Empires in World History: Commonality, Divergence and Contingency 981161539X, 9789811615399

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Empires in World History Commonality, Divergence and Contingency

Empires in World History

Niv Horesh

Empires in World History Commonality, Divergence and Contingency

Niv Horesh Western Sydney University Penrith, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-981-16-1539-9 ISBN 978-981-16-1540-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For my brother, Ori Horesh

Contents

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1

Introduction

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State of the Field

19

3

Analysis of the Comparative Scholarly Literature on Empire in Antiquity

69

Analysis of the Comparative Scholarly Literature on Empire in the Early Modern and Modern Ages

81

5

Is the US an Empire ?

93

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Is China an Emerging Empire

101

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Future Scenarios

113

4

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract Racism gradually became démodé after World War II, and all powers shunned the label “imperialist” while blithely apportioning it to their opponents. During the heyday of the Cold War, the USSR thus called US foreign policy “imperialist”; Ronald Reagan on his part pointed to the USSR as “Evil Empire” and ridiculed Soviet allies as “satellites”. Nevertheless, Americans have ceaselessly been measuring themselves up for better or worse against imperial Rome. Similarly, even anti-traditionalist Maoism drew on occasion on imperial Chinese metonym, and Stalin relied on traditional Russian chauvinism in no small measure. The knots that tie racism to empire building have thus not gone away altogether. Keywords Empire · Racism · USSR · US · Maoism

The Empires of the Future are the Empires of the Mind Winston Churchill

Over half a century after decolonization, the shadow of empire still falls on the streets of the nation-state, souring social cohesion. As the Black Lives Matter movement is reminding us, the legacy of Atlantic plantation slavery is still being bitterly contested. In London, for example, a local museum decided to voluntarily take down the statue of a prominent © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 N. Horesh, Empires in World History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5_1

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slave trader, Robert Milligan (1746–1809), from its front yard this June. There were more discordant confrontations elsewhere too: at Oxford University, there have been long-standing calls to take down the statue of prominent empire builder Cecil Rhodes, and in Bristol, protestors violently tore down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston (1636– 1721). Protestors’ ire far from subsided there, and next an assault on the statue of British wartime hero Winston Churchill near Parliament House transpired. London Mayor, Sadiq Khan said in response that a review of “problematic” statues and street names was to follow, but added Churchill was not within its remit.1 In America, where all Founding Fathers except Hamilton owned slaves, the situation was rendered even more complex late into President Trump’s term in office. Here, disapprobation at the Confederate Flag quickly degenerated—following George Floyd’s tragic killing—into violence on the streets in defiance of Corona social-distancing bylaws, culminating in an attempt to topple the statue of former President Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, Washington DC.2 And in Portland, Oregon, a smaller group of rioters sprayed a statue of George Washington with the slogan “genocidal colonist”.3 Jackson, like Churchill, was a wartime hero: he fought for US sovereignty against the British and their Native American allies, and helped recover Florida from the Spanish. But progressives denounce his presidency today due to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which saw tens of thousands banished west of the Mississippi. Not that America’s main rivals, Russia and China, have a clean historical slate being as they were storied land empires in their own right. Czar Alexander I butchered the Chechens; the Qianlong Emperor of China systematically persecuted, in turn, the Zunghars. Many Zunghars suffered from the outbreak of epidemics as a result, much like Native Americans earlier in the colonization process.4 That said, the plight of Muslims in Russia and of

1 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-52977088. 2 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-andrew-jackson-statue-prison-warning1512717. 3 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/19/us/portland-george-washington-statue-top pled-trnd/index.html. 4 Peter C. Perdue (2010), China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press).

