices of the central character and their consequences are also dramatized in gendered terms; Tamil, as opposed to the English he tries to teach, is associated with a feminine Indian presence, in this case his wife. The gendering of Tamil in the novel reflects the processes that underlay the personification of Tamil as a goddess for Tamil activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was paralleled by a similar imagining of other Indian languages in gendered terms.119 The novel therefore reminds us of how imperial and postcolonial politics of difference were also imbricated with gendered representations, ranging from the imagining of colonized lands to the conceptualization of languages as feminine. The fact that Achebe and Ngũgĩ could debate the significance of their linguistic choices shows that whatever the hegemonic weight and official prestige of English in the British Empire, it did not eliminate all local languages in its sphere of influence. In India the relationship between English and Indian languages was complex, with different strands of colonial policy promoting English in certain spheres and Indian languages in others.120 Paralleling these policies were the social mechanisms enabling English to migrate from its community of migrant native speakers to groups of potential Indian users in zones of interracial contact and acculturation.121 The extensive production of grammars, glossaries, manuals, dictionaries, and editions of Indian texts was a crucial part of the colonial production of knowledge about India and in the expansion of English in the subcontinent.122 Lexicography was a key genre in the negotiation between English and Indian languages; in this context the opening up of languages to each other, the slipperiness of transferring meanings across languages, and different styles of lexicography generated their own cultural and ethnological politics.123 In general, lexicography played a key role in defining relationships between different languages in multilingual imperial environments. In the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, missionaries’ artes or manuals of Amerindian languages were normally in Spanish or Portuguese. Some, however, were also in Latin, and others were trilingual, as in a Spanish-​Latin-​Nahuatl manuscript dictionary of circa 1530–​1555.124 In the Sanskrit cosmopolis, dictionaries and lexicons had an influential role to play in the relationship between Sanskrit and local languages, especially in South India. In the late tenth century, for example, the first dictionary of Kannada (ca. 990) offered synonyms of rare Kannada words by way of the local lexeme or Sanskrit derivatives and supplied definitions in Sanskrit of Kannada words. The main purpose of the Sanskrit-​Kannada lexicons that followed in the succeeding centuries, modeled on Sanskrit lexicographers, was to make available



119

Ramaswamy 1997: King 1992, 123–​147. Moir and Zastoupil 1999. 121 Dahrwadker 2003, 206–​216. 122 Cohn 1985, 276–​329. 123 Majeed 2014. 124 Laird 2014b, 823; 2014a, 153–​154. 120

Literature of Empire  359 to Kannada poets a range of Sanskrit vocables and their synonyms. An important lexicon in the relationship between Sanskrit and local languages is Hemacandra’s Desinamamala (Dictionary of the Words of Place, ca. 1150), which reflects the growing prominence of localized culture in theoretical reflection.125 However, lexicography also performed other functions in multilingual empires. In the Persian cosmopolis of India during the medieval period, some Persian glossaries compiled in the tenth and eleventh centuries were motivated by the need to gloss difficult dialect words or archaic vocabulary used in the earliest literary works in New Persian, especially the Shahnama. The glossaries compiled in India between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had as their principal object the creation of a manual for reading and understanding this poem, and were also commentaries on the classics of Persian literature. They were addressed to readers of Persian poetic texts, enabling them to appreciate the lexical ingenuity of writers, and they catered to poets by expanding lexical options and facilitating the selection of rhymes. The citation of supporting verses from the early Persian classics is the rule in the definition of entries, so that many of these glossaries were also de facto anthologies of verse.126 The creative promise and pitfalls of cosmopolitan and syncretistic cultural, literary, and linguistic imaginations fashioned in the crucible of empires are captured by Chinua Achebe when he writes of how “we lived at the crossroads of cultures . . . the crossroads do have a certain dangerous potency; dangerous because a man might perish there wrestling with multiple-​headed spirits, but also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of prophetic vision.”127 The bringing together of different languages within empires meant writers could experiment with mixing languages in their creative works. This is an important technique in some works of imperial and anti-​imperial literature produced during and after empires. The incorporation of Igbo lexical items in Chinua Achebe’s (1930–​2013) novel Things Fall Apart (1959) dramatizes the narrator’s double consciousness, as both detached observer, reflected in the ethnographically distancing effect of such statements as “Darkness held a vague terror for these people,”128 and knowledgeable insider and wise tribal elder of Igbo society; ethnographic distance is combined with “autoethnographic” intimacy. The linguistic creativity of the novel both frames and compensates for the way key Igbo protagonists are silenced at the end by the central character’s suicide (“He could say no more. His voice trembled and choked his words”129), and recreates at another level the eloquence that is shown to be prized in Igbo society, which makes such a fall into silence doubly poignant. The imperial politics of difference produced multilingual and cross-​cultural sensibilities which are dramatized in the narrative voices, eclectic

125

Pollock 2011, 368–​369, 402–​405. Baevskii 2007, 124–​125, 160, 171, 175–​176. 127 Achebe 1975, 68. 128 Achebe 1994, 9. 129 Ibid., 208. 126

360  Javed Majeed styles, and linguistic textures of other novels such as Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-​ Wine Drinkard (1952) with its mixing of Yoruba and English, G. V. Desani’s (1909–​ 2000) All About H. Hatterr (1948), and Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1984). In Desani, the exhilarating enactment of the “middling messy” of interpenetrating languages and cultures produced by the legacies of empire is foregrounded by the narrator’s provocative statement that “I am debtor both to the Greeks and the Barbarians,” appropriately calling attention to the primary linguistic meaning of the latter’s onomatopoeic evocation of babbling. In Shame the playful and destabilizing ironies produced by post-​imperial sensibilities are reflected in the narrator’s self-​ conceptualization as both insider and outsider to multiple cultural and linguistic worlds using the terms of translation: I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion . . . that something can also be gained.130

The complex personae of narrators in texts such as these emerge from the legacies of the politics of difference in empires. Roberto Schwarz discusses how in José de Alcenar’s (1829–​1877) novels the narrator speaks with different voices, sometimes as a social chronicler, at other times a wise commentator, a strict moralist, an educated man aware of Brazil’s provincial status, and a respecter of local social practices. The use of diverse terms of reference produces realist fiction that is inconsistent but also valuable because of its “mimetic accuracy” to Brazilian social life as a post-​imperial society caught between liberal political ideals and the “rule of favour”; these contradictions are also articulated in the “alternation between incompatible ideological presuppositions” in his novels.131 Thus, authors like Achebe, Rushdie, and many others writing in English and other ex-​imperial languages, enact multilingual and cross-​cultural sensibilities in their narrators’ personae as part of a repertoire of techniques to reframe and subvert imperial legacies and their ideological binaries. But imperial texts like Kipling’s Kim (1901) also evoke the cultural and linguistic mixing of empire by using a range of techniques from phonetic interference to hybridized and hyphenated linguistic items.132 At the same time, though, it tries to contain this mixing in order to safeguard the cultural and racial differences crucial to British imperial authority in India, hence the impossibility (for its author) of having its central protagonist being of English ethnicity, as opposed to a malleable Indianized orphan of Irish ancestry, who is thereby suitable for the role of an imperial intermediary—​a role, though, which takes its psychic toll in terms of the periodic crises of identity Kim is shown to suffer in the novel. The novel’s narrative voice, so closely aligned



130

Rushdie 1983 (reprint 1984), 29. Schwarz 1992, ch. 4. 132 Husain 1983 is a rigorous examination of the linguistic texture of Kipling’s Indian texts. 131

Literature of Empire  361 and yet ambivalent toward Kim as its focalizer, is simultaneously linguistically and culturally creolized and imperially distant and belittling, reflecting the unstable politics of difference in the novel. This kind of ambivalence also characterizes the British Indian glossary Hobson-​Jobson (1886), which enacts the split identity of the British in India as linguistically creolized in their everyday dealings in the subcontinent while trying to maintain a cultural and social distance from it.133 As such, it reproduces a defining imperial tension between a high-​status language and the linguistic mixtures required for the practicalities of everyday life in imperial territories. Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931) is similarly characterized by a divided mode of identification (in this case with China); it destabilizes cultural affiliations, while rehearsing an imperial perspective and dramatizing anti-​ imperialist possibilities in its narrative. Colonial and neo-​colonial novels such as these blur the cultural and linguistic binaries produced by the politics of difference in modern empires, while disavowing this blurring because of the threat it poses to an imperial authority grounded in the supposed stability of cultural, racial, and linguistic differences.

Cosmopolitan Nationalism The multilingualism and cross-​cultural sensibilities that shape texts by authors such as Achebe, Rushdie, and others, also underpins a distinctive cosmopolitanism which is the product of modern empires. Schwarz stresses that imperial literary legacies in the case of Brazil mean that oppositions between the original and the imitative, the foreign and the national, are unhelpful; they obscure “the share of the foreign in the nationally specific, of the imitative in the original and the original in the imitative.”134 Borges makes a similar point about “The Argentine Writer,” arguing that the idea that Argentinian poetry must abound in Argentine differential traits and in “local color” is a recent European “import.” He points out that it would be absurd to say that Shakespeare was not an English writer because he did not stick to English subjects; just as the use of Italian subjects belongs to the tradition of English literature, so also the Argentinian literary tradition, he argues, is the “whole of Western culture.”135 Borges’s position points to the complex relationships between cosmopolitan expansiveness and the nation’s uniqueness in anti-​imperial and “national” literature. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) exemplifies such complexities as a cosmopolitan nationalist text because it crosses both linguistic and geographical boundaries. It was published in Gujarati in 1909 and in an English translation by Gandhi in 1910; the text was therefore a multilingual event, working with and through the



133

Majeed 2006b; and Teltscher 2013, introduction. Schwarz 1992, 16, 69. 135 Borges 2000, 426. 134

362  Javed Majeed multilingual environment of the British Empire in India and South Africa. Its publication in South Africa by Gandhi’s own press points to the enabling role of the diasporic experience in defining Gandhi’s key anti-​imperial ideas. The manuscript was written by Gandhi while on board a ship, sailing between England and South Africa, so its inception is testimony to the importance of the experiences and ideas of travel to the political consciousness of Indian nationalist writers.136 Gandhi’s book was a response to the debate among Indians outside India on the justifiability of violence against imperial rule. It participated in a global exchange in which Indian revolutionaries in North America, such as Taraknath Das (1884–​ 1958), the Russian novelist Tolstoy, and Gandhi were interlocutors. The text uses European history for its own purposes, and one of its chapters draws on Italian unification for inspiration. The appendix lists works by Plato, Mazzini, Tolstoy, and Ruskin, bringing together authors in a globalized intertextuality which crosses linguistic, cultural, and regional boundaries. Given the importance of dialogue as a philosophical method in both Sanskrit and in European philosophy, the text’s reworking of this form as a dialogue between an editor and reader also has cross-​ cultural resonances. European imperial expansion and the global circulation of ideas gave colonized intellectuals like Gandhi opportunities to dissect Western ideologies and to construct hybrid species of ideas that appealed to both local audiences and the wider world.137 Cosmopolitan thought zones were a crucial dimension to the aspirational cosmopolitanism of anti-​imperial thinkers and writers from the Indian subcontinent. The circulation of people, concepts, knowledge, texts, and fashions galvanized nationalist politics and inspired artistic and literary production.138 The web-​like character of the British Empire with horizontal linkages between colonies also facilitated inter-​colonial exchanges and the flow of texts, bodies of knowledge, and concepts.139 The interleaving of personal identity, a transregional India, and world politics is effected in the formal techniques and writing styles of Jawaharlal Nehru’s autobiographies, whose distinctive cosmopolitanism is worked into the text in a myriad of ways to define a secular India.140 This cosmopolitanism is also indicative of Nehru’s intertwined careers as a nationalist politician and an activist participating in a number of transnational solidarity movements.141 In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries nationalists sometimes worked in conjunction and sometimes at odds with these movements, shifting between identifying with the territorial concept of the nation and expressing notions of solidarity across space with only loose associations with state institutions. By the 1930s a variety of international political movements had come into being, with inter-​empire connections



136

Majeed 2007a. Bayly 2004, 476–​477. 138 Bose and Manjapra 2010, introduction. 139 Tony Ballantyne explores this dimension of the British empire in Ballantyne 2002. 140 Majeed 2007a, ch.4. 141 Zachariah 2004, 58–​59; Gopal 1975, vol. 1, 100–​104. 137

Literature of Empire  363 conditioning the development of movements such as pan-​Africanism, négritude, and communism.142

Becoming National This shaping of political imaginations within and against empires reveals how historical trajectories are more complicated than simply a movement from empire toward nation-​states.143 The violent effects and messiness of making nation-​states in the wake of empires have been prominent themes in literatures shaped by imperial legacies. This messiness is staged on a number of levels in Wu Zhuoliu’s poignant novel Orphan of Asia (1946). Set during the Sino-​Japanese war of 1937–​1945, World War II, and the period leading up to these epochal events, it dramatizes how, in the words of Taiming, its central character, Taiwan is “caught in the vicissitudes of history.”144 The disorientating effects of the multiple formative cultural and linguistic influences of China and Japan on Taiwan are brought to a head during the war and Japanese occupation, with Taiming forced to make harsh choices as a collaborator with the Japanese, while at the same time resisting the political and cultural demands placed on him by both nationalists and imperialists for “clearer self-​definition.”145 Vacillating between identifying with China and Japan, partly exemplified through his troubled relationships with different women that highlight his own fragile masculinity, he becomes a “small rudderless boat drifting between the currents of two epochs,” and in his troubled sleep he flits “from Shanghai to Taiwan to Japan.”146 The burden of these choices posed by both empire and nation precipitates his final descent into madness, expressed in the daubing of enigmatic aphoristic statements on the walls of his home village. The novel hollows out the genre of a nationalist bildungsroman with a narrative of repeatedly frustrated homecomings. Prior to becoming deranged, Taiming denounces the “depths of delusion” required to make nationalized selves: The mass murder that had taken place during the war had been rationalized and even made heroic in the name of the “nation.” Every possible contradiction had originated in the belly of “the nation.” Taking “the nation” as a presupposition had distorted the study of history; textbooks were nothing more than propaganda meant to justify the nation and protect its power. In short, the curriculum from elementary school to university was nothing more than a continual reiteration of that propaganda. This education had accustomed people to the idea

142

Burbank and Cooper 2010, 387, 402–​403. Stressed in ibid., 2. 144 Wu 2006, e-​book, location 2563. 145 Ibid., location 499. 146 Ibid., location 499, 1744. 143

364  Javed Majeed of nationhood until it became a custom and then finally a system unto itself. The purpose of such a system is to cast human beings into one identical mold. Those who refuse to be made over in such a fashion are labeled heretics and troublemakers.147

Taiming’s moment of clarity and final act of self-​definition against nationalism precipitates his descent into madness, bearing testimony to the hegemonic force of the compulsion to become national, and the difficulties of living outside the idea of the nation in the twentieth century. Such difficulties are intensified in regions where the legacy of colonialism has been particularly divisive. In Israel/​Palestine the statelessness of part of the population has foregrounded the liberating potential of the nation by its absence, while problematizing the creation of a nation-​state that has displaced an existing population. Even here, though, authors have been concerned to distance their writings from the perceived philistinism of nationalist aesthetics. In his Arabic novel, I Saw Ramallah (1997), Mourid Barghouti defines himself against “the poetry of the stones,”148 while Amos Oz has expressed his frustration at readers reading “our literature as political allegory” alone.149 These assertions against “the simplifying tendencies of writing at the command of a nation” are paralleled by the complex staging of the nation in their texts.150 The centrality of newspapers and novels in imagining the nation (as argued by Anderson) is supplemented by Barghouti, who calls attention to how the Palestinian is a “telephonic person”; global telephone lines are a crucial component of the diasporic Palestinian nation dispersed in multiple time zones, just as the radio is central to the fantasy of the Indian nation in Midnight’s Children.151 Barghouti also uses the experience of exile to reflect upon the act of writing as a “displacement from the normal social contract,” forcing the writer to become a stranger to his own tribe; for him, becoming a poet is linked to his “discovery of how faded all abstracts and absolutes” like the nation are.152 Amos Oz’s My Michael dramatizes this fadedness of the nation through its disaggregation in the psychological distress of Hannah, the first-​person narrator who cannot become a healthy, fully signed-​up citizen-​protagonist. Troubled by Zionist triumphalism, and haunted by sexually charged and violent dreams of the Arab twins she knew in her childhood, she remains alienated from her motherly role of reproducing the nation. The gendered tensions of becoming national are evoked through the relationships between dreams, literature, and poetry too slippery to fit in with national paradigms (Hannah is a student of literature), and the technically dry and scientific geological treatises of her nationally committed



147

Ibid., location 4003. Barghouti, 2005, 160, 42. 149 Oz 1994, 74. 150 Bernard 2013, 71, 69. 151 Barghouti 2005, 126. 152 Ibid., 132–​133, 62. 148

Literature of Empire  365 husband (although there are affinities between the two, noted in passing by Hannah).153 These tensions are also captured in Miles Franklin’s (1879–​1954) My Brilliant Career, ironically published in the year Australia became a federation (1901). Despite the narrator’s own criticisms of the conventions of romance in her introduction, the text slips in and out of realism and romance, with her resorting to the language of the Victorian heroine of romance or melodrama at crucial points of the text.154 The generic instability of the text reflects the inability of its narrator-​ protagonist to find a stable subject and class position in the landscape and economy of an emerging nation rooted in patriarchal norms and an overtly masculine ethos. Henry Lawson’s preface unconsciously reflects the gendered politics of writing in becoming national; he points to the “girlishly emotional parts of the book” as being in tension with “descriptions of bush life and scenery”; the latter are “painfully real” and “true to Australia.155 Lawson’s masculine aesthetic governed his own Short Stories in Poetry and Prose (1894), and was aggressively expressed in the influential Bulletin, founded in 1880 as the National Australian Newspaper, with its subtitle “Australia for the White Man” reflecting a racialized masculinity as the cornerstone of the emerging nation. The destabilizing effects of nationalism and the psychological distress it engenders in individuals as they switch allegiances, form new ones, and re-​ identify and re-​locate places within newly defined territories are captured in the bleakly comic Urdu short stories of Sadat Hasan Manto (1912–​1955). His “Toba Tek Singh” (1955), set in a lunatic asylum, is a consummate example of the genre of partition literature.156 The unhinged utterances of its central character, Bishan Singh, in an inchoate mixture of Panjabi, Urdu, and English, scramble the politics of difference and, like Taiming’s own mad wall writings in Orphan of Asia, express his inability to become national, while relativizing the term “lunacy” in the extreme situation of partition. Similarly, Salman Rushdie’s comic epic Midnight’s Children (1981) parodies nationalism’s grounding assumption of a one-​to-​one correspondence between individual selves and the nation. It plots the fantastically extravagant attempt of its protagonist to embody the whole of India, and to engineer an “equation between the State and myself ” in a subcontinent where there are “as many versions of India as Indians.”157 This results in the comically deranged psyche of its narrator-​protagonist Saleem Sinai, who is difficult to categorize in terms of nationality and cultural affiliation, and it draws attention to the messy attempts to map nation-​states onto the diverse and heterogeneous Indian subcontinent.



153

Both languages “delve down into the depths, as it were, in quest of buried treasure”; Oz 2011, 40. Henderson 1997, 165–​173. 155 Franklin 2012, xiii. 156 For two useful collections of Indian partition literature, see Bhalla 1995; and Hasan 1995. 157 Rushdie 1981, reprint 1982, 420, 269. 154

366  Javed Majeed

Socialism and Literature As mentioned earlier, inter-​empire connections conditioned international political movements in the 1920s and 1930s; this included communism. Communist-​ inspired literature played an important role in anti-​imperial literature in the twentieth century, and by its very nature it was transregional and international. Marx’s own writings were peppered with citations and allusions to a range of literary texts in European languages, including Greek and Latin, and he used these to powerful rhetorical and critical effect. He also addressed the issue of the socioeconomic contextualization of literature and the techniques of literary writing.158 The career of the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy (1887–​1954) as an “interstitital thinker” spanning Europe, Latin America, and India, is indicative of the internationalist trajectory of a number of Marxist writers and authors in this period.159 The Marxist-​ inspired All India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA) first met in embryonic form in London in late 1934, electing the novelist Mulk Raj Anand (1905–​2004) as its president. The group’s manifesto was discussed at this meeting, and subsequent versions appeared in the Hindi literary journal Hans in October 1935 and the Left Review in London in February 1936. A third version was discussed at the first meeting of AIPWA in India in April 1936. A major figure in the development of AIPWA was Syed Sajjad Zaheer (1905–​1973) who liaised between the organization and the Communist Party of India. The Left Review version of the manifesto referred to the importance of using “both native and foreign resources” in creating a politically committed Indian literature, and Zaheer described the London phase of the association as valuable because of the connections that were made with progressive literary movements outside India. This internationalist outlook was reflected in the early careers of Zaheer and Anand; the latter had close contacts in the Bloomsbury group and both attended the Paris International Congress for the Defence of Culture, convened in June 1935 against the rise of fascism in Europe. Some of the French members of the organizing committee had strong connections with India or Indians. Anand presented an address at the Second Conference of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture in London in June 1936.160 Referring to this period of his life, Anand described how [y]‌oung writers like Aragon, Malraux, Auden, Spender, Lewis and others . . . were asking themselves [questions] more or less similar to ours in India, and irrespective of race and colour, we shared similar concepts and aspired toward kindred objectives. . . . All of us were united . . . in the faith that we could defend world heritage from the attacks of the Fascists of Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as the reactionaries of our own country, and help to build a new healthy civilization on the reserves of enormous potential power for good of human beings.161

158

For a full account, see Prawer 1976. Manjapra 2010. Coppola 1988, 1–​41. 161 Cited in Bald 1974, 479. 159 160

Literature of Empire  367 It was in conversation with Louis Aragon in Paris after this conference that the idea of AIPWA further crystallized in Sajjad Zaheer’s mind prior to his departure for India in late 1935.162 In Orphan of Asia, Taiming vacillates between identifying with Chinese classical literature and its literati and the rural peasantry. He sees his dilemma as “the common tragedy of all intellectuals” in relation to “the people” of emerging nations.163 His predicament exemplifies Szeman’s characterization of the nation as a fluid conceptual and rhetorical space for the articulation of the political dilemmas faced by writers in relation to the production of culture vis à vis “the people.”164 This predicament was intensified in the case of the AIPWA writers because of their socialist politics. The Conferences in Paris and London foregrounded the question of culture and art in relation to political commitment and opposition to fascism, highlighting the cultural dimensions of imperialism alongside its political and economic aspects, and stressing the need to bring literature close to the “masses.” This was echoed by the AIPWA manifestos, especially in the Left Review version, and writers in the movement reflected on how they might overcome their class origins in creating socialist literature. This included practical proposals for living and working with peasants and laborers.165 Similar questions were addressed by Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan‘an Forum on Literature and Art” in the 1940s, where the immediate context was resistance to Japanese imperialism and the establishment of a soviet in the Yan‘an countryside controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. In defining a revolutionary art and literature, Mao made practical suggestions regarding how writers were to connect to peasants, workers, and soldiers and how they were to represent them. Like the key figures in AIPWA and in its manifestos, he stressed the need to draw upon the art and literature of other countries, alongside incorporating popular and folk traditions of Chinese art and appropriating the “literary and artistic forms of the past,” infusing them with “new content.”166 In both India and China, politically committed writers reflected upon, modified, and practiced different forms of socialist realism as propounded by the Union of Soviet Writers and the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1934. The literature of these movements covered a variety of genres and forms, and was an important part of the anti-​imperial literature of the twentieth century.

Conclusion Literature, especially belles-​lettres and poetry, played a prominent role in the education of imperial elites in the pre-​modern age, from ancient Greece and Rome to China, the Middle East, and the Persianate world. Ideas of the classical,

162

Coppola 1988, 28–​30. Wu 2006, location 2854. 164 Szeman 2003, 31, 39–​40, 47. 165 Malik 1967, 652–​654. 166 Mao 1996, 465, 471. 163

368  Javed Majeed and texts canonized as “classics,” were influential in shaping imperial and anti-​ imperial literary sensibilities in these pre-​modern empires as well as in their modern successors. Literature was important in defining the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of pre-​modern empires, and it remained so in modern colonialism, when the growth of printing, the spread of literacy, more extensive reading publics, and the emergence of the novel as a dominant literary genre, intensified its role in shaping empire as a literary, cultural, and linguistic process. Both imperial and anti-​ imperial literatures dramatized and interrogated distinctions between civilization and barbarism. Because empires were composite, multiethnic, and multilingual entities, imperial and anti-​imperial literatures could be syncretistic in form and content and in their linguistic textures. In the modern era, texts could therefore be simultaneously nationalist and cosmopolitan in outlook. The cosmopolitanism of anti-​imperial socialist literature, for example, reflects how empires were crucibles for the intersection between political and literary imaginations, with the circulation of ideas, texts, and bodies of knowledge expanding the horizons of writers and poets, and deepening their practices of writing in opposition to the empires that nurtured them in conflicting and problematic ways. Roberto Schwarz mentions how, in the case of Brazilian literary culture, writers were confronted with a “vast and heterogeneous, but structured field, which is a historical consequence” of empire and “an artistic origin.”167 This was also evident in the cosmopolitan eclecticism of Indian literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Writers in the subcontinent drew upon multiple literary traditions and forms, both Indian and European, in a variety of languages. Their freedom to move across and appropriate the resources and conventions of a range of literary traditions, made available partly as a result of empire, was very much in evidence in their work.168 A cosmopolitan range of references, multilayered historical sensibilities, and a variety of argumentative techniques from different philosophical cultures also characterize the writing of Indian political texts in this period.169 Thus, while empires were often politically and economically oppressive, they expanded the range of creative materials, literary possibilities, and opportunities for literary experiments available to authors and poets. As such, their creative possibilities in the literary field have to be kept in view alongside their oppressive social, economic, and political hierarchies.

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DISPA R I T I E S OF P OWE R : HIER A RC H I E S , R E SISTA NC E , R E S OU RC E S

11 Empires and the Politics of Difference Pathways of Incorporation and Exclusion Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper

History is replete with conquest, violence, defeat of ambitious rivals or vulnerable groups, but a fundamental question is what came next—​whether and by what means diverse people were incorporated into a large polity. As long as political ambition exists in the world, and as long as human populations are distinguished by linguistic and cultural variety, conquest and subjugation will lead would-​be rulers to seek ways to govern unlike people. Empires were large states that managed to incorporate diverse populations while reproducing distinctions and hierarchy among them. Over time, empires developed multiple strategies to deal with this essential task, tactics that we label the “politics of difference.” In this chapter we discuss how empires, compared with other kinds of states and with each other, confronted difference. We describe two unlike approaches to difference, the “Roman” and “Mongol” types. We then elaborate the strengths and weaknesses of particular governing strategies and consider the transformations and repercussions of the different ways in which empires exercised power. Finally, we look at ways out of empire, and how the politics of difference inflected these changes in sovereignty.

Why Empires, Why Difference? Empires govern different people differently. In these terms, empire could be a passing phase:  if an expansionist state erases differences among the territories and peoples it incorporates—​via some combination of extermination, acculturation, and assimilation—​it becomes simply a big state, distinguished from political structures in which distinction is recognized, preserved, or even cultivated. One might argue that homogeneity and heterogeneity are both fictive descrip­ tions and that all polities embody both tendencies to some degree. “Nation” and “empire” can be overlapping categories, reflecting tendencies toward heterogeneity and homogeneity within a complex polity.1 But fictions can have effects. They can kill, and they can provide the basis for political organization. Recent waves of ethnic 1 Malešević 2017; Berger and Miller 2015. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires and the Politics of Difference  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire.  Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0011.

376  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper cleansing—​in the Balkans in the 1990s, in Rwanda in 1994—​were carried out to make a state homogeneous, composed of a single people. Such ruthless drives for national purity run up against the intermixing and mobility that are intrinsic to human behavior. Over the sweep of history, the heterogeneity of imperial polities comes closer to reality than the projected sameness of the nation-​state. Making a polity homogeneous requires focusing diverse people’s imaginations and practices on commonality and equivalence—​ producing the “horizontal” community that Benedict Anderson described in 1983.2 Some of the national polities of twentieth-​century Europe were the product of a deliberate “unmixing of people,” in the phrase of British statesman Lord Curzon: expulsions, purges, and exterminations on the territories of the Habsburg Empire after World War I, new waves of ethnic cleansing after World War II, and again in the Balkans in the 1990s.3 But neither ethnic cleansing nor common participation in state institutions—​“civic nationalism,” as some term it—​has consistently made state conform to nation. Imagining the state in national terms was and remains one kind of political vision, among other more complex and inclusive ones. Empire is not the only form of political organization that recognizes and reproduces difference. Federation and confederation, in theory and at times in practice, recognize and share power out among different collectivities within an overarching political structure.4 Confederations may give rise to empires—​ the Mongol empires sprang from Eurasian tribal confederations and alliances. Or empires may induce the formation of confederations, whose components share a history of life under imperial rule. The power of empires to set the context for both imagination and possibility is evident precisely where the nation-​state was supposed to have been the model: in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Europe and its interactions with the rest of the world. Inside Europe, people with national or supra-​national goals (such as pan-​ Slavism) imagined various kinds of political associations, but had to confront the power of the dominant empires—​polities that did not limit their resources to one category of population or one space.5 Looking beyond Europe, Wang Hui argues that the “binary” of empire and nation-​state itself emerged as European elites tried to write themselves into a “universal world history,” in which the nexus of Asia-​ empire-​despotism-​backwardness would give way to progress configured by economic and political structures of European design. The imposition of colonial domination on much of the world compelled other powers to confront this form of imperial power. Consequently, both colonial empire and resistance to it provided a Eurocentric story of outmoded empires giving way inevitably to nation-​states with a strong hold on politics and scholarship.6 2 Anderson 1983. 3 Brubaker 1996, 148–​169, makes use of Curzon’s concept in analyzing the politics of east-​central Europe. On the nation-​state and violence, see Ther 2014. 4 Beaud 2009; Cohen 2012. 5 Burbank and Cooper 2010. 6 Wang Hui 2014: 36-​44. Peter Haldén proposes that European states developed exclusive forms of sovereignty after the Reformation undermined the ideal of Christian universalism. Trapped by competition inside Europe, leaders of these polities sought to expand their power overseas: Haldén 2012.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  377 Setting aside this modernist conceit in favor of a long-​term and more global history of empires forces us to come to grips with the variety of practiced and imagined political forms. A wider perspective helps us escape from the conventional assumption that a single people within a unitary state is the norm from which other polities deviated or the only model to which they could aspire.7 The association of popular sovereignty with a uniform polity also demands rethinking. The proposition that sovereignty derives or should derive from the people seems to imply a radical dichotomy between those who are members of the polity and those who are excluded from it. Such an argument could justify subordinating colonized people within a “democratic” empire or denying political voice to certain categories of people within a national state.8 But the location of popular sovereignty was contested from the moment the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was proclaimed in Paris in 1789: should sovereignty belong only to a French nation in Europe or to different categories of people in French colonies in the Caribbean as well? When France, for pragmatic as well as principled reasons, abolished slavery in Saint Domingue and made slaves into citizens in 1793, these actions seemed to signal an imperial version of the new republic. Napoleon’s restoration of slavery in 1802 undermined this inclusive strategy. When slavery was abolished for good in French colonies in 1848, ex-​slaves became citizens, but this did not establish a unitary people. As France acquired overseas territories during the nineteenth century, conquered peoples were granted the lower status of subjects. Such distinction making was regularly contested –​by subordinated people who could frame their arguments in terms of the dominant ideology or challenge that ideology directly, and by elites who took republican principles or the threat of colonial rebellion seriously.9 When an imperial government needed more than subservience from much of its subject population–​soldiers in wartime for instance–​the need for inclusive gestures became stronger.10 Questions of inclusion, equality, and recognition of cultural difference were thus part of a long debate within the French empire–​and the British as well–​and the question did not disappear when colonies became independent. With many citizens whose origins lay in the former colonies living in France, Britain, and other former imperial powers, prejudice and discrimination–​and fear of people who are “different”-​have become burning issues inside post-imperial states.11 Empires’ politics of difference carried over into fictively national polities. 7 Here lies the fallacy in Michael Doyle’s (Doyle 1986, 30) well-​known definition of empire as “effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society.” He assumes that societies—​as discrete entities—​have a prior existence. Societies can be as much the products of empires as their component parts. 8 Fradera 2018 both demonstrates the sharpening of the distinction between a national polity and subordinate colonies within nineteenth-​century European empires and illustrates how often this distinction was called into question. 9 On the ups and downs of anti-​colonial critique in France, from the Enlightenment until the mid-​ twentieth century, see Muthu 2003; Pitts 2005; Cooper; 2014b. 10 Hassett 2019 presents a telling instance: Algerians who had fought in World War I making demands on France. 11 Tshimanga et al 2009.

378  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper Within the long history of empires, the politics of difference took many forms. The spectrum of empires’ practices runs from treating difference as an ordinary fact of human life to genocide.12 Not only did empires come up with distinctive styles of rule, but even a single empire ordinarily applied an array of strategies to different elements of the polity. Empires could shift their tactics over both time and space, profiting from the flexibility of differentiated rule. Imperial rulers, nevertheless, were not free to choose their strategies at will. They acted within the constraints imposed by internalized assumptions and habits and in response to subjects who pushed back against their rulers, even if such interactions were rarely symmetrical. Empires usually existed in relation to and competition with each other. Empires could try to make nations on other empires’ territories. It was tempting for imperial rulers to encourage groups to secede from their rivals’ composite structures, if not to incorporate them, at least to diminish or fragment an enemy. If quests for homogeneity produced and continue to produce episodes of extreme violence, building and maintaining empires was also often violent and repressive. When entire categories of people were treated as inferiors, as people who could be exploited, moved about, or humiliated and destroyed at will, the politics of “difference” could become the politics of “race.” Francisco Bethencourt13 uses the term “racisms” in the plural and makes the point that each racism had its origins in a political project. Prejudice, stereotyping, and category-​making exist in many kinds of society—​from villages to national republics—​but in specific contexts, elites can transform distinctions into ideologies of systematic subordination, exploitation, or exclusion. What enables “racism” is the definition of difference in terms of descent—​often connected to concerns for “purity of blood”—​and the linkage of such distinctions to discrimination, oppression, and exploitation.14 Descent is not simply a matter of genetics. Some societies or segments of them emphasize descent in the male line only. An Ottoman sultan was a pure son of the dynasty regardless of the fact that his mother, in most cases, was a captive from a non-​Ottoman, non-​Muslim, non-​Turkish-​speaking region. Someone considered black in the antebellum United States might be considered mulatto in the Caribbean and white in Brazil. The variation among racisms over the course of history is wide; the variation of politics of difference even wider. Both quests for homogeneity and practices of unequal incorporation can produce racisms. In empires, there are countervailing tendencies, connected to the task of maintaining the scope—​and hence the diversity—​of the imperial polity. This reliance on difference gives rise to arguments among elites. Some, convinced of their

12 Zahra 2010; Brubaker 2015. 13 Bethencourt 2013. 14 Schaub 2019.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  379 superiority and entitlements, want to exploit without constraint a portion of the incorporated population; others see a longer and more stable future in combining coercion with co-​optation and giving at least the elites of subordinated societies something to gain from accommodation to imperial rule. Leaders of subordinated collectivities have at times sought to turn rulers’ incorporative claims into demands for a fuller role in the empire’s political and economic life. Distinction, even racialized, can become a claim for a place—​and at times for rights—​in empires where difference is a recognized and ordinary condition of social life. Because empires reproduce distinction, they put or leave in place collectivities that could secede from or take over the imperial polity. Both those who support control and co-​optation and those who seek to overthrow an imperial regime can draw on and amplify people’s sense of communal privilege or their resentment of the alleged advantages enjoyed by others. Empires’ tendency to expand, split, and recombine has produced not only armed conflict, but also struggles to redefine or alter the categories of difference. Categories of distinction are not mere tools of the historian; they can become the foundation for claims and counterclaims, with the livelihood and dignity of many people at stake.

Two Influential Variants on the Politics of Difference We use the concept of the politics of difference more broadly and more neutrally than multiculturalists who agitate for recognition of distinct communities and their presumed values. This contemporary demand derives from material and ideological conditions that drew different peoples together in the first place. But a claim based on cultural authenticity is only one way to make difference an element of politics. The politics of difference in some empires meant recognizing the multiplicity of peoples and their varied customs as an ordinary fact of life; in others it meant drawing a strict boundary between insiders and “barbarian” outsiders. Let’s consider two influential empires with different approaches to difference.

Rome: The Politics of Citizenship During its long existence, the Roman Empire tended toward homogenization, based on a distinctive culture that developed as Rome expanded. The idea that ultimate power rested with the people of Rome and that the capacity to make and change laws devolved from the citizenry dated to the early Republic. In a political innovation with enormous implications for future politics, Rome gradually extended its citizenship beyond the limits of the city of Rome, first to nearby and demanding peoples, but ultimately (in 212 ce) to all free adult males in the empire. This inclusionary strategy defined at least potentially a vast number of people who

380  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper shared a single legal status and who could imagine a personal bond with state power and with other citizens of the empire.15 The rights associated with Roman citizenship—​as well as Rome’s protection of commerce—​were attractive to ambitious people in conquered areas. The imperial capital and the point toward which material and cultural resources gravitated remained Rome, but elites from many parts of the empire could, in Greg Woolf ’s phrase, “become Roman” in many aspects of their lifeways.16 A  widely diffused imperial culture—​knowing Latin and Greek, participating in imperial rituals, enjoying the comforts and pleasures of Roman technology, arts, and learning—​ enhanced likeness among Romans. The extension of a Roman way of life across a wide space also marked and reinforced social hierarchies, for the lower orders were more enmeshed in local particularisms than were their social superiors. As Woolf argues, elite culture reflected the influence of conquered provinces, but was identified as “Roman” nonetheless. The other side of this coin was exclusion. Slaves and women were left outside citizenship. With geographical outsiders—​conquered tribes, for example—​things were more complicated. Romans’ strong notion of the superiority of their culture went along with a belief that all peoples, if properly educated, could ultimately become civilized in the Roman way. The divide between cultured insiders and inferior outsiders took on new meanings as the empire shifted its religious practices. During Rome’s first several centuries, the Romans, as polytheists, could tolerate numerous local cults and sometimes absorb, transform, and add on deities as they expanded their empire. But monotheism presented the expanding empire with a problem. How to absorb people, like Jews, who believed their single god to be the only one? Conflicts between Jews and Roman authorities led to revolts, the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and the extension of the Jewish diaspora. Christianity was an even greater challenge, since Christians’ universalistic claims and their penchant for aggressive organization mirrored Rome’s own qualities. But in time, emperors themselves became Christians, and in the fourth century ce, Christianity became Rome’s state religion. Christianity added spiritual and material élan to Rome’s vision of its unique and superior civilization, but as the Roman way became more homogenizing, it narrowed the grounds for inclusion in the polity.

The Mongol Way The Mongol empires of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries took a contrasting approach—​to religion, to culture, to law, and to sovereignty. For Mongol rulers,

15 Dench 2005; Mathisen 2006; Beard 2015; Bang, Chapter 9, in Volume 2 of this work. On the importance of the edict of 212 ce—​extending well beyond the fall of the Roman Empire—​see Ando 2016. 16 Woolf 1998.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  381 sustained difference was both normal and useful. The politics of difference in Mongol empires was based on the recognition that the peoples of the empire would have their laws, religions, and customs and that effective rule meant, for the most part, keeping things that way.17 The Mongols, like other successful nomadic groups, practiced the political arts of tribal formation and confederation. Mongols were exogamous—​they married outside a clan—​and they could “adopt” outsiders as family members or as loyal subordinates to a leader. Adept at the organization of long-​distance herding, Eurasian nomads formed confederations of tribes, with personal linkages between each unit’s leader and his superior, sometimes enhanced through marriage and concubinage. Over centuries, Eurasian nomads had developed political and technological tools that allowed them to control long-​distance trade over vast areas, and to exploit, challenge, and learn from city-​states and empires on the edges of the steppe. Ghenghis Khan made his way to power in a political context where loyalty trumped commonality.18 From early times, the steppe empires of Inner Asia were not built around a fixed capital, or a central cultural or religious conception, but founded on a superior person, the Great Khan. In the thirteenth century, when the Mongols rapidly—​ and violently—​created the largest land empire in history, Ghenghis Khan and his descendants incorporated client rulers with their followers into a patrimonial power structure. The Mongols benefited from not only their military superiority but also their ability to rule dispersed and disparate populations.19 Mongols, like many steppe peoples, were originally shamanists—​ believers in multiple spirits and gods who could be accessed by those with special powers. Mongol khans spared religious authorities when they sacked and destroyed enemy cities, exempted religious institutions from taxation, and invited spiritual leaders of different faiths to their courts. Mongol empires sheltered Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Daoism, and Islam. Mongol khans married women of multiple faiths and tried out various religions themselves. In China, Great Khan Khubilai became a Buddhist and the patron of Tibetan lamas. Mongol khans in Persia (the Il-​Khans) converted to Islam. Eastern Christian bishops from Byzantium set up operations in Sarai, the capital of the Golden Horde. This wealthy Mongol khanate on the major cross-​continental trade route later became mostly Muslim.20 Mongol khans’ eclecticism and acceptance of religious difference, combined with their interest in commercial contacts and exchange, opened up cultural pathways and crossroads that had a profound effect on art, science, and medicine across Eurasia. Mongol khans offered favorable contracts to merchants who carried on long-​distance trade. Mix, but not necessarily match, was the Mongol approach to culture. Artists, cooks, and scholars as well as merchants traveled along

17 On the Mongol empire, see Kradin, Chapter 18, in Volume 2 of this work. 18 Fletcher 1986. 19 Biran 2004.

20 Morgan 2007.

382  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper silk and other routes, transferring knowledge, statecraft, cuisine, and art in both directions.21 The Mongol way did not produce, as Rome had done, a singular, recognizably “Mongol” elite culture. Early on their way to empire, Mongols adopted regulatory practices used by other empires to facilitate the collection of taxes and tribute. To conquer China, Mongols secured the advice and assistance of both Chinese and Tibetan collaborators; once victorious, Khubilai Khan exploited the potent Chinese imperial tradition and had himself proclaimed emperor in 1272. The Mantle of Heaven was not cast down, but assumed by the new Mongol leader. Legal pluralism came easily to Mongol khans who did not consider it necessary or useful to intervene in the mechanisms of social control developed by peoples they conquered, at least in matters of little significance to imperial authority. What counted was sovereignty at the highest level: the khan or emperor was the ultimate lawgiver, the final judicial authority, the protector of all religions and all peoples under his rule and care. The Mongols’ combination of devolved legal authority in some matters, the location of ultimate law in the overall leader, and the recognition of other powers’ legitimacy left its mark on later empires.22

Making, Maintaining, and Confronting Difference Difference among peoples was a reality that any empire had to face. Some empires, as we have seen, used difference as a building block of imperial control. But difference was also, at various points, a political creation. It took work to make distinctions salient and operative. Distinction-​using and distinction-​making were flexible, at times contested, factors in the histories of empires. Between the Roman and the Mongol models lay a large spectrum of possibilities.

Empire and Monotheism Monotheism, in Christian and Muslim variants, inflected the politics of difference of early empires around the Mediterranean and later in other parts of the world. The idea of one empire, one God, and one emperor was a powerful one. It potentially defined an all-​or-​nothing distinction between insider and outsider, raising the stakes on adhesion and loyalty. Both crusades and jihad linked their respective claims of religious universality to political projects and imperial expansion. But the other face of imperial monotheism was schism, the argument that the current emperor was not the proper guardian of the true faith. Struggles over who qualified to be God’s representative on earth and over which religious practices and

21 Allsen 2001.

22 Amitai and Biran 2014.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  383 institutions should be enforced challenged imperial authority in many empires. Political Christianity was a Roman legacy that both inspired and inhibited the reconstruction of empire in western Europe. The Holy Roman Empire was one outcome, but the ambitions of popes, bloody conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, struggles between rulers and religious hierarchs, wars of conquest, conversion, and rebellion were also part of the Christian heritage.23 Islamic empires were also riven by schism—​ notably between Sunnis and Shi‘ites—​ from the time of Mohammed’s immediate successors onward. The compelling synthesis of a single God and a single Islamic community raised the stakes for political elites in any conflict. As Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds commented: “There was only one true imam and one true umma . . . whoever made the wrong choice would find himself outside the community.”24 Outside the quest for power at the top, however, Islamic empires for much of their history were better able than the kingdoms and empires of post-​Roman Europe to position themselves as both defenders of their faith and as protectors of Jewish, Christian, and other “outsider” communities. Muslim rulers could avail themselves of the doctrine of a house of Islam and an external world outside the faith whose people, once brought into the imperial fold, had to be governed differently. Bethencourt25 sees the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries as a time when, in western Europe, the universalistic claims of the Christian religion became more sharply articulated as assertions of “purity of blood.” The consolidation of Catholic monarchy in Iberia and the culmination of the conflict with the remnants of the Islamic polity in Grenada—​finally defeated in 1492—​put religious distinction at the heart of an effort at domination. In the year of the “reconquest” of Muslim Spain, the monarchy expelled all Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. The Inquisition persecuted even those who converted, on the grounds that their fidelity was inherently suspect. Consolidation of power, religious intolerance, and distinctions based on descent were tied together.26 Catholic orthodoxy, civilization, and monarchal power defined a complex structure that spanned land and sea. One could become Spanish, through conversion and behavior—​a possibility that set the terms for long debates over the attributes of different peoples, their propensity for becoming civilized, and the ethics of subordination in an empire that was both incorporative and exploitative.27 The extension of empire in the name of a single true religion could have unintended consequences. The Spanish conquest of the Americas was a disaster for indigenous populations—​demographic as well as cultural. But the process also opened up profound tensions within an empire that was both rapacious in its 23 Haydén 2012. 24 Crone and Hinds 1986, 40–​41. 25 Bethencourt 2013. 26 Protestants were not necessarily more tolerant:  Luther considered Jews parasites and usurers. Bethencourt 2013, 153. The Protestant-​Catholic conflict mapped onto the revolution against imperial domination (by the Habsburgs) in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 27 Herzog 2013.

384  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper quest for riches and restrictively religious.28 In the sixteenth century, Bartolomé de las Casas insisted that Spanish rule in the Americas violated the church’s and the empire’s basic precepts: the Catholic monarchy professed its duty to save the souls of Indians, but abused their bodies and destroyed their civic order. In 1542, Spain issued new laws intended to set limits on the exploitation of indigenous labor. These were mainly followed in the breach, but Las Casas’s critique lived on, sustained by imperial competition. His work was translated into English in 1583 and was invoked by British elites to call into question the legitimacy of the Spanish Empire’s claims to authority in the Americas. Many later movements to defend and promote indigenous peoples’ rights against imperial power took up the weapon that empires of likeness held out to those exploited and excluded. If the empire was based on a universal civilization, why were some subjects not fully part of it?

The Normality of Difference Imperial ambition and monotheistic religion did not necessarily lead to a sharp distinction between the included and the excluded. Let us take the Russian Empire as our case in point.29 Russia made its way into empire by extending political control out from a once insignificant town (Moscow) whose princes were for over two centuries subordinates of a Mongol khanate, the Golden Horde.30 From the Mongols, the Muscovite princes learned, under duress, imperial statecraft, but they also relied on their clan’s glorious origin in Kiev where the rulers had converted to Eastern Christianity. The choice for a Byzantine variant of monotheism mitigated the challenges posed by Catholicism to imperial powers in western Europe. Eastern Christianity was multi-​lingual and accommodationist where political power was concerned. As they extended their sway over vast territories, Russia’s rulers turned their Mongol, Christian, and dynastic legacies into a powerful and malleable imperial practice. The remarkable fact that Russia has sustained for so long control over so many unlike populations, dispersed over vast spaces, derives from its effective integration of difference into its ruling mode. Difference functioned at many levels in the empire. The most fundamental divide was between rulers and the ruled—​between people who in some way made or applied the rules, and the mass of people who were supposed to obey. But even the empowered elites around the autocrat did not constitute a “nationally” consolidated leadership. The empire relied from its earliest days upon co-​opting local authorities of multiple ethnic origins into imperial service; some of the highest-​ranking families in the realm were originally Tatars or Poles. Even in the beginning of the



28 Elliott 2006.

29 See Lieven, Chapter 35, in Volume 2 of this work. 30 Ostrowski 1998.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  385 twentieth century, half of the titled members of the State Council came from non-​ Russian families.31 This pattern of drawing people from different places, cultures, and “peoples” into governance continued into Soviet times, under the aegis of the Communist Party. One consequence of this kind of rule was the absence of categorical divisions of an ethnic or racial sort between governors and governed. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the empire were thought of in collectivizing ways; each subject was assumed to have an ethnicity, a religion, a civil status or rank, possibly a regional or functional identification. Russian rulers assumed that peoples had “their” collective customs and rules prior to Russian annexation and after.32 Rights, like obligations, were assigned to people through their status as members of collective bodies. Marriage, buying property, changing one’s place or residence, bequeathing land and goods were regulated according to the estate, confession, ethnicity, or territorial location of the individuals concerned. A variety of norms and sanctions were legitimated through a legal system that devolved judicial powers to religious and low-​level civil authorities. Nineteenth century law included codes and regulations produced for different groups. In property matters, for example, the civil code applied to only a minority of the population. Rulers could change the rules, and put the accent (hard or soft) on different people at different times. Poles, with their Catholicism, their former empire, their relative prosperity, and, especially, their rebellions, could be singled out for special treatment.33 In 1864, a year after an uprising led by Polish nobles, peasants in formerly Polish territories received extensive land rights and freedom from all obligations to their lords, while thousands of noble estates were confiscated. Playing on different registers and shifting them was the clue to this kind of politics of difference.34 The striking difference between the attitudes toward “others” deployed in empires that took difference as a fact of life—​and glorified and exploited heterogeneity—​ and the racism and other degradations found in empires based on the principles of likeness was related, at least in part, to the location of sovereignty.35 Russia’s regime of differentiated rights worked as long as no one was a citizen; it was threatened when some of its elites campaigned for equality and political representation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This problem arose for the Habsburgs around the same time:  an empire that had staked its legitimacy on a complex web of connections to the throne and developmental projects for its multiple ethnic groups was destabilized when, under a constitutional regime, liberals demanded more uniformity while national minorities clamored for their special language and other rights.36 31 LeDonne 1991; Lieven 1989. By non-​Russian, Lieven means families who had not become Russian before 1600. 32 Werth 2014. 33 Lieven, Chapter 35, in Volume 2 of this work. 34 Burbank 2006. 35 Burbank 2015. 36 Judson 1996, 2006; Unowsky 2005.

386  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper The politics of difference could take many forms, particularly in long-​lasting empires as they adapted to new circumstances. The trajectory of Russian history with its accent on incorporation of unlike groups illustrates a flexible variant on the “Mongol” mode of governing difference, but even empires that made sharp distinctions between the “civilized” and the “barbarians” often found themselves making adjustments to the demands of unexpected circumstances, in particular defeats by the presumed inferiors. China twice came under the rule of non-​Han dynasties—​the “Yuan” of Mongol origin in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the “Qing” of Manchu roots from the seventeenth to the twentieth. In both cases, the new “outsider” rulers, as well as the officials, scholars, and military leaders so critical to imperial order, had to find an accommodation if the empire was to survive. The Qing, like the Yuan, took on the “Mandate of Heaven” with verve and cultivated many aspects of Chinese culture, but they did not merge with or subordinate themselves to Han society. Instead the Qing dynasty followed a self-​ conscious policy of playing on ethnic distinction, maintaining the cohesion of the now-​dominant Manchus and dividing offices between Han and non-​Han elites. The “Manchu Way,” as Mark Elliott calls it, preserved ethnic difference and used it to enhance imperial control over essential intermediaries.37 Even the Ming dynasty, situated chronologically between the Yuan and the Qing, did not adhere to a strict insider/​outsider divide. The Ming rulers could play the card of return to true Chinese civilization after an interlude of Mongol rule, but as David Robinson38 shows, Ming rulers—​much as they denigrated the Mongols (the nomads’ “stench of mutton,” etc.)—​developed multiple strategies for working with as well as against Mongol communities within the empire’s frontiers. To some groups, the Ming offered relations of alliance and clientage; others were forcibly relocated, still others sedentarized. For Mongols during the Ming period, the possibility of accommodation posed a dilemma: integration into imperial institutions meant surveillance through the Ming’s sophisticated registration system, but did remaining outside offer more than a vain hope for reconstituting their former dominance? For a conquering empire, in China or elsewhere, the degree to which populations should be integrated into governing institutions or be allowed or forced to keep their distinctiveness was a matter of both short-​and long-​term consequence. In the early centuries of the expansion of Islamic empires, the non-​integration of much of the overrun population not only made a rapidly moving conquest more feasible, but left a rationale for differential taxation, allowing the growing empire to appropriate some of the surplus of existing economic structures. As John Haldon39 points out, the Islamic caliphates had trouble directing this surplus to an imperial center; fragmentation and local recovery quickly followed upon expansion.

37 Elliott 2006; Rawski 2012. See also Crossley, Chapter 29, in Volume 2 of this work. 38 Robinson, Chapter 19, in Volume 2 of this work. 39 Haldon, Chapter 5 in this volume.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  387 Differential taxation and administration directed at whole communities were not the only ways of exploiting difference as a strategy of rule. The caliphates, especially the Abbasid, drew on clients who detached themselves from their own communities and converted to Islam and on slaves, often from the warrior-​nomads of Central Asia. Dependence on their imperial masters made both kinds of outsiders useful adjuncts in ruling and exploiting diverse populations.40

Colonialism and Diversity When European empire-​builders pushed into new territories in Asia, the Americas, and Africa, they encountered already differentiated societies whose structures had been shaped by earlier imperial histories. The newcomers could exploit divisions in the societies they encountered, as in the case of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs (see Smith and Sergheraert, Chapter 24 in Volume 2) or in the takeover of large parts of Africa in the late nineteenth century, using only small European armies. They confronted not only small-​scale communities, but polities that were empires in their own right, whose power constrained the newcomers and whose commercial networks offered opportunities.41 Administering new imperial territories, each with its own cultural diversity, required effective approaches to governing at a distance. Would Europeans use difference as a managerial asset, as the Russians were doing in their Eurasian spaces, or would differences among the colonized be eclipsed by the colonizers’ assertion of superiority? Could the Christianizing missions of the Iberian empires from the sixteenth century onward or the “civilizing missions” of colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries impose a European culture around the world?42 Or did colonial regimes’ exploitation of difference exacerbate ethnic distinctions? Some scholars have argued that Europeans created distinctions—​that African ethnicity or “communal” differences in South Asia are to a significant extent a European product, resulting both from strategies of divide and rule and a European predilection to distinction-​making.43 The answers to these questions show that the politics of difference in colonial situations took up many strategies, most of them difficult to carry out. Civilizing missions were never pursued by European powers with enough vigor to replace diversified indigenous cultures with a generic Western one. Similarly, the idea that racial or class oppression produced commonality among the oppressed is largely a myth. Even as racist a regime as that of apartheid South Africa could provide enough incentives to get some colonized people to cooperate—​as “chiefs” 40 Crone 1980. 41 Subrahmanyam 2006. 42 On European empires’ uneven efforts to impose uniformity on European terms on colonized peoples see Belmessous 2013. 43 Debate over these issues was set off by the publication of Hobsbawm and Ranger 1984. See also Pandey 2006; and M’Bokolo and Amselle 1985.

388  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper supposedly embodying traditional authority, as policemen, as translators. South Africa, explicitly organized around difference, was able to exploit the cleavages it helped to create, as well as some it inherited from the process of conquest itself. Indigenous communities on the eve of European conquest were the products of histories that had included conquest, incorporation, and both differentiation and acculturation in earlier complex polities; colonial rule added new distinctions and at times reified old ones.44 The British, for example, ruled much of northern Nigeria through an indigenous, Islamic power elite that itself had conquered previous polities in the early nineteenth century and had built up a hierarchical system in which slaves were used both in positions of authority and as subordinate laborers.45 In parts of southeastern Nigeria, on the other hand, “chiefs” were largely a British invention. One does not need to choose between naturalizing ethnicity or caste in Africa and Asia as timeless “autochthony” or reducing them to colonial instrumentality. When colonial regimes chose to use indigenous intermediaries, the social relations those intermediaries drew on were themselves transformed. An individual’s access to patronage and ability to escape forced labor or conscription might depend on connections to elites. At the same time, intermediaries were not entirely the creatures of the colonizing power, for they had to have some room to maneuver in order to be useful. Their legitimacy might depend on their being able to buffer “their” people from the worst excesses of the conquerors, or—​more likely—​they could acquire resources through their positions and set themselves apart from their communities.46 If colonial governments organized administration around the categories of tribe or caste, these notions could become a new reality, shaping access to resources, providing a foundation for shared sentiments or common action, and, once politics opened up, giving politicians a basis on which to mobilize support. Under colonial rule, flexible ethnic boundaries might harden and increased communications and movement to cities could, instead of adding to a melting pot, contribute to turning linguistic similarity—​earlier cut across by the cleavages of kinship and regional politics—​into a basis for collective action, creating “superethnicity,” a wider form of affiliation. These enlarged collectivities could in turn come into conflict with one another during struggles against colonial rule and afterward between independent states and their regional or ethnic rivals.

Hierarchy and Imperial Rule In any type of state, rulers worry not only about people who are culturally different, but those who are similar, and especially those who have access to resources. The 44 Spear 2003. 45 The colonial government in Nigeria not only worked through such an elite in northern Nigeria, but used agents from it to rule over other regions of the colony—​setting the stage for tension and conflict; Ochonu 2014. 46 Lawrance et al. 2006.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  389 scale of empire—​and its capacity to protect and organize commercial ties across long distances—​gave elites a reason to cooperate with imperial rulers.

Aristocracy and Autocracy Over time, elites could consolidate their access to extensive resources and pass them on to their descendants; aristocracies emerged in such diverse empires as Rome and Mughal India. But for emperors, aristocrats were a double-​edged sword. They could bring material resources and followers to imperial projects, but they could also deny these resources to the imperial center, use their local control to foment rebellion, or throw their support to another imperial ruler who offered more favorable conditions. The powers of aristocrats, like those of other intermediaries, made their positioning and containment a critical element of the politics of difference. Tension between autocracy and aristocracy was strong in the histories of many empires. As Haldon47 points out, Rome, China, and the Ottomans tried to build structures and to control resources independently of noble families and regional magnates; their solutions to the challenges posed by aristocracy were more durable than those of the Carolingians. The fall of the Roman Empire diffused control of key resources to regional lords; for centuries these localized powers would pose obstacles to the consolidation of monarchical authority across most of western Eurasia.48 The Ottomans offer an impressive example of empire-​building that managed to keep aristocracy at bay. Rather than recruit high officials from people who were in kinship or ethnic terms closest to the ruler, sultans collected young boys from the provinces, especially in the largely Christian Balkans, brought them into the sultan’s household, converted them to Islam, and trained them for a variety of administrative and military tasks. Even the reproduction of the emperor, once the empire was consolidated, turned to the outside: enslaved concubines, not wives, were the mothers of future sultans, avoiding the problem of powerful in-​laws. Difference—​ in both biological and cultural aspects—​was used to tamp down the threat posed to the emperor by elite families.49

Slavery, Capitalism, and Class And what of class differences—​the distinction between those who had access to resources and those who did not? Class formation took place both inside and outside empires—​through market mechanisms as well as coercive expropriation. 47 Haldon, Chapter 5 in this volume. 48 Scheidel 2019 argues that the breakup of the Roman Empire into multiple competitive polities unleashed energies that in long run fostered economic development. 49 Peirce 1993, 2007; Barkey 2008; Kołodziejczyk, Chapter 26, in Volume 2 of this work.

390  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper But because empires made connections and concentrated resources, their actions transformed classes and their relations around the globe and across states. At the same time, empires created contexts in which class or other categories of social differentiation could be debated on both a local and a world scale. The convoluted relationship of empire and slavery inserted both long-​lasting distinctions and arguments about them into world history. Slavery is an old and widespread institution, hardly unique to empires, but the enormous scale of the Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries changed the nature of the relationship between an owning and an owned class of people. The plantation economy in the Americas could never have attained its world-​changing capacity without the exercise of imperial power. Large slaveholdings were extremely valuable; they required protection against rival claimants and against slave revolt. Slaveholders needed backup to make their investments safe. The sugar economy depended on long-​ distance commercial and political connections: land in and around the Caribbean, slaves from Africa (from outside the territories of European empires), a market for sugar in Europe, and goods, like cloth or guns, produced in different parts of the world (cloth from India, for example) and transmitted through mechanisms that were a mix of private initiative and imperial control (the British Navigation Acts, for instance). Wealth was generated in cities like Bristol or Nantes that were leading slave-​trading ports. But most important—​as Kenneth Pomeranz has shown—​sugar produced in the overseas empire enabled cheap calories to be provided to a developing working class in England, with low opportunity costs in land and labor. In this way, the Atlantic complex—​in which British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish navies and merchant classes competed and fought—​was the setting for the formation of both propertied and working classes in the Old World as in the New. The “fiscal-​ military” state that supervised a changing economy in the pioneering case of Great Britain was an imperial state, shaped by the demands of a navy and the resources imperial policy helped to concentrate.50 Property-​owners and slaves were not the only people moving across empire space and, for some, into new class positions. Empire created possibilities of a modest sort—​for the servant willing to take on an indenture to cross the Atlantic, for small-​ scale merchants seeking wealth through the movement of low-​cost commodities, for young men striving for advancement through military service. Some Scots may have reconciled themselves to their unequal place in the British Empire because of opportunities that the empire developed for them overseas. Irish—​Catholics as well as Protestants—​served in British armies away from home. Some Irish soldiers fought in the British military against the rebels in the Boer War of 1898–​1902, while others joined the Afrikaner rebels out of opposition to British imperialism. As several chapters in this collection make clear, migration and settlement in imperial



50 Pomeranz 2000; Parthasarathi 2011; Brewer 1989.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  391 settings created multiple intersections between people and ideas, including transformative interpretations of difference. From the late eighteenth century, slavery—​the very system that European empires had extended and exploited in the Americas—​came under attack by members of the British public.51 Empire was the context in which the anti-​slavery movement honed an ideological and political distinction between a class of slaves and a working class, the legitimacy of wage labor underscored by the illegitimacy of slave labor. The British anti-​slavery movement portrayed enslavement as a moral issue, as a stain on the British flag. Debates over the ethics of slave labor also developed in the French and Spanish empires, sometimes the result of British pressure, but more fundamentally enabled by the cross-​imperial movement of ideas and arguments over the basis of legitimate power within different political entities. News of slave revolts also traveled, and ex-​slaves moving between the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe created alternative networks to those of the slave economies. Some ex-​slaves became eloquent spokespersons against slavery.52 If imperial power had been necessary to protect and sustain plantation development, it was the decisions of imperial governments facing political challenges at home and slave revolts overseas that led to the outlawing of slave labor in 1833 in the case of Britain, 1848 in France, and 1886 in Spanish Cuba.

Transforming the Politics of Difference The rejection of slavery underscored the legitimacy of other transformations of social relations on an imperial scale. Taking land from indigenous populations was masked by multiple fictions—​the land was unoccupied, the populations were “nomadic” and therefore had no genuine rights in it, only people who “improved” land could claim it—​and was not free from controversy.53 But land seizures created facts on the ground, and the law of property in land could enforce social distinction even when the law of property in human beings was repudiated. Where settlers wanted land but not people, the politics of difference could come close to extermination, as in the case of Australian aborigines, or lead to the marginalization of indigenous populations, as in the “reservations” where Native Americans were pushed as European Americans moved west.54 In South Africa, the combination of settler land grabbing with the development of a capitalist mining sector in the late nineteenth century produced a racialized proletarianization that came closer to the Marxist model of capitalist development than anything else in colonial Africa. The aspiration to control land and labor brought 51 Brown 2006. 52 Peabody 1996; Peabody and Stovall 2003; Drescher 2002; Fradera and Schmidt-​Nowara 2013; Scott and Hébrard 2012. 53 Fitzmaurice 2014; Belmessous 2012; White 1991b. 54 White 1991a.

392  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper the British state into direct conflict with the Afrikaner element of settler society in the so-​called Boer War of 1898–​1902. After the war, the state consolidated its control over the movement of African peoples, many of them obliged to shuttle back and forth between wage labor and rural “reserves.” The enmities of the Boer War gave way to the “alliance of gold and maize,” of international capitalists in the gold and diamond industries and large-​scale Afrikaner landowners, sharing an interest in coordinating the exploitation of black labor in farms, mines, and industries.55 Elsewhere in Africa, there were too few whites to superintend such processes, resources were too scattered to make the systematization of labor control worthwhile, and social relations among African communities were strong enough to make the costs of strict control unbearable. Instead of racialized proletarianization over an entire continent, colonial regimes in Africa produced patchworks of different relations of production—​islands of tightly controlled wage-​labor in mines, commercial centers, ports, and in some places (South Africa, Algeria) settler agriculture, surrounded by areas that were, deliberately or otherwise, left without commercial outlets, giving rise to the oscillatory labor migrations that benefited other sectors.56 That most land, outside of South Africa and parts of other colonies, remained subject to “customary” jurisdiction had political consequences: local political relationships through lineage elders, chiefs, nobles, or patrons of various sorts remained at least as necessary to people’s access to resources as government institutions and law.57 Colonial regimes in much of Africa also profited from the export of products grown by Africans with little imperial oversight or control. In a few regions, moderately prosperous communities of African producers emerged in the imperial context, some of them diversifying their interests into commerce and transportation, sending their children to mission or government schools. These various strategies for exploiting populations and resources gave rise to new patterns of social differentiation within and across empires. All of them produced pressures on colonial regimes: educated Africans challenged racial discrimination in terms of European democratic ideals; peasants and middle-​scale farmers fought restrictions on produce marketing; workers in mines, railways, and ports organized and struck; and many Africans, by moving back and forth between different places and different activities, made it impossible for colonial governments to impose the social order they desired. Ideas of order themselves were not fixed or alike. London and Paris became places where intellectuals and activists from different parts of the British and French empires could engage in public debate.58 People involved in colonizing projects were heterogeneous enough that some of them exposed abuses. Missionaries could call for change, as did skeptical administrators, businessmen, and scholars. Their criticisms implied that a more just form of colonization was possible. More

55 See the pioneering work of Trapido 1971 and subsequent studies, some by his former students.

56 For a short summary of a large literature see the chapter “Africa and Capitalism” in Cooper 2014a. 57 Boone 2014.

58 Goebel 2016; Matera 2015.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  393 fundamental critiques of colonial empire had moved in and out of European intellectual circuits ever since the Enlightenment. By the early twentieth century, liberal or socialist principles were providing a basis for denunciations of colonialism. J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism of 1902 and Lenin’s Imperialism; The Highest Stage of Capitalism of 1916 became mobilizing texts. As in the past, the space of empire was neither homogeneous nor neatly divided into separable spheres. In the twentieth century, European powers were developing variants of what we now call welfare states. Could these new social arrangements be limited to the European spaces of empire? At first, the Europeans’ politics of difference offered an answer: Africans and Asians themselves were “different.” Their patterns of natality, family formation, life course, education, old age appeared distinctive, both in indigenous contexts and in the exploitative conditions of colonial economies. The claim that Africans neither needed nor merited state social services proved difficult to sustain. International institutions became sites where the differential treatment of social problems in the colonies was both justified and questioned. In the 1920s and 1930s, the International Labour Office became the venue for a critique of forced labor in overseas colonies along with reflection on the dangers of migratory and contract labor. In the late 1930s and especially after World War II, the “social question” became a problem for colonial powers to rethink, overseas as well as at home. Strikes and demonstrations in the colonies—​particularly in the British West Indies between 1935 and 1938—​confronted the British Colonial Office with the hard fact that dislocation and poverty could not be attributed to the “primitive” nature of colonized peoples; these problems were rampant in regions that had been part of the empire for centuries, as well as in the most dynamic cities and mine towns of Africa.59 Britain, France, and other colonial powers thus faced, at last, the fact that the tensions of industrial society that they had been confronting at home existed in a much larger spatial field, with its own social, cultural, and political complexities. They now had to ensure that a growing working class in vulnerable cities or mines in the colonies would be productive and orderly, that populations would be healthy enough to produce and reproduce, that the skills demanded by a changing economy would be taught, that grievances against exploitative labor regimes would not lead to disorder or revolution. They discovered that many of their colonial subjects were well aware of the standard of living of Europeans and saw no reason why they should aspire for anything less. Social reform empire-​wide was going to be an expensive proposition; it might give rise to as much conflict as it was intended to alleviate. Concern for order in colonies eventually led European administrators to wonder by the 1950s whether maintaining colonial empire was economically feasible in the age of the welfare state. These new perspectives implied a shift in the politics of difference:  removing or attenuating the barriers of racial discrimination that educated Africans faced, accepting that African workers, like those of Europe, could join trade unions,

59 Cooper 1996.

394  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper and in some places reforming land tenure regimes to give Africans a stake in property ownership. In settler societies, these policies ran into the deeply entrenched prejudices and institutionalized powers of elite whites. In Portuguese Africa, extensive migration of whites from their relatively poor European homeland to Angola and Mozambique meant that niches that might otherwise have been filled by skilled Africans were occupied by Europeans.60 Where social change was pushed forward, increased class differentiation among Africans gave rise to its own tensions.

Connections Across Empires The formation of collectivities—​ classes, networks, ethnicities—​ did not just take place within empires, but across them. “Trading diasporas” are a case in point. These drew together people who developed a high degree of collective self-​consciousness through their projects of moving commodities across long distances, making use of their cultural and religious affinities, and crystallizing these ties into relations of trust and common action. Trading diasporas connected, for example, Moroccan and Ottoman empires north of the Sahara desert to African empires (Mali, Songhay) to the south; some of these mobile communities acquired the ethnonym “Tuareg.”61 The concentration of wealth and power by empires on either side of the desert made the traders’ operations more lucrative and simultaneously enhanced these networks’ relative autonomy. Across steppes, deserts, and seas, entrepreneurial groups exploited the ambiguities of commercial operations in between empires, often to the frustration of greater powers. When the Ming tried to secure control over trade in China’s ports and severely restricted the activities of foreign merchants on the empire’s territory, Chinese merchants regrouped in port cities across Southeast Asia.62 Their presence and activism helped develop the maritime routes and economic vitality that attracted Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and British explorers and empire-​builders from the fifteenth century onward.63 Inter-​empire networks did more than exchange goods. The diverse people who traveled or settled in the rival Venetian and Ottoman Empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped a dialogue about difference and connections across political, religious, and ethnic frontiers. The Mediterranean was for centuries a web of connection as much as of conquest and rivalry, where different powers tried to extend their networks and people in interlocking cities tried to play one authority off against another.64



60 Bandeira Jerónimo and Costa Pinto 2015.

61 Lydon 2009; Hall 2011; Gomez 2018. On trading diasporas, see the pioneering work of Cohen 1971. 62 Sen 2003; Greene 2010.

63 See the chapters in parts 6 and 7 of this work. 64 Rothman 2012; Clancy-​Smith 2011.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  395 Connections across the Indian Ocean fostered networks controlled by Hadrami Arabs or Gujeratis, who persisted in making commercial connections even as polities came and went in different parts of the region. By the time Great Britain began to rule Zanzibar and coastal Kenya (and Tanganyika after 1919), South Asians were already a well-​established commercial diaspora. Their networks linking different parts of the British Empire facilitated empire-​wide economic development at low cost to the colonizing power even as officials worried about networks they did not control, with their unpredictable economic and political consequences.65 Muslim Indians and Arabs living in India fostered networks connecting Bombay, Surat, and Karachi with Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul, spread ideas coming out of the revolts of the mid-​nineteenth century, and shaped a Muslim ecumene. Scholars, political refugees, and diasporic merchants were influenced by concepts of Muslim community configured by the controversies of the early Caliphates, the Ottoman reformist projects of the nineteenth century, and critiques of British imperialism in India.66 Ideas moved not only within empire space, but across imperial boundaries. Competitive as they were, officials of European colonial empires sometimes exchanged information and strategies, and some internationalists sought to shape—​through the League of Nations and the International Colonial Institute—​ what one might call “best practices” for colonial rule. As Britain and France led efforts to reform their empires after World War II, they sometimes cooperated in fields like health and industrial relations in an effort to turn political tensions into technical or managerial problems.67 Opposition to empire also crossed imperial boundaries. African, Caribbean, and Afro-​American activists established pan-​African circuits, as did anti-​colonial leaders from South Asia and the Middle East. London, Paris, Moscow, and at times Hamburg or Berlin became nodes in anti-​imperialist networks.68 Oppositional associations were both mobilizing and fractured by ideological and tactical disagreements—​including fears that the Soviet Union was using anti-​imperial networks for its own purposes and the underlying question of whether people were engaged in a common struggle against imperialism or particular struggles for national liberation. Some saw anti-​imperialism and independence as necessarily intertwined—​forging a world order that could accommodate both recognition of cultural particularity and aspirations for equality among peoples. This aspiration would prove difficult to attain even after the formal end of colonial empire.69

65 Ho 2006. On the wider history of connections in the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal, see also Bishara 2017; Alpers 2014; Bose 2006, Amrith 2013; Ward 2009. 66 Alavi 2015. 67 Wagner 2016. 68 On Paris and London see Goebel 2016; Matera 2015. 69 Cooper, Chapter 45, in Volume 2 of this work. Getachew 2019 uses the concept of “worldmaking” to underscore the ambitions for global transformation of influential nationalists.

396  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper

Racism, Colonialism, and Distinction At the heart of colonialism, Partha Chatterjee has argued, is the “rule of difference.”70 We emphasize instead the politics of difference, for the meanings of difference were multiple, contested, and rarely stable. Many scholars have argued that race was the category that counted most, particularly for the colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonized people felt the brunt of racism at many levels, from daily humiliations to the elaboration—​by writers like Carlyle or de Gobineau—​of theories of human society that put blacks at the bottom. Questions of race have persisted throughout and beyond the history of colonial empires. As scholars examine the history of racism in the nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century colonial empires, it becomes a no less vicious practice but a less coherent ideology. The proposition that a “scientific racism” was the product of classificatory thinking characteristic of the Enlightenment runs into the problem that at no point did scientists agree on the significance of race. If some scientists concluded that the world’s population was clustered into unequal groups—​white, black, and yellow—​ others reasoned that human beings were intermixed in a variety of ways and that skin color, intelligence, or other capabilities did not correlate. These arguments among scientists and officials trying to define and legitimize a colonial order never produced a consensus, even when the rule of European powers over much of the world was at its height.71 Imperial practices provoked some to criticize racial domination and others to justify it in new ways. The British anti-​slavery movement’s deployment of the image of a black man in chains, pleading, “Am I not a man and a brother?” invoked the universality of humanity. But British lawmakers in the early 1830s were of two minds about whether people of African descent, if freed from the shackles of slavery, would become “rational” actors who could participate in market economies as wage laborers, and—​at least some of them—​in political institutions. When ex-​ slaves did not follow the script written for them by abolitionists—​often preferring a variety of economic activities to the constraints of full-​time wage labor on the plantations where they had worked as slaves—​British administrators and some missionaries concluded that blacks were a racial exception to an economic rule and could contribute to the empire only if kept in a subordinate position. That position too provoked controversy, as well as efforts on the part of ex-​slaves to claim the rights which formal emancipation had seemed to dangle before them.72 The consolidation of colonial states—​and the fact that colonizers came to live in them for short or long periods—​raised the question of whether boundaries between colonized and colonizer needed to be defined and policed. The European who “went native” and the child of a European father and indigenous mother confounded the notion of a society neatly divided into superiors and inferiors and

70 Chatterjee 1993, 16.

71 Muthu 2003; Tilley 2011; Conklin 2013. 72 Hall 2002; Holt 1992; Dubois 2004.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  397 raised the possibility of subversion from inside or at the margins of a colonial society. Metropolitan and settler elites did not see eye to eye on how far to go in treating indigenous people as a category that could be exploited at will.73 Entrenched settler communities with their self-​identification as “whites” sharply distinct from indigenous people—​as in Kenya, Rhodesia, or Algeria—​could complicate matters for imperial administrators who took a more pragmatic view of the costs and benefits of colonial rule.74 French governments were reluctant to inscribe racial distinction in law. They insisted that the major distinction in the overseas territories was juridical status: colonized peoples were subjects, not citizens; their legal affairs did not come under the French civil code. However much “race”—​immutable and heritable—​ seemed distinct from “culture”—​a category that also made invidious distinctions, but admitted the possibility of change—​the two were imbricated in one another. British anthropologists in the early twentieth century preferred to analyze the particular ways in which different societies solved universal problems rather than to emphasize fixed hierarchy among people. As usual, practice and ideology did not line up neatly. Portuguese governments claimed to have transcended race consciousness, but practiced distinction-​making to a high degree. Most important, people of African and Asian descent pushed back against the different forms of racism they encountered. Even before colonialism in much of Africa was consolidated, organizations like the Pan-​African Conference of 1900 were attacking the racist assumptions of imperial rule. When W. E. B. DuBois issued his famous statement of 1903 that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” he was signaling a struggle that would challenge the foundations of multiple empires and the political forms that succeeded them.75 Some colonizers—​secular as well as religious—​invoked the idea of a “civilizing mission” that might eventually create equality among imperial subjects.76 The concept combined Roman humanitas with Christian proselytism. But if the goal was to uplift, could Africans or Asians be lifted very far? As earlier, the civilizing mission was undercut by humiliations directed at the very people who had absorbed mission thinking. British Protestant missionaries, like the secular civilizers of the French Third Republic who were the agents of “cultural imperialism” or the “colonization of consciousness,” did not necessarily think that their subjects would ever attain the levels of their mentors. But subjects in the colonies often refused to accept this message. Studies of converts show that the lessons of Christian and other missions could be reinterpreted and lived out in disparate ways. People insisted that they could become Christian while remaining “African.” Culture was a realm

73 Stoler 2002; Saada 2012; Cooper and Stoler 1997. 74 Lake and Reynolds 2008 stress the mutual influence of the builders of “white men’s countries”—​from Australia to North America to South Africa—​on each other and the tensions with the Colonial Office in London over issues of race. 75 DuBois 1903: 1. 76 Conklin 1997.

398  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper of contestation, more complicated than an imperialist imposition or a defense of African authenticity.77 The civilizing missions of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century colonialism supposed a dynamic element: colonizers were staking their legitimacy on the colonized becoming more like them. Yet while convergence could be deferred to an indefinite future—​and perhaps be imagined as only partial even then—​the concept of “civilization” could be used in a static sense to inscribe a global, hierarchical division of people that transcended the competition among colonial powers. The profession of international law offered a venue for imperial definitions of difference on a grand scale. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as jurists and statesmen in Europe set out procedures for adjudicating conflicts among themselves and limiting actions in time of war, they elaborated a distinction between civilized powers that interacted with each other on the basis of mutually recognized sovereignty and polities that did not deserve such respect. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–​1885 and the Brussels Conference of 1890–​1891, rival powers agreed on the rules for their competitions over Africa—​notably “effective occupation” as a basis for claiming territory—​and committed themselves to practices, such as stamping out the slave trade, that were supposed to mark their advanced civilization.78 In this way, they enforced, for themselves at least, the cultural superiority of “Europe,” even as they competed with each other to incorporate supposedly less civilized people into rival imperial blocs. In the actual exercise of power, imperial rulers could not operate as if the world were divided into the civilized and the uncivilized.79 Such a division of the world was complicated by the existence of non-​European empires that, however much they were condescended to, still had to be reckoned with—​the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire, and—​of increasing importance at the turn of the century—​Japan. The fraught relationships among these empires, the Russian and Austro-​Hungarian empires, and the growing overseas empires of some western European powers has often been covered up by thinking of all but the latter as anachronisms. Yet Asian, Eurasian, and empires on Europe’s edges were all part of the game of power that ruling elites played—​with devastating consequences in 1914. These empires were all aware of and influenced by each other’s politics of difference.80 The cataclysm of World War I  seemed to explode the commonalities of Europeans, and even before then, mobilizations within the colonies confronted rulers with multiple challenges, some turning “civilizing” ideologies against colonial authority, others positing alternative visions. As colonial governments tried to co-​opt some elements of society while repressing others, they encountered in real 77 McKittrick 2002; Peterson 2012. On the importance of Catholic missionaries to the civilizing mission advocated by the supposedly secular French Third Republic, see Daughton 2006. 78 Koskenniemi 2004. In practice, “European” and “African” sovereignties were not so neatly divided and the process of subordinating the latter entailed more negotiation and improvisation than jurists would admit. Surun 2014. 79 Benton 2010. 80 The overlap and interaction of these different types of empires is well portrayed in the contributions to Leonhard and von Hirschhausen 2011. On variations in the Ottoman politics of difference in the late nineteenth century in Anatolia and Yemen see Doumanis 2012 and Kuehn 2011.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  399 terms the incoherence behind their claim to legitimate authority over people they had tried to define as “others.” At the end of World War II, both French and British governments formally repudiated race as a legitimate category of state practice with remarkable alacrity. Assertions of non-​racialism did not, however, mean equality and respect. White settlers did their best to preserve racial privileges; habits of denigration among colonial officials, businessmen, and tourists died hard if at all. And the nature of distinction could be subtly transformed. In the twentieth century, as colonial regimes became more serious about economic and social reform in order to preserve empire, administrators put a new emphasis on distinctions in behavior. If Africans were now considered capable of becoming rational economic actors, participants in Western-​style political institutions, and students of science and literature, the African who refused to conform to the “modern” ways made available to him could be considered to be acting in a willfully negative manner, well deserving the designation of “savage.” This kind of thinking was prominent in the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya and the war in Algeria; people labeled as backward could be forcibly resettled in closely supervised villages, interned, tortured, or killed—​all at a time when in other parts of Africa, colonial regimes were negotiating with African political parties about the transfer of power. The most persuasive analyses of racism treat it not as an intrinsic characteristic of European society—​any more than “tribalism” should be considered an inherent characteristic of African culture—​but as a mode of thinking that evolved in conjunction with the exercise of power and exploitation.81 The contents and deployment of racial thought thus shifted with the trajectories of colonial empires—​and not least in relation to the fact that Africans and Asians argued back. If empires configured the context for both racism and anti-​racism, they did so in relation to myriad struggles in particular imperial situations, at the level of an entire empire, and across empires. Political movements in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries insisted that the inhabitants of the Raj were “imperial citizens” who could claim the rights of an Englishman anywhere in the empire. An Indian who managed to get to England might make good on such a claim, although not so in British India itself. In the early twentieth century, controversy erupted when Indians wanted to exercise the right they had to enter the British Isles or any other part of the Empire, including self-​ governing dominions like Canada and Australia. Those governments refused that right on racial grounds, a refusal that was a significant factor in alienating Indian elites from carrying on their struggle within British institutions. They were running into another empire-​wide vision—​of a “Greater Britain” extended across the globe, an imperial space in which only white people mattered.82 What of race outside European empire? That non-​European societies were capable of making invidious distinctions should hardly come as a surprise, but once again the relationship between power and difference was not uniform. Some African

81 Bethencourt 2013; Schaub 2019.

82 Banerjee 2010; Bell 2007; Sinha 2006; Lake and Reynolds 2008.

400  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper empires had been content to extract tribute and obedience from conquered people without treating them as a distinct category or trying to change their way of life. The great empires of the Sahelian region from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries (Ghana, Mali, Songhay) ruled over diverse peoples and fostered linkages over large spaces without insisting on assimilation. But particularly when external slave markets created powerful incentives, outsiders could be defined as the “enslavable other.” Bruce Hall has documented the denigration of “black” Africans by light-​ skinned inhabitants of the edge of the Sahara desert in the context of political consolidation and the slave trade, but he is careful to point out that blackness was considered as much a matter of patrilineal descent as of physical appearance. Two people who looked the same might be considered to be of different races. In a later context, tensions between “Arabs” and “Africans”—​neither of which constituted a homogeneous category  —​crystallized in these more generalized terms during contests for power in Zanzibar as it became clear that British power was fading and control of a successor state was at stake.83 In imperial Russia, the politics of unproblematized everyday difference strained under the pressures of nationalist movements84 and the vogue for racial theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Russia’s scholars participated in research projects and international debates on “race science.” While their differences in political aims, academic ambitions, and theoretical arguments were legion, overall Russia’s scholars considered physical anthropology more “scientific” (more objective) than cultural ethnography with its “colonial” biases.85 Professional fascination with physical type and worry over civilizational categories accorded with dilemmas faced by the empire. Not only did Russia’s administrators have to manage and learn something about enormous numbers of distinctive peoples, they had also to cope with the disdain of European competitor empires who played the civilizational card against Russia itself. One ideological move on the part of rulers was to claim that the Russian Empire was bringing “Western” civilization to its “Asiatic” regions.86 Russia’s loss to Japan in the war of 1904–​1905 was a hard blow. Whether the empire constructed by Japan in Asia from the 1870s through the 1940s was similar to or distinct from European empires was the subject of fierce argument at the time. Japanese ideologues sought at times to emphasize their distinction from the people of Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria (or for that matter, Hokkaido and Okinawa) and their equivalence to European powers, at others to portray themselves as “big brothers” to Asian relatives. They developed an anti-​ imperialist—​that is anti-​European—​imperialism. Even as Japanese authorities exercised harsh interventions and relegated incorporated peoples to second-​tier status, they went further than European empires in fostering industrialization in their newly acquired territories. Some Koreans found opportunities for profit in their Japanese-​run homeland or in Japanese-​conquered Manchuria. Nonetheless,

83 Hall 2011; Glassman 2011. See also Gomez 2018.

84 See Lieven, Chapter 35, in Volume 2 of this work. 85 Mogilner 2013.

86 Sunderland 2004.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  401 in the 1930s Japanese conquerors in China proved themselves every bit as brutal as their European rivals.87 In recent years, demands from Korea and China that Japan acknowledge its colonizing past are acknowledged by some Japanese intellectuals, but are resisted in official quarters.

Gender and Empire Politics Empire both reflected and produced particular kinds of gender relations. At first glance, most empires appear as masculine endeavors that fostered myths of valor and control on the battlefield, in positions of command, and in remote outposts of civilization. But the politics of gender varied in different imperial contexts. Nomadic empires valorized women’s contributions to mobile economies and even armies; Mongol khans’ wives and mothers were powerful actors in dynastic politics. Mongol practices of exogamy as well as polygyny, concubinage, and rape during conquest produced millions of children by non-​Mongol mothers across Eurasia. The Ottoman practice of sultanic reproduction with concubines depended on a strictly patrilineal notion of legitimacy—​the mother was an outsider and a slave—​ yet it gave women an important role in palace politics, as women of the harem struggled to bring about the succession of their sons.88 The chosen and surviving son had good reason to heed the wisdom of his mother. Miscegenation was characteristic of most empires, especially when it was men without families who ventured forward. Marriage with foreign royals was an ancient way of shoring up alliances and incorporating conquered elites; Antony and Cleopatra are salient exemplars of this practice and its potential problems. In as brutal a situation as that of the Spanish among the Inca, marriages of conquistadors and Inca princesses did take place. The famous chronicler of the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega, was the proud product of such a union. There was nothing egalitarian about these marriages, but they were part of what produced creole societies that might or might not recognize the complexity of their origins. An entire genre of painting—​ known as “Castas”—​from eighteenth-​century Spanish America illustrated the diverse combinations of people of Indian, European, and African origin. Social categories could be fine-​tuned in much more complex ways than a distinction between colonizer and colonized, white and black. Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin, had Slavic, German, Scandinavian, and African roots. His great-​grandfather—​an African captured and sent to Peter the Great’s court—​became a governor and a general in the imperial army.89 Biological mixing did not necessarily produce a distinct category, especially when status was reckoned strictly in the male line, but in some contexts the question of miscegenation was fraught. In late nineteenth-​century European colonies

87 Itagaki et al. 2012; Young 1999; Barclay 2018. 88 Peirce 1993.

89 Nepomnyashchy et al. 2006.

402  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper in Africa, many European men allotted themselves the privilege of liaisons with African women and claimed the right to recognize or not the legitimacy of children as a masculine prerogative. In Germany, women tried to put a stop to such practices, on the grounds that miscegenation produced the wrong kind of people and that only true German women could forge a colonial society that was sustainable and civilized. Meanwhile, missionaries led the attack on the gender practices of African or Asian communities, criticizing polygamy and making the putative European family the model to which all people were supposed to aspire—​and whose unattainability could be a marker of colonial hierarchy.90 Colonial situations often made family life difficult for workers:  male African migrants to gold or copper mines lived in single-​sex barracks, leaving wives in villages caring for the young and the old. At times, women found new niches for their skills and resources; they were active in marketing in urban areas, for example. Until the late 1950s in South Africa, women’s mobility was less policed than that of men. After World War II, when French and British administrations tried to turn a new leaf and encourage economic development and more stable societies, they insisted that the key to reform was the African woman and her children. Their plan was that oscillatory migration would give way to labor stabilization, based on a wage-​earning man who lived with his family at the place of work, under the watchful eyes of nurses and teachers, away from the backwardness of village life. The male breadwinner model proved less effective in practice than in theory, but it revealed tensions in late colonial societies over the applicability of European gender and class hierarchies and over the degree to which the continued distinctiveness of colonized peoples was something to be overcome or exploited.91 That tension was mirrored among colonized people themselves: should they try to make their way in a world that others had defined, or find their own ways of doing things? Some scholars have distinguished between a domestic world where South Asian people could defend a distinct way of life and a public realm where political and social movements were most likely to achieve success if they operated within institutions set up by the colonizers. Others have argued that the private and public realms were more intertwined and contested.92 Léopold Sédar Senghor, in 1945, told Africans that they should assimilate—​taking what was good out of European culture—​but not be assimilated. They should retain what was valuable in African cultures and contribute thereby to universal humanity.93 He was insisting that there were different routes out of the colonial politics of difference. Women and men, young and old, political leaders and people who had long suffered as colonial “subjects” were exploring the possibilities in their daily lives, in their writings, in their political activities. What they came up with was varied, and did not necessarily conform to images of mimicry of Western culture or

90 Saada 2012; Wildenthal 2001; White 1999; Stoler 2002. 91 Cooper 1996; Lindsay 2003.

92 Compare Chakrabarty 2000 and Sinha 2006. 93 Senghor 1945.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  403 autonomous cultural conceptions, of assimilation or incommensurability. More salient are ongoing arguments about values and behavior. To take one example in a particularly harsh context, some Zulu in South Africa have hitched their future to the African National Congress’s egalitarian and multiracial values, while others believe that they need to defend gender-​and age-​based hierarchies that are considered “crucial to collective well-​being.”94

An Empire of Liberty and Likeness The United States provides a particular variant on the politics of difference, although it bears close comparison with other territories of large-​scale settlement, like Australia and Canada.95 At the beginning, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed the new state “an empire of liberty,” but this liberty would be enjoyed only by some—​ not by slaves or Indians. Colonists, whose eagerness for land led directly to clashes with earlier inhabitants, had developed more antagonistic relationships with Native Americans than had the British crown, a situation exacerbated as the new country expanded westward. The US Supreme Court in 1831 declared Indians to be “domestic dependent nations” whose relation to the United States was that of “a ward to his guardian.” The formula recognized Indians as distinct peoples, neither part of an American polity nor independent of it; they were not allowed to govern themselves. Subsequently, US governments supported the “removal” of Indians from desirable locations to newly acquired territories further west and eventually to “reservations.”96 Until 1924, Indians could only acquire citizenship by removing themselves from their tribes. They had to cease to be Indians to become Americans. Slaves were also excluded from the American polity, although they were counted as three-​fifths of a person in allocating seats in the House of Representatives to different states. But the United States had trouble with the notion of governing different people differently. There was only one kind of fully integrated subunit in the country—​a state—​as opposed to the mix of colonies, protectorates, and other forms of incorporation in the British and other empires. The distinction between “slave” and “free” states and the question of how to allot new territories between these categories led to a civil war that almost destroyed the polity. In the war’s aftermath, a stronger federal government and a more “national” view emerged, one of whose effects was the drive to subdue Indian communities and confine them to reservations. The American system offered little space between complete exclusion and homogeneous inclusion; once slaves were freed, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution seemed to suggest that the only way forward was to submerge ex-​slaves in an undifferentiated (except by sex) American citizenry. These provisions set the context for efforts on the part of Southern landowners and

94 Hickel 2015: 17.

95 See also Preston, Chapter 44, in Volume 2 of this work. 96 White 1991a.

404  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper their allies to deprive those laws of substance, as well as for a long-​term struggle on the part of African Americans and their supporters to fulfil the promise of the emancipatory laws.97 Ideology in the United States slowly shifted from a self-​acknowledged imperial project on the North American continent to a more homogeneous national polity. The civil rights movement after World War II was to a large extent conducted in the name of an inclusionary American society. Its partial success gave way in recent decades to attempts to combine egalitarian ideals with recognition of difference—​ of the distinct life experiences that African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and immigrants of many origins have had, among themselves and in their relationships with the state and with other Americans. This recognition has given rise to a backlash among some white Americans, challenged in turn by largescale protests against ongoing racism and inequality. Along the way, the United States had acquired the resources of continental empire, vast enough to give the government considerable choice in where and how it could intervene in the world. In the late nineteenth century, when other powers like Britain, Germany, France, and Japan were colonizing vast stretches of the world, the United States helped itself to several overseas territories, largely at the expense of the flagging Spanish Empire. But counterarguments against incorporation of these territories emerged, not just from critics of American power, but out of a racist anti-​ imperialism at home. Many Americans did not want more black, brown, or yellow people in the polity, even in a subordinate position.98 The United States never created its own version of the British Colonial Office or the French Ministère des Colonies—​ bureaucracies that ratified the subordinate place of different people within structures of governance. In the twentieth century—​and into the twenty-​first—​the United States repeatedly conducted occupations, but it was reluctant to acquire colonies, imperial responsibilities, and challenges to its strict insider/​outsider boundaries.99

New Empires of the Twentieth Century and Their Regimes of Difference As noted earlier, Japan conducted its own imperial ventures; its attempt to position itself as a big brother to subordinated Asian polities had much in common with the attitudes of western European colonizers. But the fact that an Asian power acted this way represented a reconfiguration of the global politics of difference that the European powers were slow to appreciate. When Japan not only defeated China in the 1890s but prevailed over Russia in 1904–​1905, it asserted its entry into the competitive imperial world. Japan gradually repudiated the unequal treaties that European intruders had imposed on Asian polities.

97 Reidy 2019.

98 Kramer 2006.

99 One of the latest efforts at analyzing the United States as an empire is Hopkins 2018.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  405 The Japanese high command cooperated with European powers in repressing the Boxer rebellion in China at the turn of the century, but it was not clear that Europeans—​ although taken aback by Japan’s victory over Russia—​had more than a condescending view of Asian empires. Japan’s attempt to get a clause repudiating racial discrimination into the post–​World War I peace treaties—​hypocritical as it might have been—​ was dismissed by the European powers. Most important, Japan’s ambitions in Asia ran directly into those of the British, French, Dutch, and American imperial ventures, and Japan’s need for resources its islands lacked—​oil and other minerals—​led its leaders to fear that rival powers might monopolize what Japan wanted most. The aggressions and dealings that led to the Pacific War of 1941–​1945 stemmed directly from the fact that Japan was playing a similar game to its European and American rivals and was equally willing to subordinate other peoples to its interests.100 The Soviet Union, emerging from the collapse of imperial Russia in world and civil wars, created another variant on empire. The new communist polity recovered most of the territories conquered by the tsars, but refined the Romanovs’ politics of difference. Distinctive ethnic groups were recognized, with their particular cultural needs, and in this sense, as well as in an explicit politics of inherited class belonging, the management of differentiated collectivities was retained from tsarist times. Communist rulers went further by giving political form to their multinational domain. The new state was in principle federal—​a “union” of national republics, each led by communists from the dominant ethnic group in the territory. The whole was held together by linkages to the center, to which national cadres were recruited, in some cases to become the country’s leaders.101 While recognizing national particularity, the communist state was also univer­ salizing: the goal was to extend its combination of centralizing authority and developmentalism around the world. When after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the USSR could extend its reach into eastern Europe, it helped local communists to shape replica states—​each juridically independent, each run by its “own” people, but following the model of the single-​party state and direction from Moscow.102 If the Soviet Union’s “empire of nations”103 was a communist variant on empires of difference, the Nazi empire took exclusionary empire to an extreme. After World War II, Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire described Nazi racism as colonial empire coming back to haunt Europe. Germany’s earlier history of colonization includes instances of genocidal massacres—​of the Herero in southwest Africa most notoriously.104 But the historical line leading from colonial atrocities to Hitler is not straight. Other colonial powers committed their share of atrocities, but England did not produce its own Auschwitz. 100 Dower 1986. 101 Martin 2001; Hirsch 2005; Hosking, Chapter 43, in Volume 2 of this work. 102 Judt 2005. 103 Hirsch 2005. 104 Hull 2005 shows that the “annihilation” strategy practiced in southwest Africa had its roots in the German High Command’s anticipation of European wars, was tested and extended in Africa, and brought back to Europe in World War I.

406  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper Unlike France, Great Britain, and other western European empires, Germany lost its colonies in 1919. Between then and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the sensibility of being a nation worthy of empire, of Germans as a civilized people who had been unjustly deprived of territory and honor, was not mediated by the practicalities of ruling real people. In this cauldron of resentment, anti-​Semitism and other forms of racism became increasingly virulent. The interaction of British or French colonizers with Africans and Asians did not make these Europeans more humane, but the realities of governing made rulers aware of the limitations of their own power. Above all, they knew—​as indeed German governors in Africa had learned before 1914—​that they needed intermediaries and that if they acted too wantonly they risked inciting rebellions whose repression would generate high costs and bad publicity.105 Nazi Germany insisted on exercising direct rule over Poland, Ukraine, and other eastern territories that it conquered. The Nazis saw Slavic people as of little use except as slave labor. Consequently, German rule reduced the Ukrainian breadbasket to famine and the Nazi leadership missed, until far too late, opportunities to exploit the resentment many Ukrainians held toward the Soviet government. To the west, collaborators were admissible and found, but the Nazis’ refusal to seek assistance in the Slavic lands was a major reason why the thousand-​year Reich lasted only 12  years.106 This radical variant on the politics of difference—​the elimination of difference altogether—​destroyed not only millions of people, but the empire itself.

Ending Empire, Redefining Difference Long-​lasting empires, we have argued, were flexible kinds of polities. Focused on extension and maintenance of power, they presumed no specific relationship of “people” and state. Because they did not eliminate difference, there was always the possibility that component parts could hive off and create or be absorbed into another polity. And as long as some powers were seeking imperial aggrandizement, others—​even if they had more limited aspirations—​had to worry about them. Imperial dissolutions and recombinations recurred throughout history. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, the world that empires had made changed rapidly.107 World War II was an empire war, in which the continental power of the United States and the Soviet Union and the transoceanic power of Great Britain (and other allies) were mobilized against the upstart empires of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Unlike the case of World War I, where only the empires of the losers were taken apart, France, Britain, and the Netherlands were so badly 105 Iliffe 1969 has shown how policies of forced cultivation and land-​grabbing provoked a widespread rebellion in Tanganyika, leading first to brutal repression and second to less intrusive economic and political strategies, as German governors accommodated to the limitations of their power. 106 Mazower 2008; Lower 2005; Wildenthal et al. 2005; Conrad 2010. 107 Cooper, Chapter 45, in Volume 2 of this work.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  407 weakened by World War II that they feared not being able to maintain their colonies. On the one hand, they no longer had to worry that a rival European empire would seek a dominant position and a monopoly on colonial resources. On the other, they needed, or thought they needed, colonial resources for their economic recovery. In 1945, France and Britain were not yet ready to give up on empire, but they sought to reconfigure it, not least their politics of difference. They both swung toward the inclusive end of the inclusion-​differentiation spectrum, hoping to maintain stability and increase production by co-​opting better educated, more cosmopolitan intermediaries whose challenges they had heretofore put down and by improving the conditions of peasants and workers through programs of economic and social development. Development, as a goal, pushed against the limits of their politics of difference. So did democratic openings, even limited ones. France took the radical move of suppressing the distinction between citizen and subject; all inhabitants of the overseas territories as of 1946 acquired the quality of citizen. Unlike the citizens of the metropole, those of the overseas territories did not have to come under the French civil code in matters of marriage and inheritance: the postwar constitution purported to respect diversity as well as equality. The government hoped to manage the political implications of this move and gradually extended the franchise. But French administrators did not reckon on the effectiveness of social and political movements in Africa that were escalating demands for political equality into demands for equal economic and social rights for all citizens. Having staked its legitimacy on an inclusive citizenship, the French government was not able to confine the claims for equivalent benefits in the postwar welfare state to the metropole.108 Britain tried to focus on the individual territory, and even encouraged educated elites to seek office on rural councils—​reversing the notion that traditional authenticity was appropriate for Africa. But the ambitions of political leaders like Kwame Nkrumah or Jomo Kenyatta could not be confined to peripheral politics; they knew from experience that Accra, Nairobi, or Lagos were seats of colonial governance and that was where the quest for power had to be directed. Meanwhile, the British Parliament, well aware of the role that dominions and colonies had played in the recent defense of empire, voted in 1948 for an act that created a second-​order British citizenship, available to citizens of dominions and subjects in the colonies. This law allowed overseas subjects to travel and settle in the British Isles. How inclusive could empire become—​and still remain empire? And still provide more benefits than burdens to the metropole? France and Britain were caught between the danger of moving too far toward inclusion—​at costs, given the poverty of many of their colonies, that would be prohibitive—​and refusing escalating demands, which could lead to rebellions. Britain with difficulty contained revolt

108

Cooper 2014b.

408  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper in Malaya and Kenya, and France was unable to do so in Vietnam and Algeria. Africans were demanding various mixes of autonomy—​only sometimes going as far as independence—​with social, economic, and political equality with citizens of the metropole. France eventually found that the only way to escape these escalating demands was to concede more and more autonomy—​and eventually independence. By the 1960s, it was becoming clear that the nation-​state would be the normative form of state power, or at least the normative fiction. Portugal—​not a democracy at home—​held to its nearly 500-​year presence in Africa until 1975, and whites in Rhodesia, finding themselves unable to defend racial domination within the British Empire, declared independence in 1965 and defended it in national terms until 1979. In both cases, the quest for African liberation turned bitter and bloody, but it was ultimately impossible to defend colonialism when it was no longer an international norm and neighboring independent states were offering sanctuary and support to rebel movements. South Africa, the last bastion of white domination, finally gave way in 1994. The world at the end of the twentieth century was operating on the fiction that all political units were juridically equivalent, even if in most respects they were not. For most of history, political and economic relations took place among units constituted in quite different ways, units that did not regard each other as equals, but were able to reach pragmatic understandings sufficient for carrying out economic and political relations of one sort or another. The Mughal, Chinese, Ottoman, and British empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are all cases in point. In the nineteenth century, European imperialism, with its fiction of civilizational superiority and reality of inter-​empire conflict, expressed a way of organizing world relations in a frankly unequal structure. For a few decades after the collapse of empires in the twentieth century, the idea of a single world system of equivalent sovereignties—​whatever the differences in cultures and institutions—​seemed to be the core principle of international relations. But neither the claim of liberal internationalism nor the clash of civilizations captures the realities and possibilities of political organization in a heterogeneous and interactive world.109 The heterogeneity of social and political life poses questions within states as well as among them. New states, with their ideologies of national unity, have had to confront the reality of their diversity—​of the layers of imperial conquests, of the arbitrary boundaries colonial regimes had established, of the structuring of patronage and political mobilization along “ethnic” lines, and of the claims these groupings and alliances, once directed toward colonial states, make on much poorer independent governments. Meanwhile, former colonial powers could rewrite their histories as those of a unified nation. The tensions and conflicts that stemmed from the presence of people from the former colonies in France or Britain could be written off as “communalism,” whose roots were in the particularity of other cultures. France and Britain

109

Phillips and Sharman 2015; Cummings and Hinnebusch 2011; Getachew 2019.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  409 by the 1970s were turning toward a harsher politics of difference, trying to keep out of their newly national space the sons and daughters of people they had once tried to keep in the imperial fold. But one should take care with generalizations about a post-​imperial world. Empires were transforming in various ways, even at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-​first, notably in the former communist world, where the earlier politics of difference failed to hold up under economic stresses and social claims. When the Soviet empire came apart, it fragmented along lines that had been drawn after earlier imperial catastrophes. Most states of eastern Europe restored independence inside borders determined at the end of World War II, while the Soviet Union was divided up by its own communist leaders using boundaries, much adjusted over decades, of the federation’s constituent “national republics.”110 None of the states created or transformed was ethnically homogeneous. In the extreme case of former Yugoslavia, a multinational state fragmented and turned into a battlefield, as nationalists sought to control—​and cleanse—​territories where populations remained mingled long after repeated “unmixings” in the 1870s, 1910s, 1920s, and 1940s. The breakup of the USSR into 15 states gave the titular nationalities—​Ukrainians, Uzbeks, etc.—​an edge over other groups on their territories, provoking in many areas a resurgence of nationalized politics and nationalized rewritings of history, in some regions out-​migration of non-​nationals, and in a few contested spaces violence and war. The Russian Federation kept the structures and prospects of a multinational entity alive, and after abandoning communist atheism, reverted to the tsarist strategy of recognizing, controlling, and utilizing multiple faiths. After a brief interlude of economic chaos (transition to capitalism, Russian-​ style) and unfamiliar civic freedoms, the state recovered its imperial swagger and began to take in, through warfare, diplomacy, and institutional penetration, territories of the former Soviet empire, ominously labeled its “near abroad.” In these efforts at re-​extension, Russian leaders appeal to their long history of protecting both national minorities (Ossetians and Abkhazians were supposedly at risk in independent Georgia) and Russian ethnics (in Ukraine). This multivalent politics of difference allows Russia’s ambitious post-​Soviet leadership to promote a new transcontinental alliance: the Eurasian Union, of enticingly vague, even Mongol-​ size dimensions, in which linguistic, confessional, and ethnic differences can once again be submerged in a new “friendship of nations” and an integrated, manipulable transcontinental market.111 The articulation of statehood with diversity remains ambiguous in these and other terrains around the world. Empires leave long shadows, but they also cast light on future variants of the politics of difference.



110 111

Plokhi 2014; Kotkin 2008. Hale 2015; Bassin and Pozo 2017.

410  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper

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412  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper Elliott, J. H. 2006. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–​1830. New Haven, CT. Elliott, M. 2001. The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA. Fitzmaurice, A. 2014. Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–​2000. Cambridge. Fletcher, J. 1986. “The Mongols, Social and Ecological Perspectives.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 1: 11–​51. Fradera, J. M. 2018. The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires. Princeton, NJ. Fradera, J.  M., and C.  Schmidt-​Nowara, eds. 2013. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. New York. Getachew, A.  2019. Worldmaking After Empire:  The Rise and Fall of Self-​ Determination. Princeton, NJ. Glassman, J. 2011. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington, IN. Goebel, M.  2016. Anti-​ imperial Metropolis:  Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third-​ World Nationalism. Cambridge. Gomez, M. 2018. African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton, NJ. Greene, M. 2010. Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton, NJ. Haldén, P. 2012. “From empire to commonwealth(s): orders in Europe 1300-​1800.” In P. Bang and D. Kołodziejczyk, eds., Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History, 280-​303. Cambridge. Hale, H.  E. 2015. Patronal Politics:  Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective. New York. Hall, B. 2011. A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–​1960. Cambridge. Hall, C. 2002. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–​1867. Chicago. Hassett, D.  2019. Mobilizing Memory:  The Great War and the Langiage of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-​39. Oxford. Herzog, T.  2013. “Can You Tell a Spaniard When You See One? ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic.” In P.  Cardim, J.  J Ruiz Ibánez, and G.  Sabatini, eds., Polycentric Monarchies:  How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony?, 147–​161. Brighton, UK. Hickel, J. 2015. Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-​Liberal Politics in South Africa. Berkeley, CA. Hirsch, F. 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY. Ho, E. 2006. The Graves of Tarim Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley, CA. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger, eds. 1984. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge. Hobson, J. A. 1902. Imperialism: A Study. London. Holt, T. 1992. The Problem of Freedom Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–​1938. Baltimore, MD. Hopkins, A. G. 2018. American Empire: A Global History. Princeton, NJ. Hull, I.  V. 2005. Absolute Destruction:  Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca, NY. Iliffe, J. 1969. Tanganyika under German Rule, 1905–​1912. Cambridge. Itagaki, R., S. Mizutani, and H. Tobe. 2012. “Japanese Empire.” In P. Levine and J. Marriott, eds., The Ashgate Companion to Modern Imperial Histories, 274–​299. Farnham, UK. Judson, P.  M. 1996. Exclusive Revolutionaries:  Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–​1914. Ann Arbor. Judson, P.  M. 2006. Guardians of the Nation:  Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria. Cambridge, MA.

Empires and the Politics of Difference  413 Judt, T. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York. Koskenniemi, M. 2004. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–​1960. Cambridge. Kotkin, S. 2008. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–​2000. Oxford. Kramer, P. A. 2006. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill, NC. Kuehn, T.  2011. Empire Islam, and Politics of Difference:  Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849–​1919. Leiden. Lake, M., and H. Reynolds. 2008. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge. Lawrance, B., E. Osborn, and R. Roberts, eds. 2006. Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison, WI. LeDonne, J.  1991. Absolutism and Ruling Class:  The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–​1825. New York. Leonhard, J., and U. von Hirschhausen, eds. 2011. Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century. Gottingen. Lewis, M. 2013. Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–​1938. Berkeley. Lieven, D. 1989. Russian Rulers under the Old Regime. New Haven, CT. Lindsay, L. 2003. Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria. Westport, CT. Lower, W. 2005. Nazi Empire-​Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Chapel Hill, NC. Lydon, G.  2009. On Trans-​Saharan Trails:  Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-​cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-​century Western Africa. Cambridge. MacCormack, S.  1991. Religion in the Andes:  Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, NJ. Malešević, S. 2017. “Empires and nation-​states: Beyond the dichotomy,” Thesis Eleven 139, 1: 3-​10. Manz, B. F. 1989. The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane. Cambridge. Matera, M.  2014. Black London:  The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA. Mathisen, R. 2006. “Peregrini, Barbari, and Cives Romani: Concepts of Citizenship and the Legal Identity of Barbarians in the Later Roman Empire.” American Historical Review 111: 1011–​1040. Martin, T. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939. Ithaca, NY. Matthee, R. 2011. Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. New York. Mazower, M. 2008. Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe. London. M’Bokolo, E., and J.-​L. Amselle, eds. 1985. Au cœur de l’ethnie:  Ethnies, tribalisme et état en Afrique. Paris. McKittrick, M. 2002. To Dwell Secure: Generation, Christianity and Colonialism in Ovamboland. Portsmouth, NH. Mogilner, M. 2013. Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia. Lincoln, NE. Morgan, D. 2007. The Mongols, 2nd ed. Malden, MA. Muthu, S. 2003. Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton, NJ. Nepomnyashchy, C. T., N. Svobodny, and L. Trigos. 2006. Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness. Evanston, IL. Ochonu, M. 2014. Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria. Bloomington, IN. Ostrowski, D. 1998. Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-​Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–​1589. Cambridge. Pandey, G. 2006. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 2nd ed. Delhi. Parthasarathi P.  2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not:  Global Economic Divergence 1600-​1850. Cambridge. Peabody, S. 1996. “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime. New York. Peabody, S., and T. Stovall, eds. 2003. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham, NC.

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12 Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern Kim A. Wagner

What bloody wars it cost the Franks, to overcome the Saxons who lived like wild men in their dense forests: Does one look for reasons for the repeated uprisings of the wild Saxons? No. . . . Civilization presses forward, and whatever tries to oppose it will be taught through blood and steel that there is no opposing it. —​German correspondent writing in 1905 during the Maji Maji Rebellion in East Africa1

As long as empires and imperial formations have exerted their dominance and expanded their control, people have resisted them.2 The very notion of Pax Imperii, in its manifold incarnations, was only ever a convenient myth that either legitimized or glossed over the violent suppression and domination of other societies and cultures; there would be no Pax Romana without slaves crucified along the Via Appia, and no Pax Britannica without Indian sepoys being blown from cannon. Varyingly described as rebellions, insurrection, uprisings, revolts, jacqueries, or emeutes, so-​called subaltern resistance played a significant role in shaping the historical trajectories of the people, societies, and states involved—​often falling short of their putative aims, such conflicts still managed to transform the political landscape within their respective contexts. If, however, we are not to take for granted the inevitability of rebellion by “wild” people against the advance of “civilization,” to use the wording of the preceding turn-​of-​the-​century quote, and if we are to query the dichotomy between tradition and modernity implied by that juxtaposition, a more considered approach is required. Within post-​colonial historiographies, it has been commonplace to rewrite the history of anti-​colonial resistance in the nineteenth century, and before, as proto-​ nationalist and as the precursor to the movements that later brought about decolonization. While in many ways understandable, the attempt to provide a colonial 1 Quoted in Monson 2010, 64. 2 I am indebted to the friends and colleagues who have helped me clarify my ideas, especially Gajendra Singh, John Pincince, Mark Condos, Saul Dubow and Peter Fibiger Bang. Research for this chapter has been generously supported with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-​Curie grant agreement No. 658047. Kim A. Wagner, Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0012.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  417 genealogy for modern nationalism is primarily a political endeavor and one that often assumes a distinctly anachronistic tenor. As the rebels of the past—​be they Maji Maji or Mau Mau—​are reinvented as heroes for the modern age, we are effectively, to use the words of Indian historian Shahid Amin, “hanging the rebels twice over.”3 The Indian sepoys of 1857 were not the predecessors to post-​1947 India any more than the Chinese Boxers of 1900 presaged the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s–​1970s, and the attempt to yoke subaltern resistance to modern agendas and ideologies must in itself be historicized.4 In keeping with the overall aim of the present volume, this chapter reflects some of the more recent developments, as well as criticisms, of the broader study of subaltern resistance and rebellion within a global context.5 The empirical case studies are drawn primarily from the European imperial expansion during the long nineteenth century, and from British India in particular, while the discussion will focus in particular on three central themes: violence, rumors, and religion.6 Considering the centrality of historiographical debates on the key concepts of “resistance” and “subalternity,” the following discussion is framed by a critical reading of the work of Ranajit Guha and his classic 1983 book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency.7 As both the foundational text of the South Asian Subaltern Studies community, as James C. Scott describes it, and as arguably the most influential study of rebellion within the context of European imperialism, Guha’s book constitutes an obvious point of reference.8 It should be noted that, obviously, Subaltern Studies does not offer the only approach to resistance or the role of marginalized groups within a global perspective, yet it is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that research in this vein has had an unparalleled impact on the wider historiography.9 While it might appear as something of a straw man to revisit scholarship more than three decades old, our main concern here is to examine both the possibilities and limitations of such a historical and methodological focus. The study of subaltern resistance furthermore means different things to academics working in different areas and under different political circumstances. In South Asia, for instance, more recent scholarship on resistance has already declared the original Subaltern Studies dead and buried, while in Middle Eastern studies, the historical focus on subalterns remain marginalized and thus retains scope for development.10 In Latin and South America, ongoing social and military conflicts, many of which involve peasants and indigenous populations, 3 Amin 2007. 4 See, for instance, Cohen 1997, 211–​288; and Ray 2003, 360–​395. 5 See Ortner 1995; O’Hanlon 1988; Masselos 1992; Chakrabarty 2008; and Wilson 2008. See also Stern 1987; Gledhill and Schell 2012; Ferrer 2014. 6 This chapter does not engage comprehensively with Marxist, Gramscian, or postcolonial theory, but see Guha and Spivak 1988; Sarkar 1997; Chaturvedi 2000; and Ludden 2001. 7 Guha [1983b] 1999; see also Guha 1983a. 8 Scott in Foreword, Guha [1983b] 1999. 9 It may be noted that the study of resistance within an African context, especially the work of Terence Ranger, predated and in important ways influenced South Asian scholarship. 10 See Chandra 2015; and Cronin 2012.

418  Kim A. Wagner have imbued the project with an altogether different relevance.11 The enduring influence of subalternist scholarship, in the twenty-​first century, would thus suggest that the horse being flogged may not be quite as dead as perhaps initially presumed.

Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies, and History from Below The historiographic field that has developed over the past several decades, within a range of disciplines, converging around the study of subaltern resistance, broadly conceived, has both produced some of the most exciting and innovative studies and at the same time revealed a tendency to be frustratingly mired in the politics of the past. The subalternist approach owes much to the work of British Marxist historians such as George Rudé, E.  P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm, and the focus on “history from below” as well as concepts such as the “moral economy of the crowd” that emerged from the 1950s onward.12 This substantial body of scholarship demonstrated that where state authorities, and later Whig and conservative historians, saw nothing but irrational spontaneity behind riots, resistance, and rebellion, there was in fact an alternative way of writing this history. The disorderly “mob” that engaged in urban riots became the “crowd,” whose actions reflected a socially sanctioned political legitimacy among the masses that challenged the existing order in early modern and modern Europe. One of the characteristics of this approach, and one that arguably informs much of the later scholarship on resistance and rebellion, is that it was written squarely from the perspective of, and largely in sympathy with, the “oppressed”—​be they peasants, workers, slaves, or simply the “people.” Hobsbawm’s notion of the social bandit, the outlaw condemned by the state but supported by the peasants, in many ways embodied this challenge to established historiography.13 Restoring agency to the very denizens of the past whose own voices were recorded only by the authorities who suppressed their resistance, or criminalized their protests, entailed the development of methodologically more versatile modes of interpreting the past. It was thus in this traditional social history, as well as what became known as micro-​history, that “new” types of sources, such as broadsheets, folklore, and ballads, were first utilized to recover the experiences and beliefs of illiterate peasants or workers of the past.14 The study of subaltern resistance accordingly constitutes an implicit critique of grand narratives which privilege those individuals, kings, generals, or politicians perceived to have the ability to change history, while the faceless masses remained just that: anonymous actors subject to the will of others.15

11 Rodrieguez 2001; and Rabasa 2010.

12 Rudé 1964; Rudé and Hobsbawm 1968; Thompson 1971; Hobsbawm 1985. See also Scott 1977. 13 Hobsbawm 1959, 1969. See also Blok 1972.

14 Bloch 1961; Burke 1978; Ginzburg 1980; Davis 1983; Darnton 1984. 15 For a recent example, see Anderson 2012.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  419 Toward the end of the 1970s, the Subaltern Studies community emerged in South Asia from a group of historians who applied elements of the Annales School approach from European social history to an explicitly colonial context.16 What united the different strands of the project was, in the pithy description of Rosalyn O’Hanlon, “an effort to recover the experience, the distinctive cultures, traditions, identities and active historical practice of subaltern groups in a wide variety of settings—​traditions, cultures and practice which have been lost or hidden by the action of élite historiography.”17 Subalternity, in other words, is a relational concept that depending on the historical context might also be applied to women, slaves, convicts, indigenous people, and other “minorities,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty describes them.18 Although not all subalternist scholarship is concerned with resistance and rebellion, this particular thematic focus was at the heart of the project in its original iteration. In Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Guha sought to recover the consciousness of peasant insurgencies as more than the prehistory of anti-​nationalist revolutionary struggles. In other words, he attempted to describe the politics of what had hitherto been dismissed mainly as “pre-​political” and spontaneous movements. Focusing on what he took to be the principal aspects of peasant insurgency in nineteenth-​century colonial India, Guha examined specific revolts, including the Uprising of 1857—​not to understand them as individual events, but to draw out the general rules that reflected their commonality as a mode of resistance. The analysis furthermore drew on European examples, most notably the German Peasant Wars of the sixteenth century and the rural unrest in early nineteenth-​century Britain. Given the peasants’ position and their subjugation by local elites, including merchants and bankers, as well as the colonial state, resistance could only assume the form of “negation,” which is one of the central concepts in Guha’s analysis. Rebellion thus consisted of an inversion of the existing power structures in which “the world was turned upside down.”19 Such challenge to the existing social order was invariably considered as criminal by the authorities, yet Guha argues that although there might be some overlap, the distinction between crime and insurgency was crucial. The modality of peasant insurgency followed a clear structure that included not only the destruction or looting of politically significant structures, such as courthouses, but also attacks on individuals associated with power. These attacks were not indiscriminate, as was often assumed, but highly selective. Property was destroyed rather than appropriated, while people of authority were verbally abused and symbolically insulted instead of being physically assaulted. Violence, Guha claims, was not necessary for the peasants to achieve their aims of destroying or appropriating power, and the real brutality that 16 Ludden 2001. 17 O’Hanlon 1988, 195. 18 Chakrabarty 2000, 97. Guha’s original definition of what “subaltern” means may be found in Guha and Spivak 1988, 44. See also Spivak 1988. 19 Guha [1983b] 1999, 29.

420  Kim A. Wagner did occur was usually that of the counterinsurgency campaigns carried out by the state. Insurgency, moreover, mobilized the entire peasant population in a show of solidarity, and the emphasis on unity within the ranks of subalterns explains why traitors and informants were dealt with so harshly and brutally—​they undermined the very fabric of class solidarity that was essential to peasant insurgency. What the authorities perceived as simultaneous and pre-​planned outbreaks actually reflected the shared grievances of all peasants, who communicated their resistance through a variety of means, including symbols, signs, and messages. Rumor was one of the most significant and effective means by which subalterns could communicate, transmitting the types of panic against which peasants rose to arms as well as mobilizing resistance. Religion played a significant part in some rumors, often imbuing insurgency with millenarian overtones, but this was ultimately not as significant in Guha’s estimation as the burgeoning rebel-​and class-​consciousness from which insurgency arose. Finally, Guha laments, the localism of peasant insurgency invariably limited the scope of such outbreaks, ultimately rendering peasants unable to realize their vision of political change. The Marxist-​Gramscian framework adopted by Guha contains two central points of critique, one relating to the colonial archive, which few today would disagree with, and one relating to nationalist historiography, which few might perhaps find terribly relevant today. If the sole aim of Guha’s work was to rehabilitate peasant insurgencies as an important mode of political mobilization prior to the emergence of anti-​colonial nationalism, it must be considered hugely successful; as an account of rebellion in nineteenth-​century India, however, it is, in many respects, inadequate. To the global historian of today, it does indeed seem more pertinent to engage with the circumscribed evidence in a theoretically and methodologically appropriate manner, rather than simply determining the extent to which this or that act of resistance did or did not reflect an emergent class consciousness. The very concept of the “subaltern,” which Guha equates with “peasant,” is not simply an analytical term, but one that comes with considerable ideological baggage.20 In that sense, the early part of the subalternist approach is entirely a product of its time and one that furthermore has not aged well. Similar to Hobsbawm’s study of social banditry, which was based on an impressive synthesis of geographically diverse case studies, so too does Guha’s argument reflect a globally comparative approach, the scope of which far exceeds most of the conventional histories in the context of which he wrote. The global comparative perspective is nevertheless misleading, since individual cases are taken simply as expressions of the very same typology—​in this case, peasant insurgency or social banditry. The comparative approach thus results in a strangely ahistorical and overly homogenous analysis, which reduces cultural and geographic specificities and differences to universal manifestations of what is essentially the same central focus: noble resistance by the oppressed against the iniquities of capitalism, i.e.,

20 Gramsci 1971.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  421 class struggle.21 Structurally deterministic, the reification of the subaltern leaves no room for the individual, who might not conform to the historian’s expectations, let alone spontaneity or the contingencies of history. In his discussion of peasant insurgency in Latin America, Steve Stern makes this point: In short, when peasants rebel, they are held to do so in reaction to changes determined by all-​powerful external forces or “systems.” Their modes of consciousness, even in rebellion, are generally seen as quite limited and predictable, and logically derivative from their “structural” position in society. These assumptions about peasants as political actors are not simple figments of intellectuals’ imagination. Enough evidence exists to demonstrate that the “parochial reactor” phenomenon is not only real, but that it also represents at least one powerful tendency in peasant political life. The problem [ . . . ] is that a tendency which is partial and in many cases offset by other tendencies has been taken to represent the essential character of peasant political behavior and consciousness.22

While analytically innovative, and provocative in its day, Guha’s work on the use of colonial sources to reconstruct an indigenous peasant consciousness leaves no doubt as to where the sympathy of the historian may be located. Given the fact that counterinsurgency and insurgency presumably constituted the antitheses of one another, Guha argues that colonial records constitute a kind of mirror that provides a negative imprint of peasant consciousness—​all one needs to do is to reverse the value of colonial accounts to reveal a presumably authentic peasant perspective. This Manichean key to the “archives of repression,” to use Ginzburg’s wording, is reflected in the following list proposed by Guha:  “ ‘contagion’—​the enthusiasm and solidarity generated by an uprising among various rural groups within a region; ‘fanatic’—​rebels inspired by some kind of revivalist or puritanical doctrines; ‘lawlessness’—​the defiance by the people of what they had come to regard as bad laws.”23 It is, however, not self-​evident that the mere inversion of colonial discourse, or master narratives, is sufficient by way of reconstructing the voices and experiences of subalterns.24 When the onus of providing an alternative reading of the past looms so large, and rests squarely on the historian, there seems to be a perennial temptation to find resistance and noble rebels where none existed—​effectively reading too much into too little. Nowhere is this tendency stronger than when the historical archive is sparse and so evidently the product of an encounter overdetermined by the imbalance of power. The study of the Indian bandits known as “Thugs” is a case in point. The phenomenon of “Thuggee” was initially sensationalized by the British in India during the 1830s and later became a standard Orientalist trope deployed to

21 See also O’Hanlon 1988; Masselos 1992. 22 Stern 1987, 6.

23 Guha 1983b, 16–​17. See also Guha 1983a, 67–​68.

24 See Ginzburg 1986; Amin 1987; and Wagner 2011.

422  Kim A. Wagner prove that India benefited from imperialism. Rather than the religious stranglers imagined by the British, however, Katherine Gough in the late 1970s argued that the “Thugs” should be classified as “social bandits” since they combined “a rather distant millenarian prospect with a certain Robin Hood gallantry and a genius for swift assassination.”25 The “Thugs,” according to Gough, robbed and killed wealthy travelers and “in some cases at least must have shared [the loot] with their fellow villagers, for they had the peasants’ loyalty in their own territories.”26 Their social commitment was reflected in their selectivity of victims, Gough further argues, as they refrained from robbing “almost every productive or defenceless category in the population.”27 The problem is that there is no evidence supporting this description of the heterogeneous practice of “Thuggee.”28 “Thugs,” which was just one of the various appellations under which these men went, served as a kind of bandit-​ retainers for local Indian landlords and went on annual expeditions to plunder travelers. Upon their return they did not simply share their spoils with their fellow villagers but paid most of it to the landlords in the form of a tax. The reason the “Thugs” claimed never to rob from certain social groups is that these groups were mainly untouchables and thus the poorest in society whom it would make little sense to rob.29 On a similar note, Felix Padel has suggested that the “Thugs” were a “Hindu reaction to alien domination”: “Is it not likely that they evolved during Mughal rule and increased under the British as a secret response to state violence and exploitation, since the victims were often merchants, and sepoys in British pay who were travelling on leave?”30 The short answer is “no”; as a type of banditry, “Thuggee” was not aimed at the state, be it Indian or British, and the choice of victims related to the amount of wealth they could be expected to procure and the ease by which victims could be plundered. Merchants, money-​carriers and newly paid soldiers on leave were all easy and obvious targets for any type of robbers, as they traveled through isolated areas far from their home. The “Thugs” scrupulously avoided attacking Europeans or any other potential victim whose disappearance might cause a stir—​ for very pragmatic reasons. The men who at times engaged in banditry as “Thugs” also served as strongmen for local landlords or even as mercenaries in the armies of Indian rulers—​none of which can appropriately be labeled simply as social banditry or indeed anti-​colonial.31 The mere fact that some practices were outlawed or criminalized by the authorities to some scholars immediately renders such practices as acts of “resistance” and implicitly noble or at least justifiable. That is not an analytically sound approach and one that obscures more than it clarifies. In a study of the varied and

25 Gough 1979, 104. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

28 See Wagner [2007a] 2014, 2011. 29 Ibid.

30 Padel 1995, 138. 31 Wagner 2007b.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  423 often contradictory involvement of Brazilian Indians against the Spanish rulers in the eighteenth century, Juan Pedro Viqueira makes the poignant argument that we should not idealize popular struggles simply because they are popular. Condemning the hard living conditions suffered by the lower classes does not provide us with a motive for justifying all of their actions, and it is impossible to do this without contradicting ourselves as a result of the diversity of the political affiliations within this population group. Both their ends and their means, therefore, must be subjected to a close critical scrutiny.32

The implicit assumption concerning the intrinsic legitimacy of subaltern resistance poses a particular challenge when extreme brutality and violence has to be explained. Religion is another aspect of rebellion that sits uneasily with the “logic” of resistance—​we can explain the actions of hungry peasants or exploited slaves, yet our attempts to make sense of popular religion or the actions of so-​called fanatics often falter.33 The real challenge facing scholars studying rebellion, resistance, and the subaltern, is, however, precisely to make sense of what appears to be senseless acts and not merely claim for themselves a sympathetic reading of those individuals and groups whom they find it easy to defend. We cannot disown those aspects of the past that are difficult to face simply because they do not tally with preconceived notions of how the dominated and oppressed ought to act or think. In the second part of this chapter we shall turn to these very considerations.

Violence While subalternist scholarship has been criticized for emphasizing armed resistance, and ignoring less overt acts of resistance and other modes of negotiation, violence as a significant issue in and of itself is curiously absent from Guha’s analysis.34 Guha did not include killing “as a principal form or method of struggle,” and defending this analytical choice, he stated that “[i]‌n insisting on this omission we have paid heed to the many references to blood and sword in our evidence and convinced ourselves that these testify less to any considerable loss of life than to the terror which grips the peasant’s enemies on the outbreak of an uprising.”35 Where Guha simply, and somewhat implausibly, denied the importance of violence in rebellion, Rudrangshu Mukherjee addressed the matter more directly in his study of the infamous Cawnpore massacres of 1857.36

32 Viqueira 2012, 79. 33 Millenarian movements have long been studied as part of the classical repertoire of social protest; see Hobsbawm 1959; Cohn 1970; and Adas 1979. 34 Scott 1985. 35 Guha [1983b] 1999, 106. 36 Mukherjee 1990.

424  Kim A. Wagner As the uprising against colonial rule spread across northern India in the summer of 1857, it was transformed from a military mutiny into a popular rising in which aggrieved peasants, dispossessed landowners, and local rulers joined. In the city of Cawnpore, the British garrison was besieged and as the position of the British quickly became untenable they accepted the offer of free passage, leaving their fortified position behind. As hundreds of men, women, and children boarded the boats that were to take them to safety down-​river, the rebels opened up a deadly fire with artillery and attacked the survivors on the banks of the river, at a place known as Satichaura Ghat. Apart from a handful of fugitives who managed to escape, most of the British garrison was killed, while some 120 surviving women and children were taken to a small compound known as the Bibighar. As a British relief force approached, however, the (in)famous rebel leader Nana Sahib ordered his men to kill the prisoners, and their bodies were dumped in a nearby well. In the British imagination, the Cawnpore massacres constituted the worst outrage imaginable and were subsequently invoked to legitimize the brutal suppression of the Uprising.37 Mukherjee has produced some of the most innovative research on 1857, but his attempt to examine rebel violence, his close adherence to Guha’s work, and the subalternist analytical framework stand in the way of a nuanced inquiry. In Mukherjee’s narrative of the Cawnpore massacres, historical events model themselves closely on the blueprint for peasant insurgency as established by Guha; the moment they rise against the British, the Indian sepoys thus cast off their uniforms and revert to their original state of peasants and everything they do thereafter becomes a symbolic and collective action carried out by the “people.” At times, the very application of subalternist theory, with the ghost of Gramsci hovering in the background, produces a highly simplistic analysis: “The populace, seized by a rebel consciousness, set out to destroy, but not indiscriminately.”38 The peasant-​rebels are thus described as two-​dimensional caricatures of ideal subalterns whom, we might imagine, consulted the relevant pages of Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency before deciding on the appropriate act and mode of resistance. In turning to the massacres, Mukherjee convincingly suggests that the restitution of the pre-​colonial order required that the common enemy, the British, must be completely annihilated. However, in his attempt to unpack and, crucially, to differentiate between the massacre at the Ghat and at the Bibighar, Mukherjee simply invokes Guha’s distinction between “crime” and “insurgency”: It was indeed an irony that under pressure from British counter-​insurgency measures, in the space of a fortnight the power of the insurrection had transformed itself from the public to the secretive:  from the communal to only the leadership: what had previously been seen as the work of God had become, one could say using the same terms, an act of Satan.39

37 Ward 1996.

38 Mukherjee 1990, 100.

39 Ibid., 115. See Guha [1983b] 1999, 109.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  425 The distinction between “open” and “secretive,” it should be clear, is not merely descriptive, but highly charged. Mukherjee, and Guha along with him, seek to recuperate criminalized practices as genuine and legitimate expressions of popular protest, while at the same time retaining the category of “criminal” as a convenient label for those actions ultimately deemed indefensible. The ambush at the river, Mukherjee claims, was characterized by the celebration of local villagers, thereby conforming to the scenario so favored by studies of early modern Europe—​the carnivalesque mode of communal violence as a celebration of the inversion of the power hierarchy.40 By contrast, Mukherjee argues, the massacre at Bibighar was a secretive act, carried out by a handful of henchmen and as such of an entirely distinct mode of violence. The river ambush qualifies as an act of open defiance, and is accordingly deemed to be legitimate by the historian, while the latter was secretive and brutal and must as such be disowned—​or, as Mukherjee implies, actually blamed on the advance of the British forces. Historians of conflict and violence during other time periods and in different places will likely be puzzled by the insistence that violence was not a significant part of subaltern resistance, or that when it did occur it was qualitatively different from other types of violence and somehow ameliorated by the virtue of the rebels’ cause.41 The two events discussed by Mukherjee were clearly different, yet the valorization of certain forms of violence is analytically troubling. The fact remains that historically, popular protest and open rebellion could be just as brutal and horrible as more secretive acts of killings—​as anyone familiar with Alain Corbin’s classic Village of Cannibals, or Natalie Zemon Davis’s work on religious riots during the French Wars of Religion, will know.42 Incidentally, Guha has much to say about the manner in which peasants target symbols of power and authority in the broadest sense, what he described as “expansion.” In addition to attacking obvious edifices of power, such as jails or police stations, insurgents thus also targeted other structures associated with the regime, including churches, schools, and private homes. The logical implication of this argument, from which Guha shirked, is that when Indians rebelled they would not simply attack and kill the local magistrate or other colonial officials but all Europeans, including women and children, because they too embodied the oppression of colonial rule. Subalterns did not merely rebel in order to turn the world upside down, as Guha maintains, but might as well be said to rebel precisely to prevent their world from being turned upside down. It was the perceived threat that colonial rule posed to their way of life, their beliefs and practices, which imbued the violence of rebellion with such retributive ferocity.43 This is also where modern studies of sectarian and communal violence have much to offer scholars of violence, resistance, and rebellion in the more distant past.44 As has so often been the case during deadly

40 Stallybrass and White 1986.

41 See, for instance, Robins and Jones 2009. 42 Corbin 1992; Davis 1973. 43 Wagner [2010] 2015. 44

The work of Veena Das may be highlighted in this context, but see also Tambiah 1996; and Horowitz 2001.

426  Kim A. Wagner riots in the twentieth century, the initial violence of the aggressors was a preemptive act in defense against an imminent threat (real or imagined), as local grievances converged with bigger conflicts and personal antagonisms were subsumed under more general sentiments. Whether it be a pogrom or a peasant uprising, momentous events in the past could be invoked to provide clarity out of confusion and ascribe primary identities to friend and foe alike—​often with deadly results. During times of crisis and uncertainty, the trigger-​event of an outbreak might thus bear little relation to preexisting grievances, and the scope of violence unleashed may be entirely disproportionate to its immediate cause. As far as riots and rebellions are concerned, the dynamics of escalation have followed a remarkably consistent pattern over time and in different places. It may be noted that this chapter has not accorded much attention to the forms of everyday resistance that James Scott famously brought into focus, nor to the acts of non-​resistance or cooperation that in many instances constituted the most common accommodation to imperialism. The emphasis on active resistance, however, should not make us blind to the ambiguity and ambivalence of resistance that Sherry Ortner has pointed to and which is explicitly excluded from Guha’s analysis where informers, for instance, are seen simply as “rotten apples” who undermined the solidarity that underpinned insurgency.45 In her intervention, Ortner thus warns against homogenizing the multiplicity of subaltern identities and experiences, and thereby downplaying the internal divisions and conflicts within such groups.46 During the Indian Uprising, large parts of the subcontinent were unaffected by the insurgency and the British only managed to regain control by mobilizing those parts of the Indian population that remained loyal to the East India Company. The thousands of Punjabi troops who joined the British in laying siege to Delhi during the summer of 1857 were no less subaltern than the rebels defending the Mughal capital—​and the range of motivations that determined which side one fought on certainly cannot be summarized with reference to an idealized and essential consciousness, be it “false” or not. The fact remains that most empires could not have been so successfully extended and maintained without local support, and this cannot simply be reduced to self-​serving elites or capitalist interests benefiting from the exploitation of the “people.” Peasants too would join the forces of invading and occupying forces, i.e., the “oppressors,” and the opprobrium linked to concepts such as “collaborator” oversimplifies the range of motivation shaping peoples’ choices. The reality of the Indian Uprising, which continued as small-​scale guerrilla warfare long after 1857, was far more complex than either Guha or Mukherjee allows for.47 The insistence that sepoys were at heart no more than peasants ignores the many other instances where they not only kept their uniforms but even went into battle with their regimental flags—​thus retaining a regimental cohesion and



45 Ortner 1995. 46 Ibid.

47 See Stokes 1986; Roy 1994; and Bayly 1996.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  427 military identity even while rebelling against their former officers and colonial rule.48 Similarly, sepoys would regularly plunder their compatriots, rich and poor, while the pastoralist Gujars, for instance, whose solidarity and spontaneous mobilization Guha exalts, were well known for plundering the rebels in the environs of the Mughal capital.49 There were certainly remarkable examples of communal unity and cooperation between the many diverse communities and political interests that were mobilized across northern India during the Uprising. But there were also instances when entirely different priorities took precedence, as one would expect from any historical event. The rebels did seek to establish a government in Delhi which reflected their diverse backgrounds, yet Muslim butchers were promptly executed, by being blown from cannon, for slaughtering cows, which offended the Hindu sepoys.50 The point is that historical reality, to the extent that it can be reconstructed, does not match the neatness of theory, and to force the empirical evidence into a preconceived theoretical framework is to put the cart before the horse. The infliction of pain and suffering was never the prerogative of the elite alone, and a notion of just and heroic struggle cannot constitute the implicit backbone of studies of subaltern resistance.

Rumor and Religion One of the most poignant critiques of Guha’s work emerged from within Subaltern Studies itself in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s discussion of Guha’s treatment of religion and the supernatural in connection with the Santhal Rebellion of 1855.51 Following their capture by the British, the Santhal leaders claimed that the rising had been instigated and fought by their deity, who had also promised to protect them from the bullets of their enemies. While Guha acknowledges the significance of religion in the worldview of these subaltern rebels, he dismissed its actual role as anything but delusional: In sum, it is not possible to speak of insurgency in this case except as a religious consciousness—​except, that is, as a massive demonstration of self-​estrangement (to borrow Marx’s term for the very essence of religiosity) which made the rebels look upon their project as predicated on a will other than their own.52

Deeply committed to restoring the agency to subalterns, Guha could not accommodate his historical interlocutors’ denial of their own agency, and he blamed their invocation of supernatural beings or rumors of a messianic tenor as reflections of a

48 Wagner 2017.

49 Dalrymple 2006; Farooqui 2010. 50 Ibid.

51 Chakrabarty 2000. See also Ortner 1995, 180–​181. 52 Guha 1983a, 78.

428  Kim A. Wagner “false consciousness.”53 Chakrabarty takes Guha to task for abandoning his commitment to recovering a rebel consciousness, and accepting the words of the subaltern only insofar as they can be made compatible with the logic, never mind politics, of twentieth-​century historiography. The important question Chakrabarty raises, but never answers, is whether there are “experiences of the past that cannot be captured by the methods of the discipline.”54 Historians of European imperialism and colonial warfare in other parts of the world will be familiar with, or at least recognize, the promise made to the Santhals by their deity to protect them against bullets. This is indeed a recurring theme in indigenous resistance against colonial rule, and in the following we shall turn to the role of “magic” or “war medicine” during two key moments of resistance against imperialism: the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the Maji Maji Rebellion against German rule in East Africa (1905–​1907). Calling for a pluralistic approach to writing history, Chakrabarty talks of what he calls “subaltern pasts,” or what might perhaps better be thought of as “historical moments that resist historicization.”55 Rather than stumbling blocks to be avoided in our fashioning of seamless historical narratives, however, we might approach such challenges as being analytically productive in the manner suggested by Robert Darnton: When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something. By picking at the document where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning. The thread might even lead into a strange and wonderful world view.56

The imagery of poorly armed “savages” charging headlong into the deadly fire of European machine guns, believing themselves to be impervious to the white man’s bullets, encapsulates one of the most powerful tropes of colonial warfare during the high point of imperialism.57 The same can be said of contemporary depictions of Muslim warriors whose seemingly suicidal attacks on colonial troops during conflicts in Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines were similarly explained with reference to their intrinsic “fanaticism.”58 The clash between magic and machine guns embodied the wider conflict of tradition versus modernity, or fanaticism versus reason, which constituted the basic framework through which most anti-​colonial rebellions were regarded by contemporaries. Faced by the onslaught of European civilization, colonizers told themselves, uncivilized people could only react by taking succor in their superstitious beliefs and barbarous practices. The so-​ called Boxers, or Yihequan (lit. “Militia United in Righteousness”) emerged from a range of local militias in late-​nineteenth-​century northern China,



53 Guha 1983b, 277.

54 Chakrabarty 2000, 107. 55 Ibid., 101.

56 Darnton 1984, 5. 57 Chivers 2010.

58 Pakenham 1991; Hawkins 2012; Kolsky 2015.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  429 who practiced martial arts and various forms of spiritual rituals. From the regional power struggles between local elites and an increasingly weak imperial government seeking to contain the ever-​expanding sphere of influence of European powers and Christian missionaries, the Boxers soon grew into a massive popular anti-​foreign and anti-​Christian movement. The spiritual beliefs of the Boxers involved the use of spells and charms, spirit possession, as well as rituals that conferred invulnerability and protected them against bullets and other weapons. As an important political movement in their own right, the Boxers could not be controlled by the Qing government, and after escalating attacks on Christian missionaries and convert communities throughout the countryside, they moved on the capital of Beijing and laid siege to the foreign legations. An international relief expedition was soon launched, and following a bloody and destructive campaign, the Boxers were completely crushed, while the Qing court had to settle for a humiliating peace and give in to the demands of the Western powers.59 A few years later, the colonial authorities in German East Africa were faced by a seemingly similar phenomenon, except that in this instance the “magical” aspect of resistance was even more pronounced. The Maji Maji Rebellion, which broke out in 1905, was named after the magic water, maji, prepared by a local prophet, or “witch doctor” in colonial parlance, who called on the local tribes to rise against the Germans, promising that the “war medicine” would make the white man’s bullets turn to water. The rising unified a number of disparate tribes and clans, many of which had suffered under colonial rule, and was initially successful with attacks on smaller outposts and isolated missionary stations. The Germans eventually launched several punitive expeditions, though it still took more than a year to pacify the region, leaving tens of thousands dead, due in large part to famine as a result of the scorched earth policy pursued by the colonial forces. Coinciding with the notoriously genocidal suppression of the Herero and Namaqua rising in German South West Africa, the Maji Maji rebellion was still one of the most devastating counterinsurgency operations of the colonial period.60 A modern analysis, for which the implicit point of reference is post-​ Enlightenment rationality, invariably struggles to make sense of the role of magic and religious beliefs and practices—​especially if we are to studiously avoid the repetition of colonial tropes of the naïve and superstitious “savage.” Recent scholarship on these rebellions, however, has suggested a number of ways by which we can productively engage with the subject, in spite of the perennial problem of the sources available. First of all, we cannot understand these phenomena as singular and self-​contained—​we should not assume that the Boxers or Maji Maji believed themselves to be protected against the bullets of European troops and that this belief in the efficacy of “magic” in and of itself caused them to rise against colonial forces. These practices must be situated within a wider cultural context and with

59 Esherick 1987; Cohen 1997; Bickers and Tiedemann 2007. 60 Becker 2004; and James and Monson 2010.

430  Kim A. Wagner a keen awareness of the interplay between preexisting beliefs and practices, and the contingencies of the colonial encounter. Unknowingly, but no less importantly, Europeans played a crucially constitutive role in the mobilization of religion and “magic” as an indigenous response to imperialism.61 One of the historical specificities that sets China apart within the current context is the fact that it was never formally colonized and that the life of the ordinary Chinese peasant was in some ways far less affected by Western imperialism, compared to, say, that of an East African or Indian peasant. By the same token, however, it is indisputable that Christian missionaries had made far greater inroads than was the case even within most formal colonies, and had in some parts of northern China established themselves as a power to be reckoned with, including a substantive Chinese Christian population. Extensive drought throughout northern China during 1899 and 1900 caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee from hunger, which apart from the suffering and hardship added to a general sense of anxiety and fear. At the time, Christians were commonly believed to be conspiring to kidnap Chinese people to steal their body parts and poisoning wells—​surely one of the most commonplace accusations against foreigners during times of crisis. The conflicts between local Chinese elites, the Boxers, and Christian missionaries, from which the Rebellion developed, therefore soon turned into a much larger existential conflict as the presence of foreigners was directly linked to the anger of the gods and the absence of rain. It is perhaps inevitable that from a Chinese perspective, the entire conflict came to be seen through a religious framework, where popular beliefs and magic played a central role. The Boxers perceived and presented themselves as the guardians or protectors of Chinese society who enjoyed the support of the gods, in some instances even claiming to be possessed by particular deities and thus effectively speaking and acting with divine sanction. Their claims of invincibility against the bullets of foreign troops were merely one aspect of the mobilization of folk beliefs, but central to any attempt at understanding what the conflict meant to the local population. The rebellion was perceived, as Paul A. Cohen has suggested, as a magical contest, where many of the Boxers’ beliefs and actions were explicitly aimed at instilling fear, as well as impressing the general population in an almost theatrical fashion.62 Claiming to be impervious to the foreigners’ bullets when entering into battle was central to such performativity. Turning to German East Africa, the use of magic can be seen to have constituted a set of widespread practices that had as much to do with internal mobilization and power dynamics as it did with anti-​colonial resistance. Jamie Monson’s summary of the function and context of war-​medicine is worth noting: Specialists in medicine and divination offered solutions to crises of fertility and agrarian productivity, witchcraft accusations, social conflict, drought and other

61 See Roque (2015) for a particularly innovative study of colonial ‘entanglement’. 62 Cohen 1997, 132.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  431 ills. Prophetic leadership intersected with or influenced military leadership when communities responded to crises that took the form of internal conflict, inter-​ group competition and colonial intervention. Medicines were therefore transformative substances that diminished vulnerabilities and enhanced resilience for those who sought assistance during a time of adversity.63

Crucially, the circulation of the maji was narrative as much as it was material, and the ritual was accompanied by stories about German defeats, supernatural intervention, and the efficacy of the “war medicine.” News of actual events merged with, and were reinforced by, prophesies that added to the cacophony of rumors, which served to both spread panic and empower the local clans and tribes. Colonial observers actually described the circulation of the maji as a form of propaganda, while a later writer compared it to a “chain-​letter.”64 This has obvious parallels in the case of the Boxers, whose stories of magical feats were widely circulated alongside rumors about the alleged wrongdoing of Christians and onslaught of foreigners. The close relationship between magic, religious beliefs, and rumors emerging from these historical examples remind us of what is perhaps Guha’s strongest and most original intervention: namely, in regard to the role of rumors during peasant rebellions. It is noteworthy that Guha actually mentioned the Maji Maji rebellion when discussing the role of rumors, stating that “it was Kinjikitile’s prophecies and his eponymous medicine which helped as much as anything else to convert anti-​German feelings into the Maji Maji uprising.”65 Unfortunately, this mobilization was not, in Guha’s estimate, of the right kind, since it was “symptomatic of a consciousness that proved far too feeble to cope with its own project and left it to be completed by the intervention of a superior wisdom.”66 In the very process of advancing a novel and highly promising argument, Guha could ultimately not escape the Gramscian framework. Moving on from Guha’s work, however, we can begin to see how rumors historically constitute an important form of symbolic threat-​assessment and mode of mobilization during subaltern insurgency—​ communicated through signs or coded language, they could cause panic or be empowering depending on the circumstances.67 In India before the outbreak of 1857, widespread concerns about the manner in which British rule was endangering the ritual status of high-​caste soldiers, and generally upending peoples’ way of life, found their expression in stories of how the British were deliberately polluting the food provided to Indian troops with ground animal bone or even blood. A vague concern about the manner in which the colonial state interfered in religious practices and tradition thus became crystallized through rumors of concrete threats, however improbable. Yet

63 Monson 2010, 48. 64 Ibid., 39.

65 Guha [1983b] 1999, 273. 66 Ibid.

67 See also Lefebvre 1973; Yang 1987; and Bhabha 1994.

432  Kim A. Wagner more than simply producing fear, such rumors would also be accompanied by prophesies about the imminent collapse of foreign rule, either through divine intervention or due to the emergence of a savior—​in the Indian case this being the Shah of Persia or the Russian Czar intervening to defeat the British.68 This sense of an imminent danger of attack, physically or symbolically, need not have any basis in objective facts in order for people to act as if it did: rumors owe their credibility to the manner in which they effectively mobilize commonly accepted tropes and narratives.69 The fact that religion was so consistently invoked in all of these culturally and geographically diverse cases reflects the fact that people perceived European imperialism as threatening much more than simply their livelihood and physical well-​being or survival—​their spiritual lives and religious beliefs were also endangered by foreign rule, which was often simply equated with Christian rule. We do not have to either accept or reject the objective “reality” of the supernatural in order to acknowledge its significance in shaping subaltern resistance, or to make an effort to understand how religious beliefs, including magic, worked historically. As outlandish or implausible as many of the stories circulating in India in 1857, or during the Boxer and Maji Maji Rebellions, were, they reflect subaltern attempts to make sense of the colonial encounter. For the Santhal leaders to claim that they were doing the bidding of a deity need not, as Guha suggested, be a way for them to disown the initiative for the rebellion or concede their inherent subalternity—​ quite the contrary, in fact. By claiming that they were acting with divine guidance, they represented the rebellion as sanctioned by the highest authority, and that it constituted an implicitly just cause. People who are vulnerable do what they can to empower themselves and they do so in ways that are culturally specific, yet historically contingent. The Ghost Dance movement among the Plains tribes of North America similarly comes to mind. In 1890 a Paiute shaman made a prophecy that the white man would be expelled from the land and that anyone who participated in the dance would be invulnerable to the soldiers’ bullets. Although the Ghost Dance movement was restorative rather than openly rebellious, it was, as is well known, brutally suppressed and came to a violent end after the Wounded Knee Massacre the same year.70 Another comparable set of events might be the putuan or massacres in Bali in 1906 and 1908, when the royal households and retinues committed a form of ritual suicide when confronted by Dutch colonial forces.71 By reading the use of magic against Western imperialism within a broader set of beliefs and practices, and as a form of propaganda, a mobilizing narrative empowering indigenous people outgunned by modern weaponry, we can thus incorporate the supernatural within our analysis. To dismiss rumors simply as garbled facts without provenance, or reducing them to the inane utterings of naïve and superstitious people laboring under a false consciousness, is to reject the possibility of writing history from more than

68 Wagner [2010] 2015.

69 See also Kuhn 1990; and White 2000. 70 Smoak 2006.

71 Wiener 1995. See also Wenzel 2009.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  433 one perspective. And it is this possibility, more than anything else, that informs the study of subaltern resistance as a productive, yet critical endeavor.

Conclusion In his magisterial work, The Birth of the Modern World, the late C. A. Bayly provided an example of what a comparative analysis of subaltern resistance and rebellion might look like—​not in the essentializing sense of old Marxist historiography, but within a global macro-​perspective.72 Bayly’s prime example was the Taiping Rebellion in mid-​nineteenth-​century China, which lasted more than a decade, led to the death of hundreds of thousands people, and almost brought the Qing Empire to an end. Notably, Bayly examined the Taiping Rebellion in the context of other major upheavals across the globe during the mid-​nineteenth century, not least the Indian Uprising, which overlapped chronologically with events in China. In this reading, these major upheavals cannot be understood simply with reference to local circumstances but were in crucial ways shaped by global events and the circulation of ideas—​especially the spread of Christianity, which influenced the syncretic beliefs of the Taiping, and in India alienated the local population and eventually provoked the uprising. This approach has been criticized for placing too much emphasis, and explanatory purchase, on global connections and networks, and yet it is suggestive of the macro-​dimensions, which might appropriately be considered alongside more detailed case studies of subaltern resistance.73 The global comparative approach not only serves to identify commonalities and potential linkages, it also allows differences and the specifics of historical instances of resistance to be fully contextualized. Where the likes of Hobsbawm reduced all bandits throughout the world to the same rebellious archetype, Bayly’s global comparison brings into focus distinctiveness as much as it highlights similarities. At differing scales of analysis, there are accordingly multiple productive approaches to the study of subaltern resistance and rebellions. In the twenty-​first century it should be possible to write a history that adequately reflects the complexity of past experience and pays due attention to multiple perspectives: where rebels are neither criminal nor noble; where subalterns are in various ways entangled with, rather than simply opposed to, elites and the state; where identity and solidarity challenge or transcend basic notions of sociocultural and ethnic boundaries; and where resistance and rebellion are more than mere negation of existing structures of authority. In this chapter, the concept of the subaltern has been used, not to refer to a valorized social position and primary identity, but as a critical shorthand for those people and groups who were historically involved in resistance and rebellion and whose voices and perspectives can

72 Bayly 2004, 148–​155. 73 Bell 2013.

434  Kim A. Wagner only be approached in a circumscribed manner. Subalterns, as we have discussed them, are thus the historical actors whose beliefs and actions cannot, or ought not, simply be yoked to a narrative of class struggle or proto-​nationalism. In that sense, an approach focused on subalternity can be deployed as more of a methodological strategy of reading the past than a political stance in the present.74 While this may to some seem to be a contradiction in terms, a deliberately non-​ideological appropriation of the methodology has the benefits of rendering the undisputed insights and sophistication that the subalternist project represents available to a broader range of scholars—​and applicable to a broader set of historical inquiries.

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74 See also Ortner 1995.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern  435 Darnton, R.  1984. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York. Das, V. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Delhi. Das, V. 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, CA. Davis, N. Z. 1973. “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-​Century France.” Past & Present 59, no. 1: 51–​91. Davis, N. Z. 1983. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, MA. Esherick, J. 1987. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. Berkeley. Farooqui, M. 2010. Besieged: Voices from Delhi, 1857. New Delhi. Ferrer, A. 2014. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. New York. Ginzburg, C. 1980. The Cheese and the Worms. Baltimore, MD. Ginzburg, C.  1986. “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.” In C.  Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems and Clues, 141–​148. London. Gledhill, J., and P.  A. Schell, eds. 2012. New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico. Durham, NC. Gough, K. 1979. “Indian Peasant Uprisings.” In A. R. Desai, ed., Peasant Struggles in India, 85–​126. Bombay. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London. Guha, R.  1983a. “The Prose of Counterinsurgency.” Subaltern Studies II:  1–​42. Reprinted in R. Guha and G. C. Spivak, eds. 1988. Selected Subaltern Studies, 45–​88. New York. Guha, R.  [1983b] 1999. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. Original:  Delhi. Reprint: Durham, NC. Hawkins, M.  2012. Making Moros:  Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South. DeKalb, IL. Hobsbawn, E. J. 1959. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Manchester. Hobsbawn, E. J. 1969. Bandits. London. Hobsbawn, E. J. 1985. “History from Below—​Some Reflections.” In F. Krantz, ed., History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, 63–​73. Montreal. Hobsbawm, E. J., and G. Rudé 1968. Captain Swing. New York. Horowitz, D. L. 2001. The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley, CA. Kolsky, E.  2015. “The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception:  Frontier ‘Fanaticism’ and State Violence in British India.” The American Historical Review 120, no. 4: 1218–​1246. Kuhn, P. A. 1990. Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768. Cambridge, MA. Lefbvre, G. 1973. The Great Fear of 1789. London. Ludden, D., ed. 2001. Reading Subaltern Studies:  Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the Globalisation of South Asia. Delhi. Masselos, J.  1992. “The Dis/​appearance of Subalterns:  A Reading of a Decade of Subaltern Studies.” South Asia 15, no. 1: 105–​125. Monson, J. 2010. “War of Words: The Narrative Efficacy of Medicine in the Maji Maji War.” In J. Giblin and J. Monson, eds., Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War, 33–​69. Leiden. Mukherjee, R. 1990. “ ‘Satan Let Loose upon Earth’: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857.” Past & Present 128: 92–​116. O’Hanlon, R.  1988. “Recovering the Subject Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1: 189–​224. Ortner, S. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1: 173–​193. Padel, F. 1995. The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa. Delhi. Pakenham, T. 1991. The Scramble for Africa. London. Rabasa, J. 2010. Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History. Pittsburgh, PA. Ray, R. K. 2003. The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism. Delhi.

436  Kim A. Wagner Robins, N. A., and A. Jones. 2009. Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice. Bloomington, IN. Rodríguez, I., ed. 2001. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Durham, NC. Roque, R. 2015. “Mimesis and Colonialism: Emerging Perspectives on a Shared History.” History Compass 13, no. 4: 201–​211. Roy, T. 1994. The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857. Delhi. Rudé, G. 1964. The Crowd in History, 1730–​1848. New York. Sarkar, S. 1997. Writing Social History. Delhi. Scott, J. C. 1977. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT. Scott, J. C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance. New Haven, CT. Scott, J. C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT. Singh, H. 1990. Rowlatt Satyagraha and British Imperialism. Delhi. Smoak, G.  E. 2006. Ghost Dances and Identity:  Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley, CA. Spivak, G. C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 66–​111. Chicago. Stallybrass, P., and A. White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London. Stern, S. 1987. “New Approaches to the Study of Peasant Rebellion and Consciousness: Implications of the Andean Experience.” In S.  Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, 3–​25. Madison, WI. Stokes, E., and C. A. Bayly, eds. 1986. The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857. Oxford. Tambiah, S.  1996. Leveling Crowds:  Ethnonationalist Conflict and Collective Violence in South Asia. Berkeley, CA. Thompson, E. P. 1971. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present 50, no. 1: 76–​136. Viqueira, J. P. 2012. “Indian Resistance to the Rebellion of 1712.” In J. Gledhill and P. A. Schell, eds., New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico, 63–​80. Durham, NC. Wagner, K. A. [2007a] 2014. Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-​Century India. Original: Basingstoke. Reprint: Delhi. Wagner, K. A. 2007b. “Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered.” The Historical Journal 50, no. 2: 353–​376. Wagner, K. A. [2010] 2015. The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising. Original Oxford. Reprint: Delhi. Wagner, K. A. 2011. “ ‘In Unrestrained Conversation’: Approvers and the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in Nineteenth-​Century India.” In R. Roque and K. A.Wagner, eds., Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History, 135–​162. Basingstoke, UK. Wagner, K. A. 2017. The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857. London. Ward, A. 1996. Our Bones Are Scattered. London. Wenzel, J.  2009. Bulletproof:  Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond. Chicago. White, L. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley, CA. Wiener, M. J. 1995. Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali. Chicago. Wilson, J. 2008. “Agency, Narrative and Resistance.” In S. E. Stockwell, ed., The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, 245–​269. London. Yang, A.  1987. “A Conversation of Rumours:  The Language of Popular ‘Mentalités’ in Late Nineteenth-​Century Colonial India.” Journal of Social History 20, no. 3: 485–​505.

13 Imperial Metabolism Empire as a Process of Ecologically Unequal Exchange Alf Hornborg

Introduction The relation between empire and ecology has several dimensions. If an “empire” is defined as an expansive state striving to extend its geographical territory by engulfing other states or non-​state societies, an underlying objective is obviously to gain control over the land and labor assets of such territory. “Land” and “labor” are convenient concepts for productive resources deriving from natural space and investments of human labor time, respectively, but their analytical separation should not obscure their interdependency. Much of what we think of as “land” (e.g., agricultural areas, managed forests, mines) represent considerable past investments of human labor, whereas “labor” is inconceivable without the food energy and other resources drawn from land. Both these factors of production, in other words, are inextricably bound to ecology. In examining actual processes of imperial expansion, it is thus possible to compare different ways in which states have appropriated ecological resources from their hinterlands. Such a comparative framework can deal with qualitative differences such as institutions, ideologies, technologies, or consumption patterns, or it can attempt to quantify the flows of embodied (i.e., invested) land and labor measured in hectares and hours of human time. The latter approach is particularly useful if the aim is to understand imperial systems in terms of their material metabolism, as measures of the productivity of land and labor can be converted into measures of energy.1 However, it should rarely be necessary to calculate the quantitative details of imperial energy flows in order to offer analytical observations on the metabolic organization of empires founded, for instance, on the appropriation of human and animal work, food, and fodder. In trying to understand societal structures such as empires in terms of natural aspects such as biogeography or energy, we need to address the relation between society and nature. This chapter will argue for an understanding of socio-​ecological systems that acknowledges the significance of perspectives from both social and natural science, but that is strongly critical of biogeographical determinism. 1 Smil 1994; Crosby 2006. Alf Hornborg, Imperial Metabolism  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0013.

438  Alf Hornborg The risk of introducing tangible, physical parameters such as energy or hectares of agricultural land is that this may inspire some readers to think of such aspects as causally primary in a simplistic sense, as it may give the impression of denying the complexity of cultural specificities and historical contingencies in order to reveal their ultimate evolutionary “function.”2 The challenge, in other words, is to understand the material dimension of imperialism without reducing sociocultural projects to reflections of material exigencies. A further challenge, also addressed in this chapter, is to understand different varieties of imperial control and appropriation of material resources as being embedded in cultural ideologies that represent unequal exchange as reciprocal, or at least fair.3 This approach should help us grasp the ideological role of mainstream modern conceptions of national “economic growth” and “technological progress.” It will simultaneously give us reason to reflect on the conspicuous absence, in the voluminous literature on the political and economic history of imperialism, of critical scrutiny of the global, social, and ecological impli­ cations of these notions, which are taken for granted. In particular, this chapter emphasizes that the ecological implications of imperialism are much more politically and morally charged than the (largely unintentional) diffusion of plants and animals.

“Ecological Imperialism” Revisited In his 1986 classic Ecological Imperialism:  The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–​1900, the historian Alfred Crosby argued that the success of European imperialism in temperate areas of the world was largely a consequence of the successful expansion of a biological assemblage of species that accompanied the European colonizers, displacing indigenous peoples, plants, and animals. Although the crucial role of epidemics in European expansion has long been recognized, Crosby’s main contribution was to show how the microbes were part of a “portmanteau biota” that existed in symbiosis with Europeans and that also included domesticated crops and animals, as well as weeds and pests. The biogeographical success of this biota, including European humans, is presented in Darwinian terms, as a process of selection ultimately determined by natural phenomena such as primeval tectonic shifts and the long-​term isolation of biological populations. As early as 3,000 years ago, Crosby suggests, “the human of Old World civilization” was something of a “superman,” in that he served as the “template” for all humans destined for global expansion.4 The features that would prove to be of such advantage to these Old World humans included not only the ability to cultivate food and fiber, domesticate

2 Cf. White 1959. 3 Godelier 1986. 4 Crosby 1972; 1986, 34; McNeill 2011.

Imperial Metabolism  439 animals, and use the wheel, but also to coexist with weeds, vermin, parasites, and a variety of disease-​carrying microbes. A similar argument was elaborated 11  years later by the geographer Jared Diamond in his 1997 bestseller, Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies.5 Like Crosby, Diamond traces the ultimate roots of European dominance in the modern world to biogeographical circumstances that were several millennia old. In attempting to explain the unequal global distribution of wealth and power, Diamond is careful to reject explanations that appeal to biological differences between human populations, but his account nevertheless refers to natural factors that, in the final instance, render social-​scientific approaches superfluous. Although he tries to evade charges of Eurocentrism, and that he justifies European domination as inevitable, Diamond’s account—​like Crosby’s—​tends to naturalize European expansion as the outcome of physical conditions and inexorable Darwinian processes of selection. These physical conditions include the geographical orientation of continents and the distribution of various species of wild animals and plants. Like most other evolutionists,6 Crosby and Diamond illustrate how an interest in the material aspects of historical processes tends to go hand in hand with Darwinian narratives that naturalize power. Neither Crosby nor Diamond offers any significant insights on the role of macro-​ sociological processes in the economic history of European expansion. In fact, it seems to be precisely by avoiding social scientific theorizing, in favor of simple and easily grasped biogeographical models, that they have gained such wide readerships. But social science does offer more credible accounts of societal expansions than pure biogeography. It is as futile for biogeographers to try to account for European expansion without considering, for instance, the cultural patterns of consumption that encourage specific constellations of long-​distance trade as it would be for scholars of economic history to disregard physical factors such as transportation routes, energy sources, demography, or farmland. Such consumption patterns are idiosyncratic, historical accidents generated by more or less arbitrary semiotic systems that assign specific social significance to particular trade goods such as certain kinds of food, textiles, porcelain, or metals.7 The economic and political expansion of Europe was indissolubly linked to its demand, for instance, for silk, spices, beaver pelts, and sugar, and to the Chinese demand for silver. Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz persuasively argue that, rather than being predetermined by geographical circumstances several millennia ago, the rise of the West was an accident of late eighteenth-​century history.8 The European peninsula is a corner of the Old World that is closest to the New World, and its history of expansion began when the two hemispheres were economically connected in the sixteenth century. Europe would in time

5 Diamond 1997.

6 Cf. White 1959; Morris 2010.

7 Baudrillard [1972] 1981; Sahlins 1976; Bourdieu 1979. 8 Frank 1998; Pomeranz 2000.

440  Alf Hornborg draw great advantages from its proximity to the vast silver resources and conveniently depopulated lands of the Americas, but until the late eighteenth century remained inconspicuous in comparison to similar, densely populated areas of the Old World such as China and India. To ignore the role of such cultural and historical contingencies in accounting for European expansion must be regarded as a major omission. The critical question we should thus put to Crosby and Diamond is whether the biological expansion of Europe really was a prerequisite for its economic expansion, or vice versa. The approach adopted in this chapter is that, although biological factors such as epidemics certainly were significant in facilitating Europe’s economic expansion, sociocultural incentives were the primary driving force. This is not to say that European society or culture was uniquely predisposed for expansion,9 but that global conjunctures in the centuries following 1492 shaped the specific trajectory of “Western” imperialism. Because this trajectory rests on modern conceptions of “economic development” and “technological progress,” the world to this day remains largely persuaded by the “West’s” own narrative of its expansion. This means that to grasp the nature of imperialism in the modern world, it will be necessary to approach contemporary accounts of global inequalities as a specific kind of ideology that is comparable to the cultural constructions of earlier empires. Moreover, to recognize the ideological affinity of modern and pre-​modern narratives of expansion, it will be necessary to unravel the various ways in which they justify the appropriation of material resources. In order to understand imperialism as a recurrent socio-​ecological phenomenon in world history, we need to ask how the expansion of European and modern empires after 1492 differ from, as well as resemble, earlier imperial expansions. Furthermore, we need to explore these differences and similarities in terms of both ideologies and material flows. Through what narratives have empires justified their power, and in what ways have they appropriated the ecological resources of expanding territories? How, in other words, are cultural constructions and socio-​ ecological processes intertwined in world history? As employed by Crosby, the concept of “ecological imperialism” has come to denote the ecological consequences of imperialism, rather than its ecological rationale. However, if we consider the asymmetric flows of energy within an empire, which are arguably as essential for its reproduction as its own narratives of expansion, it should be valid to think in terms of what I have elsewhere referred to as the “thermodynamics of imperialism.”10 In an article called “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have explicitly proposed to replace Crosby’s influential definition with a concern with “the growth of the center of the system at unsustainable rates, through the more thoroughgoing ecological degradation of the periphery.”11 Writing about the implications of “peak oil” for the position

9 Cf. Blaut 1993, 2000.

10 Hornborg 1992.

11 Foster and Clark 2004, 198.

Imperial Metabolism  441 of the United States in the modern world, Foster has also used the concept of “energy imperialism.”12 We have every reason to think about imperial projects as ecological phenomena, involving increasingly distant appropriation of natural resources such as energy. In applying such a perspective to the modern world, however, we will inevitably be confronted with modern narratives proposing that “imperialism” is a thing of the past and a concept that is inapplicable to the current situation. This is a predictable aspect of the fact that we, like the subjects of empires in the past, tend to be impregnated with the specific imperial narratives of our time.

Toward a Comparative Study of Imperial Metabolism The vast literature on the archaeology and history of empires contains a growing body of quantitative data on land use, tribute flows, and the organization of labor that could be used for a systematic, comparative analysis of the material metabolism of imperial projects. This chapter can merely suggest a possible direction for such work to pursue, building on some methodological experiments in quantifying asymmetric transfers of embodied labor and embodied land.13 Labor and land can be translated as (human) “time” and (natural) “space” and their appropriation by imperial power centers understood as a societal redistribution of time and space. Later in this chapter we shall see how modern “technology” fits into this picture as a recent version of time-​space appropriation, but the argument will make more sense if it is grounded in a long-​term history of imperialism. The list of imperial projects to be briefly considered here begins with two distinct and foundational Old World empires, Han China (206 bce–​220 ce) and Rome (241 bce–​476 ce). These imperial expansions are then compared with the two most prominent New World examples, the Inca (1438–​1532) and the Aztec (1428–​ 1519). We shall next consider the establishment of two trans-​Atlantic empires that were largely based on connecting Old and New World resource flows, the Spanish (1492–​1780) and the British (1600–​1947). Finally, we shall discuss continuities and discontinuities in imperial strategies through more than two millennia of world history, from ancient Rome to the United States. How can all these strategies be compared in terms of flows of appropriated energy, land, and labor, and how can they be differentiated in terms of ideologies and institutions?

Han China (206 bce–​220 ce) After a civil war which ended the former Qin dynasty, the Han dynasty, founded in 206 bce, consolidated imperial control over a Chinese population of around

12 Foster 2008.

13 Hornborg 2006; Bogadóttir 2012; Warlenius 2011.

442  Alf Hornborg 60 million people and a territory extending about four million square kilometers.14 The metabolism of the empire was primarily based on the extraction of agricultural tribute, mostly in the form of grains such as rice, wheat, and millet. Based on an estimated average carrying capacity of two persons per hectare, the agricultural area can be roughly calculated at around 300,000 square kilometers. Oxen and water buffalo were used as draft animals, but all other work was conducted by humans. Along with grain, raw materials such as cotton and timber, as well as precious items such as jade, corals, ivory, pearls, and gems, were imported to imperial centers, which in turn exported and redistributed textiles (including silk), grain, incense, spices, medicines, and ornaments. The main forms of capital investments were hydraulic infrastructures for agriculture, transports (roads, canals), ceremonial architecture, and an army numbering several hundred thousand warriors. In ideological terms, imperial power was founded on the divinity of the royal dynasty and the perception of the empire as protection against enemies. In material terms, the fundamental rationale of the ancient Chinese empire was to use military coercion and religious devotion to extract labor and food energy through tens of millions of peasants on hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of agricultural land.

Rome (241 bce–​476  ce) By 241 bce, the former city-​state of Rome had begun to expand beyond the Italian Peninsula by conquering the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.15 It then proceeded to conquer the Carthaginian territories in northern Africa and Iberia, consolidating an empire which controlled the Mediterranean and much of what is now Europe for several centuries, until the fall of Western Rome, traditionally set to 476 ce. The total population of the empire was around 60–​75 million people in 150 ce, of which around one million lived in the city of Rome itself. Like Han China, it was basically an agrarian empire collecting tribute in grain, notably from Egypt. The 2.7 million hectares of agricultural land in Egypt supported an estimated 7.5 million people, suggesting a carrying capacity of 2.7 people per hectare. Unlike China, however, the Roman Empire depended heavily on maritime shipping across the Mediterranean. Instead of the Chinese rivers and canals, Rome relied on the sea for bulk deliveries of grain to its center, perhaps as much as 400,000 tons in some years.16 When imports were at their height, only around 10 percent of the wheat consumed in the city of Rome was grown in Italy.17 Another difference was the central significance of slavery, an institution inherited from ancient Greece.



14 Scheidel 2009; Burbank and Cooper 2010.

15 Scheidel 2009; Burbank and Cooper 2010; Woolf 2012. 16 Garnsey 1988, 231–​232; Debeir et al. 1991, 35. 17 Myrdal 2012.

Imperial Metabolism  443 To a large extent, slaves were war captives from peripheral areas of the empire. It has been suggested that it was in part because they became increasingly expensive in the early centuries ce that some of their labor was replaced by water-​mills.18 Oxen were used as draft animals. Wine and olive oil were traded throughout the Mediterranean. Major capital investments were made in farmland, roads, architecture (including aqueducts), armies, and naval fleets. Although water-​mills and sailing ships represented alternative sources of energy, the Roman Empire was primarily based on the extraction of food energy from conquered territories and the exploitation of peasant and slave labor. Christianity became the state religion in the fourth century. In the year 395 the empire was split into a Western and an Eastern (Byzantine) half, the latter centered on the city of Constantinople. The Western half fell apart during the fifth century, but the Byzantine Empire survived for another millennium, until Constantinople was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.

Inca (1438–​1532) After a decisive victory over the neighboring Chanka polity in 1438, the kingdom of Cuzco in the southern Andes rapidly conquered the Andean highlands and Pacific coast of South America, from northern present-​day Ecuador to central Chile.19 Military force remained a central means of expansion, but several provinces of the Inca Empire were integrated through diplomatic persuasion. At its height, prior to the Spanish conquest in 1532, the population of the empire may have been close to 12 million people. The majority were peasants and llama pastoralists, the main staples being potatoes (in higher altitudes) and grains such as maize and quinoa. Estimates of the productivity of intensive raised-​field potato cultivation in the Titicaca Basin suggest a local carrying capacity of up to four people per hectare. Because there were no draft animals, all agricultural labor was undertaken by humans. The Inca court established a redistributive system of tribute represented as relations of mutual benefit, in which common people delivered labor and military service in exchange for ceremonially distributed gifts of maize beer, cloth, and ornaments. In addition to the maintenance of agricultural terraces, irrigation canals, armies, roads, and ceremonial architecture, tribute was invested in a system of warehouses storing food and cloth for redistribution in times of need. Imperial ideology represented the Inca emperor as the divine son of the Sun and the source of agricultural productivity, which meant that the delivery of tribute to him was perceived to be compensation for harvests and protection against famine. Investments in architecture and infrastructure increased the capacity of the imperial elite to extract labor, food, and materials from the territories over which it had gained control.

18 Debeir et al. 1991, 39. 19 D’Altroy 2001, 2002.

444  Alf Hornborg

Aztec (1428–​1519) Following the defeat of neighboring Azcapotzalco in 1428 and certainly by the time of the Spanish conquest of 1519, the Aztec polity centered on the city of Tenochtitlan had conquered much of what is now Mexico.20 About 250,000 hectares of raised fields and other intensively farmed land in the Basin of Mexico provided food for about one million people, suggesting a carrying capacity of around four people per hectare in the core area, a figure identical to the one for the Titicaca Basin. The main agricultural staple was maize. As in the Andes, there were no draft animals. In fact, in ancient Mexico there were not even any pack animals like the Andean llama, which meant that all tribute and merchandise had to be carried by humans. The Mesoamerican area was considerably more commercialized than the Andes, and the political consolidation of Aztec hegemony was less formalized. Whether the extraction of goods from peripheral areas was perceived as tribute or trade seems unclear, since the emperor’s tribute-​collectors were merchants and much of the transfer of goods occurred at markets. Major items of trade and tribute included obsidian, cotton textiles, ceramics, feathers, gold, jade, turquoise, bronze, and cacao. Cacao beans and cotton textiles frequently served as currencies in market transactions. The Aztec Empire illustrates how the extraction of labor-​power and natural resources for purposes of accumulation in core areas can occur largely through market (“non-​administered”) exchange, even in pre-​modern contexts.

Spanish (1492–​1780) The Iberian peninsula was integrated into the Umayyad caliphate in 711 and remained partly Muslim territory until 1492, when the Habsburg dynasty defeated the last caliph of Granada and attempted (as Charlemagne had done seven centuries earlier) to resurrect the Western Roman Empire.21 The ideology of conquest and unification was strongly grounded in Christian theology. Blocked by Muslim polities, which now controlled most of the Mediterranean, the Iberian rulers extended their interests westward, trading along the African coasts and establishing sugarcane plantations on Madeira, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and in the Caribbean. Having sponsored exploration of the Caribbean since Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, the Spanish Crown began extracting bullion from the Aztecs in the 1520s and from the Incas in the 1530s. By the end of the sixteenth century, Spanish silver mines in the New World yielded about 85 percent of the world’s silver. However, the Spanish Crown was heavily indebted, and much of the wealth ended up in the Netherlands, which was claiming independence from

20 Smith 2001.

21 Burbank and Cooper 2010; Schwartz 2011; Altman 2011.

Imperial Metabolism  445 Habsburg Spain and Portugal at this time. Because of the strong demand for silver in China and India, the Dutch East India Company in the early seventeenth century was thus well equipped to assume control over the European trade in spices and other merchandise from Indonesia and the Indian Ocean. Previously controlled by the Portuguese, who in 1497 had rounded Africa, this trade largely passed into Dutch hands over the course of the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, Portugal controlled much of the Atlantic trade in African slaves bound for its own sugar plantations in Brazil, as well as for Spanish plantations in the rest of the Iberian New World. By the mid-​eighteenth century, the Spanish colonial territories in the New World encompassed western South America (most of the continent except Portuguese Brazil), almost all of Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, and western North America. These territories exported several agricultural products, such as sugar, tobacco, cacao, and hides, but precious metals remained most important. Spain itself provided its colonies with iron, mercury (for refining silver), wine, and olive oil, as well as luxury goods like textiles and porcelain that often had a non-​ Spanish origin. Spain also imported grain and timber from northern Europe. Its main capital investments were in ships, armies, and ceremonial architecture. The use of wind energy to propel its sailing vessels was a crucial complement to the muscle energy of humans, horses, and oxen in maintaining the metabolism of the empire. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Empire experienced several major rebellions, such as the Túpac Amaru revolt aiming to resurrect Inca power in Peru in 1780.

British (1600–​1947) In the year 1600, the British East India Company was granted monopoly on English trade east of Africa.22 Although unable to compete with its Dutch counterpart in Southeast Asia, it established successful relations with the Mughal Empire in India and soon exported Indian textiles, silk, indigo, saltpeter, and tea to Europe. Similar companies organized British expansion in North America and Africa. The Virginia Company (founded 1606) thus financed the establishment of English settlements in North America, beginning with Jamestown in 1607; the Royal Africa Company (founded 1663) organized the trade in slaves for the British plantation colonies in the Caribbean; and the Hudson’s Bay Company (founded 1670) controlled the North American fur trade. The island of Jamaica became an important British colony in 1655. In the seventeenth century, 60 percent of the people who crossed the Atlantic to live in the British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch colonies in the New World were African slaves, a figure that in the next century rose to 75 percent. The slave trade and plantation system created demand for food exports from the British colonies in North America as well as for

22 Burbank and Cooper 2010; Chaplin 2011.

446  Alf Hornborg cotton textiles exported from Britain,23 while industrial workers in England derived a significant share of their food energy from Caribbean sugar mixed with tea from China and India.24 The imports to England of cotton, sugar, and other land-​intensive products from the New World colonies were part of the so-​called triangular trade through which British merchants exchanged cotton cloth and other manufactures for West African slaves, which were then shipped across the Atlantic and sold in the colonies. The mechanization prompted by the market demand for textiles likewise offered powerful new vehicles for transport and military conquest, most notably trains and steamboats. Although colonial territories in North America (the future United States of America) achieved independence from Britain in 1783, the empire continued to expand. In the early twentieth century, the British Empire encompassed around 650 million people and about 35 million square kilometers. Much of this territory remained part of the empire until the mid-​twentieth century, when a number of important former colonies achieved independence, notably India in 1947 and several African nations in the 1960s. It was in the core of the British Empire that the “Industrial Revolution” occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This signified a new kind of capital investment alongside the fields, roads, canals, armies, ships, and architecture of earlier empires: capital accumulation in the British Empire also included factories, railroads, and steamships. The strategy of industrial imperialism established in Britain was to be adopted and expanded by its former colonies in North America, as the United States emerged as an imperial power in the mid-​twentieth century. What these new investments in “technology” actually meant in terms of imperial metabolism is the topic of the next section.

Industrialization as a Strategy of Time-​Space Appropriation At the core of the Industrial Revolution was the substitution of human and animal muscle power, as well as water and wind power, with fossil energy, or—​if you wish—​the imperative to increase productivity per hour of human labor. Steam engines and steam-​driven factories inaugurated this development toward what we now know as high-​tech society and a continuous aspiration for economic growth. The most prominent economic thinkers from this period—​including Thomas Malthus (1766–​1834), David Ricardo (1772–​1823), and Karl Marx (1818–​1883)—​ all lived in England and devoted much effort to understanding the economic and technological changes of their time. Like most other classical economists, Malthus emphasized the existence of biophysical limits to growth, remembering the land shortages that a few decades earlier had seemed to constrain England’s economic expansion. Ricardo, and later Marx, objected that the development of

23 Inikori 1989. 24 Mintz 1985.

Imperial Metabolism  447 new technologies, by increasing productivity, would transcend such constraints. Ricardo argued that access to capital and labor could compensate for a shortage of land. This “substitutability” of the factors of production was crucial to the new approach to economics that he helped to establish, and that predominates to this day. Karl Marx, too, had confidence in technology and labor, but emphasized that the factor that propelled technological development during the nineteenth century was the desire of the owners of capital to increase their profits, which in his view was done at the expense of the working class. The incentive behind mechanization, in other words, was to lower costs of production, compared to paying wages to a larger and less mechanized work force. By producing and selling a larger volume of products per hour of human labor, capitalists could increase their net income and invest in further technological improvement. Marx also argued that these profits and investments ought to be the collective property of the working people, an argument that profoundly influenced the politics of the twentieth century. A central question, for our comparative understanding of imperial metabolism, is what Ricardo’s and Marx’s objections to Malthus really signified, from a global perspective. Ricardo was obviously right in maintaining that the shortage of land would not be an obstacle for England’s economic growth. But the “technological development” that made it possible to transcend the country’s biophysical limitations actually implied that England’s pressure on the environment was displaced to areas outside its own political boundaries and to future generations. In other words, the limits to growth posited by Malthus did not disappear but were shifted beyond view. Even if we disregard the vast quantities of labor time invested in the British colonies to subsidize Britain’s economic growth during the nineteenth century, we can join Kenneth Pomeranz in calculating the equally vast land areas claimed for the British economy.25 By the mid-​eighteenth century, the annual British import of Swedish iron represented around a million hectares of Swedish forest.26 To substitute for the food energy in sugar consumed in England in 1831, the country would have needed to grow domestic food crops on an additional million hectares of farmland. To replace the cotton fiber imported in 1830 with domestic wool, England would have required an additional 9.3  million hectares of pasture and hay. To replace the annual import of Baltic and American timber in the early nineteenth century would have required almost 0.65 million hectares of British woodland, and to substitute firewood for the annual consumption of coal around 1815, another six million hectares of forest. During the course of the nineteenth century (from 1815 to 1900), Pomeranz adds, England’s imports of sugar increased 11-​fold, its coal output 14-​fold, and its cotton imports 20-​fold. In the year 1900, these three commodities alone (sugar, coal, and cotton) thus implied an “ecological relief ” amounting to over 200 million hectares of ecoproductive land. Rolf Peter Sieferle calculates the wood equivalent of British coal extraction in the year 1900 as in itself over 225 million

25 Pomeranz 2000, 274–​278, 313–​315. 26 Warlenius 2011, 68.

448  Alf Hornborg hectares (2,252,000 km2) of woodland.27 If we include, in addition to sugar and cotton, other land-​intensive imports such as grain, beef, timber, and a variety of colonial crops such as coffee, tea, and tobacco, it becomes apparent that this “ecological relief ” surpassed the total landmass of Great Britain (less than 24 million hectares) by at least an entire order of magnitude. The extraction and transport of these and other imports to England was to a large extent financed with revenue from textile exports. Ultimately, in other words, the point with all the investments in intensified mass production was that it granted England access to increasing volumes of resources beyond its own land surface. This reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution in terms of global transfers of resources has not taken into account the immense amounts of labor invested in colonial plantations, mines, and forests, or the vast land areas that provided all these laborers with food. In acknowledging the requisite appropriation of labor and land in the periphery, this perspective on industrialization finally leads us to recognize that “technology” may not primarily be a matter of saving time and space, but of redistributing it in global society.28 Fundamental to such asymmetric transfers of embodied time and embodied space in the world-​system, of course, are global discrepancies in the price of labor and land. Technological rationality, in other words, is a subset of mercantile rationality (what the economists refer to as arbitrage), and “technological progress” contingent on global market conjunctures. Even these cursory and incomplete calculations can contribute to a reassessment of the essence of “technological development” in a global perspective. Malthus and the other classical economists were right in concluding that there are limits to the amount of land area that is available to a nation’s economy, but Ricardo was right in observing that England could transcend such limits by substituting capital and labor for land—​although, as we have seen, this largely meant shifting its land requirements to other nations. Neither Ricardo nor Marx had reason to doubt that technological development would continue to offer Europe unlimited economic growth. Nevertheless, to the extent that recurrent concerns with the “limits to growth” can be justified, whether raised by the threat of environmental degradation, energy scarcity, resource depletion, food shortages, climate change, global inequalities, or financial collapse, it is essential to understand the emergence and expansion of industrial technology as a total social—​and world-​historical—​fact.

Continuities and Discontinuities in Imperial Strategies The empires briefly reviewed in the preceding sections vary enormously in geographical extent, population size, and institutional framework, from the few million inhabitants of the Aztec realm in 1519 to the 650 million citizens of the

27 Sieferle [1982] 2001, 104. 28 Hornborg 2006, 2013.

Imperial Metabolism  449 British Empire four centuries later, but in order to understand the world-​historical transformations leading from tributary agrarian states to mercantile and industrial expansionism, we need to address the continuities as well as the discontinuities. To begin with, we can observe that all the imperial projects mentioned have relied, to use the nutshell definition of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, on “the political logic of enrichment through expansion.”29 All empires aim to control the land and labor of a vast territory in order to accumulate wealth or capital in the hands of a powerful elite affiliated with its core. In all the cases we have reviewed, imperial projects can be viewed as attempts to control politically (and coercively) preexisting systems of agricultural surplus production and long-​distance exchange—​that is, to turn trade into tribute. As argued earlier, most of the productive potential of “land” and “labor” in an agrarian society ultimately represents solar energy captured through photosynthesis. The mainly agrarian, tributary empires in our sample (Han China, Rome, Inca, Aztec) relied on a combination of religious devotion and military coercion to channel such energy so as to make it accessible to elite control. In the final two cases (the Spanish and British empires), we can more clearly see how they were at least initially geared to global market conditions, relying on advantageous exchange rates to complement religion and coercion in guaranteeing the accumulation of wealth. Market institutions were variously also employed in imperial China, Rome, and Mexico (less so among the Inca), but the divinity and military power of the emperor remained the dominant prerequisites to accumulation. The largely mercantile origins of Spanish and British imperialism in no way means that religion and military coercion were dispensable to them, but rather that global structures of market demand had become indispensable.30 Without the global patterns of demand for silver, sugar, and cotton textiles, such mercantile empires would not have appeared and continued to thrive. For Han China, Rome, Inca Peru, and Aztec Mexico, the preexistent networks of long-​distance trade were certainly a condition for their appearance. But once imperial power was established, there was a tendency for commerce to become suppressed and secondary to administered exchange. If the acceptance and use of market institutions prompt us to draw a distinction between those imperial expansions that are more or less dependent on such institutions, and those that are not, we also need to consider the distinction between primarily mercantile empires (such as the Spanish in the sixteenth century) and industrial empires (such as the British became in the nineteenth century). As suggested earlier, the industrial strategy of accumulation can be visualized as a subset of the mercantile strategy, in that both rely on global discrepancies in the market prices of labor and land-​based resources. It is trivial to reiterate the economic rationality of, for instance, the spice trade, in which the opportunity for accumulation hinged on the huge differences in the market price of spices in

29 Burbank and Cooper 2010, 10.

30 Braudel [1979] 1992; Wallerstein 1974.

450  Alf Hornborg Indonesia and Europe. It is considerably less trivial, however, to observe that for eighteenth-​century Europeans to find it rational to replace local labor with mechanical devices requiring the input of labor and natural resources from some remote periphery (such as forests and iron mines in Sweden, or coal mines in the northwest of Britain), the relative price of local versus peripheral labor should be a crucial consideration. By way of concrete illustration, let us imagine how different the conditions for industrialization in nineteenth-​century Britain would have been, if the labor that harvested the cotton fiber in the colonies had been paid standard British wages, and the land rent for colonial plantations had been equivalent to that for prime British farmland. From this perspective, the mechanization of production is inextricably intertwined with market conditions, as part and parcel of a strategy of mercantile conversion. The very existence of modern technology, in other words, relies on specific rates of exchange (of labor time and natural space) between different sectors of world society. Having reconceptualized industrialization as an imperial strategy comparable to accumulation through tribute or mercantile capitalism, we next ought to reconsider the concept of “capital” itself, as well as the ideologies that tend to accompany and legitimize these various modes of capital accumulation. In a comparative, world-​historical perspective, capital accumulation can be understood as a recursive (self-​reinforcing) relation between some kind of material infrastructure and a symbolic or coercive capacity to make claims on other people’s labor or land-​based resources. This very general definition of capital would thus include, for instance, not only the specifically “capitalist” relation between nineteenth-​ century British textile factories and the institutions of wage labor and market exchange, but also the similarly recursive relation between sixteenth-​century agricultural terraces in Peru and the Inca institution through which maize beer was ceremonially redistributed in exchange for labor. With this definition, both the textile factories and the terraces qualify as capital in the sense of a material infrastructure that is accumulated through a specific cultural strategy for appropriating a net social transfer of labor and resources, and the expansion of which enables an expanded appropriation of such transfers in the future. In the sample of empires reviewed here, we have recognized as examples of such accumulated capital a range of investments including agricultural infrastructures, roads, canals, ships, armies, ceremonial architecture, factories, and railroads. Moreover, accumulation presupposes objectively quantifiable rates of unequal exchange that guarantee net transfers of labor time or natural resources from one segment of society to another. Following Godelier,31 however, we expect such asymmetries in exchange to be systematically mystified and instead presented as reciprocal or fair. Using our earlier comparison, we can thus juxtapose Inca concepts relating to the redistribution of maize beer with modern concepts of “wages” and “market prices” as comparable instances of mystification. Other examples of cultural ideologies that have represented appropriation as reciprocity would include

31 Godelier 1986.

Imperial Metabolism  451 beliefs concerning the various divine services of emperors in Han China, ancient Rome, and the Habsburg version of the Holy Roman Empire.

Ecological Imperialism Redefined: Imperial Strategies of Ecologically Unequal Exchange Although more or less intuitively based notions of “unequal exchange” or “exploitation” are common in the social-​science literature, particularly within the paradigm of world-​systems analysis, attempts to analytically define such concepts tend to be flawed and confusing.32 However, if empires through world history have indeed been oriented toward “enrichment through expansion,” there is every reason to carefully consider if and how they have been engaged in unequal exchange with their conquered territories. Predictably, the concept of unequal exchange makes little sense to mainstream economists, whose focus on monetary exchange values (prices) generally implies inattention to other metrics (e.g., energy, materials, embodied labor time, embodied land) by means of which an inequality of exchange might be assessed. Similarly, because economists tend to understand “capital” as abstract monetary wealth rather than material infrastructure, it is difficult for them to see the relevance of positing an unequal exchange of material resources (including labor, which is actually a form of energy) that contributes to the accumulation and maintenance of capital. Discussions of unequal exchange have thus generally been confined to schools of thought concerned with finding non-​monetary perspectives on resource flows, primarily Marxist and ecological economics.33 In these discussions, unequal exchange has generally been conceptualized as the deviation of prices from “values” in international trade, generating an asymmetric (net) transfer of value between different segments of society (generally nations). The underpaid value has been defined in terms of either embodied labor or embodied energy. Such “physicalist” definitions of value, however, are difficult to reconcile with what social and cultural theory has to say about the semiotics of consumption. Nor are they conducive to constructive discussions with mainstream economists, who also tend to be concerned with what consumers actually consider valuable. For these reasons, it is analytically more valid to decisively distinguish definitions of unequal exchange from considerations of value. The asymmetric transfer of various kinds of resources (unequal exchange of energy, materials, embodied labor time, or embodied land) is indeed crucial for the accumulation of capital (as previously defined), but the assessment of such asymmetries should not be geared to notions of underpaid “value.” This seems to be the only analytically tenable way to proceed in reconciling the interaction between material and semiotic aspects of economic processes.

32 Hornborg 1998, 2013, 2019.

33 Emmanuel 1972; Bunker 1985; Odum 1996; Lonergan 1988.

452  Alf Hornborg These considerations clearly have relevance for the study of largely mercantile empires such as the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and British, where particular constellations of consumer preferences were intertwined with material processes of capital accumulation. In other words, the transoceanic trade in goods such as spices, sugar, tea, and beaver pelts yielded monetary profits that could be invested in more ships, armies, and ultimately factories. The accumulation of such infrastructures through market transactions clearly entailed asymmetric flows of timber, foodstuffs, ores, and other resources that could be approximated in terms of unequal exchange, but to approach such flows in terms of underpaid “values,” dissociated from the actual preferences of market actors, would lead nowhere. To demonstrate that a given pattern of market transactions entails a systematically unequal exchange of embodied land or labor time can help to account for the accumulation of capital, but rather than proposing that land or labor is underpaid, it will suffice to show that market prices function as an ideology of reciprocity that mystifies such asymmetries. In turning from mercantile to ancient tributary empires with little or no market institutions, we need to ask to what extent the accumulation of capital can be viewed as the product of (unequal) “exchange”:  Can labor and resources appropriated through tribute at all be said to be exchanged? Although concepts of unequal exchange have been developed to expose asymmetries in trade masked as market reciprocity, the underlying (and wider) notion of exploitative, net transfers of resources must obviously include tribute as well. In several cases (e.g., the Aztecs), the distinction between trade and tribute is in fact difficult to draw. Most forms of tribute, even in as non-​mercantile an empire as that of the Inca, are conceived by the tribute-​ payers as a kind of exchange for services provided by the emperor. Such a perceived exchange of services can generally be assessed in terms of objectively quantifiable flows of embodied labor and land. Thus, for instance, it would be fairly simple to demonstrate that the maize beer which the Inca emperor served his subjects only represented a fraction of the harvest that he gained from their labor. Any kind of societal flows of goods or services, including tribute, should be considered part of an exchange, and market exchange is simply one among several institutions (and market vocabulary one among several ideologies) for organizing unequal exchange so as to render it invisible.

The Roles of Money and Technology in the Ecology of Empire If much economic and technological expansion can indeed be visualized as the product of ecological imperialism, redefined as ecologically unequal exchange, we must conclude that mainstream beliefs about the societal roles of money and technology are incomplete. The gradual world-​historical transition from tributary to increasingly mercantile and industrial imperialism is generally viewed as progress, and in some respects this is certainly a valid perspective. At the same time,

Imperial Metabolism  453 we must not ignore the global inequalities and unevenly distributed ecological consequences that have accompanied this development, which might justify the question, “Progress for whom?” Whatever transformations the next few centuries have in store for world society, whether managed or unintentional, it will be important to develop as full as possible an understanding of global socio-​ecological processes. This should include recognizing that market exchange can mask asymmetries in global resource transfers, and that what we think of as technological development can in fact rely on such asymmetric transfers. Even “globalized” environmental problems such as climate change have highly unequal repercussions for different parts of global society.34 Moreover, we need to acknowledge the temporal dimension by considering how the combustion of fossil fuels and depletion of finite resources also imply a colonization of future generations everywhere. There is no doubt that all-​purpose money and global market exchange provided the means toward new forms of ecological imperialism, particularly after the establishment of intensive transoceanic trade in the sixteenth century. Money is a curious cultural institution that continues to mystify socio-​ecological processes—​for instance, the accumulation of new technologies in particular sectors of the world-​ system. Moreover, toward the end of the twentieth century, the idea and institution of money became the foundation of yet another and even more opaque strategy of accumulation that we might call financial imperialism.35 Much as in earlier imperial strategies of enrichment, our difficulty in grasping its exploitative nature is an essential condition for its existence. Power is founded on obscuring the relation between the material and the symbolic. Ubiquitously, it entails both unequal access to material resources (e.g., energy or land) and cultural mystification of such inequalities (e.g., through concepts such as “market prices” or “debt”). Ubiquitously also—​not only in Marx’s nineteenth-​century capitalism—​political relations to other people masquerade as relations to things. These material “things” include landscapes, commodities, money, and technology.

Landscapes Environmental historians have assembled the details of landscape transformations in the wake of imperial expansions. In the ancient agrarian civilizations, the most conspicuous cultural transformations of landscape were deforestation and the establishment of various kinds of landesque capital.36 The traditional Chinese landscape of rice paddies, mulberry trees, and fish ponds was largely a product of two millennia of Chinese Empire, as the Mediterranean landscape of grape vines and olive trees was a product of ancient Greece and Rome. The terraced Andean slopes



34 Roberts and Parks 2007. 35 Graeber 2011.

36 Williams 2003, 2007; Widgren 2007.

454  Alf Hornborg and irrigated coastal valleys of Peru likewise reflect millennia of state expansions, ending with the Inca, as do the extensive investments in raised fields in waterlogged areas such as Titicaca and the Basin of Mexico. The landscape legacies of the Spanish and British empires include abandonment of indigenous landesque capital and an initial reforestation in the wake of indigenous depopulation, followed by renewed and unprecedented deforestation and cultivation in connection with colonization and the establishment of plantations, frequently leading to serious soil erosion and degradation. European expansion in the New World also brought devastated mining landscapes, collapsed fisheries, and a severe decimation of numerous wild species ranging from North American beavers (and the concomitant hydrological and vegetation changes following the abandonment of beaver dams) to Caribbean sea turtles. To this we should add, of course, the introduction and often explosive expansion of Old World species of animals and plants, both wild and domesticated. As Crosby and others have shown, the expansion of European empires since the sixteenth century is largely responsible for the global distribution not only of cattle, sheep, pigs, and wheat, but also of rats and dandelions. These early modern empires may have transformed their natural environments more dramatically than ancient empires such as Rome,37 but it is no exaggeration to observe that the landscapes of significant proportions of all continents have been molded by world-​systemic conjunctures of imperial command and market demand over the past two millennia. These landscapes can thus be viewed as the historical imprints of social and political relations between humans, inscribed on the ecosystems of which they are a part.

Commodities The goods that constituted the essential metabolic flows in the empires mentioned earlier, and the production of which significantly shaped their landscapes, are in themselves perhaps the clearest illustration of how relations between people masquerade as relations between things. Commodities are ultimately embodiments of human labor and natural resources, but present themselves to our senses as decontextualized items of exchange. Their exchange on the market, including the rates at which they are exchanged, has no systematic relation to the quantities of labor time or natural resources that they embody. The extent to which their exchange entails asymmetric transfers of embodied labor time or natural space must thus be investigated separately, without guidance from the vocabulary of economics, except when the actual exchange rates help us to empirically assess the specific quantities of labor time or natural space that are transferred in a particular context.

37 Cf. Woolf 2012, 56–​61; Horden and Purcell 2000.

Imperial Metabolism  455

Money Like commodities, money was recognized by Karl Marx to have a fetish-​like aspect, in that it focuses our attention on a concrete reification of a wider social system of material exchanges. Money fetishism prompts us to attribute to non-​living objects like bills and coins certain properties of living things, such as a capacity for autonomous growth (“interest”), rather than acknowledging that the appearance of having such properties is a result of social relations of exchange. As argued earlier, this capacity of money to mystify the material substance of unequal exchange has for a very long time been an important ingredient in imperial expansion. The literature attempting to grasp the emergence of this elusive cultural phenomenon is vast and impossible to summarize, but a highly promising attempt is the comparative economic anthropology of David Graeber.38 Although his analysis is not concerned with material asymmetries in resource flows, or the material dimensions of capital accumulation, he persuasively relates the world-​historical emergence of money and markets to cultural conceptions about predatory lending, debt slavery, state institutions, mercenary soldiers, and violence. Money, we suggested earlier, is basically a symbolic capacity to make claims on other people’s labor and landscapes. It is an idea, embodied in things, which developed as a means of extending control over people beyond relations of kinship, proximity, and trust, in order to get them to behave in ways they might not otherwise have done.

Technology Finally, as argued previously, technology is also a category of “things” which can mystify unequal relations of exchange. Viewed from the perspective of time-​space appropriation, technological objects reflect their owners’ harnessing of the deflected agency of other people. Modern technology can be reconceptualized as a strategy to locally save (human) time and (natural) space, at the expense of time and space lost elsewhere in the world-​system. Although it has been suggested that the earliest proto-​machines (water-​mills) were built in the late Roman Empire in part to replace (increasingly expensive) slaves, as a continued preoccupation with the delegation of work to other beings/​things, the question remains if technology has not so much replaced as displaced slavery. We need only think of the role of Caribbean plantation workers and British coal miners during the Industrial Revolution, or the working conditions of Peruvian copper miners and Brazilian sugarcane harvesters today. Like commodities, technological objects are fetishized, obscuring asymmetric exchange relations and distant investments of labor time, embodied land, or energy. The “Western” fetishization and glorification of technology has been abundantly

38 Graeber 2011.

456  Alf Hornborg documented, particularly by historians of British and American imperialism.39 It is a pervasive component in the mainstream narrative of “development,” which legitimizes the hegemony of wealthier nations by representing poverty as failure and global inequalities as a temporary state of affairs.

Conclusions: Ecological Imperialism Today and Tomorrow In considering the prospects for a comparative study of imperial metabolism, we have suggested that the appropriation of (human) time and (natural) space, in the form of embodied labor and embodied land, might serve as quantifiable parameters that transcend specific production systems and energy regimes. Labor and land, always intertwined, are indeed universal sources of energy for capital accumulation. To understand current trends in ecological imperialism, we need to begin by rethinking the rationale of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, requirements for energy and land converged in the production of food for human labor and fodder for draft animals, but for two centuries now, fossil fuels have made it possible for some sectors of the world-​ system to separate their energy and land requirements. This material condition was the foundation of the industrial worldview that emerged in early nineteenth-​ century Britain, the “image of unlimited good”40 that pervades mainstream economic thought to this day. Faced with twenty-​first-​century prospects of peak oil production and climate change, this worldview is now being challenged more seriously than ever. We need to ask if some of the fundamental tenets of modern economics are inextricably connected to the use of fossil fuel energy. A  return to biofuels would reintroduce some of the constraints and rationalities of pre-​ industrial imperialism, including the ancient competition over land for energy versus food production, and the logic of calculating transport costs in terms of the requisite ecological space. Although sharing much continuity, nineteenth-​century British and twentieth-​ century American imperialism are in some respects diametrical opposites. Britain’s imperial strategy was largely propelled by its great need of additional land, while it was more than self-​sufficient in fossil fuels. The contemporary United States has been prepared to go to war to secure its imports of fossil fuels, but is more than self-​sufficient in agricultural land. If, prompted by peak oil or global warming, oil consumption in the United States were to be replaced with (best-​practice) Brazilian ethanol, it would require hundreds of millions of hectares of sugarcane plantations, which is several times the area within the United States currently devoted to agricultural exports and vastly more than the area in Brazil currently devoted to sugarcane ethanol. Without a doubt, the future of ecological imperialism and our

39 Adas 1989, 2006; Marsden and Smith 2005; Headrick 2010. 40 Hornborg 1992; cf. Foster 1965.

Imperial Metabolism  457 understandings of ecologically unequal exchange will to a large extent hinge on the geopolitics of energy. Contrary to many theorists contemplating the expansion of “the West,” acknowledging the significance of energy in the world history of empire should not lead us to adopt a simplistic, Darwinian perspective that represents high-​energy, high-​tech imperialism as natural and inevitable.41 Such evolutionary determinism is pervasive in the work of cultural ecologists like Leslie White42 and recurs, for example, in the influential narrative of the biogeographer Jared Diamond. References to the relative amount of energy harnessed or controlled per capita, however, do not suffice to explain the world history of imperialism. Access to powerful technologies may certainly be useful to empires, best illustrated by British and American imperialism in recent centuries, but the complex vicissitudes of imperial fortunes are equally dependent, for instance, on the cultural vagaries of global markets, political intrigues, epidemiology, harvests, and weather (recall the fate of the Spanish Armada). Empires rise and fall, and in many historical instances low-​energy and low-​tech polities have proven more resilient than their more powerful neighbors or predecessors.

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458  Alf Hornborg Crosby, A.  W. 1986. Ecological Imperialism:  The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–​1900. Cambridge. Crosby, A. W. 2006. Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. New York. D’Altroy, T. N. 2001. “Politics, Resources, and Blood in the Inka Empire.” In S. E. Alcock, T. N. D’Altroy, K. D. Morrison, and C. M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, 201–​226. Cambridge. D’Altroy, T. N. 2002. The Incas. Oxford. Debeir, J.-​C., J.-​P. Deléage, and D. Hémery. 1991. In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization through the Ages. London. Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York. Emmanuel, A. 1972. Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. New York. Foster, G. 1965. “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good.” American Anthropologist 67, no. 2: 293–​315. Foster, J. B. 2008. “Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism.” Monthly Review 60, no. 3: 12–​33. Foster, J.  B., and B.  Clark. 2004. “Ecological Imperialism:  The Curse of Capitalism.” Socialist Register 40: 186–​201. Frank, A. G. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA. Garnsey, P. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-​Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis. Cambridge. Godelier, M. 1986. The Mental and the Material. London. Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY. Headrick, D. R. 2010. Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present. Princeton, NJ. Horden, P., and N. Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford. Hornborg, A. 1992. “Machine Fetishism, Value, and the Image of Unlimited Good: Toward a Thermodynamics of Imperialism.” Man (N.S.) 27: 1–​18. Hornborg, A. 1998. “Towards an Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange: Articulating World System Theory and Ecological Economics.” Ecological Economics 25, no. 1: 127–​136. Hornborg, A. 2006. “Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-​Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement.” Ecological Economics 59, no. 1: 74–​81. Hornborg, A.  2013. Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange:  Fetishism in a Zero-​Sum World. Revised paperback edition. London. Hornborg, A. 2019. Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene:  Unraveling the Money-​ Energy-​Technology Complex. Cambridge. Inikori, J. E. 1989. “Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England.” Social Science History 13, no. 4: 343–​379. Lonergan, S. C. 1988. “Theory and Measurement of Unequal Exchange: A Comparison between a Marxist Approach and an Energy Theory of Value.” Ecological Modelling 41: 127–​145. Marsden, B., and C.  Smith. 2005. Engineering Empires:  A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-​Century Britain. Houndmills, UK. McNeill, J.  R. 2011. “The Ecological Atlantic.” In N.  Canny and P.  Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World 1450–​1850, 289–​304. Oxford. Mintz, S. W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York. Morris, I. 2010. Why the West Rules for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future. London. Myrdal, J. 2012. “Empire: The Comparative Study of Imperialism.” In A. Hornborg, B. Clark, and K. Hermele, eds., Ecology and Power: Struggles over Land and Material Resources in the Past, Present and Future, 37–​51. London. Odum, H.T. 1996. Environmental Accounting:  Energy and Environmental Decision Making. New York. Pomeranz, K. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ.

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14 Ecology Environments and Empires in World History, 3000 bce–​ca. 1900  ce James Beattie and Eugene Anderson

Empire-​making and environmental change are interconnected. Empires in world history controlled and exploited animal, human, plant, and mineral resources to expand and consolidate power, often at other polities’ expense. Factors like technological know-​how and innovation, improved transportation and military might, as well as plant-​and animal-​breeding, enhanced an empire’s ability to exploit environments. Conversely, environmental factors could contribute to imperial decline—​through climate change, flooding, or unforeseen environmental feedbacks, the last often resulting from resource overexploitation. This chapter uses environmental history to explore that relationship. We begin by defining environmental history and reviewing some of the most influential approaches to world empires and environment. We divide our case studies into four main periods, defined by major changes in world environmental history, relying mainly on secondary sources while drawing also on our own expertise in early (Gene) and modern (James) world environmental history. Our chapter emphasizes the entanglement of world empires in what are still often inaccurately referred to as “natural” and “human” processes. Even in obviously natural processes—​such as pre-​1880s periods of climatic cooling and warming—​ humans often interposed themselves as arbiters between Heaven and Earth (as in China), or viewed in their own behavior explanations of divinely driven environmental events (floods, drought, plague).1

Frames and Perspectives Moving “between global space and local place, between nature and society,”2 environmental historians use scientific and archival evidence to explore human-​nature interactions over time. They draw strongly from ecological models—​ideas that imperial experience furthered3—​to understand interrelated effects of environmental 1 Elvin 1998; Endfield and Nash 2002; Beattie et al. 2014a. 2 Griffiths 2000. 3 Bowler 1992; Anker 2001. James Beattie and Eugene Anderson, Ecology  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0014.

Ecology  461 change.4 Empires were founded on the exploitation and manipulation of particular ecosystems. Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986) offer some of the earliest and most influential approaches deploying ecological explanations in world history. For Crosby, ecology helped to explain European imperialism’s success in the Americas and Australasia—​“neo-​Europes” whose climates and other environmental aspects resembled those of the settlers’ homes. In Crosby’s formulation, Old World plants, animals, and diseases outcompeted those of the New World. Disease debilitated native populations. Hooved animals trampled their way across continents; and introduced grasses outcompeted indigenous ones. Working in concert, these processes significantly aided and inflected European imperialism.5 Since Crosby, many other approaches to world empires and environment have appeared. Alf Hornborg (Chapter 13 in this volume) fuses world-​systems theory and ecology to explain global inequality. Other historians have traced energy transfers or metabolism, in both urban and rural settings,6 or have used different frameworks, such as eco-​ambiguity or environmental anxiety, to explain the disjuncture between environmental attitudes and behaviors.7 Writers give attention to climatic or geographical processes in imperialism, although some popular studies (usually by non-​historians) can present environmental deterministic arguments.8 Historians of world empires and environmental change also study disease histories,9 drawing insights from related disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, political ecology, and historical geography, as well as subjects like histories of food, commodities, and gardens. The richness and variety of approaches to environmental history and empire are staggering. Historians have viewed empires and environmental change through the perspectives of climate,10 fire,11 cities,12 water,13 animals14 and insects,15 marine resources,16 and nutrient cycling.17 Use of environmental history has also helped redefine studies of empire, as Pekka Hämäläinen’s work on the rise of the “Comanche Empire” demonstrates.18 Outstanding global, regional, and empire-​wide histories exist, and a number of dedicated journals and book series cover the topic.19

4 Jones 2014; Jacobs 2015. 5 Crosby 1972, [1986] 2004. 6 Muscolino 2014; McNeill 2000; Douglas 2013. 7 Thornber 2012. 8 E.g., Diamond 1997. 9 Radkau 2008; Arnold 1996; McNeill 2010. 10 Endfield and Nash 2002; Behringer 2010: Beattie et al. 2014a. 11 Pyne 2000; Pooley 2014. 12 Kheraj 2015; Douglas 2013. 13 Broich 2007; D’Souza 2006; Beattie and Morgan 2017. 14 Melville 1994; Jones 2002; Walker 2005. 15 Mitchell 2002; McNeill 2010. 16 Gaynor 2014; Jones 2014. 17 Cushman 2013; Melillo 2012. 18 Hämäläinen 2008. 19 Of journals: Environment and History; Environmental History; International Review of Environmental History; Journal of World History. Of series:  ABC-​Clio’s “Nature and Human Societies”; “Palgrave World

462  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson Despite such richness, a number of periods and topics beg further inquiry. Work on empire and environment commonly focuses on the post-​1500 period; more scholarship is needed on earlier world empires and environmental change (hence our approach). Garden history and environmental history—​as we show—​offer rich pickings for environmental historians examining world empires,20 yet have not been fully developed. Nor has urban environmental history.21 We also require greater comparisons between different world empires and environmental change.22 And, in studies of world empires and environment just as much as in global environmental history, the challenge remains of integrating material and cultural analyses of change.23 Our chapter demonstrates how control of natural resources laid the basis for, but also shaped, different world empires. Competition over natural resources, and their more efficient exploitation, spread, and improvement, drove imperial expansions over millennia, just as environmental degradation and disease sometimes acted as brakes on expansion. Attitudes toward natural resources also underwent change through the commodification of resources, a process which has accelerated over the last two hundred years.24

The Dawn of Empire in the Near East Agriculture began in the hill and valley country north and west of Mesopotamia, around 8500 bce, soon spreading into river plains,25 which provided the optimum habitat for farming. Extremely fertile soil, near-​permanent warmth and sunlight, and plentiful water allowed lush crops to grow with only the simplest agricultural knowledge. Irrigation developed early. Oasis cultivation more or less trapped farmers in Mesopotamia. Surrounding areas were too dry and infertile to farm, especially in the south. With no easy escape, as Robert Carneiro argues, nascent states could conquer, hold, and control people.26 City-​states emerged before 3000 bce in southern Mesopotamia, and at the same time in Egypt, indicating probable linkages; Egypt was growing Near Eastern crops, not native Egyptian plants.27 Conflict, often over land, led to the conquest of some Environmental History”; Ohio University Press’s “Ecology and History”; Cambridge’s “Studies in Environment and History”; and Taurus’s “Environmental History and Global Change.” 20 Beattie 2018. 21 Anderson 2014a; Melillo 2013. 22 Notwithstanding such fine studies as:  Burke III and Pomeranz 2009; Beinart and Coates 1995; Tyrrell 1999. 23 Beattie et al. 2014. One to attempt this is Beattie et al. 2015. 24 Cronon 1983; Weaver 2003; Radkau 2011. 25 Barker 2006; Liverani 2014; van de Mieroop 2008. 26 Carneiro 1970, 2012a, 2012b. 27 Algaze 2008; Liverani 2014; van de Mieroop 2008.

Ecology  463 states by others, and the emergence of larger states through conquest or military alliance. By 2300 bce, this process had advanced far enough to be able to speak of real empires, which began in Mesopotamia. We define an empire as a state that has conquered other polities, and holds them in some form of subjection, ruling from a distance and without totally assimilating them. This produces a significant (if not always present) difference between an empire and a state (see Chapter 1 in this volume). A state ordinarily homogenizes its ecology and agriculture, in interests of legibility, if nothing else.28 Empires are more diverse, normally encompassing regions of different ecologies and agricultural systems. This allows for, among other things, borrowing and learning within an empire. An empire normally has a center, with a highly productive agriculture able to support a large capital city and standing army. It also requires a large hinterland of easy-​to-​conquer territory into which it can expand. Under pre-​modern conditions, this occurred in steppes, fertile plains, maritime fringes, and other areas where it is easy to march, haul wagons, and/​or ship provisions. The logistical difficulties of transporting, feeding, and supplying an army posed problems for empires in deserts, and almost insurmountable ones for empires in vast dense forests. Mountain fastnesses were also hard to conquer and hold, but usually could be surrounded or bypassed and subdued later. Before the Industrial Revolution, most empires were of two types. The majority were agrarian empires, such as in China and India, located in extremely fertile valleys in easily conquered plains and steppes. A few were thalassocracies, seaborne or maritime empires conquering outward from major port and trade centers, such as the Carthaginian empire in ancient times, and more recently the Portuguese empire after 1400 ce. Empires that did not fit these patterns, such as the nomadic Central Asian empires, usually did not last long, unless they conquered and moved to a fertile central zone, as the Mongols did in China and the Near East.

Empire’s Origins in the Ancient Near East Early Mesopotamian states and empires created a wholly artificial environment of cities and carefully irrigated, grid-​patterned fields around them, growing only cultivated plants. This lifestyle fostered a growing distaste for natural environments, promoting a view of them as alien and hostile, which grew to include “barbarian” herding tribes of mountainous uplands. It is to this—​not to later phenomena such as science or capitalism—​that the West traces its chronic fear of nature and belief that “progress” means replacing natural environments with wholly artificial ones.29

28 Scott 1998.

29 Anderson 2014b.

464  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson Egypt, and other early civilizations, had weaker forms of this idea; they were more willing to work with nature. Empires depend on external and internal trade. Ancient Near Eastern empires expanded along trade routes, often to gain control of local sources and networks. They desperately needed wood, which is sparse in Egypt and Mesopotamia’s alluvial valleys. The best wood—​cedar—​came from Lebanon and the Taurus Mountains. Lebanon especially became a battleground between Egypt and Near Eastern regimes, notably with and after Tuthmosis (Thutmose) I’s conquests just before 1500 bce.30 Trade in cedars reached far into Egypt and Mesopotamia, and was critical to naval strength since no Egyptian wood makes seaworthy vessels.31 Empires stripped Lebanon’s forests. Without strong conservation measures—​well attested in the Bible (e.g., Nehemiah 2:8) and the Epic of Gilgamesh32—​it would have lost its last cedar thousands of years ago. As it is, a few survive even today. Another vital resource was stone. Mesopotamia, in particular, a vast expanse of essentially stone-​free alluvial land,33 needed to import all stone for tools, construction, ornaments, and other purposes. Valuable gemstones came farthest; Baltic amber and lapis lazuli from northeast Afghanistan were the most distantly sourced. More important still was the development of metal. The rise of empires was linked with the rise of metallurgy. Copper use led to the invention of bronze, making tin as well as copper a necessity. Neither is particularly common in nature, though both occur in northern Near Eastern mountains and could be traded from there.34 Iron was important by 1000 bce, and quickly became the universal working metal, since it is tougher than bronze and more widely distributed. As mountainous areas became increasingly important, needs for metals increased, resulting in environmental damage. By Greek and Roman times, authors were highlighting pollution (including air and water) associated with mining and metalworking.35 Scholars often traditionally considered trade to be small-​scale until recently, when this interpretation changed with the discovery of shipwrecks like the 16-​meter-​long boat wrecked at Uluburun, Turkey, around 1325 bce, which was carrying surprising quantities of metal (10 tons of copper alone), wood, and manufactured goods, including precious things like ivory. It was apparently typical for the times.36 Trade at this scale implies considerable environmental pressure from logging, mining, smelting, and manufacturing—​all well documented a millennium later in Greek and Roman sources. These early empires were built on wheat and barley. Barley was often the major grain, because it is the most tolerant of heat, drought, and salty soil. Very small

30 Aruz et al. 2015; Broodbank 2013.

31 Moran 1992; on early sea travel and its environmental challenges, see Rayes et al. 2015. 32 Gardner and Maier 1984.

33 Liverani 2014, esp. 17–​33.

34 Liverani 2014; Cunliffe 2015, 119–​120. 35 Sallares 2007.

36 Broodbank 2013, 399–​400.

Ecology  465 concentrations of salt kill most plants, including wheat, but barley tolerates a significant (if still rather small) amount. It thus assumed ever greater importance as irrigation accumulated salts in soil. The Nile’s annual flooding, washing out the salt from most areas, spared Egypt from this problem but barley triumphed anyway, because of Egypt’s hot and dry climate (Egypt later produced much wheat for Rome, however). Other grains did not thrive, until sorghum moved up from the south somewhat later.37 Also critical to trade and commerce were domestic animals: sheep, goats, cattle, donkeys, pigs, and dogs. Sheep wool provided a source of cool-​weather clothing and a trading item (Linen, and sometimes other plant fibers, provided warm-​ weather clothing). Unless carefully herded, intensive grazing by sheep and goats—​ and browsing by goats—​degraded range and soil. From what we know of modern graziers in the area, these animals were probably fairly well-​managed in most cases. However, overgrazing, already a local problem long before states and empires arose, surely grew worse with empires. An empire requires enormous amounts of tribute and usually depends on trade, with wool being valuable and produced in large quantities. No other pre-​modern empires relied so heavily on animals as those of the Near East and Mediterranean—​they were unique in their dependence on meat, milk, and wool, and the environment suffered accordingly. Alfred Crosby noted that the combination of crops and intensive livestock-​raising made farmers in this cultural tradition formidably successful managers of the environment, enabling them to spread widely and change whole regions. Early empires institutionalized the basic pattern seen in world-​systems ever since:  trade of high-​value-​added manufactured goods from metropoles for raw materials from peripheries. Centers imported wool, raw metal, and wood, while exporting cloth, tools, and crafts. Primitive transportation made shipping large quantities of grain difficult, except along rivers, and meant grain was less commonly traded. Instead, food had to be produced near cities, dictating their location in the centers of the most fertile valleys. Egypt faced less constraint, since barges could carry enormous amounts of goods up and down the Nile, but even there the cities stuck to fertile land.38 Empire-​protected trade brought exotic goods from long distances without overwhelming expense. In Egypt, products from northeast Africa came down the Nile—​everything from myrrh to elephants—​while Near Eastern goods such as cedar wood and precious stones went the other way. In Mesopotamia, southern manufactures moved north, while northern products such as good wool clothing, ores, and precious stones moved south in increasing quantities. How much this had to do with diversifying crops is not clear, but Mediterranean empires drew on a rapidly widening roster of plants for food, spicing, and medicine. Knowledge also spread. Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean civilizations by 1500 bce shared

37 On early agriculture, see Liverani 2014; Zohary 2012. 38 Broodbank 2013, passim; Liverani 2014.

466  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson many bodies of knowledge, while the application of some knowledge, such as of metallurgy, architecture, and irrigation, left long-​lasting marks on the landscape. People also widely shared environmental ideology. The memorably beautiful praise and love of nature in Psalm 104 of the Old Testament echoes Egyptian sources; some of it appears to be directly taken from Akhenaton’s Hymn to the Sun.39 Many other documents record conservation, love of nature, and concern for animals and plants as worthy beings quite apart from their resource-​value. However, it is also clear that the great Mesopotamian empires, in particular, damaged natural environments, both for economic reasons and to prove domination and regimentation.

Empires Expand into Europe and Central Asia, 600 bce–​600  ce The early Near Eastern empires gave way to challenges from both west and east—​ Greece and later Rome (west) and Persia (east). These better watered and more mineral-​rich lands had lacked geopolitical power until agriculture and transportation developed sufficiently to make them competitive with the super-​fertile alluvial valleys. Empires also developed in the Indian subcontinent, as riverine states rose along the Indus and Ganges and spread to Central Asia, whose oasis agriculture supported them. Empires caused deforestation and overgrazing, but the extent of the phenomena is highly controversial; data are insufficient to show the scale of damage, and impacts were highly localized.40 We know that the Roman Empire suffered much erosion. Less debatable is hunting’s devastating impact on animals, through demand for them for sport and protection, and in Roman circuses. Elephants disappeared from the Near East and North Africa, as did lions from Europe. Ostriches vanished, or nearly did, from the same areas. Hippopotami ceased to live in Egypt and the Mediterranean. All large animals withdrew into remote fastnesses. This was not the slow, steady replacement of large animals by people that characterized China and India; it was an animal holocaust, driven by circuses and the like in particular, and by fear and hate of wildness in general. These attitudes were driven by a thoroughly urban culture, one giving us the word “civilization”—​a word equating the city (civitas) with high culture, education, and all things good.41 With cities arose the new phenomenon of world empires, starting with Persia. Cyrus II the Great (r. 559–​529 bce) expanded the Achaemenian Empire from an already large state into a world empire, conquering modern Iran and neighboring lands.42 The Persians also spread the concept (not wholly new) of a royal hunting



39 Kitchen 1999, 251–​260. 40 Sallares 2007.

41 Anderson 2014b and sources therein. 42 Cunliffe 2015, 204–​206.

Ecology  467 park, a vast tract of land preserved for game and sustainable hunting.43 The old Persian word for this was pairidiz, whence our “paradise.” This world empire provoked a reflex state (a state created to respond to another state’s challenge), under Alexander of Macedon (356–​323 bce), who conquered Greece, Egypt, and Persia, and present-​day Pakistan and Afghanistan, among other areas. Religion changed accordingly. The Persians introduced monotheism—​ Zoroastrianism in their case—​and also the idea of making their religion synonymous with imperial conquest. Religious tolerance affected local ecology, freeing groups like the Jews, released by the Persians from the “Babylonian captivity,” to keep their environmental rules. The Jews tabooed eating pigs and other animals that ate filth or blood. They outlawed plowing with a mixed team (ox and ass), sowing mixed seed, and using other combinations of plant and animals. They also had firm rules about wood use, cultivation, and hunting. Other minorities in the rising empires had their own rules, yielding a diversity of religious and ethnic rules, variously protected or threatened by the empires of the day, which gave rise to an equally diverse pattern of ecologies. Later enforced religious unity resulted in dogmatic acceptance of one set of ecological rules, often inappropriate in new settings: as when the taboo on pigs, reasonable in Near Eastern deserts, spread to places like Southeast Asia where it was nutritionally and agriculturally a poor idea. “Empire” in a Roman context usually applies only to the autocracy established by Julius Caesar, but the Roman Republic (509–​27 bce) that preceded it really established empire in our sense of the concept. The Republic ruled, or at least obtained hegemonic dominance, over the Mediterranean, having conquered most of the more fertile parts of Europe, northern Africa, and the Levant. It continually warred with Persia for control of Syria and Mesopotamia. The former cores of empires instead became contested frontiers, a very unusual situation by world standards. Rome drew heavily on Egypt and the frontier zones of Europe for grain, and on central Europe for timber and other resources.44 Its empire fed Rome. At one time, the city boasted nearly a million people, who consumed at least 150,000 metric tons of grain per annum. North African colonies grew grain and cereals, thanks to irrigation. Slaves provided labor. Imperial armies maintained control. Romans consumed fruit, wine, oil and other staples on a vast scale, and required building materials and fuel wood, as well as luxuries, from Chinese silks and Indian cotton and spices to African ivory and animals. Rome’s consumption of energy and materials embedded it in larger ecosystems.45 Meanwhile, the Mauryan Empire (322–​185 bce) represented the first really huge empire in India. It followed the Persian example of elevating one religion, in this 43 Allsen 2006. 44 See Broodbank 2013; for Mediterranean ecologies over time: Grove and Rackham 2001 and McNeill 2003a, 2003b; Grove and Rackham criticize McNeill but all are correct for the places they describe—​ disagreement results from overgeneralizing. 45 Douglas 2013, 47, 50–​52; Thommen 2009 overviews Greek and Roman environmental history.

468  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson case Buddhism, which encouraged nonviolence—​especially against humans, but increasingly against all beings—​most memorably proposed by Emperor Ashoka (r. 272–​232 bce). His ahimsa remains the real political wellspring of India’s reluctance to take life and of India’s vegetarianism, and thus may have been the single most influential ecological move ever made by an early empire. Later empires such as the Gupta (fl. 320–​550 ce) generally maintained at least lip service to ahimsa.46 This led, or contributed, to a broader policy of designing with nature—​leaving considerable forest and savannah. As elsewhere, local culinary specialties became known all over the empire, with resulting diversification and enrichment of agriculture and foodways. Yet Indian empires still expanded agriculture, cut forests, killed wild beasts, and engaged in extensive trade, with consequent specialization and local monocropping.

Early Empire in China China independently developed agriculture around the same time as the Near East. Qin (221–​207 bce)—​the first true empire—​quickly collapsed; the succeeding Han Dynasty (206 bce–​220 ce) really “made” China, establishing a mix of Daoism and state Confucianism.47 These empires were centered in the dry northwest, a region where rain-​fed millet, wheat, and barley dominated, with only localized irrigation. Qin and Han conquests in what is now southeastern China and as far as northern Vietnam, gave them rich irrigated rice lands and introduced the Chinese to a vast wealth of new crops. Shortly after Han, the Book of Plants and Trees of the Southern Regions48 made North China aware of trees like coconut, betel nut, and citrus. In the west, Han embassies traveled far into Central Asia, bringing back the western grapevine, alfalfa, and probably other new plants. Han emperors had huge hunting parks (learned from the Persians, ultimately), but tended to convert them to farmland as population grew, starting a tradition that has lasted through China’s history, by setting a long-​standing and major tension between conservation and farming, which Karen Thornber calls “ecoambiguity” (Figure 14.1).49 Han’s great rival, the Xiongnu Empire, held about equal territory, but with far less population. It controlled what is now Mongolia and western China, and lived by oasis agriculture, extensive rain-​fed agriculture, and nomadic herding. It warred with Han along a contested frontier in Shaanxi’s dry farmlands, until Han definitively defeated it around 100 bce. Competition between steppe empires and agrarian Chinese dynasties thereafter became the norm; productive rain-​fed agriculture’s 46 Cunliffe 2015, 253–​294. 47 The main histories of Qin and Han are Lewis 2007; Twitchett and Loewe 1986. On China’s environmental history, see Anderson 2014a; Elvin 2004; Marks 2012. 48 Li 1979. 49 Thornber 2012; also Elvin 2004.

Ecology  469

Figure 14.1.  This eighteenth-​century seascape with islands depicts the Daoist mountains and isles, an idealized vision of the abode of the immortals. Karen Thornber explores the tension between environmentally sensitive doctrines such as Daoism and environmental reality. Reproduced with permission from Canterbury Museum.

inland limits set the frontier, until modern times. Contrary to a common misconception, Central Asian empires did not expand and invade when stressed by drought. Drought and cold ruined them, destroying troops and horses. More usually, expansion occurred during warm, wet periods that allowed humans, horses, and livestock to reproduce and flourish in the otherwise cold and dry lands. This was true of the Xiongnu and later of the Liao, Jin, and Mongol dynasties. Thus, the interplay of monsoon cycles affected Chinese history, though only as one of a huge number of variables.

New Imperialism, 600–​1450 ce After 200 ce, empires decayed, in part because of a cooler, drier climate. The Han dynasty fell. Steppe empires shrank back to oases and better-​watered grasslands. The Roman Empire declined and the western portion fell in the fifth century. Imperial decline allowed some ecological recovery, though not as much as once thought, since it appears that Europe and China did not collapse ecologically—​their economies, polities, and trade shrank, but their agriculture continued. After 600, a new cycle of empire began. In the west, Islam rose, and following it, the Arab, later Arab-​Persian, Empire. In the east, the Sui (581–​618) and Tang (620–​907) dynasties reunited China, paradoxically during a cold, dry period. As climate improved, Tang, like Han, conquered far into Central Asia. Canals expanded greatly; the innovative Grand Canal brought grain from the fertile south

470  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson to the drought-​prone capital in the west. Climate and ecology could facilitate imperial plans, but were not determinative, providing challenges that could be met in various ways. Before and during this period, West Asian plants, medicines, food-​ways, fabrics, and religions reached China, and a rather more limited set of Chinese contributions spread west, resulting in a slow closure of the gap between empires. Finally, China and the expanding Arab realm clashed at the Talas River—​almost in the exact center of Asia—​in 751 ce. The Arabs won. Chinese power slowly faded in Central Asia as Islam rapidly spread. One result was that western agriculture, technology, medicine, foods, and environmental management dominated Central Asia for centuries, while Chinese agroecology shrank back to China’s frontiers.50 From 600 to 1368, Central Asia often drove the dynamic of empire in East Asia. There vast, but thinly populated and often short-​lived empires arose, either conquering China or affecting China’s dynasties. The relative power of the Central Asian Turks and Mongols had ecological roots: they could raise good horses, which is hard to do in the Chinese core area, as it is short of good forage with mineral nutrients. Thus, the Turks and Mongols could both maintain better cavalry and make China dependent on them via the horse trade (Figure 14.2). Trade along the “Silk Road”—​the Central Asian caravan routes—​was also critically important during this period, not least as a source of new ideas and technology. The nomads developed a strategy of learning military techniques at one end of the Silk Road and applying them—​as a new and unpleasant surprise—​at the other. This is how gunpowder reached the West, along with only somewhat less strategically useful foods and medicines. The Mongols, for instance, brought high-​quality Near Eastern wound-​treatment methods to China.51 Less pleasant were the effects of repeated conquest on northern China. Garden-​ making contributed to the Song’s breakup. Emperor Huizong (1082–​1135, r. 1101–​ 1125) ambitiously developed a park (Genyue) designed to bring Heaven’s favor upon himself and his empire. A  specially created “Flower and Rock Network” mobilized China’s vast labor and transportation networks, overseeing a massive redistribution of flora, fauna, and rocks from south to north, and its tribute empires. Huizong’s enterprise demonstrates the importance of cultural and religious ideas in promoting imperial ecological transformation. It also shows the ecological power, and limitations, of a pre-​modern empire. This gargantuan project drained Song finances, diverted its people from more pressing tasks, and ultimately diminished an already weakening dynasty.52 From Genyue’s collapse onward, wars engulfed China, propelling the non-​Han conquest dynasties of Liao and Jin, and Mongol 50 On Tang, see Lewis 2009. 51 A vast literature exists, but from 900 on, Mote 1999 is so superior an introduction as to make further citation unnecessary here. 52 Beattie forthcoming; Schafer 1963; Hargett 1988–​89.

Ecology  471

Figure 14.2.  This rubbing, from Tang Emperor Taizong’s tomb, portrays Taizong’s own steed, which he rode while pacifying the eastern capital of Luoyang. Horses revolutionized warfare and enabled steppelanders to conquer Chinese territory. Reproduced with permission from Canterbury Museum.

Yuan dynasties farther and farther south.53 Population and infrastructure took decades to recover. The dynasty-​changing Chinese uprising of 1368 forced the Mongols back to the steppes, where they confronted the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300s–​1800s). Extreme cold and dry conditions ended all possibility of further Central Asian conquests. Not only could the Mongols never build up great herds again; the Chinese, and elsewhere in Eurasia the Near Easterners, Europeans, and Indians, began a sustained demographic increase that tipped the balance of power in their favor.

53 A particularly fine study of the ecological effects is Zhang 2016.

472  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson

New World Empires Meanwhile, a wholly different set of empires was arising in a world unimaginable to the Arabs and Chinese. Agriculture in the Americas was almost as ancient as it was in the Old World. Maize became extremely productive, yielding enough food per acre to support imperial ambitions. Potatoes in the Andes added another productive food source. Yet empires started late. The realms controlled by the great city of Teotihuacan in Mexico and the smaller but important one of Tiwanaku in Bolivia seem to have deserved the title, though tiny in comparison to their Chinese and Persian cousins. The usual effects on trade, distribution of crops, and spread of new crops and ideas throughout imperial regions took place. Empires in South America spread technologies like terracing, canal irrigation, and raised potato beds. Extremely intensive and massive environmental modification, landesque capital, resulted, but was generally locally managed. The Inca Empire, arising around 1400 ce, did more, not only creating vast road networks and canals, but also developing a socialist economy based heavily on assembling, storing, and distributing grain.54 Huge grain-​storage depots, with vast bins, still exist in parts of the Inca lands. The Incas distributed crops widely and had to grow them for different latitudes because their empire extended 3,200 kilometers in length and over 4,500 kilometers in height, encompassing the Andes and many adjacent coastal lands. The contemporary Aztec Empire—​Mexico’s first and only really large pre-​ Columbian empire—​was less environmentally manipulative, but nevertheless expanded trade and distributed crops. Mexico’s standard money, cacao (chocolate) seeds, were grown widely.55 However, the Aztec Empire soon fell to the Spanish. No other sizable New World empires developed, largely because of the strategic difficulties of expanding (given the simple technology) into tropical forests and deserts. In the pre-​Iberian New World, ecology worked against imperialism. An enormous range of plants was domesticated, but no animals were, other than the llama/​alpaca, Muscovy duck, and turkey (the dog entered the New World with the first humans). In contrast, in Europe and the Near East, the Islamic Empire soon fragmented into local states, some of which constituted small empires but of little ecological impact. The Turks changed this as, conquering outward from Central Asia, they brought at first savage warfare, then peace and stability under the Seljuk and Ottoman dynasties in the west and the Moghuls in India. Dispersal of goods eventually included new crops, introduced by Spanish and Portuguese from the New World; the Ottomans picked up these so quickly that Americans still call Mexico’s domesticated bird a “turkey.” Europeans likewise long called maize “Turkish corn,” 54 The best introduction to the Incan Empire is Garcilaso de la Vega 1966. See also the excellent Mumford 2012. 55 The best introduction to the Aztecs is Berdan 2014, but for advanced study of Aztecs and environment, Sahagun 1950–​1982 is essential.

Ecology  473 because of its origins in European agriculture via the Turks. With peace and new crops, the Middle East flourished as never before.56 This empire-​building resulted in a world that in 1400 had huge empires in the Middle East and China; smaller states in the west; and small but growing empires in the New World. All relied on grain agriculture, with a range of other crops, including the critically important legumes for supplying protein to the poor, and equally important vegetables and spices to provide mineral and vitamin nutrients. All depended on exchange to some extent, but using traditional means of transportation (only shipping could carry large amounts of grain). This meant that every empire was a highly diverse system, characterized by many local ecosystems, each with their own crop complexes, environmental problems, and environmental solutions, ranging from vast irrigation works to massive terracing to extensive forestation. Every empire could draw on ecological diversity. As Horden and Purcell point out, for the Mediterranean world, exploiting different ecological niches and developing locally tailored systems enabled them spread risk and served as insurance.57 This is a general point; South China similarly balanced North China, Indonesian islands had different strategies, and the Inca in Peru quite consciously developed local ecologies to balance out resources. A final note is that disease spread with empire as surely as crop varieties and animal species. Many Old World diseases came from livestock: smallpox, probably from cattle (cowpox); influenza, from swine and ducks (especially in South China where they are raised together); and others. Malaria developed in humans in Africa from strains already established in primates, but empires spread it throughout the tropics. Cities and trade routes became focal points of disease spread, where epidemics such as plague could flourish and intensify, often causing vast loss of life. The more complex and intensive the human interaction with the environment, the more diseases could spread to humans.

A Globalizing World, 1450–​1750s Although unaware of it at the time, Columbus’s unexpected landfall in the Americas in 1492 would change the course of human history. Over ensuing centuries, maritime trade came to span the globe, knitting together the fates of peoples and ecosystems around the world as commodities, peoples, plants, animals, and pathogens moved with increasing ease and speed. New technologies and more efficient state and private organizations intensified environmental exploitation to levels never before seen. Sailing ships, plantation economies, mining, commercial pastoralism, irrigation works, and other innovations met increasing demand for luxuries and other commodities as environments in one part of the world were remade to

56 Mikhail 2013.

57 Horden and Purcell 2000; also, Halstead 2014.

474  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson meet demand in another. Overall, world population doubled from around 400–​ 500 million in 1500 to 850–​900 million by 1800,58 although in other places, such as the New World, it declined precipitously. Human impacts spanned the globe. Thanks to later historians, Columbus posthumously gave his name to one of the key drivers of this transformation—​the Columbian exchange. Fundamentally, this involved the redistribution of people, plants, pathogens, and animals between the New and Old Worlds. A flood of Old World biota into the Americas matched the spectacular radiation of New World crops and other lifeforms into the Old. The earliest and most profound of these environmental changes came about in the Americas, following colonization first by Spanish and Portuguese, and then other European powers, such as the Dutch, English, and French.59 While utilizing private capital, imperial powers directed and benefited from resource commodification. New World nature enabled Iberian maritime empires to evolve into substantial land empires. For example, Spain controlled the New World galleon trade and the supply of land and resources, provided military support and administrators, and levied taxes. Some three-​quarters of a million Spaniards went to the New World in the 1500s and 1700s, most (450,000) in the 1600s.60 European plants, animals, and pathogens brought by Spanish and other colonists aided New World colonization. One of their most significant and devastating introductions was unintentional: colonists unwittingly introduced a host of pathogens against which indigenous peoples had no immunity: Old World diseases (smallpox, measles, typhus, mumps, etc.) and violence reduced America’s pre-​1492 population of perhaps 100–​ 125 million to about 5 to 10 percent of that by 1650. This precipitous demographic collapse speeded up conquest and reshaped America’s ecologies, but it also created significant labor shortages. It enabled forests to recolonize “throughout most of Atlantic America,”61 as indigenous ecological systems fell apart or disappeared entirely. In their place, came a variety of newly introduced plants and animals. In Mexico, from 1519, in a process of “animal imperialism,” the Spanish replaced intensive indigenous agricultural systems with an extensive agropastoral economy. This became possible because Mexico’s population declined from 15–​25 million to approximately 1 million by the early 1600s, owing to disease and military takeover. While the Spanish also introduced a host of new plants—​notably fruit trees and vegetables—​and engaged in monocropping of European and New World varieties, pastoralism dominated Mexico’s landscape. In the 1600s, some 7–​10 million animals grazed one-​quarter of New Spain.62 Such animal invaders had profound impacts on humans and ecosystems alike. As Elinor Melville pointed out, “[m]‌eat animals converted previously unused grass and

58 Richards 2003, 1.

59 Crosby 1972; Mann 2005, 2011. 60 Richards 2003, 310. 61 McNeill 2010, 23.

62 Richards 2003, 346.

Ecology  475 forage to protein,” storing it for use during drought conditions. Beasts of burden provided motive power that extended the range of imperialists and pulled their plows. Animal manure fertilized fields, and their hides and meat provided a primary source of export revenue.63 Animals and other species also “put in motion a vast number of changes that were augmented and complicated by the settlement process.”64 Un-​ adapted to hooved animals or their manuring, the soils changed composition under the impact of animals. Their grazing disturbed ecosystems, encouraging secondary growth of weeds (mesquite) and processes such as gullying and erosion.65 The Spanish and Portuguese also plundered New World gold and silver, relying for labor on local Indians, forced and waged, and later African slaves. A chance discovery in 1545 turned Potosí (Bolivia) into a proto-​industrial boomtown. Resembling a scene from Dante’s inferno, dirt-​coated men dug up silver ore as others, working in billowing smoke, fed timber from nearby forests into the hungry smelters. Within a decade, Potosí’s once lushly forested hill was a scarred, denuded nightmare landscape. The industry itself collapsed once miners had exhausted the easily won, high-​grade ore. It revived in the mid-​1570s, thanks to the use of mercury, which “had a catastrophic impact on the environment, the people, and their communities, as well as a transformatory [sic] effect on the global economy.”66 Huancavelica—​2,000 kilometers northwest—​provided Potosí with most of the mercury necessary to win silver through amalgamation, but its use precipitated “one of history’s most massive and sustained cases of mercury intoxication.”67 Potosí miners burned an estimated 39,000 metric tons of mercury over 1574–​1810, poisoning the surrounding air, water, soil, plants, and animals.68 Potosí’s human population—​at one time, 160,000—​absorbed mercury from the surrounding environment, plants, and animals, and developed a variety of maladies from madness and insomnia, to hair loss and depression, and eventually death. Poor diet and abysmal living and working conditions facilitated the spread of pathogens, adding to the brutality of life in Potosí. Latin American mines provided 80 percent of global silver production from 1550 to 1800. This was vital to the developing world economy, after China had moved from a paper money-​system to accepting un-​coined silver as the new monetary standard.69 Spain used New World silver and gold to fund its increasingly expensive wars, support its colonies there and in Southeast Asia, and pay for luxuries from the East, especially manufactured goods from China, which also reached South American shores. At least one-​third of China’s silver in the 1600s and 1700s came via Spain’s possession in Manila.70

63 Richards 2003, 344; See also Skabelund 2013; Ritvo 1987. 64 Melville 1994, 13. 65 Melville 1994.

66 Robins 2011, 178–​179. 67 Robins 2011, 9.

68 Robins 2011, 184. 69 Robins 2011, 4. 70 Robins 2011, 6.

476  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson Another profoundly transformative component of the Columbian exchange involved agricultural plantations. In the Caribbean and along America’s eastern seaboard, European powers imposed monocultures of export crops, especially sugar and tobacco, and later cotton, each of whose value was realized thousands of miles away in foreign markets. Representing “a short-​term strategy for turning sunlight and soil nutrients into money as fast as possible,”71 the system exploited the (initial) bounty of New World soils and the labor of imported slaves and animals to establish new crops and processing systems. Vessels—​umbilical cords in this inequitable and destructive system—​brought slaves from Africa to the New World, taking raw products to Europe (and thence to trading partners elsewhere) and returning finished goods. Another triangle connected North America, Africa, and the Caribbean: North American rum financed the transportation of African slaves, who worked on Caribbean plantations producing molasses for rum-​making.72 Slavery peaked in the eighteenth century and was progressively stopped, though not totally, in the nineteenth. Slavery drained Africa, in particular, of its labor. Slaving wars destroyed entire states and cities, disrupting or making cultivation impossible.73 Some 12–​15 million74 enslaved Africans reached the New World. Deaths in slave-​taking wars and under the Middle Passage’s appalling conditions were many times greater: at least three people died for every enslaved person reaching the New World, sometimes as high as 10 people for every one.75 Sugar plantations transformed the Caribbean and represented a conjuncture of global trade, as sugar was added to a host of new drinks becoming available in Europe: tea (China), coffee (North Africa), and cocoa (New World).76 Caribbean sugar exports to Europe averaged 186,241 metric tons each year over 1770–​1774; increasing to 271,102 over 1815–​1819.77 Although begun by the Portuguese, other colonial powers moving into the region—​English, French, and Dutch—​rapidly developed plantations in the seventeenth century. The ecological impacts of sugar—​ and other plantation crops, such as tobacco, cotton, ginger, and indigo—​were profound, but differed according to factors such as an island’s size, population, and topography. On Barbados, sugar growers’ demand for land and wood precipitated wholesale deforestation by the mid-​1660s, save for private woodlots. Extinctions, soil erosion, soil compaction, and even climatic changes resulted on this small island (440 square km). Production declined rapidly by the mid-​1680s, despite attempts to conserve soil and woods, and annually replant sugarcane. A high and dense population and a landmass almost totally devoted to sugar made Barbados dependent on

71 McNeil 2010, 23. 72 Marks 2002. 73 Davis 1966.

74 Meyer 2011; Eltis and Richardson 2002, 95. 75 Genovese 1974. 76 Mintz 1985.

77 Richards 2011, table 12.2, page 455.

Ecology  477 enormous outside inputs of energy and nutrients—​livestock (New World), wood (Baltic), food (Americas), and above all humans (Africa).78 In contrast, Jamaica’s much larger size (almost 11,000 square km) gave it greater self-​sufficiency in energy, food, and livestock than Barbados. Jamaica also sustained a more varied land use and ecology that enabled sugar producers to leave land fallow. Conquered by the English from the Spanish in 1655, these factors enabled Jamaica to become the Caribbean’s leading eighteenth-​century producer of sugarcane, averaging over 42,000 metric tons of sugar annually from 1770 to 1774, nearly doubling by 1815–​1819.79 The island had indigo, cotton, coffee, and ginger plantations, and was large enough to raise livestock to provide food and motive power. Although it did not suffer from the same degree of ecological problems as Barbados, humans depleted turtle stocks to the point of extinction.80 Wholesale ecological and demographic transformation resulting from plantation economies and other activities had unanticipated impacts on European colonization by producing disease regimes conducive to malaria and yellow fever. According to John McNeill, “[p]‌lantations and the ports that sent sugar to Europe made ideal incubators and larders for” the mosquito carrier of yellow fever, Aedes aegypti, of African origin.81 The lowland Caribbean’s warm temperatures enabled mosquitoes to survive year-​round. Sugar plantations provided disease-​carrying mosquitoes with human and animal hosts and dense populations for ensuring their rapid spread—​even sugar residues helped, by maximizing “bacteria populations on which A. aegypti larvae could feed.”82 Trade transferred both mosquitoes and their viruses around the Caribbean, and brought in populations without antibodies. Yellow fever spread from the late seventeenth century, impacting European health and military activity. McNeill shows that yellow fever hindered eighteenth-​century British and French colonization of the Greater Caribbean, such that a degree of immunity from yellow fever actually protected some of Spain’s colonies from further conquest. For example, yellow fever (and malaria) thwarted Britain’s amphibious assault on Spanish Cartagena in 1741. Overall, 74 percent of Britain’s 10,000 troops sent to the West Indies over 1840–​1842 had perished by late 1842; only 6 percent in fighting.83 As McNeill shows, malaria spread quicker than yellow fever because several species of mosquito capable of hosting the parasite already lived in the Americas, whereas yellow fever required both the disease and its mosquito vector to arrive in the New World. Malaria came with African slaves, whose bloodstreams carried the plasmodia. Environmental change associated with plantations encouraged malaria’s



78 Richards 2011, 423.

79 Richards 2003, table 12.2, page 455.

80 Discussion of plantation economies relies on Richards 2003, chs. 9, 11, and 12. 81 McNeil 2010, 48. 82 McNeil 2010, 48.

83 McNeil 2010, 164.

478  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson spread. Deforestation and soil erosion created brackish swamps. Introduced cattle enabled mosquitoes to reproduce more rapidly and live longer, as did favorable warmer, wetter conditions associated with the Little Ice Age’s end. But above all, irrigated rice agriculture’s calm, warm, enriched waters created ideal conditions for mosquito reproduction, especially during the rainy season.84 The Columbian exchange propelled products, people, plants, animals, and pathogens across continents. For example, Africans introduced okra, pigeon peas, bananas and plantains, and some other crops. They brought knowledge of ideal cultivation techniques for peanuts (similar to African groundnuts), sweet potatoes (much like African yams), and above all, rice. Slaves introduced West African rice (Oryza glaberrima), but also applied their knowledge to growing India-​originated rice in the United States, allowing it to become a major rice-​producer. American rice-​cooking owes many techniques and dishes to this exchange.85 Introduced New World products like sugar and New World food plants like potatoes—​along with other such foods, such as cod from the Atlantic New World86—​revolutionized diets across Eurasia, providing vital caloric inputs, and changing ecologies and increasing population. The arrival of these crops could not have come at a more propitious time: the Little Ice Age global temperature plunge narrowed the geographical range of foodplants, leading to total abandonment of some varieties in some places. Cold, wet summers imperiled harvests. Famine stalked Eurasia, fanning social and political unrest. Colder weather meant fewer animals and fish, but intensified overharvesting as hungry humans hunted or fished out resources. Settlement patterns changed. Greenland became too cold and was abandoned. Icelanders gave up cereal cultivation altogether.87 Famine stalked China’s north and northwest, too, as the Little Ice Age pushed the monsoon too far south, contributing to social and political instability. In China, “New World food crops such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and peanuts . . . served as brakes on starvation during harvest failures of the more preferred staples, rice and wheat.”88 Introduced maize and sweet potatoes enabled previously marginal land to be brought into production:89 Chillies, tomatoes, papayas, New World squash (nan gua), and similar crops had truly revolutionary effects on vitamin nutrition in the warmer parts of the country. They removed a serious roadblock to population increase by providing readily grown, easily stored sources of vitamins A and C.90



84 McNeil 2010.

85 Carney 2001; Carney and Rosomoff 2009; Hess 1992. 86 Kurlansky 1997.

87 Behringer 2010, 93. 88 Rowe 2007, 91.

89 Mazumdar 1999.

90 Anderson 2016, 37.

Ecology  479 New World crops, such as tobacco, also sustained South China’s growing economy, despite government protestations that a cash-​crop economy made a population much more vulnerable in times of dearth.91 New World crops, in combination with eighteenth-​century frontier expansion, enabled China’s highly efficient, small-​ family agro-​ecosystem to continue as long as possible, and to rely on biological (rather than fossil-​fuel) inputs to feed its population.92 This marked the beginning of the end for the biological Old World. Not just China, but so too the Spanish Americas were facing an ecological crisis, exacerbated by long-​term environmental destruction and a worsening climate from the 1700s.

The Great Acceleration, 1750s Fossil fuels—​first coal, then oil—​ended the biological Old World. By utilizing stored energy in coal and oil, respectively, steam engines and later internal combustion engines powered global social, economic, demographic, and ecological change. They enabled humans to break free of their reliance on energy inputs from sun and water, and human and animal muscle. The steam engine powered Britain’s industrial revolution, whose impacts and model spread around the world.93 Industrialization encouraged urbanization and changed consumption patterns. It generated new modes of social organization and heightened exploitation of environments and peoples. Improvements to world food supply and distribution, among other factors, increased world population from an estimated 770 million in 1750 to 1.6 billion by 1900.94 The populations of industrialized areas commonly underwent a demographic transition, from larger to smaller families. Never before were people, commodities, capital, and organisms able to move with such freedom or rapidity,95 thanks to modern transportation technology such as the train, the clipper ship, and the steamboat.96 New banking developments also permitted investment in resource commodification, activities supported by bureaucracies, legal systems, and military might.97 Imperialism opened up new resources to Europeans and other groups. Between 1812 and 1914, some seven million Britons migrated to Canada, Australasia, and South Africa.98 In a little over 100 years, British-​controlled Hong Kong provided a gateway to 6.3  million Chinese,99 many of whom, as miners, merchants, and laborers, exploited new resources in empire and beyond.100 Millions of free and

91

Marks 2011. Anderson 2016. 93 Malm 2016; Bayly 2004. 94 Overfield 2011. 95 Winsek and Pike 2007. 96 Harvey 1989. 97 Headrick 1981. 98 “Migration within the Empire,” 1945. 99 Sinn 2013, 2. 100 Beattie 2015; Beattie and Liu 2016. 92

480  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson indentured laborers also moved around the British Empire to newly opening resource frontiers.101 Technological improvements accelerated environmental exploitation and resource commodification globally, as local ecologies responded to global demand. Whole species disappeared, ecologies changed rapidly or were shifted to different parts of the world. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, China’s demand drove rapid Pacific Island resource exploitation (including of sandalwood, bêche-​de-​mer, seals, and other products, devastating Pacific Island ecologies).102 In the same period, the “world hunt” reduced fisheries (including whales).103 Turning to terrestrial environments, changes that “in Europe took twenty centuries, and in North America four,” took place in New Zealand “within a single century” following colonization.104 Historians commonly refer to this period as marking the beginning of the Great Acceleration. Our planetary impact from the 1880s—​on everything from geology and climate, to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems—​has led many scientists to name a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.105 Empire was a vital driver of the nineteenth-century’s Great Acceleration, none more so than Britain’s. As Corey Ross notes:  “Reordering environmental relationships and altering ecosystems was an integral part of modern imperialism.”106 Advantaged by cheap and readily available supplies of coal, Britain’s empire gave it an edge over rivals by providing raw materials and foodstuffs, and a ready-​made market for its manufactured goods.107 Its ability “to draw raw materials from ecosystems abroad, subjecting them to monoculture, simplification, and deterioration . . . was part of the reason for the tenacity with which the UK defended and extended its empire in the nineteenth century.”108 It and other empires exploited the biological old world to fuel Europe’s industrialization. By the end of World War I, Britain ruled over more than a quarter of the earth’s landmass and more than 458 million people.109 From the late eighteenth century, Britain’s textile industry underwent a major revolution through a series of technological advances, most notably the spinning jenny and later the steam engine. Cotton plantations in Antebellum America supplied Manchester’s factories with cheap raw materials and markets for manufactured goods. Slavery kept demand for cotton textiles high and labor costs low. The steam engine increased output exponentially, and advantaged Britain over its rivals, which relied on manual labor or water-​drawn power. Meanwhile, Britain’s imperial possessions provided it with cheap and plentiful supplies of food for its



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McKeown 2004, 157–​158. Jones 2014. 103 Richards 2003. 104 Cumberland 1941, 529. 105 Robin 2007; Steffen et al. 2007. 106 Ross 2017, 3. 107 Beinart and Hughes 2007; Butlin 2009; Beattie et al. 2015. 108 Donald Hughes 2001, 124. 109 Myrdal 2012, 37; Maddison 2001, 98, 242. 102

Ecology  481 workers (think sugar, but also other foods and products), effectively freeing up land for industrial production and urban growth—​a process Kenneth Pomeranz terms “ghost acres.”110 Nineteenth-​century Britain consolidated control over India, turning it from a major supplier of textiles into a producer of cash crops, such as cotton, tea and opium. Britain’s sub-​continental possessions gave it a comparative advantage, which it then used over China. The British introduced plantations of opium poppies into India, to produce a drug—​opium—​to pay for its manufactured goods in China, thus addressing a balance-​of-​payments deficit. Over the nineteenth century, Bengal opium accounted for 6–​15 percent of British India’s tax revenue. Opium fields “stretched for 500 miles across the Ganges River Valley, with over a million registered farmers growing poppy plants exclusively for the company.”111 In another instance of how empire enriched Britain, introduced tea plants into India and Sri Lanka reduced British reliance on Chinese imports of that beverage.112 Cash-​crop monocultures of cotton, opium, and tea altered ecologies, economies, and societies. In 1867, Clement Markham estimated that over 24,000 hectares of western Ghats’ s forests had made way for plantations of tea, coffee, and cinchona.113 Plantations caused soil degradation, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. Plantation workers labored in inequitable conditions, such as debt peonage.114 Deforestation associated with cash crops on the Ganga-​Jamna Doab caused climate change and salinization, and expanded malaria’s range; water-​storage tanks incubated malaria’s Anopheles mosquito vectors.115 Colonies and ecologies responded to consumer demand. In Sri Lanka, unstable global prices led to rapid cycles of boom and bust, and replacement of one cash crop with another.116 Everything from plantation agriculture to forest management responded to the nineteenth-​century clarion call to improve, improve, improve that had swept up late-​eighteenth-​century Britain in a whirlwind of agricultural innovation, stock breeding, and enclosures.117 Science promised to meet God’s injunction to subdue and make the earth plentiful, and provided the means of understanding, controlling, and improving nature.118 In empire, scientific bureaucracies developed to rationally and efficiently survey and exploit resources, from forests and animals, to foodplants and h ​ umans.119 Improvement schemes took many forms. India’s fixed land-​revenue drove British expansion of agricultural production, thanks often to irrigation expansion, especially in

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Pomeranz 2000. McCoy 2000, 318. 112 Sharma 2011. 113 Markham 1866, 188–​189. 114 Melillo 2015. 115 Mann 1995. 116 Herbert 2015. 117 Gascoigne 1998. 118 Drayton 2000. 119 McLeod 1975. 111

482  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson the latter nineteenth century. By 1892, almost 22,209 kilometers of canals and other smaller channels slaked some 13.4 million acres of land.120 In the Punjab—​British India’s irrigated heartland—​67,800 kilometers of canals were irrigating 30.6 million acres of land by 1947.121 Training for hydrological engineers proliferated here, as in other possessions, such as Egypt, where irrigation was a necessity.122 The satellite institutions orbiting Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, developed another crucial science of empire. This enterprise improved and sent new cash crops around empire, its agents sometimes engaging in “bio-​prospecting,” or plant espionage.123 For example, cinchona grows naturally in South America, and was an important constituent in anti-​malarial drugs. Smuggled out of South America, staff at Kew improved it and then sent it to grow in Britain’s sub-​continental colonies.124 Local botanical gardens also drove improvement:  Peradeniya’s Royal Botanic Garden helped develop Ceylon’s plantation economy.125 Colonial development exhausted environments and caused extinctions, but also stimulated new ways of managing resources. Railways provided motors of change as bridgeheads into colonial interiors, conveyors of resources to ports, and distributors of food and products. By 1900, the equivalent of 52,811 hectares of forested land lay in 64,600 kilometers of railway tracks connecting British India.126 India’s population rise over 1850 to 1900 placed additional pressure on timber resources for building and fuel.127 State forest bureaucracies, protection, and plantations developed in India.128 India’s forest service eventually controlled 25 percent of its land area.129 Not just concerned with future exhaustion of timber supply, some European officials feared deforestation’s effects on soil erosion, water supplies, and even climate change.130 Improvement schemes often brought unanticipated—​and unwanted—​ecological and human impacts, often impacting the poorest.131 Salinization haunted imperial irrigation, by rendering thousands of acres irredeemable for agriculture.132 Meanwhile, ever more complex water-​engineering projects heightened vulnerability to flooding and even sometimes spread disease, such as canal redevelopment spreading malaria, or perennial irrigation from Egypt’s Aswan Dam (1902) helping to introduce chronic water-​borne diseases.133 Furthermore, ecological



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Arnold 2000, 119–​120. Calculated from Islam 1997, table 26. 122 Gilmartin 2006; Beattie and Morgan 2017. 123 Schiebinger 2007. 124 Philip 2005. 125 Herbert 2015. 126 Calculated from Williams 2006, table 11.4, page 359. 127 Morris 1974. 128 Rajan 2006; Beattie 2011; Barton 2002; Bennett 2015. 129 Barton 2002. 130 Grove 1995; Beattie 2011. 131 Scott 1998; D’Souza 2006b. 132 O’ Gorman 2012; Morgan 2015; Beattie and Morgan 2017. 133 Whitcombe 1996; Derr 2011, 150. 121

Ecology  483 changes encouraged sand-​drift and desertification, and a host of other ills, while boom-​and-​bust colonial cities crowded together people in unsanitary conditions that encouraged disease to spread.134 Warfare, disease, land confiscation, and other policies reduced indigenous population across the empire.135 But local peoples adapted to and challenged colonization. Some nineteenth-​ century Māori tribes, armed with European weapons, dominated others, later challenging imperial power, just as the Comanche did in southwestern North America.136 Both ultimately lost, but in countless other ways, local peoples made use of the ecological (and technological) opportunities that imperialism offered. A  thriving export-​led economy supported several mid-​nineteenth-​century New Zealand Māori tribes, which had invested in schooners, mills, and other modern equipment. Horses became important status symbols. New crops were readily incorporated into existing horticultural and agricultural techniques.137 Other groups, such as Chinese, also made use of resource frontiers, as well as transportation networks, opened by imperialism.138 Some Europeans chafed at environmental changes. Through poetry and suitably titled artworks, Australasian artist, poet, and writer Alfred Sharpe painted protest landscapes—​highly romanticized environments on the cusp of change, cities despoiled, or, more spectacularly, factories belching out pollution, poisoning earth and air.139 Sharpe’s critique of civic environmental change is a reminder of empire’s urban dimensions—​of the transforming role of imperial ports and cities as conduits of change, as sources of new organisms, capital, and policies, and as global markets. Urban sprawl and its infrastructure—​such as city parks, road and rail networks, and plumbing—​and pollution brought tangible environmental change and engendered new ways of living and thinking about nature. The shift to fossil fuels profoundly changed cities’ metabolism and their relationship to centers of agricultural production. While industrialized Europe continued to rely upon the largely organic economies of its empires, industrializing imperial cities outside Europe also altered relationships with their peripheries. As motorized transportation replaced horses and night-​soil collection declined, they reduced organic transfers from city to fields. (Oil not only adds carbon to the air, it adds a lot of nitrogen, and that fertilizes downwind of cities to a cumulative degree over a longish period comparable to fertilizing fields).140 Encounters with unfamiliar imperial environments stimulated advances in thinking about natural processes,141 most famously and—​independently—​Darwin and Wallace’s ideas of natural selection. Imperial environments inspired nature

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MacLeod and Lewis 1988; Curtin 1989. Beinart and Hughes 2007; Weaver 2003. Hämäläinen 2008. 137 Beattie and Clarkson forthcoming. 138 Beattie 2015a. 139 Beattie 2011; also Bonyhady 2011. 140 Ross 2017; Hughes 2001; Douglas 2013; Dümpelmann 2015; Jones and Beattie forthcoming. 141 Griffiths and Robin 1997; Star 2006. 135 136

484  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson studies and museums, as men, women, and children sketched, collected, and displayed natural history, their endeavors contributing to both species preservation and their decline.142 Infamously, Walter Buller’s attempts to collect the last specimens of New Zealand’s Huia bird (Heteralocha acutirostris) hastened its demise,143 a sad illustration of Ryan Tucker Jones’s postulation of a possible “global conjuncture between declining ecological diversity and an intensification of natural history study.”144 Empires also reached environmental limits. Especially in tropical empires, new disease regimes debilitated and killed the military, officials, and settlers,145 as well as their livestock.146 Testing the mettle of scientists, it also led to new fields such as tropical medicine and tropical veterinary science.147 Tropical medicine, with sanitary measures, developed to enable Europeans to more safely live in the tropics. Furthermore, some medical breakthroughs originated in empire. Thanks to his research in India, Ronald Ross proved malaria’ s mosquito-​borne origins. While studying plague in situ in Hong Kong in 1894, Alexandre Yersin identified the bubonic bacillus.148 If tropical powers constrained imperial effectiveness, then their temperate Canadian and Australasian colonies—​ as neo-​ Europes—​ offered opportunities for the transposition of permanent white settlement and agricultural practices into new lands. As Crosby has argued, New World plants and animals gave Europeans an early advantage in Australasia that also relied upon such windfalls as the indigenous-​created grasslands of southeastern Australia and eastern New Zealand, which proved ideal for settler pastoralism. Into these lands, acclimatization societies introduced many organisms.149 As more recent scholarship shows, however, Europeans tapped into a wider range of sources, and engaged in a more complex series of exchanges, than Crosby’s pioneering work recognized.150 New Zealand’s transformation into a neo-​Europe, for example, also relied on historical conjunctures other than ecological factors alone. This included industrialization, stockbreeding, technology, and especially colonial land policy. Quite fortuitously, in the 1870s the clip from New Zealand’s specially bred Corriedale sheep proved ideal for production of high-​quality worsted at Bradford’s woolen mills. New, late-​nineteenth century technology (refrigeration, dairy processing, steamships) enabled frozen meat and dairy products from New Zealand (and other neo-​Europes) to reach British consumers just as European butter production was declining. This drove significant deforestation in New Zealand’s North Island,



142

Mackenzie 2009. Galbreath 1989. 144 Jones 2014, 234. 145 Anderson 2002; Harrison 1999. 146 Brown and Bilfoyle 2010. 147 Harrison 1994; Arnold 1993; Peckham 2014, 2016. 148 Peckham 2016. 149 Dunlap 1999. 150 Tomlinson 1998; Frost 2002; Pawson 2008; Beattie 2014. 143

Ecology  485 stimulated large-​ scale pasture introduction, and encouraged further colonial 151 development. Australasian farmers, however, needed to consolidate and sustain “their prosperity and status as neo-​Europes after exhausting the windfall of frontier colonialism.” After the initial flush of productivity provided by burning, soil fertility declined, as did yields. Consolidation, argues Gregory T.  Cushman, “required a second stage of ecological imperialism involving the massive importation of soil nutrients and other natural resources from overseas empires in the Pacific Basin.”152 Neo-​ecological imperialism, as Cushman calls it, called for the redistribution of nutrient-​rich soils (bird droppings) from small Pacific islands, which Britain, Australia, and New Zealand assumed control over post-​1919. Between 1920 and 1958 over 1.2 million metric tons of phosphatic fertilizer from Nauru, Tuamotus Islands, and Ocean Island were dumped on New Zealand.153 This source sustained New Zealand’s grasslands revolution of the 1920s, as it did production in both Australia and Britain. New Zealand’s colonization and ecological remaking underlines a factor vital in empire: the securing and control of land, commonly achieved by force and legal measures.154 Maori agriculture’s great success (see earlier) demonstrates that non-​ Europeans could take advantage of new organisms and technology to grow wealthy, but also how settler land hunger, supported by military force, confiscation, and legal frameworks, could destroy it.155

Conclusion Global ecological change is irrevocably connected to the rise of large and extensive empires and their associated systems of environmental exploitation. Control and exploitation of resources consolidated and expanded imperial power through conquest, technological innovation, plant-​and-​animal breeding, and improved transportation networks. Conversely, environmental factors could contribute to imperial decline. Forms of resource use shaped empires, too. Settled agriculture and hydrological control could encourage strong centralized states able to coordinate labor, facilitate transportation, and process resources. Agriculture made it easier for authorities to control a settled population, but such concentrated settlement could also facilitate disease transmission. Animal domestication brought benefits (food, labor, protein,

151 Brooking and Pawson 2010. 152 Cushman 2013, 19. 153 Brooking and Pawson 2010, table 10.1, page 187. 154 Weaver 2003. 155 Petrie 2006. Despite the effects of some diseases, New Zealand Maori often received smallpox vaccination, unlike native American populations, who were colonized earlier.

486  James Beattie and Eugene Anderson sometimes military advantage), yet made it easier for microorganisms to jump from one species to another, especially when humans and animals lived in close proximity. Empires connected and moved formerly geographically disparate people, organisms, and commodities around the world. After 1500 trade networks and empires came to encompass the globe. Since then, millions of people, thousands of plant and animal species, countless micro-​organisms, not to mention millions of tons of precious metals, minerals, and other resources like timber and fertilizer have moved from one part of the world to another. Innovation in resource exploitation accelerated post-​1500. Plantation agriculture responded to global sugar demand, by bringing together slave labor, trade networks, different ecologies, and raw materials. Especially in the nineteenth century, European metropoles exported environmental problems to their global empires, creating ghost acres that freed up labor and resources at home—​a process that, as we show, was as vital to industrialization and Europe’s rise as new energy exploitation (fossil fuels). As a result of complex and contingent processes, depending on social, cultural, political, and environmental factors, imperial exploitation especially post-​1750 transformed oceans, lands, soils—​even atmosphere and geology. At the same time, imperial experiences of extinction and depletion produced new ways of using and understanding nature. Loss encouraged more efficient and innovative ways to exploit and conserve nature (although not always successfully), but also new disciplines that sought to understand such processes. Today, we are grappling with these environmental legacies as we confront our own particular challenges.

Acknowledgments We thank the following for generously commenting on drafts: Peter Fibiger Bang, Peter Holland, Edward D. Melillo, Brian Moloughney, David Moon, Xiongbo Shi, Paul Star, Ryan Tucker Jones, and James L. A. Webb Jr.

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ME MORY A ND DE CLI NE

15 Memories of Empire Literature and Art, Nostalgia and Trauma Phiroze Vasunia

Freud’s Rome Why did Sigmund Freud abandon his Roman example? Remember that Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, had turned to Rome in order to show how the past lingered on in the minds of human beings. He first conjured up a vision of the city as it might have been experienced in his own day. This was a modern metropolis in which contemporary buildings and old ruins coexisted and in which the discerning observer could find traces of different histories. In this city, further remnants lay undetected beneath the surface, antiquities that might one day be brought to the surface again and restored. But Freud then summoned up a second kind of Rome. “Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—​an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.”1 In this city, buildings of various periods would all be standing intact, some of them in the same place, somehow cohabitating without the displacement of any older structures. “In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—​without the Palazzo having to be removed—​the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes.”2 All these palaces, temples, and monuments would be visible to an observer, who “would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.”3 No sooner did Freud offer up the metaphor of Rome as a psychical entity than he began to back away from it. This Rome was a fantasy, Freud said, and depended on a scenario that was “unimaginable and even absurd”; such a city did not exist, and it was impossible to represent it, at least in spatial terms.4 Besides, comparing the

1 Civilization and Its Discontents, in Freud 1953–​1974, vol. 21, 70. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.

Phiroze Vasunia, Memories of Empire  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0015.

498  Phiroze Vasunia human mind to a city, to any urban settlement and not just the “Eternal City,” was not feasible, and the friable quality of a city would make it unsuitable for a comparison of the kind undertaken by the analyst. Freud went on to disavow the analogy between Rome and the mind, although he also stated “the fact that it is the rule rather than the exception for the past to be preserved in mental life.”5 Readers have wondered why Freud included this description of Rome if he was going to deny its validity for the argument of Civilization and Its Discontents. Various explanations have been put forward, including one by Ellen Oliensis, who suggests that Freud’s text shows how large-​scale feelings of desire and aggression lie behind imperial expansion. For Freud, the “ego-​feeling of maturity” coexists with the survival of an infantile ego-​feeling, which is “a much more inclusive—​indeed, an all-​embracing—​feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.”6 This infantile ego-​feeling, Freud suggests, lies behind the “oceanic feeling” to which he refers in Civilization and Its Discontents. In presenting to his readers the “archaeologist’s dream (or nightmare) of total preservation” in his second description of Rome, Freud is also providing an example of the mature adult’s desire to reconnect to that oceanic feeling.7 The psychoanalyst’s Rome “embodies the imperious desire to reabsorb the world the infant had perforce to let go.”8 As Oliensis puts it, “the oceanic feeling resurfaces as the sensation of Roman imperialism,”9 and Freud’s city stands for an aggressive fantasy of complete possession, in time and space. It is this “imperial problematic,” so well explored by Latin poets such as Virgil, “that Freud could not bring himself quite to write out of his Aeneid,” namely, Civilization and Its Discontents.10 One way of understanding Freud’s use of Rome in Civilization and Its Discontents is to read it as an acknowledgment of the difficulties involved in recalling the past and in finding ways of comprehending it satisfactorily. But Freud’s peculiar deployment of Rome suggests that more is at issue than infantile memory. Many if not most of Freud’s references to Roman buildings refer to the period of ancient Rome’s rise to world historical importance and to the era when it becomes established as the imperial capital par excellence. Approached from this perspective, Freud’s disavowal implies that memories of empire are not easy to explore, that they frustrate the best efforts to represent them, and that metaphors or rhetorical figures are unlikely to provide adequate models for exploring the imperial past. Neither the initial example of contemporary Rome nor the turbo-​charged image of permanence that he constructs is sufficient for the purpose of working through what an imperial experience felt like in the past and what it might mean for the present and the future. Memories of empire are not (like) cities, or palimpsests, or chronotopic structures



5 Freud 1953–​1974, vol. 21, 72. 6 Ibid., 68.

7 Oliensis 2009, 134, following Leo Bersani. 8 Oliensis 2009, 135. 9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., 136.

Memories of Empire  499 that can be easily accessed and analyzed. Such memories can be impactful but also complex and indirect, and their recollection is never pure and simple but frequently uncertain, fallible, contested, and difficult. An additional implication of Freud’s work is that “memories” can be construed expansively, so that Freud’s description of Rome can itself count as a “memory” of the city. Broadening out the term in this fashion is not inconsistent with historiographical developments in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, when historians have become familiar with concepts such as collective memory, social memory, and historical memory and have explored the significance of “places of memory.” Freud himself provided an example of what has subsequently been called “mnemohistory” in Moses and Monotheism, a book which tries to show how the effects of historical trauma have lingered among the Jewish people for centuries. Let us, therefore, take the expression “memories of empire” in a very broad sense. Memories of empire are individual and collective; they seep into narratives that are historical and fictional, pictorial and verbal; they can be found a generation after the event, or a millennium. Events may be forgotten or repressed, and an individual or a group may feel a compulsion to act out or work through what has been forgotten; at times, what is forgotten may be displaced or transformed into narratives that bear little correspondence to the past. For these reasons, any discussion of memories of empire remains challenging and tentative. The expression “memories of empire” is intelligible in at least two ways. In the sense that I have been using it, the expression can denote the memories that people or groups have of empires in the past. My parents’ or grandparents’ reminiscences about India during the period of British rule fall into this category, as do recollections by any number of others who were alive during the Raj. A Kenyan waiter in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father remembers “that the same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels that the white man has built.”11 His memory of empire is framed by the realization that, as in colonial days, small elites control a disproportionate share of the country’s resources and that inequalities of wealth persist. Numerous studies attest to the pride, melancholia, nostalgia, guilt, and shame felt by the French or the British after the loss of their colonies in the twentieth century; such feelings were prompted, in part, by recollections of empires that once existed. National traditions, ceremonies, and archives are frequently built around such memories of the imperial past.12 But construe the genitive in a subjective rather than an objective sense and you grasp a different implication of the term “memories of empire,” and in this meaning, empire itself is said to have memories. What memories does empire have? Empire has a memory of empire. To illustrate the matter in simple terms, one might point out that Samudragupta’s Allahabad pillar inscription, “a foundational document of

11 Obama 1995, 314. 12 Hall 1998.

500  Phiroze Vasunia the self-​expression of imperial polity in the Sanskrit cosmopolis,” was engraved on a pillar used by Ashoka to display two of his edicts.13 The pillar was then exploited, after some centuries, by the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir and has prompted observers to proclaim that it “embodies two millennia of Indian political charisma”14 (see further Bang, vol. 2, part I). Or one might deploy another chain of linked instances and say that the French and British empires looked back to the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire recalled Alexander the Great, and Alexander himself sought to emulate the kings of Persia. But so bald a sequence barely does justice to the phenomenon, which needs to be analyzed, conceptually and in detail, and to which we can merely allude here. At any rate, both senses of the term “memories of empire” will be relevant as we explore its associations in this chapter.

Memories of Empire “Around him the whole dream-​world of the East took shape and substance; of him every old story of a divine world-​conqueror was told afresh. More than eighty versions of the Alexander-​romance, in twenty-​four languages, have been collected, some of them the wildest of fairy-​tales . . . no other story in the world has spread like his.”15 Every subsequent conqueror, and conqueror manqué, has remembered Alexander III (“the Great”) of Macedon. His memory has never passed into oblivion. So many rulers of so many countries have called themselves Alexander, Iskandar, or Sikandar, after him, that it would be impossible to arrive at an exact count. The inhabitants of parts of northwest India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan still claim descent from him and his soldiers. Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King gains much of its plot and popularity from this conceit. In Kipling’s youth, Kafiristan was the subject of intense colonial interest because Britons perceived a connection, which was encouraged by many locals, between the Kafirs and Greco-​Macedonian settlers in the region. Perhaps Alexander’s only historical rival is Julius Caesar, but already for Romans such as Caesar, Alexander had set a demanding precedent. Some Romans tried to walk in the footsteps of Alexander; a few of the inhabitants of Pompeii walked on him, or rather, on his likeness. The Alexander Mosaic is a floor mosaic that was originally part of the exedra of the first peristyle in the so-​ called House of the Faun (Casa del Fauno) in Pompeii; it dates to the late second century bce and now forms part of the collection of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. The Mosaic was discovered in October 1831. At the time, the House of the Faun was known as the House of Goethe (Casa di Goethe), in honor of the poet, who had visited the site in 1787, “just when German Romanticism had transformed the classical world in its image, largely through the agency of Goethe’s



13 Pollock 2006b, 239. 14 Ibid.

15 Tarn 1953, 435.

Memories of Empire  501

Figure 15.1.  The Alexander Mosaic, ca. 100 bce. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Source: The British Library.

genius.”16 Goethe added a drawing made by Wilhem Zahn of the mosaic to his collection in Weimar not long before his death. The words he wrote down on receiving the drawing are frequently quoted: “The present and the future will not succeed in commenting in a manner worthy of this artistic wonder, and we must always return, after studying and investigating it, to simple, pure admiration”17 (Figure 15.1). Goethe thought that attaching his own name to this house in Pompeii was “an echo from the past meant to temper the loss of my son.”18 The casa of Alexander for the death of a son—​what would Freud say? In fact, the young Freud had been enthusiastic about Alexander and advocated, successfully, that his younger brother be named after the Macedonian conqueror. Much later, Freud was to write to Carl Jung, “Just rest easy, my dear son Alexander, I will leave you more to conquer than I myself have managed, all psychiatry and the approval of the civilized world, which regards me as a savage!”19 The “deeply oedipal undertones” of this remark are evident; the remark also casts an informative light on “Freud’s original desire to name his own brother Alexander in the first place, as if to displace his own oedipal feelings 16 Badian 2012, 404–​406. 17 Goethe, letter to Wilhelm Johann Carl Zahn (March 10, 1832), in Goethe 1962–1967, 4.473–​476, at 475: “Mitwelt und Nachwelt werden nicht hinreichen, solches Wunder der Kunst würdig zu kommentieren, und wir genötigt sein, nach aufklärender Betrachtung und Untersuchung, immer wieder zur einfachen reinen Bewunderung zurückzukehren.” 18 Goethe, letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (March 11, 1832), in Goethe 1962–1967, 4.476–​478, at 477: “Ein Echo aus der Ferne, welches den Verlust meines Sohnes mildern soll.” Translation in Bodley 2009, 552. 19 Quoted in Armstrong 2005, 108.

502  Phiroze Vasunia toward his father.”20 Freud’s statement illustrates to us that Alexander often appears in oedipal relationships and that he is used to address issues of power, conquest, and desire. It is simplistic to say that the Romans’ fascination with Alexander had an oedipal element to it. Yet, whatever “commenting in a manner worthy” of the Alexander Mosaic might look like, any such commentary would have to take into account the interpretive ambiguity of the image, an ambiguity that renders the image at once admiring and hesitant in its stance toward Alexander.21 On the one hand, the Mosaic “represents” a scene from a battle that Alexander won and pays tribute to the victor and to his subjugation of the Persians, at Gaugamela and elsewhere. On the other hand, the Mosaic undercuts Alexander’s triumph and calls into question the value of his conquests. The prominence given to the Persian king Darius is extraordinary. Critics such as Ernst Badian have said that he “dominates the action,” and Darius assuredly seems to rise above the fray in his chariot.22 The “look of horror on his face” is brought on by the “self-​sacrifice of his fellow nobles” and shows him as a sympathetic ruler, distraught at the loss of his countrymen.23 By contrast, Alexander is “leaning away from his enemy,” and his helmet has been knocked off his head: “he is, to put it bluntly, a man who has lost his hat.”24 Badian writes, “The representation as a whole may justly be called not merely not heroic, but deliberately unheroic . . . .”25 Moreover, the figural counterpart to Darius is not Alexander but a dead tree. Badian reads the tree as a symbol of “the destruction and denudation caused by Alexander’s war” and for “the vanity of human, and especially of heroic, effort”;26 for him, the centrality and symbolism of the tree is suggested not by Greek or Roman artistic precedent but by “Persian hunting scenes in paradeisoi depicted in Asia Minor.”27 Far from promoting Alexander’s success over the Persians, the Mosaic emphasizes the sorrow of the Persians and the emptiness of the conqueror’s accomplishment. The location of the Mosaic complicates our understanding of the work’s reception in antiquity. Pompeii was notionally not a “Roman” town in the late second century bce, and the Pompeiians obtained Roman citizenship only in the first century bce. The owner of the house may have been from Samnium, as some have suggested, and may have had pro-​Roman or anti-​Roman views, or views that were ambivalent about Rome.28 Even the fact that the Mosaic was on the floor of the peristyle adds to the indeterminacy of meaning. In her book about the Roman Alexander, Diana Spencer says, [T]‌he most fundamental instability for this mosaic is its openness to a multiplicity of angles of gaze. It is on the floor, beneath the feet of any who enter the room from

20 Ibid.

21 See the discussion in Briant 2003, 226–​247. 22 Badian 2012, 409. 23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 410. 25 Ibid. 26

Ibid., 410–​411.

27 Ibid., 415.

28 Cohen 1997, 180–​181, 193–​194.

Memories of Empire  503 the peristyle from which it opened. This vast mosaic provides an Alexander who can be trampled upon, turned on his head or sideways, who can be a decorative addendum to a garden, or its focal point, all at the whim of the course strolled by the viewer. One could even, potentially, excise Alexander altogether and gaze from one garden to the next without dropping one’s eyes to the floor.29

It hardly needs to be added that Darius, too, could have been trampled upon by anyone in the room. That the Mosaic presents so conflicted a response to Alexander indicates that on the Italian Peninsula, by the first century bce, he was being remembered not solely as an invincible soldier, but also as a symbol of vanity and the transience of military success. Let us place another image alongside the Alexander Mosaic, a painting not from the Roman era but made by an empire that never ceased to recall the Romans and their imperial accomplishments. The East Offering Its Riches to Britannia (1778) (Figure 15.2), which was painted by Spiridione Roma, used to be part of the ceiling of the Revenue Committee Room, in East India House, and now can be found near the top of a stairway in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), in

Figure 15.2.  Spiridione Roma, The East Offering Its Riches to Britannia, 1778. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:The_​East_​offering_​its_​riches_​to_​Britannia_​-​_​Roma_​ Spiridone,_​1778_​-​_​BL_​Foster_​245.jpg



29 Spencer 2002, 188–​189.

504  Phiroze Vasunia London. When the East India House building in Leadenhall Street was torn down, the painting was removed from the ceiling and relocated to the India Office, which was itself later absorbed into the FCO complex. It is not a surprise that a painting commissioned by the officers of the East India Company occupies a position in an official building of the government of the United Kingdom. The government of the twenty-​first century continues to use many of the insignia, institutions, and monuments that were created in the days of its empire, and, in that sense, the government keeps alive the memory of an old empire. Nor is it a surprise, of course, that a former imperial capital such as London is filled with memorials to empire, and in that sense the city resembles Beijing, Istanbul, or Madrid. Roma’s painting is merely one of many imperial creations that has continued into the postcolonial present, where it resonates with contemporary concerns and serves as a reminder of an epoch when the Company was a going concern. The painting’s classicizing features refer its viewers back to ancient Rome; these are typical of the late eighteenth century, but in this case are put at the service of the ambitions of the powerful Company. A  description offered by Gentleman’s Magazine, in 1778, is worth appreciating at length: The principal figure represents Britannia seated on a rock, to signify the firmness and stability of the empire; and as guardian and protectress of the Company, who are denoted by children behind Britannia, and overshadowed by her veil. The union of the old and new Companies is expressed by two children embracing each other, and one of them placed sitting on the upper part of the rock, to show the firm basis on which the present Company stands; on the other part of the rock the child climbing up towards the summit is intended to express the prospect of the Company’s continuance. Britannia is characterised by the usual emblems of the shield and spear, and guarded by a lion, which lays tamely by her side, pleased with the offerings made her from the different East-​Indian provinces. At the foot of the rock lays the genius of the Ganges, in a majestic attitude, pouring out his whole stream on Britannia’s footstool. The various provinces are represented under the Conduct of Mercury, the god of merchandise, eagerly pressing to deposit their different produce and manufactures before the throne of Britannia. Calcutta (the capital settlement of the Company in Bengal) presents a basket with pearls and other rich jewels, which Britannia receives. China is characterised by jars of porcelain and chests of tea; the produce of Madras and Bombay by a corded bale; Bengal is denoted by an elephant, palm-​ trees and a camel. Persia appears at a distance bringing silks, drugs, and other effects, and with her are to be supposed all the rest of the provinces; which the artist could not describe on the canvas without crowding or destroying the whole composition, and harmony of the picture.

Memories of Empire  505 At a distance is an Indiaman under sail, laden with the treasure of the East, an emblem of that commerce from which both Britain and the Company derive great and singular advantages.30

Few images illustrate more dramatically the “gentlemanly capitalism” of the Company, its self-​image as a national enterprise, and its political and mercantile ambitions across the seas. As the riches of India, China, and Persia are made available to Britannia, who, from her elevated perch, looks down on the other characters, no trace of force or violence is manifest in the picture, the Company’s arms and sepoys being wholly effaced from the tableau. The gestures of the Eastern figures are those of presentation, that is, obeisance and offering, as if these riches were being eagerly and respectfully tendered to the Company:  Calcutta presents, Britannia receives, as the magazine’s description has it. The movement across the painting’s horizontal axis is thus of giving and taking, with jewels and pearls on offer, and Mercury, the god of commerce, extending his staff in the direction of Britannia. Hovering discreetly in the back and center is the ship that conveys these valuable commodities back to Britain, while Ganges, an almost indifferent figure, in the foreground allows his waters to flow beneath the elevated Britannia (For comparison, see also cover image for volume 2: a Qing dynasty version of the 10.000 tributary peoples bringing their rich gifts to court). Roma’s painting was commissioned by the Company and aimed to please its patron. A preliminary drawing, made in pencil, pen, wash, and signed by Roma, suggests that he was asked to make certain changes to his original design, presumably to accommodate the wishes of the Directors.31 The design was brought closer to an existing marble chimney frieze, which was about a related theme (“Britannia receiving the riches of the East”) and which had adorned the Director’s Court Room in Leadenhall Street since about 1730. One critic writes, “The finished painting is altogether more classical in conception with a greater degree of symbolism. . . . The theme has also changed; and Britannia now dominates the scene.”32 The preliminary drawing is missing Britannia, Mercury, and the lion, among other things, and does not show Calcutta offering its riches either. The Directors were plainly seeking a more classicizing idiom for the painting and they chose to emphasize their contribution to the nation by asking Roma to alter his initial plans. They wanted to be remembered by a painting that was more classical, more evocative of older histories, than the initial design of the artist. The painting used to be a fixture in a building that had been constructed over another image, an image which served as a marker of the Roman Empire in Britain. A mosaic dating from the Roman era was found underneath the premises of the East



30 Gentleman’s Magazine 48 (1778), 628–​629.

31 British Library, India Office Prints and Drawings (Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections), WD3546. 32 Rohatgi 1976, 3.

506  Phiroze Vasunia

Figure 15.3.  The Leadenhall Street Mosaic. Copyright: © Trustees of the British Museum.

India Company, to the surprise of nineteenth-​century observers. “Appropriately enough,” notes the British Museum, to which the work was transferred in the 1860s, the mosaic shows the god Bacchus riding or reclining on a tiger and alludes to the story of the god’s journey to India (Figure 15.3). Appropriately enough, the mosaic shows a memory trace of the Roman presence in Britain coming back to the surface in a century when Britons increasingly compared their own empire to the Roman Empire, when they came to think that they were displacing the Romans as the most powerful empire-​builders on earth, and when they were consolidating their hold over the Indian subcontinent.

Trauma The history of empires provides no shortage of traumatic events and no dearth of commemorations either. What counts as trauma, how you remember a traumatic event, and what you remember of it depends, of course, on who is doing the remembering. Already by the ninth century ce, Arabs were mourning the loss or transformation of their empire, especially since it was the peoples they conquered who more or less displaced them from the seat of power.33 The end of the British

33 See Crone 2006.

Memories of Empire  507 Empire was welcomed by hundreds of millions, but many millions of others lamented the loss and displacement that followed. Who was traumatized by the Morant Bay rebellion, the Mau Mau uprising, and the Indian Mutiny of 1857? The colonizers, the colonized, or both? To take the example of the Indian uprising, many in Britain had little doubt that the “Sepoy Mutiny” was an unjustified and violent provocation by Indians against the British, or that it needed to be stopped ruthlessly. A recent study, by Christopher Herbert, bears the title War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma and seeks to show that the response to the uprising of 1857 was multifaceted in Britain and that not every British commentary should “properly be read as anything like a confident allegory of British virtue and racial entitlement to rule.”34 For Herbert, the uprising caused Victorian British writers to come face to face with the excesses of their own rule in India, with its racism, violence, and venality. He writes, “The shock of finding that they were despised by their supposedly grateful imperial subjects in India was in part the shock of finding that their national idealism and national self-​esteem were self-​deluding and morally corrupting.”35 Yet, Herbert’s study itself has prompted a reviewer to observe, “The trauma of the traumatizers becomes a cause for great compassion, and their honesty about their participation in it a cause for tremendous admiration and, indeed, forgiveness.”36 The impact of the uprising on the British, in South Asia and Britain, in the nineteenth century, can scarcely be in doubt. St. James’s Church in Delhi still bears Victorian inscriptions that “pay tribute to the military and civilian casualties: to three members of the Corbett family, ‘who were murdered During the Massacre of the Christians in Delhi’; to Thomas Collins and no fewer than 23 members of his extended family, ‘all barbarously murdered at Delhi on or about the 11th of May 1857’; to Dr Chimmun Lall, a ‘native Christian and a Worshipper in this Church’, who ‘fell a martyr to his faith on the day of the massacre of Christians in Delhi.’ ”37 Some 30 years after the events, Blackwood’s magazine claimed that “there were more accounts of the Mutiny in popular fiction than of any other nineteenth-​century event.”38 According to one reckoning, about 70 novels about the uprising were published, most of them in the nineteenth century.39 By the early years of the twentieth century, the uprising was an occasion for commemoration and for acknowledging the bravery of those who fought on behalf of God and Empire. On December 23, 1907, 50 years after the uprising, the British survivors came together for dinner, at the Royal Albert Hall, in London, as guests of the owners of the Daily Telegraph. On the following day, “At the conclusion of Lord Roberts’s speech the whole assembly stood while the ‘Last Post’ was sounded by



34 Herbert 2008, 17. 35 Ibid.

36 Freedgood 2008. 37 Jasanoff 2005.

38 Schwarz 2011, 235, summarizing [Gregg] 1897. 39 Chakravarty 2005.

508  Phiroze Vasunia the buglers of the 1st Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, the defenders of Lucknow. Mr Ben Davies then sang ‘Recessional,’ and Mr Lewis Waller recited a commemorative poem by Mr Rudyard Kipling entitled ‘1857–​1907.’ The proceedings closed with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ sung by Miss Muriel Foster and Mr Ben Davies, and enthusiastic cheers by the veterans for Lord Burnham.”40 The poem that Kipling wrote to accompany this characteristically British celebration of bravery was entitled “The Veterans” and went as follows: To-​day, across our fathers’ graves,   The astonished years reveal The remnant of that desperate host   Which cleansed our East with steel. Hail and farewell! We greet you here,   With tears that none will scorn—​ O Keepers of the House of old,   Or ever we were born! One service more we dare to ask—​   Pray for us, heroes, pray, That when Fate lays on us our task   We do not shame the Day!41

The classical and biblical echoes are not surprising from Kipling, who elsewhere wrote of the mutineers in pejorative terms. In this poem, the narrator salutes the soldiers who are present at the gathering, doughty soldiers who are said to have used their steel swords and “cleansed” the colony of its murderous rebels; the narrator asks that younger defenders of the Indian Empire similarly to rise to the task and not be found wanting on Judgment Day. The distance of nationalist Indian commentators from this kind of tribute and from earlier treatments such as John Kaye’s History of the Sepoy War in India (1864–​1876) can be measured by reading the title alone of Vir Savarkar’s Indian War of Independence (1909). Savarkar’s book was one of many Indian responses to the uprising; several took the nationalist line and preferred to see the events of 1857 as the stirrings of a widespread native demand for independence, rather than as a small mutiny by soldiers in the army of the East India Company. Savarkar wrote about “the brilliance of a War of Independence shining in ‘the mutiny of 1857’ ” and described how “out of the heap of ashes appeared forth sparks of a fiery inspiration.”42 Prone to characterize the uprising also as a “Revolution,” he claimed, “The seed of the Revolution of 1857 is in this holy and inspiring idea, clear

40 “Indian Mutiny Celebration,” The Times, December 24, 1907, 6. 41 From The Years Between, in Kipling 1938, 353. 42 Savarkar 1930, i.

Memories of Empire  509 and explicit, propounded from the throne of Delhi, the protection of religion and country.”43 What was the uprising: a Sepoy Mutiny, a war of independence, or a revolution? The debate is familiar:  it can be traced back to disputes of the Victorian period and unfolded in both Britain and India. It will suffice here to say that the legacy of this reception continues to be felt in the Indian subcontinent where school textbooks caution against an unqualified use of the word “mutiny” and also recognize the contested nature of the historical record. That the Mutiny continues to provoke strong passions in India can be learned from the force of the protests that greeted a British party to Lucknow when, in 2007, on the 150th anniversary of the uprising, it attempted to visit a church for British soldiers who lost their lives in the conflict.44 In the same year, the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made an address to Parliament in which he said that Indians “cannot forget those inspired revolutionaries—​many of them anonymous to history—​who sacrificed their lives in 1857 to free the country from foreign yoke.”45 William Dalrymple’s detailed account, The Last Mughal (2006), arguably prompted more debate in India than in Britain. In the subcontinent, reviewers vigorously objected to his claim that Indian historians had neglected sources in their own archives and had not written about the uprising from an Indian perspective. In Britain, the debate was far less heated and the book created a smaller splash than its predecessor, White Mughals, which recounted the tragic love story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-​Nissa. Perhaps a story of interracial love was more appealing to a British audience than a reminder of blood spilled during Company rule. But the uprising had begun to lose its hold on the British imagination as early as World War II, when Madame Tussaud’s removed its wax statue of Lord Roberts, a recipient of the Victoria Cross for gallantry during the uprising, the hero of Kandahar, and commander-​in-​chief of India. The removal, we are told, was “a matter of no public controversy as no one much remembered who he was or what he had done.”46 That the uprising was traumatic for nearly everyone involved in the action can hardly be in question. The repercussions were vividly felt, by Kipling, among others. Kipling was born in Bombay, in 1865, several years after the events, but he grasped like no other Anglo-​Indian writer the fragility of the hold exercised by the rulers over the native population. Even if he could not have experienced the uprising firsthand, and even if Bombay was far from the scenes of the most violent encounters, he lived among those who could not forget what must have seemed an unimaginable horror, a horror doubtless amplified by hearsay and the passage of time. 43 Ibid., 7. 44 “Briton Visits India Mutiny Grave,” BBC News, September 26, 2007, http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​world/​ south_​asia/​7014281.stm. 45 “Indians Mark Revolt Anniversary,” BBC News, May 11, 2007, http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​world/​south_​ asia/​6645457.stm. 46 Schwarz 2011, 338.

510  Phiroze Vasunia Consider the The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, which was published in 1885, and which remains what Angus Wilson, in The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, called “one of the most powerful nightmares of the precariousness of a ruling group, in this case of a group haunted by memories of the Mutiny not yet twenty years old.”47 In Kipling’s short story, the protagonist, Morrowbie Jukes, accidentally strays into a sandy crater with a low-​lying encampment inhabited by the living dead, or as the narrator says, by “the Dead who did not die, but may not live.”48 These were Hindu Indians who were believed to be dead and who showed signs of life just on the point of cremation but who could not be returned to the world of the living since the last rites had already been performed on them and were thus forced to live in badger-​ holes in the small village beside a river. The site’s residents were prevented from fleeing by swampland, by high sand walls that enclosed the crater on the sides which did not open onto the river, and by a boat that patrolled the river all day. Jukes falls into the place by accident when his horse bolts and flies headlong into the crater so that both animal and rider find themselves among a group whose “filth and repulsiveness . . . [are] beyond all description.”49 The only native to recognize Jukes in the village is a man called Gunga Dass, who used to be in charge of a telegraph office. But these natives are not prone to defer to their colonial masters, for instead of encountering the “civility from my inferiors” to which he had grown accustomed, “even in these days, when local self-​government has destroyed the greater part of a native’ s respect for a Sahib,” Jukes is greeted with the sounds of cackling laughter, whistling, and howling.50 Ultimately, Jukes’s servant boy, Dunnoo, tracks the horse’s hooves to the crater and hauls him out of the village of the dead and delivers him back into the world of the living. In commenting on Kipling’s work, Christopher Lane has suggested that “the colonial drive leads its subject inexorably toward ruin and death.” Lane adds, “When Freud likened the ego’s regulation of the unconscious to ‘a man on horse-​back, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse,’ he unwittingly endorsed the most common allegorical structure of Kipling’s fiction.”51 Thus, Jukes’s strange ride “over what seemed to be a limitless expanse of moonlit sand”52 links the story, in Freudian terms, to colonial fantasies about “the convulsive bliss of self-​sabotage—​a jouissance ride into the hole of oblivion and the brink of the real.”53 From this perspective, Jukes’s decision to saddle his horse and hunt down the “huge black and white beast” that is keeping him up at night can be read in the terms of a colonial psychodrama, made all the more pungent by the “delirium of fever and the excitement of rapid motion through the air” that marks the rider’s journey over the sand dunes and

47 Wilson 1977, 72.

48 Kipling 1937, 183. 49 Ibid., 188. 50

Ibid., 188–​189.

51 Lane 1995, 32.

52 Kipling 1937, 185. 53 Lane 1995, 32.

Memories of Empire  511 into an abyss of inversion. And the crater, which lies across the sands and beyond the colonial outpost, thus comes to symbolize “Jukes’ self-​destructive fantasy.”54 Yet, Kipling indulges the fantasy of self-​destruction only up to the point when Jukes is rescued by his servant, Dunnoo. The “normal” master/​servant relationship is reasserted at the end of the story and the exploration of the troubling world is called off in a few sentences. What scares Jukes in the crater is not just that the worst elements of colonial India are all compressed into a small space—​disease, filth, smells, lack of hygiene, the breakdown of hierarchy—​but also that his own life may someday come to resemble his fearful experience. For Jukes, the crater in the sands bears witness to the breakdown of colonial rule and also offers a harrowing vision of life among the natives as an equal. It is not an experience that Jukes expects to suffer in the near future, but it may yet lie after that moment on the horizon which marks the end of empire.

Melancholia In his book After Empire, Paul Gilroy writes about the “imperial melancholia” that Britons have come to feel following the end of their empire. Gilroy’s discussion owes as much to the social psychology of Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich (Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, “The Inability to Mourn”) as to Freud’s analyses of mourning, melancholia, and narcissism.55 The Mitscherlichs wrote about “the loss of a fantasy of omnipotence,” and Gilroy extends their work to say: “From this perspective, before the British people can adjust to the horrors of their modern history and start to build a new national identity from the debris of their broken narcissism, they will have to learn to appreciate the brutalities of colonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit, to understand the damage it did to their political culture at home and abroad, and to consider the extent of their country’s complex investments in the ethnic absolutism that has sustained it.” Gilroy adds that Britons have been slow to work through “[t]‌he multilayered trauma—​economic and cultural as well as political and psychological—​involved in accepting the loss of the Empire.”56 As a result of their slowness in working through this trauma, he suggests, the British have been unable to deal fairly with questions of race, ethnicity, and nationhood or to respond hospitably to the arrival of immigrants, especially those who come from former colonies. One reason why the trauma of imperial loss has been treated inadequately is that the public sphere in Britain has not dealt effectively with memories of empire. Many Britons are embarrassed and ashamed about the country’s imperial past and want to forget that part of the nation’s history, even if they were actively involved in it

54 Ibid., 33.

55 Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1968. 56 Gilroy 2004, 108.

512  Phiroze Vasunia and even if they ultimately cannot forget. Many of those who were born during or after World War II suppose that the history of the British Empire has little relevance to the modern nation. There are others who glory in the history of empire and exhort their fellow Britons proudly to embrace this chapter of their past and to value its contributions to culture and civilization. But, in the terms of Gilroy’s diagnosis, we can say that the imperial legacy is not addressed directly by these groups of people and that, rather, the Empire is brushed under the carpet, its importance is minimized, or its achievements are championed simplistically. None of these attitudes to the Empire can be construed as a satisfactory attempt to engage with its afterlife, and none of them is, therefore, going to lead to a more inclusive reckoning with history. A consequence of this pathology is the nation’s dysfunctional stance toward its own history no less than toward racial and immigrant minorities. J. Enoch Powell, who was a classical scholar before he gained notoriety as a politician, is sometimes characterized as an extreme personification of this condition, but he was an unusually articulate spokesperson for a widespread phenomenon. He had a way of conjuring up images that would catch the attention of the press and the public, as he did when he spoke of the river foaming with much blood or of the time the black man would have the whip-​hand over the white man. After Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party, dismissed him from the shadow cabinet on the grounds that his speech was “racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions,” polls showed the public coming out in support of Powell by an overwhelming majority:  in a survey conducted by the Wolverhampton Express and Star, 372 thought that Heath was right to dismiss him, but 35,000 said Heath was wrong.57 What is interesting about Powell, in this context, is that, as an older man, he did not boast loudly about the Empire and appeared to have lost his youthful enthusiasm for it. But he, like his many supporters, was able to talk explicitly about racial and ethnic issues, the perils of immigration, and the decline of England, and all these conversations “drew upon memories of the imperial past.”58 As Bill Schwarz writes, “Inside the nation’s forgetfulness about empire, the memory-​traces remained. Empire may not have been spoken for what it was. It was, however, present.”59 Traces of imperial melancholia permeated through the culture broadly and could be found in non-​racial discourses as well. In the early 1980s, Salman Rushdie famously attacked novels, television series, and films set in colonial India for their “Raj revisionism” and pointed out that they were proliferating roughly at the same time as the Falkland Islands war, which, in his view, was spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher, “who most plainly nailed her colours to the colonial mast, claiming that the success in the South Atlantic proved that the British were still the people ‘who had ruled a quarter of the world.’ ”60 Raj nostalgia was really connected with the

57 Schwarz 2011, 35, 39. 58 Ibid., 31. 59 Ibid.

60 Rushdie 1991, 92.

Memories of Empire  513 ideologies of the ruling Conservatives, as Rushdie argued, and would not lead to a deeper historical appreciation of the fraught British presence in India or the relationship between Indians and Britons in the colonial period. It was associated with melancholia and was a defensive response to the traumatic loss of empire: it put Rushdie “in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb.”61 Raj nostalgia flourished for some years but now has been subsumed into neo-​Victorian and neo-​ Edwardian fiction, which consists of texts set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, not all these texts are explicitly about empire (for instance, Possession, by A. S. Byatt, offers only a fleeting glance at a postcolonial interlocutor), and some are explicitly critical about the colonial power and/​or created outside the old metropolitan center of London (for instance, the Hindi film Lagaan). These texts are not just colonialist in the sense that Rushdie deplored, therefore, but also postcolonial, in all the senses of that term. To quote one scholar who has written about the genre, “the return to the Victorian in the present offers a highly visible, highly aestheticized code for confronting empire again and anew; it is a site within which the memory of empire and its surrounding discourses and strategies of representation can be replayed and played out.”62 Britain is not the only country to suffer from the kind of imperial melancholia that Gilroy describes, and he himself mentions Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as other countries that have yet to fully acknowledge their colonial histories and the violence done to the colonized and the colonizer in the name of empire.63 To this list, one should also add the United States of America, a country which has continued to act as an imperialist power in our time. Each nation deals differently with imperial trauma and melancholia, and in the case of the United States, the traumas have taken many forms, including the war in Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, and the attacks of September 11, 2001. After each of these events, many Americans believed that their nation was required to respond forcefully, that decisive action needed to be taken overseas, and that national pride had to be restored. The first Gulf War was seen by several commentators as America’s attempt to lay to rest the ghosts of Vietnam and Iran; the later invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan were direct responses to the attacks of 9/​11. But an extremely bloody aftermath followed the occupation of Iraq, while the war in Afghanistan has continued for many years, with an enormous loss of life on all sides. In each case, America has failed to achieve all its objectives, ill-​defined as these were in the first place. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with the economic crisis of 2008, led observers to speak of the decline of the American empire and of an imperial melancholia in that culture as well. But it is misleading to talk about imperial melancholia only in relation to the colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Washington, D.C., or only in relation



61 Ibid.

62 Ho 2012, 5.

63 Gilroy 2004, 109.

514  Phiroze Vasunia to places such as Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and Tibet where empire survives. Many people today manifest a form of nostalgia for the Muslim Caliphate. Algeria, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, the Korean Peninsula, South Africa, and the Caribbean, all are locations in which memories of empire still remain, where men and women hark back to a lost golden age and dream of an earlier political order. To varying degrees, a sense of trauma and feelings of melancholia and nostalgia can be perceived among some groups in these postcolonial cultures. We can discern these emotions most starkly in local elites, abandoned or largely forgotten by the colonizers, and not as successful or powerful as they once were, but also among subalterns and non-​elites. A whole body of prose and verse has explored how questions of empire persist in the words and actions of people living in former colonies, in memories and memoirs, visual materials, archives, institutions, and bureaucracies. J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Seamus Heaney, V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Derek Walcott, and Rushdie himself can be counted among the most distinguished exponents of this literature in English. Not only do they examine the bloody legacies of the colonial past: they also explore the many charms, allures, and seductions of empire and depict the betrayal and disappointment left in its wake.

The Postcolonial Predicament While nationalism nurtured colonial and anti-​colonial movements, nationalism has continued to shape the legacies of empires in the wake of decolonization and postcoloniality. Nations and political parties regularly invoke public memories to authorize a particular claim to the past or to promote a particular conception of the community. It is not surprising that the political use of memory, especially the memory of empire, stirs up debate, rouses fierce passions, or provokes conflict. But these divisions are as much about the community’s conception of itself in the present and future as they are about judging the past. Longing to shape the public agenda or to implement dearly held policies, political leaders are driven to memorialize histories, to refashion or repudiate traditions, and to insist on accounts congenial to their own interests. Nationalist passions and imperial memories fueled each other, for instance, long after France was compelled to withdraw its troops from Algeria and accept the independence of its colony. In the years following the Algerian War of Independence (Thawra al-​Jazā’iriyya, 1954–​1962), the French government seemed not to want to acknowledge or mention either that there had been a war or that the nation was a colonial power in Algeria. Instead of a reckoning or a formal acceptance of the colonial war, there was a prolonged evasion—​despite, or because of, an official death toll in the tens of thousands, the destruction of entire communities, and the widespread use of torture. It was the war that dared not speak its name: until 1999, the official name for the conflict used to be “des opérations de securité et de maintien de

Memories of Empire  515 l’ordre.” Why was the war not acknowledged officially for 40 years? Patricia Lorcin explains the situation thus: For France, the relinquishing of Algeria was a political, economic, and psychological loss. . . . There was a measure of shame attached to the loss, whether it was shame at having indulged in the deplorable experience of colonization and colonial warfare, which dishonored France’s humanitarian traditions, or shame at having lost what was perceived to be “rightfully French” and thus at diminishing France’s world status. These conflicting sentiments meant that no dominant memory could satisfactorily emerge. Instead, there was silence—​a silence resonating with France’s inability to forget.64

And so, for all the critiques of the war by thinkers of the stature of Jean-​Paul Sartre, the official position of the French government remained unchanged for decades after the formal end of hostilities. Yet, this combination of nationalism and official amnesia did not pass uncontested, with the debate joined by loud voices on all sides. As one would expect, the use of torture in the French-​Algerian war sparked particularly heated controversies, accusations, and denunciations. Soon after Louisette Inghilahriz, a member of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), spoke about her torture to Le Monde, in 2000, others attempted to recount their own experiences, and prominent writers and activists, including Henri Alleg and Pierre Vidal-​Naquet, “called on France to acknowledge and condemn torture during the guerre d’Algérie.”65 Notoriously, a French general, Paul Aussaresses, admitted to the use of torture. But after Aussaresses’s declaration, former soldiers of the Algerian War published a collection entitled Le livre blanc de l’armée française en Algérie, which, according to Alleg, “justified the torture and assassinations committed under their orders, as well as the methods they had been ‘obliged’ to use against the ‘rebels’ and their accomplices.”66 Were the French justified in using torture during the colonial war? Who tortured whom? How should allegations of torture be addressed so many years after the event, given that people’s memories and official records can be so tendentious and partial? These are some of the questions that circulated in France as the nation sought to resolve the consequences of its colonial occupation of a part of North Africa. In Algeria, meanwhile, the post-​1992 civil violence between government and non-​government forces has provided a different context to torture. The practice of torture in postcolonial Algeria has meant that discussions of the subject cannot avoid accounting for its use during the more recent violence (when Algerians tortured Algerians) as well as during the Algerian War (when the French tortured



64 Lorcin 2006, xxiv–​xxv. 65 Prochaska 2006, 262. 66 Alleg 2006, xi.

516  Phiroze Vasunia Algerians): in Algeria, past and present regimes stand to be indicted in the matter. As David Prochaska writes, “Intellectually, the stakes in recovering a previously occluded historical past in Algeria are even higher than in France, where it is about recovering a key episode in recent French history, because in the Maghreb it is ultimately a matter regarding the history of the Algerian nation in the past half-​century, the history of Algerian nationalism, and the FLN’s claim of embodying Algerian nationalism.”67 In this scenario, the contemporary political situation colors the reception of memories of the war and potentially implicates Algerians in a brutal practice with a long history in the country. While the violence has been relatively less intense since 2006, memories of the colonial era are not yet fully worked through: the complicity of their own elites in acts of torture, repression, and kidnapping has made it difficult for Algerians to arrive at a historically sensitive reckoning of an earlier period in which torture was practiced on Algerians. If the national euphoria that followed decolonization allowed Algerians to gloss over the different roles (for or against French colonialism) they played during the war, the civil unrest of the last two decades reopened the wounds and allowed them to fester anew. The French government’s trouble with the naming of the war in Algeria reminds us that the names we give to events reveal a great deal about how we want to talk about them. The question of “the proper name” haunts not just former colonizers but also many postcolonial societies, as the latter seek control over signs and symbols in the public sphere and over narratives that are told about the past. Here, again, the contemporary national situation intersects with the memory traces left behind by empire. India is no stranger to the politics of naming, as Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras have yielded to Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. Bombay was officially renamed “Mumbai” in 1995, for example, when the central government of India acceded to the formal demands of the state government of Maharashtra, then ruled by an alliance of two parties, the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The renaming of the city was consistent with the nativist and nationalist ideologies of the parties: the Shiv Sena is a regional right-​wing party that has aggressively promoted what it considers Maharashtrian culture, and the BJP is a national right-​wing Hindu party. For members of these parties, the act of renaming was an assertion of a regional identity and a repudiation of a colonial European past; it was the declaration of a Maharashtrian and a Hindu claim on the city. The passage from Bombay to Mumbai indicated that “the city could be reinscribed in a national territory as a ‘proper’ Indian city, within a national history and an emerging national modernity that recognized its indigenous cultural and linguistic roots, and its name could be properly enunciated in the vernacular.”68 In fact, the change also corresponded to other nominal changes that had occurred, or were about to occur, in the city. The name of the main railway station, Victoria Terminus, was altered to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, in 1996, while, in 1975, the Victoria & Albert

67 Prochaska 2006, 269. 68 Hansen 2001 4.

Memories of Empire  517 Museum had been rechristened the Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum. Numerous roads, monuments, and institutions acquired new names, often to the exasperation of residents. But the demand to change the city’s name was inspired by movements going back at least to the 1960s, and no political party opposed the change of name. The renaming was supported by socialists, leftists, moderates, and many others, even though the formal change was implemented during a fanatically right-​wing administration. At one level, therefore, the change to Mumbai can be understood as the recognition and reassertion of native agency in the age of postcolonialism. Not everyone, however, celebrated the change in the city’s name or the implications of that metamorphosis. At the time of the change, in 1995, a prominent individual from a rival political party described the action as a diversion from the socioeconomic problems of the city, a view echoed by contemporary commentators.69 Many complained that the city’s varied, flexible, and open identity was obscured by the new designation, that its cosmopolitan history had been hijacked by right-​wing supremacists, and that the Shiv Sena was attempting to turn Bombay into a Maharashtrian Hindu enclave, emptied of Muslims and other minorities. “And there was no good reason to change the name of Bombay,” Suketu Mehta writes in Maximum City, a book that is not misty-​eyed about the city’s darker histories or its structures of oppression. “It is nonsense to say that Mumbai was the original name. Bombay was created by the Portuguese and the British from a cluster of malarial islands, and to them should go the baptismal rights. The Gujaratis and Maharashtrians always called it Mumbai, when speaking Gujarati or Marathi, and Bombay when speaking English. There was no need to choose. In 1995, the Sena demanded that we choose, in all our languages, Mumbai. This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city.”70 Mehta here is ventriloquizing the lament of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie and he suggests that their conception of the city clashed with the aspirations of those who sought to evoke a different history or communal identity. The names Bombay and Mumbai, thus, mask different interpretations of urban space: the question of the name is not just about the overthrow of colonial rule or a change into the linguistic vernacular; it is also about competing visions of the postcolonial city and what the city has come to signify to its inhabitants. When memories of empire are mobilized in the nation-​state, these memories often run up against competing desires, priorities, and programs. Algerians ought to have repudiated torture, especially given the prevalence of the practice in colonial times and the devastation it wrought then. But torture continued all too patently, and its use in domestic conflict forestalled a fuller analysis of the colonial period, in the fear that such an analysis might lead to unfortunate truths about the present situation. The inhabitants of Bombay ought to have greeted the erasure of the city’s old name as the joyful rejection of a time when they, along with other Indians,

69 See Chaware 1995.

70 Mehta 2004, 140–​141.

518  Phiroze Vasunia lived under a colonial regime. Many were jubilant. But others saw the renaming as proof that their city was taken over by a violent, neo-​fascist, anti-​Muslim party and feared that their polity had lost its vibrant, multiethnic, and hospitable character. Unfortunately, subsequent developments, including horrifying violence and civic dysfunction, appeared to bear out their anxieties. The cold realities of postcoloniality require the state to repress or manipulate colonial memories, to bully minorities into submission, and to give fresh dreams to an unsettled populace.

Repetition Compulsion? “It has often seemed to me far easier,” Sheldon Pollock says, “to argue that it isn’t those who forget the past who are condemned to repeat it, but, on the contrary, those—​in Ayodhya, Belfast, Jerusalem, Kosovo, or Washington—​who remember it. And this makes it clear that we have not made much progress in understanding the advantages and disadvantages of history for life.”71 Pollock adds that the comparative study of empires shows that empires become imperial, that is, empires are made, by the action of looking at older empires. Historical empires stoke the flames of aspiration as much as they hold up warnings to would-​be imperialists. Empires often proceed by imitation, and most successful colonialists, from the Achaemenid Persians to the French and British, have displayed an awareness of hoarier exemplars and an inclination to follow or surpass them in conception and in detail. Indeed, a great deal remains to be said about the practice of imperial mimesis, about what provokes it, and about what succor it draws from historical memory. But there is something in Pollock’s claim that resonates uncannily with the Freudian concept of compulsion, and this resonance is worth a concluding glance. Pollock himself does not treat Freud in any detail in his discussion, but he looks at historical phases where empires are driven to mimic other empires and he asks how the world might move toward “a new future, a kind of Empire that might finally end the numbingly repeated imitations of empire.” For Pollock, a possible way to avoid imperial repetition and to progress to an age without imperialism lies in such models as “the Sanskritic cosmopolitanism of Bharata Varsha and the Islamic cosmopolitanism of Al-​Hind, which suggest however faintly some alternatives.”72 Unlike Freud, who seldom offered the salve of utopia to his readers, Pollock appears to be saying that, were we to look back to precise historical periods and concepts, we would be able to forge a community in the future that was less imperial and more egalitarian and more peaceful than the empires of recent history. Pollock finds these moments of promise not in the immediate past of the West but in older, non-​ Western formations.



71 Pollock 2006a, 176. 72 Ibid., 188.

Memories of Empire  519 It was to ancient Egypt that Freud turned in Moses and Monotheism, the book in which he explored the possibility that Moses was an Egyptian priest in the kingdom of the pharaoh Akhenaten.73 In Freud’s account, Moses is originally Egyptian and not Hebrew, while the originary traces of Mosaic monotheism prove to be Egyptian as well. There are many ways to understand Freud’s study of historical memory, but in this context it would be essential to refer both to Edward Said’s brief exploration in Freud and the Non-​European and Jacqueline Rose’s response to Said. “For Freud,” Said says, “writing and thinking in the mid-​1930s, the actuality of the non-​European was its constitutive presence as a sort of fissure in the figure of Moses—​founder of Judaism, but an unreconstructed non-​Jewish Egyptian none the less. Jahveh derived from Arabia, which was also non-​Jewish and non-​European.”74 According to Said, the central implication of Freud’s book is that Jewish identity, including Freud’s own identity, was divided from the inside, and that its defining characteristic was the combination of Jewish, non-​Jewish, and non-​European elements. To be Jewish, for Freud, was to be cosmopolitan through and through. Jewish identity, in this analysis, cannot conceive of itself “without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian.”75 Thus, the historical memory of Moses agrees with Freud’s self-​conception of Jewish identity and shows the psychoanalyst himself to be a many-​sided, worldly individual. Yet, Said also makes the further point that a group with this sense of identity could potentially reach out to another fraught identity, “by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound—​ the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even within itself.”76 Said thus suggests that Israeli Jews ought to embrace Freud’s vision, reach out to Palestinians as another people with a complicated identity, and seek to live peacefully, and on equal terms, with them, so that both might be able to coexist harmoniously together. Rose observes in her response that there is an additional dimension that needs to be brought to bear on Said’s analysis: trauma and the response to trauma. As Rose writes, “the most historically attested response to trauma is to repeat it.”77 Freud’s text is surely marked by at least a couple of violently traumatic moments, including the murder of Moses by the Jews and the exodus from Egypt. And Freud himself saw the book as further denial of the conventional Jewish understanding of Moses, a denial he made explicit in his memorable opening sentence (“To deprive a people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken, least of all by someone who is himself one of them”). But in addition to the literal and figurative killing of Moses, and to the historical memory with which Freud attempts to engage, we should look at the historical situation in which the book appeared. Freud’s book was published, in 1939,

73 Freud 1953–​1974, vol. 23. 74 Said 2003, 42. 75 Ibid., 54. 76 Ibid.

77 Rose 2003, 77, cited in Said 2003.

520  Phiroze Vasunia the year of his death, after he was forced to flee Vienna and seek refuge in London, and after he had reworked the text during the latter half of the 1930s. The book assumes a poignancy in the light of Freud’s exile, and postwar readers cannot but approach Moses and Monotheism without an awareness of the Holocaust as well as of the author’s anguish. The identity of a people who have suffered from a trauma so enormous can only have undergone a huge stress—​and not necessarily for the better. Rose asks, “Are we at risk of idealizing the flaws and fissures of identity?” and she points out that trauma, far from leading to openness, can cause “identities to batten down, to go exactly the other way: towards dogma, the dangers of coercive and coercing forms of faith.”78 In other words, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians can be interpreted as a response to the historical traumas suffered by Jews, and Israel’s recent history suggests that a traumatized people may go on to inflict suffering on others. On this analysis, Freud’s analysis of historical memory is unlikely to provide a model for the peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians in a shared space. The implication of his work and its subsequent reception, rather, is that communities are forged on acts of primal murder, that trauma gives rise to the repetition of traumatic violence, and that the memory of oppression is invoked to visit oppression on others. Rose thus draws on Freud’s work in order to qualify Said’s interpretation of his late masterpiece. Said’s lecture emerges from Rose’s response as a “misreading” of Freud as much as a noble attempt to seek a blueprint for reconciliation. Yet, Freud’s own treatment of Egyptian and Hebrew material in Moses and Monotheism was also a misreading of the sources, as many scholars have remarked, and even in his own day few established historians actually espoused the views he held about the “the man Moses.” But what is powerful in each case is less the interpretive misprision and more the uses to which the thinker put his analyses, less the putative inaccuracy and more the challenge to a contemporary state of affairs. Each author was compulsively drawn to make an intervention in the political situation of his own day, Freud in relation to the already dangerous circumstances of Jews in the 1930s, Said in relation to the postwar plight of Palestinians. Each was responding to a trauma, the understanding of which was shaped by memories historical and personal. Each teaches his readers, as indeed does Pollock, that remembering the past is not merely sufficient to avoid repeating it and that what we remember is often shaped by the cues of the moment. Memories of empire are variable, and the way we stitch them together are the result of present exigencies. The lesson for us appears to be that working through jealousy, melancholia, nostalgia, or euphoria is one way to come to a deeper understanding of the past and to avoid repeating the worst excesses of empire.



78 Rose 2003, 76, cited in Said 2003.

Memories of Empire  521

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522  Phiroze Vasunia Rushdie, S. 1991. “Outside the Whale.” In S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–​1991, 87–​11. London. Said, E. W. 2003. Freud and the Non-​European. With an introduction by C. Bollas and a response by J. Rose. London. Savarkar, V. D. 1930. Indian War of Independence, 3 parts, 2nd ed. Calcutta. Schwarz, B. 2011. Memories of Empire, vol. 1: The White Man’s World. Oxford. Spencer, D. 2002. The Roman Alexander: Reading a Cultural Myth. Exeter. Tarn, W. W. 1927, reprinted with corrections 1953. “Alexander: The Conquest of the Far East.” In J. B. Bury, S. A Cook, and F. E. Adcock, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 6: Macedon 401–​301 B.C, 387–​437 (in reprint). Cambridge. Wilson, A. 1977. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. London.

16 The End of Empires John A. Hall

If John Darwin is right to claim that empire is the default mode of politics in the history of the world, then the task given to me is well nigh impossible.1 I begin by stressing the sheer variety of imperial experience that makes it so, in order to acknowledge that there have been particular endings for particular empires. Nonetheless, I then suggest that certain patterns are often present in imperial decline. The section that then follows derives from the simplest of observations, namely that history does not stand still, with huge increases in human powers presenting new challenges to rule in the modern era. Hence we must ask if such novel conditions and circumstances will send empires into final decline. I will argue that there is a great deal of truth to this, but will resist complete endorsement of this generally accepted view. It may be as well to note the definition of empire used in this chapter. Empires have usefully been seen in terms of a rimless bicycle wheel: a metropole stands at the center with powers of coercion in part based on the simple fact that the separate societies with which it is in contact do not easily communicate with each other.2 Very much the same idea is present in Ernest Gellner’s famous diagram of an agro-​ literate polity—​in which a thin military, ideological, and political elite sits on top of a series of laterally insulated societies, with its own distinct cultural identity.3 These models have the advantage of making us realize that central power is likely to be curtailed by the lack of social mobilization. This is not just a matter of pre-​modern logistical circumstances. The powers of empires in modern times are best seen as varying from direct control in core territories to indirect rule through local elites, and then from coercive demonstrations through gunboats and punitive expeditions to the informal control exercised by the manipulation of terms of trade. All this suggests that empire is a system of rule. Self-​definition as an empire may mean little. Great Britain in large part and the United States at all times have refused to admit that they are empires. Equally, Bokassa was no emperor despite his claim to be such, nor really was Henry VIII—​although there is a little sense in this latter case, given the earlier conquests of Wales and the lowlands of Scotland. But later developments in Britain lead to a further consideration. Ireland and Scotland, at

1 Darwin 2007, 491. 2 Motyl 1999, part 3. 3 Gellner 1983, ch. 2. John A. Hall, The End of Empires  In:  The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0016.

524  John A. Hall least for some periods, had their own assemblies, while Scotland retained its own legal system with the link between the two territories being that of a union of crowns. This is to say that the state was composite. So too was the Habsburg “empire,” as the different regions that comprised it held their own “liberties” to which the ruler acceded. It may be as well to cite another example at some length, not least as the nature of its demise will concern our attention later. The Helstaten ruled by Danish kings has at various times included control of southern Sweden and part of the Baltic coast, Norway, Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, a trading post in West Africa and two in India, colonies in the West Indies (St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas), and Schleswig and Holstein. This list makes it clear that the Oldenburg dynasty was at once imperial and royal, possessed of an empire overseas but having within Europe the character of a classic composite monarchy within which different types of rule were exercised. The personal union with Norway in 1380 changed markedly in 1536 when Norway’s status as a separate state was abolished, leading some thereafter to speak of the United Monarchy. Still more complex were relations to Holstein. The Oldenburgs were Dukes of Holstein, thereby owing loyalty to the Holy Roman Emperor because Holstein was part of that strange entity. But there was change here, too, notably in 1773 when a dispute with the Russian ruling dynasty was solved by allowing for complete control over Holstein—​although this did not lead to uniform central rule in Copenhagen, as Holstein was administered by a separate unit, the Deutsche Kanzlei. Further complexity followed in 1806 when the Holy Roman Empire collapsed, allowing for its complete annexation—​albeit this move was reversed in 1814 when it became an independent duchy in the German Confederation. If such a list, incomplete though it is, leaves one a little breathless, then a purpose has been served. Imperial rule can be messy, and any pretense to the contrary misleads (further Bang, Chapter 1 in this volume). All these comments suggest that there never can be any “closed” or final definition of empire. Still, a particular text stands at the back of this chapter. John Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902) is best known as the precursor to Lenin’s view of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. In one sense this is a terrible mistake, for the book argued the case opposite to that of Lenin’s, namely that imperialism was neither necessary nor profitable, its incidence instead being explained by the predatory behavior of the few. But what is of interest here is not the general thesis of the book but the opening pages on nationalism and imperialism. The novelty of the recent Imperialism regarded as a policy consists chiefly in its adoption by several nations. The notion of a number of competing empires is essentially modern. The root idea of empire in the ancient and medieval world was that of a federation of States, under a hegemony, covering in general terms the entire or recognized world, such as was held by Rome . . . Thus empire was identified with internationalism, though not always based on a conception of equality of nations . . . the triumph of nationalism seems to have crushed the rising hope of internationalism. Yet it would appear that there is no essential antagonism between

The End of Empires  525 them. A true strong internationalism in form or spirit would rather imply the existence of powerful self-​respecting nationalities which seek union on the basis of common national needs and interests . . . Nationalism is a plain highway to internationalism, and if it manifests divergence we may well suspect a perversion of its nature and its purpose. Such a perversion is Imperialism, in which nations trespassing beyond the limits of facile assimilation transform the wholesome stimulative rivalry of varied national types into the cut-​throat struggle of competing empires.4

There is much to praise here. The ideal typical empire of the pre-​modern era sought to create a world all of its own, free from competitors. Such empires claimed to be universal, and so were something more than agro-​literate polities, greater than composite monarchies. Of course, they were “multicultural” to a fault, bound to diversity by weakness, lacking means to indoctrinate and to homogenize into a single mold. Nationalism and imperialism were indeed separated from each other, making any notion of intimacy between them ridiculous. Hobson continues this passage by claiming that “imperialism is an artificial stimulation of nationalism in peoples too foreign to be absorbed and too compact to be crushed.”5 His reference point here seems to have been peoples overseas; we will see that his concern applies equally to core areas of the world polity. But let us put Hobson’s concerns to one side for a moment so as to concentrate first on variability and typicality within the great imperial eras.

Variabilities of Rule, Idiosyncrasies of Endings Variability is enormous. Empires form in very different ways, and they have widely differing time spans, with the longest lasting, notably China and Byzantium, being those that ruled within the great agrarian civilizations.6 It is as well to remember that the largest empire, created by the nomad Chinggis Khan, was also one of the shortest-​lived. In this context it is worth noting that it matters enormously whether nomads bring with them ideals as well as military capability. There is a striking contrast between the Mongols and the Arabs, the former having force while the latter had force and value.7 But it is important not to overdo this contrast. For one thing, the Arabs were few in numbers and soon faced the problem of absorption. This was a common problem. Alexander faced resistance from his fellows fearing their own absorption into a foreign culture when forced to marry Persians so as to unify the empire.8 Arab empires proved not to be long lasting, simply because

4 Hobson 1902, 6–​10. 5 Hobson 1902, 10.

6 Scheidel 2013, 27–​30.

7 Cook and Crone 1977; Khazanov 1993 8 Bang 2012.

526  John A. Hall conversion to their religion and polity was so easy.9 For another, Islam was so complete and finished a world religion that it sought to establish godly rule, that is, it did not easily provide ideological glue for imperial rule. When this was combined with the continuing presence of tribes, rule of any sort might be transient, as Ibn Khaldun and his later followers have made clear.10 Islam produced powerful empires only when it possessed key agricultural core areas, whether in Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, or Egypt. The presence of imperial rule throughout the historical record should lay to rest what is still the most common taken-​for-​granted explanation for empires, both inside much of academia and certainly among the general public—​namely, the soft marxisant view that sees expansion as necessary for the needs of a capitalist economy, whether for markets, materials, or profits. Bluntly, empires existed long before capitalism, so the theory in question cannot be true. This is not to say that pre-​modern empires had no economic significance. Careful assumptions made about Rome, seen in the light of the Mughals, make clear the extent to which trade was encouraged by the tribute that came to the great agrarian empires.11 Still, the luxury goods so prized by the elite came long distances in very small quantities.12 There is a world of difference with modern empires, able to restructure territories overseas so that significant amounts of goods and products began to move around the world. One feature that has been left by modern overseas empires is communication routes designed for metropolitan advantage rather than local purpose: the railway lines in Ghana go from the interior to the coast so that the British could get their hands on cocoa. Nonetheless, modern empires were not all powerful, while industrial metropoles depended less upon extensive possessions than did their tributary predecessors—​which did not prevent them from having greater impact on the areas under their control. It is crucial to add a further point about the great states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, namely that they felt that power needed to be based on size.13 This is a careful formulation. Colonial empires did not produce high rates of return, although India mattered enormously to Britain both because of its support for the military budget and because its surplus was used to balance the current account at home. But there was always the sense, among statesmen rather than among most capitalists, that extensive territory might prove to be necessary for economic reasons in the future. There were of course other contrasts between modern empires. One classic contrast was that between land empires and overseas possessions. Another difference concerned political form. The great European land empires tended to be autocratic or authoritarian at home because rule over their near abroad demanded coercive control. The situation in the British case was entirely different, with liberal rule present at all times,

9 Crone 2012, ch. 8.

10 Ibn Khaldun 1978; Gellner 1981. 11 Bang 2008.

12 Bayly 2002.

13 Lieven 2000.

The End of Empires  527 and with democracy extended during the nineteenth century—​and with levels of popular interest in overseas possessions that may well have been rather minimal. These differences can be overdone, as the Irish would attest, and they pale in any case beside the pressures caused by the need that all felt to maintain great size. It is worth spelling out an assumption implicit in what has been said about modern empires. They were less worlds unto themselves than great powers constantly in contact: theories drawn from international relations will help us understand them quite as much as sociological theories of empire. We will turn to this later, but note now the very great divergence within the tributary empires of the agrarian era. The differences within pre-​modern systems of rule are huge, and obvious. A further advantage of Gellner’s model of the agro-​literate polity is its highlighting of the different interests of the ideological, economic, and political components of the elite.14 He offered a neat set of four contrasts: centralized/​uncentralized, stallions/​ gelded, open/​closed, and fused/​non-​fused. Each contrast had an illustration: the first contrast compared the papacy to the decentralized world of the ulamas of Islam; the second had in mind the difference between feudal warriors and the eunuchs, made biologically loyal, so to speak, to the Roman and Chinese empires; the third contrast was between the great meritocratic, examined mandarinate of China and the hereditary Brahmins of the classical Hindu world; finally, the European orders that combined military and religious power in their expansion to the East were seen as wholly different from the careful division of function so characteristic of the caste system. Such a set of distinctions is extremely helpful, but it is merely the tip of an iceberg. Recent work on imperial cultures makes us realize that complexity could be increased in many ways—​by borrowings, both ideological and institutional, between empires as well as by attempts of empires to produce new syncretic doctrines.15 In a nutshell, the “repertoires of empire,” as Burbank and Cooper16 nicely put it, have great range in terms of the major sources of social power. One way of highlighting this emphasis on difference is to think for a moment about the ending of one particular imperial world, that of the Occident, best conceptualized in terms of a comparison with Imperial China. Despite manifold differences, there were very considerable resemblances between the Roman and Chinese empires in the early part of the Christian era, from the nature of their economies to their being bounded by great walls designed to manage the movement of nomadic and other tribal populations. But the eventual historical patterning of the two ends of Eurasia led to the continuation of empire at one end and the creation of a multipolar system at the other.17 One factor that helps explain the end of full-​blooded imperial politics in the West is the role played by Christianity.18 A purely intellectual element that mattered

14 Gellner 1983, ch. 2.

15 Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2012. 16 Burbank and Cooper 2010. 17 Scheidel 2009, 2015. 18 Hall 1985.

528  John A. Hall derived from the injunction of Jesus himself to give unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, but to give to God one’s full spiritual attention. More importantly, the persecutions by Rome of the early Christians created something of a gap between secular and sacred power, immortalized of course in St. Augustine’s insistence in The City of God that the timetable of God was not that of Rome. The situation in China was wholly different, with the mandarinate bearing a creed that stressed loyalty to the empire. The papacy did for a short period seek to establish an empire of its own, but it always lacked the coercive ability to make this work. Its characteristic role, in contrast, was to offer the numinous rites of rule—​the singing of the Laudes Regiae and anointing with holy oil at coronations—​to kings rather than to emperors, perhaps in part so that it could better prosper in a more acephalous world. This helped to create the European multipolar system of states, endlessly locked in competition and so bound to rationalize and develop their societies on pain of extinction. “Barbarian” invasions at the other end of the world saw no similar move; rather, nomads eventually turned to the mandarins to restore imperial rule. This drift into mobilizing rivalry is a very particular ending of an imperial system, wholly unique in world history. Reflection on the case brings to mind a second consideration, important but wholly different, not least when we remember Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, the title of Anderson’s account of this period.19 As is often the case with the work of this scholar, Weberian realities provide the core of argumentation, even though this goes very much against formal Marxist pretensions. Friedrich Engels had once been asked if the presence of Christianity in the late Roman and medieval world contradicted the central presupposition of Marxism—​namely that the ideological superstructure should change as soon as the basic mode of production evolved. Engels’ answer—​that Christianity was not the same religion in these different periods—​was and is nonsensical. It is to the credit of Anderson to have recognized the myriad ways in which the Christian church served as a transmission belt from antiquity to early modern Europe. There is undoubted truth in this, and it suggests something much more general, and of absolutely vital importance in the context of this essay. Cultural continuities are easy to recognize, as indeed is the even more basic fact of the preservation of literacy. A whole social world was opened to us when Peter Brown stressed the continuities that marked the world of late antiquity.20 One can go further. Ruskin realized long ago that cultural efflorescence could go hand in hand with a loss in military power; Cecily Hilsdale21 has reiterated that argument for late Byzantium. Perhaps I may add a personal comment at this point, not least as it further stresses the varieties of imperial experience. The impact of the British in India remains astonishingly large to this day, wholly in contrast to the situation in Indonesia, where the impact of the Dutch seems to have been almost minimal. Furthermore, empires can end differently in the metropoles



19 Anderson 1974. 20 Brown 1971.

21 Hilsdale 2014.

The End of Empires  529 themselves. High levels of immigration in Holland and the United Kingdom mean that “the empire has struck back”; in contrast, the situation in Denmark is very different, almost wholly bereft of any memory of empire.

Decline in General A respect for nominalism need not rule out the search for regularities. Common dilemmas faced most empires, even if they then handled them in their own distinctive ways. The empirical base at the back of the discussion is both that of such long-​ lasting tributary empires as Rome, Byzantium, Mughal India, and China and that of the great modern empires, whether centered on land or in possession of overseas territories. All of the factors mentioned—​each highlighted in italics in the following in the interest of clarity—​apply to both pre-​modern and modern realms, although the salience of the factors mentioned toward the end refer with particular force to the modern world. But the fundamental issue that brought down most modern empires applies to them alone, and it stands at the heart of the next section. Before proceeding, a methodological note is necessary. The decline of empires is so varied as to rule out any precise formula. The first reason for this follows from the presence of the set of factors that will concern us. Some empires have several factors at work at the same time, while others have single factors that impact with different tempos. But there is a second reason that deserves to be noted, although to develop the matter fully would require another complete essay of its own. Imperial rulers can seek to arrest, to manage, and even to reverse decline.22 Consider Great Britain, faced with the challenge of Germany in the twentieth century. On the one hand, it resisted, through higher taxes designed to win the naval race and through geopolitical retrenchment allowing the fleet to concentrate in European waters; on the other, it sought to appease the rising power as much as possible. But there are other strategies. Most obvious is the desire to return to one’s best self, to remove corruptions so as to restore the institutions that worked in the past. Attempts to renew in this way can be seen time and again in Islamic and in Chinese history. This is to say that most empires differ from the states within early modern Europe, forced at all times to imitate on pain of survival, as Dominic Lieven notes in Chapter 35 of Volume 2 when contrasting Ottoman attempts at renewal with the Russian exception—​in which partial imitation of European patterns derived from closer geographical proximity. This is not to say that pure innovation was absent: Diocletian after all changed the empire, making it at once more militarized and less centralized by instituting a system of power-​sharing between four emperors, the so-​called tetrarchy.23 Finally, empires can seek to survive by preventing the rise of rivals, as we shall see later when considering Vienna’s behavior in 1914.

22 Motyl 2001.

23 cf. Bang 2013, 415–​417, 448–​453.

530  John A. Hall It would be remiss not to begin with the factor most often noted by imperial ideologists, namely that of moral corruption. The sociology of Ibn Khaldun revolves around this.24 As rulers become corrupted by urban life, they lose both legitimacy and military effectiveness, and become easy prey for a virtuous, militarily effective tribe called to power by discontented ulama; but history is made cyclical by the certain fact that urban life will corrupt the new rulers. A very similar view derives from classical thought. The military prowess ensured by simple virtuous living is destroyed by luxury, leading thereby to decline. Edward Gibbon had this theory at the heart of the account of empires, although he felt that modern Europe’s economic advance meant that technological sophistication would at last counter the military virtue of invading nomads. What are we to make of this view? For social scientists, the prescriptive quality of the theory can irritate. One notes, for instance, that the tulip mania present in the early eighteenth-​century Ottoman Empire was not linked to decay or decline. Still, the presence of the theory suggests a measure of background descriptive power. Ibn Khaldun’s theory does explain some of the changes in regime in North Africa, while Diocletian’s innovations can be seen as an attack on corruption in Rome. Further, careful invocation of the factor does help us understand modern empires. The imperial elements of the United States have suffered in recent years from hubris—​from the corruption that comes from laziness, from not seeking to understand cultures different from its own. To some extent, all rule depends upon cooperation between state and society. Any center of power necessarily lacks detailed knowledge of local conditions, with its effectiveness resting in the end upon the presence of transmission belts able to see, to suggest, and to implement. This consideration lay behind Tocqueville’s explanation for the greater powers of the English state in the eighteenth century compared to that of France—​powers resulting from greater military capacity resting on higher levels of taxation agreed to by an upper class that trusted a state in which its voice was heard.25 But both these states were relatively small, both on course to become nation-​states. The problem of the allegiance of elites was much more serious for composite, imperial entities.26 The powers of the center were constrained both by limited rates of fiscal extraction and very often by distance. In these circumstances, it was absolutely necessary to rule through local power-​holders. Such power-​holders might be appointed from the center, or the center might choose to cooperate with varied types of traditional elites—​a practice famously described by Lord Lugard when writing about British rule in West Africa as that of “indirect rule.”27 But danger lurked here at all times. On the one hand, the local power-​holders could over time become too autonomous, so much in control of local resources as to refuse to pass enough to the center, and able on occasion to challenge it altogether. The great

24 Ibn Khaldun 1978. 25 Tocqueville 1856.

26 Runciman 2011; Gellner 1988, ch. 6. 27 Lugard 1922.

The End of Empires  531 theorist of this world is Franz Oppenheimer,28 who made much of the “feudalizing” tendencies of agrarian rule. The great Islamic gunpowder empires might seek to avoid “pure” feudalism by insisting that land grants were merely prebends, revocable at will. But continual recovery of prebends never occurred; it was much easier for the center to make deals, to accept regionalization and a diminution of power in return for implicit agreements not to actually challenge the center. For long periods such deals could bring stability, although the danger of revolt was always present. Just as importantly, the western half of the Roman Empire failed in the end because it proved possible for regional elites to make deals with incoming invaders, rather than rush to the aid of the metropolitan core.29 Of course, the danger was well known, and one interesting attempt to deal with it deserves special notice. The incoming Ming sought to limit economic expansion in the regions precisely because uneven development might provide sinews for revolt.30 In contrast to all such attempts to work with regional elites stand the attempts to exert direct control. These were always likely to lead to revolt. Classic instances include the Revolt of the Netherlands, against Habsburg Philip II, and the rebellion of the 13 American colonies against England. The identity of the North American colonists had been distinctively English, but this changed when London sought to limit expansion to the west and to raise taxes in order to fund state expenses. Of course, this revolt led to the loss of the first British overseas empire (cf. Canny, Chapter 32 in Volume 2). The growth of the empires, their provision of peace and habitual economic growth, made them ever more attractive to outsiders. The Hollywood image of “barbarians” is of uncouth pillagers, bent on rape and destruction. The truth was often exactly the opposite, namely that of the desire to get in, to gain the benefits of a more advanced world. Of course, this increased the pressure on agrarian empires, and this often resulted in heightened demands for taxation, frequently avoided but otherwise capable of breeding revolt. Of course, empires could seek to control nomadic invaders by using them. In the case of Rome, this was an all-​ too-​comprehensible option as it became harder to defend the empire by traditional means, by raising citizen armies. But trouble ensued here too. Tribes, of both nomads and agriculturalists, had characteristically been disunited, indeed often set against each other. Recruiting them into the forces of Rome gave unity and information to tribal outsiders. When this was combined with a characteristically high military participation ratio, and one blessed with striking means of mobility, the empire was threated in the most striking way.31 This factor can and should be extended. One can usefully argue that the key contradiction of the British Empire lay in adherence to liberalism. It was only natural as educational standards rose, notably when education was received in the metropole itself, that native intellectuals used this principle against the empire. One should remember, to take but a single

28 Oppenheimer 1919.

29 Mann 1986; Wickham 2005; Bang 2013. 30 Huang 1974.

31 Whittaker 1994.

532  John A. Hall example, that Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana and its predecessor the Gold Coast between 1951 and 1966, attended the London School of Economics. Distance makes it hard to exercise control. One remembers how many months it took the government of Margaret Thatcher to assemble a rather motley fleet to retake the Falkland/​Malvinas islands! Hence a notable cause, often interrelated with those already noted, is that of overextension. The great theorist here is Paul Kennedy, the author of a much-​cited work designed to warn the United States that it might follow in the footsteps of Great Britain.32 If that warning was perhaps premature, as we shall see, there is no doubt but that overextension and exhaustion massively contribute to the end of empires. Spain lost its imperial possessions in Latin America because it became overextended when fighting against Napoleon. But Russia under Tsars or Bolsheviks was always overextended when it controlled Poland. The possession of culturally and politically advanced regions made it all too likely that trouble would ensue—​as the Ming had realized when seeking to avoid economic imbalances within their empire. But this is a factor of which many empires were aware, and which they sought to avoid. Hadrian on accession decided to withdraw from Mesopotamia despite the fact that Trajan had just spent much energy conquering this territory. Equally striking was the decision of Great Britain to cut back its commitments overseas, as noted, in the face of increasing German power. Anglo-​Saxon solidarity allowed a measure of retreat from informal empire in Latin America, while a treaty with Japan made it possible to bring part of the fleet back to home waters. The latter demonstrates that power is not simply a question of metropolitan force; it can equally result from diplomacy. This naturally leads to another factor, analytically separate even though it is very often joined together with overextension. Notice has already been given to John Hobson’s view that traditional empires were worlds unto themselves. This is, of course, not entirely correct. The Mughals and the Qing faced genuine rivals, and many emperors wrote to their fellows, often referring to them as brothers. Still, the greatest tributary empires did not face much rivalry, and so were able to last for very long periods even after much power had been transferred to the regions. Nonetheless, it is in the modern world, as noted, that systematic rivalry comes to the fore. As a background to this factor, it is important to note that the British Empire lasted so long because no great power wished to challenge it, or to allow any rival state to challenge it.33 Longevity resulted from an idiosyncratic power vacuum. But once full-​scale rivalry did surface at the end of the nineteenth century, maintaining empires became difficult. Great Britain was sorely stretched by conflict in South Africa, not least because it lacked any allies. The Ottomans were unable to adapt, and were slowly dismembered, suffering massive ethnic cleansing from their former Balkan territories. Still, an agreement of the great powers to maintain at least the shell of Ottoman power for a long period prevented complete disaster, as

32 Kennedy 1987.

33 Kennedy 1983; Darwin 2009.

The End of Empires  533 indeed was the case in China. But once war exhausted the great European empires, they were doomed. Austro-​Hungary and the Ottomans did not recover from World War I; the British, French, and Dutch overseas empires fell after World War II, not least because their defeats in Asia removed their reputation for invincibility. Sheer ruthlessness did of course mean that the Russian Empire was reconstituted under different management after 1919. But no account of the collapse of the Soviet Union would make sense if it made light of the effective military defeat during the course of the Cold War. The final factor is simply that societies tend to institutionalize the moment of their success. A modern example can make the point most clearly, and in an aseptic manner. Great Britain had pioneered what might be called the first stage of the industrial era. But the leading sector of that stage, textile production, was clearly overtaken at the end of the nineteenth century by German specialization in chemicals. It is hard to adapt, and there are sunk costs in particular technologies. But sunk ideological and institutional costs can matter quite as much. Dominic Lieven in Chapter 35 offers an interesting example. The eighteenth-​century Russian system of mobilizing resources in the cause of imperial power was formidable and ruthless. This successful tradition of authoritarian mobilization undoubtedly inhibited the introduction in the nineteenth century of reforms which might have drawn state and socialist together by allowing elected representatives of the social elites to participate in government and legislation. The resulting alienation of these elites from the regime was an important element in tsarism’s demise.

Vigorous attempts were sometimes, as noted, made to reform, change, and rejuvenate. Diocletian tried to do this in the Roman case, and did so with some success—​ although the increasing militarization in the end increased regionalization. But the more characteristic pattern is to return to old and trusted ways rather than to imagine new ones, all too likely to be seen as newfangled and dangerous. The struggles between “Westernizers” and “populists” characterized the last years of many empires. This is scarcely surprising. No one likes to admit to inferiority, making an inward turn to local traditions easy to understand.

The Sense of Terminal Ending It takes very little thought and the simplest of calculations to see that imperial rule has very largely come to an end within relatively recent history.34 Latin America freed itself from Spain at the start of the nineteenth century. A still greater wave of nation-​state creation, in part begun before 1914 in the Balkans, followed the end

34 Wimmer 2013, ch. 1.

534  John A. Hall of World War I, albeit at the very moment the French and British empires reached their maximal extension. Decolonization of course changed the political map of the world most fundamentally, though this was followed by a final wave of nation-​state creation as the Soviet empire came to an end. One has the sense of a final ending to the era of empires, not least as this form of polity has now come to be seen in almost wholly negative terms.35 Two considerations explain why this is so, both of which, however, have complexities attached to them. The first is very simple. Europeans often fought very hard to maintain their empires after 1945 in the belief that size would remain necessary for power and prosperity. The French provide a particularly striking example. The officer corps of that country had witnessed the decline of Spain, and was convinced that France would descend into comparable poverty without its empire—​and so fought viciously to retain Algeria, with extremist elements being prepared to assassinate the leader of their own state. There was of course much moral opposition to the horrors unleashed, but most attention needs to be paid to the “icy clarity” of Raymond Aron’s intervention, La tragédie algérienne (1957). Aron took seriously the notion proposed by those who wished to retain Algeria that it could become part of a single political entity in which everyone would have similar rights. Very simple sums demonstrated that shared levels of education and welfare meant that the standard of French people would have to fall dramatically if those in Algeria were to be raised. Self-​sacrifice had no appeal in Paris. This points to the key consideration. The fears of Europeans, that they would become poor if they lost their imperial possessions, proved to be groundless. Very much to the contrary, the postwar period saw the greatest period of economic growth in European history. Economic histories of the period suggest that growth resulted from trade within the continent of Europe, at the higher end of modern technologies. It was noticeable in this regard that British economic performance was markedly inferior precisely because its continuing links to the Commonwealth tied it into a less competitive world.36 We have already seen that colonial empires had very often not paid; they certainly did not do so when metropolitan troops had to be sent out to deal with nationalist insurgencies. Freed from commitments, competing at the top end of the product cycle with other advanced countries blessed with sufficient wealth to ensure markets, Europe prospered as never before. The spirit of mercantilism was finally laid to rest, with positive sum economics replacing politics designed to beggar-​thy-​neighbor. Small, nationally homogenous countries such as Denmark and Holland seemed to do especially well.37 The secret of late industrial society seemed ever more to depend, as Adam Smith had suggested, upon human capital, the ability to swim inside a larger competitive shell as the result of adaptive skills. Intensity replaced extensive reach. The complexity



35 Beissinger 2006. 36 Milward 1984.

37 Patsiurko, Campbell, and Hall 2013.

The End of Empires  535 within this picture concerns the openness of the world economy. Small countries had done very badly in the interwar period, when protectionism made their desire to specialize irrational given the small size of their own home markets. Hence we will need in a moment to turn to those forces that guarantee the openness of the world political economy as a whole. But let us turn now to the second general factor that seems to explain the terminal decline of imperial rule, that of the rise of nationalism. It is important to be clear as to the character of this protean force. For one thing, nationalism is as much a category of practice as of analytic social science. For another, it is crucial to avoid any notion that rebellions in the pre-​modern world were fundamentally nationalist in character. For nationalism is best defined as an ideology which is popular, seeking to remove the lateral links in Gellner’s model so as to include everyone in the political community within which rule can only be exercised by its own members. Almost by definition, national sentiment in the pre-​industrial era was aristocratic, habitually seeking to preserve privilege rather than to mobilize the masses. That had been true of the aristocratic leaders of the revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century. But on this rare occasion, something like a nationalist movement was born when the “sea-​beggars” mobilized from below for religious reasons, pushing the aristocrats in a genuinely revolutionary direction. Nor should nationalism be confused with nativism, the sheer dislike of foreign rule and the insistence that it be ended so that old ways can be restored. Nationalism is a modern project, seeking to establish a new sort of political community. If the old regime does not allow an awakened nation to enter into the polity, secession becomes both rational and attractive. The most celebrated theorists of nationalism came from the Habsburg lands, many of them made sensitive to the question of nationalism because they faced exclusion and prejudice as the result of their own Jewish backgrounds. However, one can safely predict that the lack of agreement about the contours of this case will continue, with some arguing that nationalism was bound to kill it and others suggesting that it might have survived but for defeat in war. In these circumstances, there is much to be said for considering an earlier case, that of the key moment of decomposition of the Danish monarchy, that of the loss of Schleswig and Holstein in 1864.38 The Danish state had been bankrupted by participation in the Napoleonic war, and was so weak after 1814 that it could not solve its nationalities problem by force. More importantly, the very character of the population changed as the result of the loss of Norway, creating a situation in which a majority of Danes faced a large minority of Germans. In one sense, this resembles the situation of the Habsburgs once the Magyars had gained autonomy in 1867. But the differences between the two cases are very great. German-​speakers in Cisleithenia were a dominant and cultured minority, whereas the Danes were the less socially advanced majority within

38 Jensen and Hall 2014.

536  John A. Hall the Oldenburg monarchy. Crucially, the German-​ speaking population of the Oldenburg monarchy had an external homeland wholly lacking for Magyars and Czechs—​albeit not for the German-​speakers of Vienna, who came to rely increasingly on Berlin. The situation of the Danes in these circumstances is easy to understand. There was long-​standing tension toward the German community, not least as German bureaucrats in the court had sought to push through Enlightenment reforms from above. But what mattered most was the fear that Denmark might cease to exist, not just because of the increase in German power, but quite as much because the influence of Hamburg led to the expansion of the German language in Schleswig. In these circumstances varied approaches were possible, from the full incorporation of Schleswig and Holstein to the incorporation of all or merely the northern parts of Schleswig—​both policies designed to homogenize Denmark and to exclude German-​speakers, either by allowing the secession of Holstein or by diminishing its place within the monarchy. The German elites in Schleswig and Holstein were equally scared, wary of closer integration with Denmark. It was at this time that the University of Kiel began to gain prominence. A brilliant intellectual cadre—​whose core included F. C. Dahlmann, J. C. Droysen, B. G. Niebuhr, and T. Mommsen—​ then came to see the monarchy as an autocratic and backward peasant state, thereby wishing to align themselves with liberal developments to the south. Here too were several approaches, from demands for special status for Schleswig and Holstein within the monarchy, to calls for secession for Holstein alone, or with Schleswig, either as a separate realm within the German Confederation or as part of the unified nation-​state that had been glorified by Fichte. Murderous conflict is most likely when two sides stake claims to the same piece of territory.39 Schleswig illustrates his point perfectly, for it had a predominantly German-​speaking population with a large Danish-​speaking minority that in the north of Schleswig constituted a local majority. By 1842, the German-​dominated assembly in Schleswig had taken to passing many motions demanding autonomy. Fearing this turning in an anti-​Danish, pro-​German direction, P.  H. Lorenzen began speaking Danish in the Schleswig assembly, an act that was met with so much antagonism that he had to be removed. This event spurred nationalist rage in the rest of Denmark. Naturally enough, a countermovement developed rapidly among the intellectuals in Kiel’s liberal environment. In the heady days of 1848, this led the National Liberals in Copenhagen to turn down attempts at federal schemes, thereby forcing parts of the German community into revolt. The civil war that followed did not alter the map, for France and Russia did not wish to see Germany, which had fought against the Danish monarchy, gain further power. But nationalist Danes were not satisfied by this outcome, and sought in the years from 1852 to 1863 to homogenize Schleswig and to exclude Holstein, formally doing so in 1863. This led to Bismarck’s intervention, and to the loss of both duchies.



39 Mann 2005.

The End of Empires  537 The Danish case illustrates the desire of multinational empires to turn themselves into nation-​states. If Tsarist Russia, to take a key example, could ensure that the Ukraine did not develop nationalist sentiments, then these “little Russians” would so swell the Russian ethnic core as to make a nation-​state at least imaginable.40 Of course, there is an irony here: political interference of all sorts, from the banning of dictionaries to forced education in Russian, actually politicized nations within the empire; this is to say that nationalism is as much a product of state behavior as of national awakening per se.41 In theory a different path was possible, that of accommodation, the granting of linguistic and cultural rights so as to gain loyalty. Austro-​ Hungary had to try this route at the end of the nineteenth century simply because it had no dominant ethnic core on the basis of which a nation-​state could be formed. It did so with considerable success, creating a situation, in the words of Count Taaffe, of bearable dissatisfaction. But Austro-​Hungary remained a great imperial power, and behaved accordingly at the key moment. The Ottomans had been forced to downsize, thereby becoming the prey of the surrounding powers. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand provided an occasion to prevent decline by warning the nationalities that Vienna would not consider any moves to diminish the size of its territories. The world war that resulted destroyed the Austrian and Ottoman empires, albeit the Russian Empire was reconstituted under different management while the British and French added to their possessions. But anti-​imperial nationalism had gained in strength, and the weakening of European powers through the resumption of world war ended their period of hegemony. It is not the case that multinational entities cannot exist and prosper.42 The granting of rights can allow sufficient voice to create loyalty. It was in this way that Tamil nationalist sentiment in India was turned away from an early secessionist drive.43 But this is possible only when the regime is not imperial, when it is looser, federal, and consociational. None of the great empires was able to decompress in this liberal manner because they felt that unity was required in an age of high geopolitical conflict. Less unitary states are now possible because geopolitical competition has softened. But this brings us to the cautions with which we must end.

Concluding with Caution Rampant capitalism and the nation-​state form characterize the contemporary world polity. But there is a third feature with which we must end, namely that of the position of the United States. An earlier comment about the need to maintain open markets was in fact an implicit reference to an important theory in international relations.44 In the industrial era, war between competing rivals has been and

40 Lieven 2000.

41 Reynolds 2011.

42 Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011. 43 Subramianian 1999. 44 Gilpin 1981.

538  John A. Hall now always will be catastrophic. Hence capitalist society is likely to work best when it is organized and led by a single great power. What matters is that such a power provides a top currency, insists on free trade, protects its allies, and provides capital and its own market for developing countries. “Hegemonic stability theory” sometimes claims that Britain acted in this way. There is little truth to this: Britain was distinctively part of a multipolar system, and was never in possession of sufficient powers as to make its rivals open their markets. But the theory does have purchase on the American case. At the end of World War II, the United States did design institutions for capitalism (the World Bank, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, and the International Monetary Fund), did provide a top currency, and most certainly protected the core of capitalist society. The economies of small countries prospered within this regime. It is very important to note changes in this situation. One can begin with a remarkable book by Raymond Aron, Imperial Republic (1979). This great friend of the United States wrote just after the United States had abandoned its promise to back up dollars with gold. He was far too intelligent to suggest that American power was thereby coming to an end. Rather, he suggested the hegemony was becoming more predatory. In a sense, how could it be otherwise? Why would a great power sacrifice itself when it had the capacity to extract benefits from its allies? Hence Aron pointed to the importance of seigniorage, that is, to the economic benefits resulting from the dollar remaining the top currency. Much can be added to this picture: the ability to pass on inflation given the refusal to pay with domestic taxes for Great Society programs and the war in Vietnam; the absorption rather than the export of large parts of the excess capital as the leader gave itself the privilege, denied to others, of living beyond its means—​something of a deal, one might say, in which money is lent to pay for protection services; and the direct extraction of resources through hidden payments designed to support the military burden of the hegemon. All of this has amounted to “empire lite,” the control of capitalist society in the interests of a leading power without the need to possess territory overseas. A crucial question that faces the world is whether this imperial presence will fade, and, if so, whether it will lead to a stable multipolar world or one again so riven with conflict as to endanger the workings of capitalist society. This is an enormous subject, dealt with elsewhere in this volume, but something can usefully be said insofar as it relates to the theme of this chapter. Bluntly, there are as yet few signs that the American era is coming to an end. Allied states, the spokes in the wheels of the rimless bicycle dominated by Washington, are often irritated by American behavior, but no state has the desire to challenge its primacy, prepared instead even to prop up the hegemon so that they can continue to live within its purview. China alone might challenge the United States in future years. But why would it do so, given that its rise has depended upon this world order and its codependency with the United States? And what sort of challenge can there be in an era of nuclear weapons? Further, the United States is not really overextended. The share of national product devoted to military affairs is, in historical terms, not great, and certainly not large enough to

The End of Empires  539 crowd out investments needed for economic growth, and it can retreat from misguided interventions abroad. Further, there is no real sign that its economy has lost dynamism, not least because of the capacity of its great universities to recognize and to invite a remarkable proportion of the brainpower of the world—​whose results can be seen both in the sheer number of Nobel Prizes gained and in the number of patents taken. But none of this is to deny that change may yet occur. The United States suffers from naïve worship of its classic moment of institutional success, and this results at present in a deadlocked political system—​a system, one must note, that threatens the world political economy through its failure to regulate the hugely enhanced powers of finance in this moment of capitalist development. The moral is simple: if we want to understand our world, we need to deepen our understanding of the changing character of empire.

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Index of Places, Names, and Events Abbasid Caliphate, 324 Abu Taleb Hosayni, 66, 68 Accra, 407 Achaemenian/​Achaemenid Empire, 11, 55, 62, 96–​97, 105, 192, 466 Achebe, 357–​361, 368 Adams, J. N., 356 Aegean, 18, 54–​55, 203 Aelius Aristides, 272 Aeschylus, 11 Afghanistan, 5, 11, 54, 321, 426, 462, 465, 498, 511 Africa, xx, 24, 41, 45, 47, 54–​55, 69–​70, 72–​74, 92, 98, 105–​106, 112, 117, 145, 169–​171, 173, 175, 184, 188, 192, 200–​202, 267, 269, 277–​278, 280, 283, 291, 306, 313–​ 314, 320, 328, 332, 335, 338, 357, 362, 387–​388, 390–​394, 397–​399, 402–​403, 405–​408, 428–​430, 442, 445, 465–​467, 473, 476–​477, 479, 505, 514–​515, 524, 530, 532 Ahriman, 328 Ahura Mazda, 322, 328 Ahutya, 128 Ajmir, 332 Akbar, 204–​205, 332, 356, 500 Akerman, Jim, 289 Akhenaten/​Akhenaton, 466, 519 Akkad, Akkadian Empire, 95, 125–​126, 168, 170 Al Qaeda, 2 Al Sadr, Muqtada, 2–​3 Alexander the Great, 55–​56, 59, 62, 165, 172, 192, 207, 467, 500–​503 Alexandria, 238, 241, 244–​245 Algaze, Guillermo, 125 Algeria, 279, 331, 336, 392, 397, 399, 408, 514–​516,  534 Algerian War, 34–​35, 514–​515 Algiers, 331 ‘Ali al-Rida, 331, 338 Allahabad, 499 Allawi, Ayad, 2–​4 Alleg, Henri, 515 Allen, Roger, 347

Almohad, 92, 339–​340 Almoravid, 92 Altaf Husain Hali, 354 Amazon, 305, 457 America, 15, 23, 26, 42, 64, 69, 72–​73, 78, 92, 94, 98, 108, 112, 139, 160, 169–​170, 173–​176, 184, 187, 194, 202, 214–​215, 230, 267, 275, 279, 306, 313, 362, 366, 397, 401, 417, 421, 432, 443, 445–​446, 457, 472, 474, 476, 480, 482–​483, 513, 532–​533 American Revolution, 215 American War of Independence, 73 Amin, Samir, 112 Amin, Shahid, 32, 417 Amritsar massacre, 14 An Lushan, 167 Anand, Mulk Raj, 366 Ananos the son of Ananos, 7–​8 Anatolia, 54, 56, 332, 398, 526 Anderson, Benedict, 344, 364, 376, 528 Anderson, Eugene, 50 Andes, 64, 106, 126, 192, 443–​444, 457, 472 Angevin Empire, 160 Angkor, 128 Angola, 394 Anna Komnene, 246 Antioch, 251 Antony, Marc, 241, 401 Arabia, 298, 519 Arabian Peninsula, 96, 280, 338 Arabic, 59, 61, 266, 298, 323–​324, 335, 347–​348, 356, 364 Arabs, 59, 193, 320, 331, 334, 356, 395, 400, 470, 472, 506, 525 Aragon, 334, 366–​367 Archduke Ferdinand, 537 Ardashir I, 323–​325, 328, 340 Arendt, Hannah, 405 Argentina, 215 Aristotle, 59, 323 Armenia, 322 Aron, Raymond, 15–​16, 23, 26, 79, 534, 538 Arrighi, Giovanni, 140 Arthaśāstra, 127

542  Index of Places, Names, and Events Ashoka/​Aśoka, 13, 58, 328, 330, 468, 500 Asia Minor, 95, 97, 332, 502 Asia, xx, xxiii, 32–​33, 41, 54–​55, 61, 64, 68–​70, 74, 82, 92–​93, 95–​97, 101, 103–​106, 108, 126–​129, 143, 167, 169–​170, 172–​173, 175, 197, 200, 235, 267, 294, 308, 320–​ 322, 332–​334, 347, 354, 363, 365, 367, 376, 381, 387–​388, 394–​395, 400, 405, 417, 419, 445, 466–​470, 472, 475, 486, 502, 505, 507, 509, 533 Assur, 129, 180, 208 Assyria, 93, 162, 172, 194, 257 Assyrian Empire, 53, 101, 105, 172, 180, 208 Aswan, 230–​231, 257, 482 Athens, 11, 18, 54, 204 Augustus, 39, 56, 238–​244, 258, 345 Aurangzeb, 8 Auschwitz, 405 Aussaresses, Paul, 515 Australasia, 171, 184, 214, 461, 479, 484 Austria, 28, 66, 186 Ayodhya, 518 Ayyub, 332 Azcapotzalco, 444 Azores, 444 Aztec Empire, 444, 472   Babylon, 53, 56, 171, 326 Badian, Ernst, 502 Baghdad, 2, 62, 192, 194, 295, 331 Bahrain, 129 Baldwin, J. E., 273 Bali, 432 Balkan, 532 Bang, Peter Fibiger, 228, 291, 323, 357, 486, 524 Bangladesh, 144 Barbados, 476–​477 Barghouti, Mourid, 364 Barkey, Karen, 289–​291 Basin of Mexico, 444, 454 Bassett, Thomas, 306 Bay of Algiers, 331 Bay of Bengal, 395 Bayly, C. A., xxi, xxvii, 8, 291, 309–​310, 344, 433 Beattie, James, 50 Beijing/​Peking, 229, 289, 429, 504 Belfast, 518 Belgian Congo, 72 Bellamy, John, 440 Bengal, 15, 174, 279, 309, 353, 395, 481, 504 Bengkulu, 279 Bennison, Amira, 39

Berlin, 22, 41, 70, 313–​314, 357, 395, 398, 536 Berlin Conference, 313–​314, 357, 398 Bhabha, Homi, 40 Bibighar, 424–​425 Bihar, 309 Bismarck, Otto von, 41, 172, 536 Blake, Stephen, 228–​229 Blaut, James, 293 Boeck, Elena, 249 Boer War, 390, 392 Bokassa, Jean-​Bédel, 523 Bolivia, 145, 472, 475 Bombay/​Mumbai, 395, 504, 509, 516–​517 Borges, Jorge Luis, 361 Bosporus, 11, 61, 249 Boswell, T., 140 Botero, Giovanni, 51, 53 Bourbon, 44 Bouvines, 160 Boxer Rebellion, 405, 428 Boyd, Rob, 132 Bradford, 484 Brazil, 69, 145, 188, 201, 360–​361, 378, 445, 456 Breasted, James Henry, 238 Bristol, 390 Britain, 9, 18, 23, 25, 44, 73–​74, 94, 100, 102, 139, 141, 160–​161, 163, 165, 171, 174–​175, 185, 191, 194, 201–​202, 204, 214–​215, 275, 294, 297, 304–​305, 308–​310, 377, 390–​391, 393, 395, 399, 404, 406–​408, 419, 446–​448, 450, 456, 477, 479–​482, 485, 505–​507, 509, 511, 513, 523, 526, 529, 532–​533,  538 Great Britain, 23, 44, 74, 390, 395, 406, 448, 523, 529, 532–​533 British East India Company, 279, 445 British Empire, xix, xxi, 9, 21, 25, 43, 47, 97–​98, 101–​102, 105, 227, 275, 277, 288, 358, 362, 390, 395, 408, 446, 449, 480, 512, 531–​532 British Guiana, 45 British Isles, 399, 407 British West Indies, 215, 282, 393 Brittany, 168 Bronze Age, 24, 34, 50, 54–​55, 78, 109, 115, 125, 128, 133, 147 Brown, N. J., 280 Brown, Peter, 528 Brussels Conference, 398 Buck, Pearl, 361 Buller, Walter, 484 Burawoy, Michael, 146 Burbank, Jane, 9, 14, 39, 267, 275, 333, 342, 449, 527

Index of Places, Names, and Events  543 Burma, 128, 278 Bush, George W., 1 Byatt, A. S., 513 Byblos, 129 Byzantine Empire, 104, 182, 195, 318, 337, 443 Byzantium, 194, 196, 223, 381, 525, 528–​529   Caesar, Gaius Julius, 8–​9, 168, 171, 238, 467, 500, 528 Cairo, 235, 274, 326, 328, 340, 395 Calavita, K., 281 Calcutta, 504–​505, 516. See also Kolkata California, 118, 120–​124, 147 Caligula, 244, 258 Caliphate, 15, 72, 96–​97, 99, 101, 191–​192, 320–​321, 324, 326–​328, 338, 347, 444, 514 Cambodia, 127–​128, 144 Cambyses, 53 Campus Martius, 239–​241, 244 Canada, 98, 399, 403, 479, 514 Canary Islands, 444 Canepa, Matthew, 249 Cannadine, David, 9, 227, 229, 261 Canny, Nicolas, xxi, 531 Cappadocia, 129 Caribbean, 69, 173, 187, 190, 201–​202, 214–​ 215, 377–​378, 390–​391, 395, 444–​446, 454–​455, 476–​477,  514 Carlyle, Thomas, 396 Carneiro, Robert, 462 Carolingian Empire, 205 Carthage, 14, 129 Carthaginian Empire, 463 Casale, Giancarlo, 298 Castile, 334 Caucasia, 320 Caucasus, 171, 347 Cawnpore, 423–​424 Central America, 64, 214, 267 Central Asia, 41, 54, 61, 68, 92, 103, 167, 170, 334, 347, 387, 466, 468–​470, 472 Central Europe, 61, 467 Césaire, Aimé, 405 Ceylon, 277–​278, 482 Chagatai, 92 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 38, 419, 428 Chandragupta Maurya, 127 Chanka, 443 Charlemagne, 106, 444 Charles V, 66, 160, 300 Charles VIII, 173 Chase-​Dunn, Christopher, 25, 73, 113

Chatterjee, Partha, 396 Chaudhuri, K. N., xxiii Chennai. See Madras/​Chennai Chesapeake Bay, 124 Chile, 64, 215, 345, 443 China Sea, 190 China, xix–​xx, 13, 25, 28–​30, 32–​34, 44, 51, 53, 56–​57, 61–​62, 64, 76, 78, 91, 97, 99, 101–​ 102, 104, 106, 127, 130, 133, 135, 139, 143–​144, 161–​164, 167, 169–​173, 176, 190, 193–​195, 213, 267, 276, 288, 294, 298, 303, 313, 322, 339, 342, 345–​346, 349–​351, 361, 363, 367, 381–​382, 386, 389, 394, 401, 404–​405, 428, 430, 433, 440–​442, 445–​446, 449, 451, 460, 463, 466, 468–​470, 473, 475–​476, 478–​481, 486, 504–​505, 525, 527–​529, 533, 538 Chinggis Khan, xx, 62–​63, 276, 525. Chola Empire, 105 Chu, 210 Churchill, Winston, 1, 43 Cicero, 12 Cisleithenia, 535 Clark, Brett, 440 Cleopatra, 238, 241, 401 Clinton, Bill, 84 Coetzee, J. M., 514 Cohen, Paul A., 430 Cohn, Bernard, 293 Colbert, Jean-​Baptiste, 308–​309 Cold War, xix, 4, 29, 48, 75–​76, 533 Collins, Thomas, 507 Columbus, Christopher, 64, 173, 298, 444, 473–​474 Comanche, 72, 461, 483 Confucius, 345–​346 Congo, 72 Conrad, Joseph, xxii, 406 Constantine I (the Great), 244 Constantinople, 66, 193, 198, 204, 223–​226, 230, 238, 244–​245, 247–​251, 258–​259, 262, 296, 330–​332, 443 Constantius II, 244 Cook, James, 37 Cooper, Frederic, 9, 14, 39, 333, 449 Copenhagen, 524, 536 Coptic, 266 Corbin, Alain, 425 Cordoba, 329–​330, 332 Corsica, 442 Cortés, Hernán, 300 Count Taaffe, 537 Crone, Patricia, 31, 338, 383 Crosby, Alfred, 437–​440, 454, 461, 465, 484

544  Index of Places, Names, and Events Cuba, 391 Cushman, Gregory T., 485 Cuzco, 256, 443 Cyprus, 254   Dahlmann, F. C., 536 Dai Viet, 128 Damascus, 192, 194, 329 Dante, 475 Danube, 61 Darius I, 53, 502–​503 Darnton, Robert, 428 Darwin, John, 523 d’Aubigné, Agrippa, 345 Davies, Ben, 508 de Alcenar, José, 360 de Ercilla, Alonso, 345 de Esquivel, Pedro, 301 de Gobineau, 396 de la Vega, Garcilasco, 401, 472 de las Casas, Bartolomé, 384 de Velasco, Juan López, 301 Deccan, 8 Defoe, Daniel, 165 Delhi, 93, 103, 105, 228–​229, 261–​262, 289, 426–​427, 507, 509 Delian League, 18 Delisle, Joseph Nicolas, 303 Delphi, 223 Denmark, xxvii, 529, 534, 536 Desani, G. V., 360 Diamond, Jared, 439–​440, 457 Dias, Bartolomeu, 173 Dilmun, 129 Dinka, 123, 147 Diocletian, 529–​530, 533 Disraeli, Benjamin, 41 Diviciacus, 8 Dome of the Rock, 329 Domitian, 244 Dong Zhongshu, 346 Doyle, Laura, 228 Doyle, Michael, 19, 48 Droysen, J. C., 536 Dumnorix, 8 Durkheim, Emile, 115 Dutch East India Company, 445 Dutch Republic, 165 Eannatum, 170 Early Modern Period, xx, 12, 58, 181, 185, 289, 293, 298, 310–​311, 353 East Africa, 72, 188, 269, 428–​430

East Asia, 92, 96, 101, 103–​104, 106, 126–​127, 470, 486 East India Company, 185, 202, 279, 281, 309, 426, 445, 504, 508 Eastern Han, 56, 106 Eastern Mediterranean, 68, 129, 244, 465 Ecuador, 64, 443 Edo, 229 Egypt, 51, 53–​56, 66, 92, 94–​95, 105, 125–​126, 171, 192–​193, 203, 211, 231–​235, 238, 243, 257, 259, 266, 274, 281, 298, 300, 331, 357, 442, 462, 464–​467, 482, 519, 526 Egypt, Ancient, 231–​233, 238, 519 Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 30–​31 Engels, Friedrich, 528 England, 9, 164–​165, 185, 187, 201–​202, 214–​ 215, 261, 277–​279, 305, 312, 362, 368, 390, 399, 405, 446–​448, 512, 531 English East India Company, 185 Ethiopia, 266–​270 Euphrates, 125, 169, 237 Eurasia, 32, 41, 51, 55–​59, 61–​62, 64, 68–​70, 74, 77–​78, 117, 171, 184, 193, 228, 267, 347, 381, 389, 401, 471, 478, 527 Europe, xix–​xx, xxiii, xxvii, 11–​12, 18, 25, 28, 30–​33, 36, 39, 44, 46, 48, 51, 61–​62, 66, 68–​70, 73, 78, 92–​94, 99, 103–​104, 108, 114, 120, 128, 133, 135, 139, 141, 143, 147, 160, 163, 165, 169–​170, 173–​175, 185, 194, 200–​201, 203, 215, 276, 280, 282, 289, 293–​295, 298, 303, 311–​313, 322, 335, 340, 345, 347, 353–​354, 366, 376–​377, 383–​384, 390–​391, 393, 398, 405, 409, 418, 425, 438–​440, 442, 445, 448, 450, 466–​467, 469, 472, 476–​477, 480, 483–​484, 486, 524, 528–​530, 534   Falkland Islands, 512, 514 Fanon, Frantz, 34–​36 Faroe Islands, 524 Fatehpur, 328 Fatimid Caliphate, 328, 338 Ferdowsi, 348 Ferhat, H., 326 Fertile Crescent, 91 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 536 Finkielkraut, Alain, 12 Firuz Tughluq, 328 Fitzpatrick, Peter, 272, 283 Flaubert, Gustave, 36 Florence, 14, 297 Foster, John Bellamy, 440–​441 Foucault, Michel, 37–​38, 305

Index of Places, Names, and Events  545 France, 26, 44, 73–​74, 94, 100, 103–​104, 139, 173–​175, 185–​187, 194, 202, 259–​260, 294, 297, 303, 307–​309, 356, 377, 391, 393, 395, 404, 406–​408, 513–​516, 530, 534, 536 Frank, Andre Gunder, 112, 439 French Revolution, 139, 290, 308 Freud, Sigmund, 497–​499, 501–​502, 510–​511, 518–​520 Friedland, 280 Fuchs, Barbara, 228 Fukuyama, Francis, xix, 4   Galanter, Marc, 281 Gallagher, John, 25, 47 Gandhi, 9, 34–​35, 38, 354, 361–​362 Ganges/​Ganga, 15, 228, 466, 481, 504–​505 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, xxii Gaugamela, 502 Gaul, 8, 191, 204, 357 Geertz, Clifford, 176 Gellner, Ernest, 30–​31, 326 Geneva, 270 Genoa, 183, 195–​196 Genyue, 470 George V, 261 Georgia, 409 German Confederation, 524, 536 German Peasant Wars, 419 Germany, 42, 44–​45, 74, 102–​104, 142, 175, 366, 402, 404–​406, 529, 536 Ghana, 400, 526, 532 Gibbon, Edward, 77, 530 Gibraltar, 514 Gilgamesh, 126 Gilpin, Robert, 25 Gilroy, Paul, 511–​513 Go, Julian, 44 Godelier, Maurice, 450 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 500–​501 Gojjam, 267 Gold Coast, 532 Golden Horde, 92, 194, 381, 384 Goldstone, Jack, 123 Goody, Jack, 54–​55 Gough, Katherine, 422 Grabar, André, 224 Graeber, David, 455 Gramsci, Antonio, 35, 424 Granada, 444 Grand Canal, 469 Great Britain. See Britain Greater Syria, 211

Greece, 39, 79, 183, 256, 344, 353–​354, 367, 442, 453, 466–​467 Greeks, 129, 132, 172, 207, 344, 350, 356, 360 Greenland, 66, 478, 524 Greenwich, 308 Grenada, 383 Gruzinsky, Serge, 37 Guangxi Province, 304 Guha, Ranajit, 417–​421, 423–​428, 431–​432 Gujarati, 361, 517 Gulf War, 169, 513 Gulhane Edict, 335 Guptas, 267 Gushnasp, 324 Guti, 126   Habsburg, 66, 104, 141, 160, 165, 188, 335, 376, 444–​445, 451, 524, 531, 535 Hadrian, 10, 81, 169, 244, 532 Hagia Sophia, 230, 246, 330 Haida, 121 Haile Selassie I, 266–​268, 270–​271 Haitian Revolution, 139 Hakka, 339 Haldane, Richard Burton, 277–​278, 282 Haldon, John, 32–​33, 115 Hall, Bruce, 400 Hall, John, 10, 31–​32, 45 Hall, T. D., 113 Halliday, P., 269, 279 Hamburg, 395, 536 Hammurabi, 328 Han dynasty, 13, 34, 56, 59, 61, 92, 96, 99, 101–​103, 106, 127, 164, 172, 186, 210, 345–​346, 349, 351, 386, 441–​442, 449, 451, 468–​469 Hangzhou, 79 Hardt, Michael, 20 Harley, J. B., 291–​293, 305 Harper, Michael, 168 Hatshepsut, 234–​237, 256–​257 Hawaii, 37, 282 Heaney, Seamus, 514 Heath, Edward, 512 Hebrew, 519–​520 Hejaz/​Hijaz, 194, 331 Helena, the mother of Constantine I, 279, 330–​331 Heliopolis, 236, 238–​239, 242 Hemacandra, 359 Henry VIII, 523 Heraclius, 331 Herbert, Christopher, 507

546  Index of Places, Names, and Events Herero, 72, 405, 429 Herodotus, 11, 54 Heslin, Peter, 241 Hilferding, Rudolf, 22, 26 Hillenbrand, R., 329 Hilsdale, Cecily, 39 Himalayas, 61 Hinds, Martin, 383 Hindu Kush, 45, 56 Hindushah Nakhjavani, 348 Hindustan, 34 Hintze, Otto, 44 Hitler, Adolf, 106, 159, 405 Hobbes, Thomas, 12, 17 Hobsbawm, Eric, 418, 433 Hobson, J. A., 21, 393 Hobson, John, 524, 532 Hokkaido, 400 Holland, 185, 486, 529, 534 Holstein, 524, 535–​536 Holy Roman Empire, 62, 93, 104, 320, 383, 451, 524 Homer, 272, 344, 354 Hong Kong, 144, 278, 479, 484, 514 Hopkins, Keith, 163 Horace, 39 Horden, Peregrine, 473 Hostetler, Laura, 37, 50 Howe, Stephen, 16, 77 Howland, D. R., 350 Huancavelica, 475 Huang Zunxian, 350 Hudson’s Bay, 445 Hui, Victoria Tin-​bor, 46 Huizong, 470 Humayun, 335 Humfress, Caroline, 36 Hungary, 66, 533, 537 Huns, 92, 194 Hurrians, 171 Hyksos, 171 Hyphasis, 56   Iberia, 129, 329, 332, 334, 339, 383, 442 Iberian peninsula, 97, 301, 332, 444 Ibn Khaldun, 13, 40, 325–​327, 329, 340, 526, 530 Ibn Tumart, 339–​340 Ibrahim Pasha, 251, 254, 298 Iceland, 66, 524 Ikenberry, John, 42–​44 Ilkhanate, 93, 194 Ilkhanid, 105 Inca/​Inka, 64, 92, 108, 123, 172–​173, 193, 256, 353, 401, 441, 443, 445, 449–​450, 452, 454, 472–​473

India, 8–​9, 13, 27, 34–​35, 41, 56, 61, 66, 68, 72–​73, 76, 78, 105, 108, 133, 144, 171–​ 172, 174, 184–​185, 197, 202, 204, 215, 227–​229, 261–​262, 274–​275, 278–​282, 297–​298, 308–​310, 313, 320–​322, 328, 330, 334, 336, 353–​354, 356, 358–​362, 365–​367, 389–​390, 395, 399, 417, 419–​ 422, 424, 426–​427, 431–​433, 440, 445–​ 446, 463, 466–​468, 472, 478, 481–​482, 484, 499–​500, 503–​509, 511–​514, 516, 524, 526, 528–​529, 537 Indian Mutiny, 507–​509 Indian Ocean, 64, 68–​69, 173, 188, 190, 298, 300, 395, 445 Indonesia, 128, 445, 450, 528 Indus, 51, 54, 95, 129, 183, 347, 466 Indus Valley, 95, 183 Inghilahriz, Louisette, 515 Iran, 53, 56, 95, 194–​195, 204, 267, 273, 281, 298, 328–​329, 331, 340, 347–​348, 466, 513 Iranian Plateau, 347 Iraq, 1–​5, 7, 10, 170, 194, 338, 513 Iron Age, 34, 50, 52–​53, 55 Isfahan, 229 Islamic State, 329 Israel, 175, 364, 520 Istanbul, 223–​225, 229, 237–​238, 247–​248, 258–​259, 262, 282, 297, 299, 330, 332, 395, 504 Italian peninsula, 442, 503 Italy, 139, 162, 173, 357, 366, 406, 442, 513   Jahangir, 328–​329, 500 Jaipur, 9, 289 Jamaica, 445, 477 James, Henry, 238 Jamestown, 304, 445 Japura, 305 Jefferson, Thomas, 403 Jerusalem, 6–​8, 10, 330–​331, 380, 518 Jesus, 6, 72, 139, 322, 528 Jewish Rebellion, 6 Jimma, 267 Jin, 92, 103, 106, 469–​470 John of Gischala, 7 Jones, Ryan Tucker, 484, 486 Jones, Sir William, 353 Josephus, 6–​8, 10 Judea, 6 Jung, Carl, 501 Jupiter, xix, 330, 497 Jurchen, 92, 103 Justinian, 272, 353   Kafa, 267 Kafiristan, 500

Index of Places, Names, and Events  547 Kandahar, 509 Kangxi Emperor, 303 Karachi, 395 Karnak, 223, 230, 232–​238, 244, 256 Kashgar, 347 Kassites, 171 Kautsky, John H., 30–​31 Kaye, John, 508 Kazakhstan, 171 Kelly, Raymond, 123 Kennedy, Paul, 44, 532 Kenya, 395, 397, 399, 408 Kenyatta, Jomo, 407 Kew, 482 Khautilya, 127 Khazars, 194 Khiva, 347 Khorezm, 92 Khubilai. See Kublai Khan/​Khubilai Khusru I, 211, 214 Kidir, 337 Kiel, 536 Kiev, 92, 108, 249–​250, 384 Kipling, Rudyard, 41, 161, 508–​511 Kirch, Patrick, 124 Kirilov, Ivan, 303 Kirkpatrick, James Achilles, 509 Kish, 125 Kissinger, Henry, 43 Kivelson, Valerie, 302 Kolkata, 516. See also Calcutta Kollman, Nancy, 275 Kołodziejczyk, Darius, 228 Korea, 144, 176, 288, 400–​401 Korean Peninsula, 514 Kosovo, 518 Kostantiniyye, 250 Krepinevich, Andrew, 169 Kublai Khan/​Khubilai, 97, 381–​382 Kumar, Krishan, 20 Kush, 45, 56 Kushan Empire, 105 Kwatkiutl, 121   La Graufesenque, 356 Lagash, 170 Lagos, 407 Lall, Chimmun, 507 Landívar, Rafael, 355 Lane, Christopher, 510 Lane, Frederic, 73 Latin America, 112, 160, 175, 366, 421, 532–​533 Latour, Bruno, 291 Lavigerie, Bishop, 331 Lawson, Henry, 365

Lebanon, 464 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 17–​18 Lenin, Vladimir, 20–​23, 25, 139, 393, 524 Lenski, Gerhard, 123, 130–​131 Levant, 467 Li Si, 58 Li Zhizao, 303 Liang, 92, 106, 339 Liao, 92, 469–​470 Libya, 54 Lieberman, Victor, 128 Lieven, Dominic, 9, 529, 533, 537 Lisbon, 297 Lithuania, 93, 108 Liu, Lydia, 351 London, 2, 3, 47, 214–​215, 238, 278, 289, 309, 366–​367, 392, 395, 397, 504, 507, 513, 531–​532 Lorcin, Patricia, 515 Lord Bryce, 40 Lord Burnham, 508 Lord Curzon, 376 Lord Halsbury, 16 Lord Lugard, 8, 530 Lord Roberts, 228, 507, 509 Lorenzen, P. H., 536 Louis XIV, 297, 308 Lower Egypt, 125, 234 Lucan, 345 Lucknow, 508–​509 Lundestad, Geier, 43 Luoyang, 471 Luttwak, Edward, 47, 168 Luxemburg, Rosa, 22–​23 Luxor, 232–​234, 237, 259 Lydia, 351   Maale, 267 Macedon, 55, 56, 172, 467, 500 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 13–​15, 159, 173 Mackinder, Harold, 41–​42 Madeira, 173, 444 Madras/​Chennai, 504, 516 Madrid, 504 Magellan, 299 Maghreb, 97, 516 Magyars, 535–​536 Mahabharata, 171 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 174 Maharashtra, 516 Mair, V. H., 348–​349 Majeed, Javed, 39, 73 Maji Maji Rebellion, 416, 428–​429, 431 Makdisi, U., 336 Malacca, xx, 61 Malaya, 128, 408

548  Index of Places, Names, and Events Mali, 62, 92, 394, 400 Malthus, Thomas, 446–​448 Mamluks, 211, 298, 340 Manchester, 480 Manchu, 68, 97–​100, 339, 351, 386 Manchuria, 303, 400 Mani, 322 Manichaeism, 322 Manila, 475 Mann, Michael, xxvi, 31, 35, 48–​49 Manto, Sadat Hasan, 365 Mao Zedong, 32, 367 Maori, 124, 485 Marco Polo, 300 Marduk, 326 Markham, Clement, 481 Marquesas Islands, 124 Marx, Karl, 446–​447, 455 Mashhad, 331 Massachusetts, 312 Mau Mau, 399, 417, 507 Mauritania, 129 Maurya Empire, 172, 467 Mawlay Isma‘il, 329 Maya, 486 Mazdak, 337 Mazzini, Giuseppe, xxii, 362 McCloud River, 121 McNeill, John, 477 McNeill, William, xxii Mecca, 66, 192, 194, 251, 331, 395 Medes, 53, 208 Media, 3, 93, 142, 197 Medina, 66 Mediterranean, 6, 31, 47, 56–​57, 59, 61–​62, 68, 79, 116, 129, 168–​169, 198, 230, 232, 238, 244, 257, 267, 289, 294–​298, 333, 336, 353, 382, 394, 442–​444, 453, 465–​467,  473 Mehta, Suketu, 517 Melville, Elinor, 474 Menelik II, 271 Mesoamerica, 126, 171, 445 Mesopotamia, 32, 51, 53–​56, 66, 95, 125–​126, 129, 170, 328, 462–​465, 467, 486, 526, 532 Mexico, 37, 106, 139, 145, 300, 355, 444, 449, 454, 472, 474, 486 Middle Ages, 305, 353 Ming, 64, 68, 92, 103, 106, 173, 229, 294, 303, 347, 386, 394, 531–​532 Mithra, 322 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 511 Modelski, George, 127

Moghador, 129 Mommsen, Theodor, 48, 536 Mongol Empire, 94, 97, 104–​105, 194, 381 Mongolia, 468 Mongols, xx, 98, 193, 195, 381–​382, 384, 386, 463, 470–​471, 525 Monson, Jamie, 430 Montesquieu, 25 Morant Bay Rebellion, 507 Moretti, Franco, 343 Morgenthau, Hans, 42–​43 Morocco, 320–​321, 328–​329, 339–​340 Moscow, 139, 176, 384, 395, 405 Motyl, Alexander, 19, 30 Mozambique, 394 Mughal Empire, 105, 197, 445 Muhammad, 3, 322, 338, 354 Muhammad Iqbal, 354 Mukherjee, Rudrangshu, 423–​426 Mullen, A., 356 Mumbai. See Bombay/​Mumbai Münkler, Herfried, 18, 45 Murad III, 251 Muscovy, 194, 472 Mussolini, Benito, 270   Nahuatl, 302, 355, 358 Naipaul, V. S., xix, 514 Nairobi, 407 Najaf,  1–​6 Namaqua, 429 Nana Sahib, 424 Nanking, 339 Nantes, 390 Naples, 500 Napoleonic Wars, 141 Narayan, R. K., 357 Nauru, 485 Nazi Germany, 42, 102, 405–​406 Near East, 11, 15, 50–​51, 53, 56, 61, 79, 267–​268, 333, 337, 462–​463, 465–​466, 468, 472 Necipoğlu, Gülru, 226, 229, 254 Nefedov, Sergey, 123–​124 Negri, Antonio, 20 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 354 Nero, 6 New England, 187, 202, 214, 312 New Kingdom Egypt, 171, 232 New Rome, 230, 244–​245 New Spain, 215, 281, 301, 312–​313, 355, 474 New World, 11, 32, 42, 64–​68, 74, 169, 200, 275, 298, 301, 304, 309, 335,

Index of Places, Names, and Events  549 349–​350, 439, 441, 444–​446, 454, 461, 472–​479,  484 New York, 238, 270 Newfoundland, 66 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 357 Nigeria, 277, 388 Nika Riots, 246 Nile, 54, 234–​235, 244, 257, 465 Nineveh, 208, 257 Nkrumah, Kwame, 23, 407, 532 North Africa, 54, 105–​106, 192, 320, 328, 332, 335, 338, 466, 476, 515, 530 North America, 15, 69, 72, 139, 160, 169–​170, 174–​175, 184, 187, 202, 214, 306, 362, 397, 432, 445–​446, 476, 480, 483 North Atlantic, 66 North China, 468, 473 North India, 13, 56, 61, 66, 197 Northeast Africa, 465 Northern California, 118, 120–​123 Northern Nigeria, 388 Northern Wei, 103, 106 Northern Zhou, 92, 103, 106 Norway, 524, 535 Nuer, 123   Obama, Barack, 499 Ocean Island, 485 Oceania, 171 Octavian, 241. See also Augustus Okinawa, 400 Old Delhi, 228 Old Kingdom, 95 Oldenburg dynasty, 524 Oliensis, Ellen, 498 Oman, 46, 108, 333, 337, 383, 502 Opium Wars, 26 Oppenheimer, Franz, 531 Ortelius, Abraham, 297 Ortner, Sherry, 426 Ostia, 258 Ottoman Empire, 45, 105, 182, 209, 230, 251, 268, 276, 281, 294, 298, 300, 321, 325, 333, 335–​336, 340, 398, 530 Ouyang Xun, 346 Oz, Amos, 364   Pacific, 108, 121–​122, 124, 147, 176, 291, 405, 443, 480, 485, 505 Pacific Northwest, 121–​122, 147 Padel, Felix, 422 Padrón, Ricardo, 300 Paiute, 432 Pakistan, 129, 467, 500

Palestine, 7, 364 Paris, 232, 259–​260, 289, 307–​308, 366–​367, 377, 392, 395, 513, 534 Parsi, 205 Partha, 396 Parthia, 93 Parthian Empire, 105 Peking. See Beijing/​Peking Peloponnesian War, 204 Pera, 251 Persepolis, 207, 328 Persian Empire, xxiv, 56, 159, 172, 192, 207 Persian Gulf, 66 Peru, 64, 445, 449–​450, 454, 473 Peter the Great, 186, 302, 401 Peter, Rolf, 447 Petersburg, 289 Philip II, 300–​301, 531 Philippines, 128, 428 Piri Reis, 298–​299 Pisa, 14, 195 Plassey, Battle of, 308 Plato, 354, 362 Pliny the Elder, 238 Poland, 406, 532 Pollock, Sheldon, 355, 518 Polybius, xxvii Pomeranz, Kenneth, 390, 439, 447, 481 Pompeii, 500–​502 Pontius Pilate, 6 Porter, Philip, 306 Porterfield, Todd, 260 Portland, 139 Portugal, 68, 93, 100, 188, 294, 297–​300, 408, 445 Portuguese Empire, 463 Potosí, 475 Pourshariati, P., 320 Powell, J. Enoch, 512 Prochaska, David, 515–​516 Prussia, 141 Psametik II, 239 Psyche, 365 Ptolemy VIII, 232 Pufendorf, Samuel, 17 Punjab, 56, 482 Punt, 235, 257 Purcell, Nicholas, 473 Pushkin, Alexander, 401   Qianlong, 303 Qin Shi Huang, 349 Qin dynasty, 13, 33, 46, 56, 58, 92, 96, 98, 103, 106, 209–​210, 349, 441, 468

550  Index of Places, Names, and Events Qing dynasty, xx, 68, 70, 72, 76, 92, 97–​99, 103, 106, 213, 228, 303, 311–​312, 347, 351, 386, 429, 433, 505, 532 Qinghai, 313 Quebec, 277 Quint, D., 345, 352   Rajasthan, 9 Ramses II, 232–​233, 238, 259 Red Fort, 229 Reed, John, 139 Remezov, Semon, 302 Renaissance, 13, 289, 292 Rennell, James, 309 Rhine, 61 Rhodesia, 397, 408 Rodger, Nicholas, 155 Roger II, 295 Roman Empire, xxii, 33, 47, 61–​62, 77, 93, 104–​105, 108, 127, 163–​164, 167–​168, 183, 191–​193, 197–​198, 320, 322, 333, 337, 353–​354, 356, 379–​380, 383, 389, 442–​444, 451, 455, 466, 469, 500, 505–​ 506, 524, 531 Romanov Empire, 159, 302 Rome, xx–​xxi, xxv, 6, 8, 31, 61, 92, 98–​99, 106, 108, 127, 162–​163, 191–​192, 198–​199, 203–​204, 230, 238–​239, 241–​245, 257, 259, 262, 269, 272, 275–​276, 288, 321, 340, 342, 344, 353–​354, 357, 367, 379–​ 380, 382, 389, 441–​442, 449, 451, 453–​ 454, 465–​467, 497–​499, 502, 504, 524, 526, 528–​531 Rose, Jacqueline, 519 Rosenthal, Franz, 326 Ross, Corey, 480 Ross, Ronald, 484 Roy, Arundhati, 514 Roy, M. N., 366 Runciman, Garry, 16, 180 Rushdie, Salman, 360–​361, 512–​514 Ruskin, John, 362, 528 Russia, xix, 28, 41, 44, 46, 66, 78, 93, 97–​ 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 139, 141, 143, 186, 267–​268, 275, 279, 294, 297, 303, 384–​385, 400–​401, 404–​405, 409, 532, 536–​537 Ruzbih, 348 Rwanda, 5, 376   Sacramento Valley, 120 Saddam Hussein, 1–​2 Sahara, 62, 171, 394, 400 Sahel, 106

Said, Edward, 8, 11, 35–​36, 38, 344, 519–​520 Saka Empire, 93, 105 Saljuq Sultanate, 321 Sallust, 40 Samnium, 502 Samudragupta, 499 San Francisco, 288 San Marco, 223 Sanskrit, 61, 353–​356, 358–​359, 362, 500 Santhal Rebellion, 427 Santiago de Compostela, 332 Sarai, 381 Sardinia, 442 Sartre, Jean-​Paul, 515 Sasanian Empire, 105, 211, 334, 337, 347 Satichaura Ghat, 424 Savarkar, Vir, 508 Scheidel, Walter, 55, 129, 131–​132 Schleswig, 524, 535–​536 Schmitt, Carl, 42, 44–​45, 76 Schumpeter, Joseph, 20–​21, 25–​26 Schwarz, Bill, 512 Schwarz, Roberto, 360–​361, 368 Scotland, 523–​524 Scott, James C., 292, 312, 417, 426 Seattle, 139 Sédar, Léopold, 402 Seine, 22 Seleucid Empire, 105, 207 Seleucid kings, 207 Selim I, 298 Sennacherib, 257 Senusret I, 232 Sepoy Mutiny/Uprising, 507–​509 Septimius Severus, 245 Sety I, 233 Seville, 297 Shaanxi, 468 Shah ‘Abbas, 329, 331 Shahid, 32, 417 Shahjahanabad, 228 Shahnama, 348, 359 Shakespeare, William, 361 Shang, 92, 95, 167, 192 Sharpe, Alfred, 483 Shiji, 58 Siberia, 15, 97, 186, 302, 313 Sichuan, 173 Sicily, xxii, 295, 442 Sidon, 129 Sieferle, Rolf Peter, 447 Silk Road, 470 Sima Qian, 58 Sinai, 365

Index of Places, Names, and Events  551 Sinan, 226, 330 Singapore, 144 Singha, 279 Smith, Adam, 25, 186, 534 Smith, John, 124, 312 Smith, Joseph, 139 Socrates, 354 Sokoto Caliphate, 72 Song, 62, 92, 101, 103, 106, 210, 271, 346, 470 Songhay, xx, 62, 394, 400 South Africa, 145, 277–​278, 362, 387–​388, 391–​392, 397, 402–​403, 408, 479, 514, 532 South America, 23, 64, 69, 73, 98, 108, 215, 267, 306, 313, 417, 443, 445, 472, 482 South Asia, 103–​106, 126–​127, 197, 267, 387, 395, 417, 419, 507 South Atlantic, 512 South Caucasus, 347 South China, 473, 479 South India, 358 South Korea, 144 Southern Asia, 354 Southern Mesopotamia, 462 Soviet Union/​USSR, 4, 30, 43–​44, 74, 76, 94, 97–​98, 103–​4, 395, 405–​406, 409, 533 Spain, 66, 68, 93, 98, 100, 165, 185–​186, 188, 202, 204, 215, 251, 281, 294, 297, 300–​ 302, 312–​313, 334, 355, 357, 383–​384, 445, 474–​475, 477, 513, 532–​535 Spanish Empire, 47, 335, 384, 404, 445 Sparta, 54 Spencer, Diana, 502 Sri Lanka, 481 Srivijaya, xx, 61 St Helena, 279 Stalin, Joseph, 48 Stern, Steve, 421 Stone Age, 111, 133, 146 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 228 Sudan, 428 Suetonius, 243 Sui, 59, 92, 106, 346, 469 Sullivan, Gordon, 168 Sumer, 130, 170, 183 Surat, 395 Sweden, 450, 524 Syria, 7, 56, 66, 176, 192, 194, 203, 207, 211, 298, 328, 330–​332, 338, 467, 526 Szeman, I., 367   Taagepera, Rein, 91 Tacitus, 167, 176 Tagus, 228

Taiping Rebellion, 139, 339, 433 Taiwan, 144, 349, 351, 363, 400 Taizong, 471 Talas River, 470 Tang dynasty, 59, 61, 92, 99, 101, 103, 106, 167, 276, 346, 469–​471 Tanganyika, 395, 406 Tansar, 323–​324, 340 Taraknath Das, 362 Taurus Mountains, 464 Teng, E. J., 351 Tennessee, 139 Tenochtitlan, 444 Teotihuacan, 472 Thailand, 127–​128 Thapar, Romila, 356 Thatcher, Margaret, 512, 532 Thebes, 238, 257 Theodosius I, 247–​248, 327 Third Dynasty of Ur, 126, 160 Thirty Years’ War, 141 Thompson, E. P., 418 Thornber, Karen, 461, 468–​469 Thutmose I, 235, 237 Thutmose II, 235 Thutmose III, 224, 236–​238, 244–​245 Tian Shan, 194 Tibet, 92, 303, 313, 514 Tibetan, 381–​382 Tigris, 125, 129, 167 Timur, 14 Titicaca, 443–​444, 454 Titus, 7, 10 Tiwanaku, 472 Tlingit, 121 Tokugawa, 229 Tolstoy, Leo, 362 Tomlins, Christopher, 274, 279 Topkapı Palace, 226, 229, 251 Tordesillas, Treaty of, 297, 305 Trajan, 532 Tuamotus Islands, 485 Tuareg, 394 Tunis, 321 Túpac Amaru, 445 Turchin, Peter, 123–​124 Turkey, 129, 252, 464, 472 Tutuola, Amos, 360 Twining, William, 271 Tyne, 167   Ukraine, 406, 409, 537 Uluburun, 464 Umayyad Caliphate, 96, 99, 101, 444

552  Index of Places, Names, and Events Umayyad Dynasty, 203 Umma, 170, 383 United Nations/​UN, 34, 42–​43, 121, 141–​142, 144, 163, 270–​271, 283, 475, 509 United Provinces, 116 United States/​USA, xix, xxi, xxiv, xxvi–​xxvii, 1–​6, 10–​11, 18, 20, 26–​27, 36, 43–​45, 48, 74, 76, 78, 94–​95, 97, 99, 108, 114, 126, 137, 139–​143, 165, 168–​169, 175, 180, 227, 229, 238, 257–​258, 268, 270–​271, 280, 282, 293, 300, 307, 352, 358, 366, 377–​378, 384, 391, 403–​404, 406, 423, 426, 431, 438, 441, 446, 448–​450, 454–​ 457, 466, 478, 497, 499, 502–​503, 508, 513, 516–​517, 520, 523, 525, 527–​530, 532, 535, 537–​538 Ur, 126, 160, 168, 329 Urals, 99 Uruk, 125 ‘Uthman, 329   van den Wyngaerde, Anton, 300 Vasunia, Phiroze, 35, 40, 353 Vatican, 297 Veneti, 168 Venezuela, 45, 145 Venice, 62, 68, 183, 195–​196, 223 Versailles, 42 Vespasian, 7 Via Appia, 416 Victoria, Queen, 228 Vienna, 26, 520, 529, 536–​537 Vietnam, 127–​128, 143–​144, 408, 468, 513, 538 Viqueira, Juan Pedro, 423 Virgil, xix, 345, 352, 354, 498 Virginia, 313, 445   Wæver, Ole, 44 Walcott, Derek, 514 Wales, 523 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 483 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 24, 27, 112, 144 War of 1812, 139 Warring States Period, 46 Washington monument, 230–​231 Washington, DC, 230–​231, 513, 518, 538 Watson, Adam, 46 Weber, Max, 17, 26, 28, 33, 156–​158, 203 Weimar Republic, 22

Wen Xuan, 346 West Africa, 72, 306, 429, 524, 530 West Indies, 24, 202, 215, 282, 393, 477, 524 Western Anatolia, 54 Western Asia, 321–​322, 333 Western Europe, 66, 143, 160, 163, 169–​170, 173, 175, 200–​201, 203, 276, 383–​384 Western Ghats, 481 Western Han, 92, 103, 106 Western Iran, 53 Western Mediterranean, 129 Westphalia, 127, 135 Wickham, Chris, 32 Wilson, Angus, 510 Wintu, 119–​122 Wittfogel, Karl August, 29–​30 Wolf, Eric, 32 Woolf, Greg, 380 World War I, 5, 47, 74, 97, 141, 175, 376–​377, 398, 405–​406, 480, 533–​534 World War II, 29, 42, 44–​45, 73, 76, 97, 102, 141, 143, 165, 175, 363, 376, 393, 395, 399, 402, 404–​407, 409, 509, 512, 533, 538 Wounded Knee Massacre, 432 Wright, Erik Olin, 145 Wu Zhuoliu, 363 Wu/​Wudi, 161, 346   Xi Jinping, 168 Xianbei, 92 Xiongnu, 92, 96, 161, 351, 468–​469 Xuanzong, 167–​168   Yana, 119–​120 Yang Guifei, 167 Yellow River, 51, 62, 162 Yemen, 398 Yersin, Alexandre, 484 Yinka Shonibare, 314 Yuan Xuetong, 42 Yuan, xxvii, 32, 42, 64, 99, 106, 386, 471 Yugoslavia, 5, 409   Zaheer, Syed Sajjad, 366–​367 Zahn, Wilhelm, 501 Zanzibar, 395, 400 Zapatista revolt, 139 Zarathustra/​Zoroaster,  322 Zhao, Dingxin, 34 Zhou dynasty, 56, 91, 95, 162, 167, 210, 346