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the Zunghars in China did not quite engender the same racially-fraught discourse that tarred millions as inferior in the Americas. The Jackson-Churchill furore is a reminder that those opposing one empire were often the builder of another. Modern empire builders rarely saw themselves as racist. As late as the 1900s, “imperialism”, i.e. enthusiasm for empire building mainly in Africa, had not yet carried negative baggage. On the contrary, empire builders often portrayed their imperial venture as more benign than that of the incumbent power of the day. Thus, Churchill in his youth proclaimed that the goal of British imperialism was to reclaim.5 …from barbarism fertile regions and large populations…to give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain.

Today’s multicultural society in the West is having trouble acknowledging its imperial mainspring partly because the Holocaust demonstrated where the excesses of racism can lead. Even Social Darwinism and eugenics have thus fallen out of grace. The linkage between Atlantic slavery and later iterations of racial oppression is openly discussed in the academic literature, and Hollywood productions like Avatar, Star Wars or Lord of the Rings do their bit to entrench the negative image of empire. It seems only sports clubs still happily carry the epithet “empire” by their fans. However, the metrics of integration still show a wide racial divide speaking to the vexed legacy of empire. Thomas Jefferson predicted the US would become a towering “Empire of Liberty”, and other linkages with the Roman Empire always persisted in American political discourse. But the post-war era saw great reluctance by American leaders of both Democratic and Republican persuasions to relate their country to anything imperial. In a 2003 interview, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (Rep.) averred: We don’t seek empires. We’re not imperialistic. We never have been. I can’t imagine why you’d even ask the question.

5 Niall Ferguson (2012), Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (Penguin), p. 23.

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And in his famous 2009 Cairo speech former President Obama (Dem.) condemned the impact of colonialism on the Islamic world. He went on to describe his country as:6 …[o]ne of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words - - within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum -- Out of many, one.

Thus, for Niall Ferguson, the US is in fact an “empire in denial” perhaps like Englishman John Newton who, on the one hand, wrote Amazing Grace but had owned slaves for a long time beforehand, on the other hand. No empire is purely altruistic but the US should actually be proud of being a (liberal) empire because, according to Ferguson, it has presided over the sort of globalization that has been lifting the likes of China and India out of poverty, in contrast to Marxian clichés.7 At the same time, one might add, the average American has seen a stagnation of his or her income in real terms. In Roman terms, the phenomenon begs the question of “patrician” vs “plebeian” interests when it comes to empire building. As threats of sending the army into US cities mount, it’s worth recalling that in the Roman Republic the word “imperium” had a distinct domestic flair. Before it connoted exceedingly big entity ruling over extensive remote territory, it had actually stood for both making war and executing laws at home.8 Following decolonization, the US, China and the USSR fought over the hearts and minds of peoples in the developing world, and Africa was certainly the fulcrum for many of these battles. All three had an imperial pedigree to downplay, although racially-derived slavery was historically much less of an issue in China and the USSR. Thus, to endear itself to

6 https://ecf.org.il/media_items/1143. 7 Niall Ferguson (2012), Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Penguin), p. 74. 8 Stephen Howe (2002), Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), p. 13.

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Third World nationalists, US foreign policy sometimes prevailed upon its post-colonial allies and turned a blind eye to economic factors—the Suez Canal (1956) crisis being the best-known case perhaps. This goes to show that informal empire is sometimes more about geopolitics than about pure economics.9 Most European powers had of their own volition acknowledged the independence of their former colonies and retreated in the 1950s and 1960s. The key exception was Portugal’s dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970). In 1968, Salazar’s successor, Marcelo José das Neves Alves Caetano (1906–1980), continued fighting the costly colonial war in Africa despite US sanctions and in spite of the unpopularity of the conscription he declared in the metropole. Finally, in 1975, upon the triumph of the so-called Carnation Revolution, millions of Portuguese colonists left Africa as refugees. Pieds Noirs attempts to cling to Algeria were also long in the tooth yet Algeria had gained independence as early as 1962. Thereafter, residual French colonialism boiled down to attempts to suppress the indigenous nationalist movement in the New Caledonia.10 Racism, at any rate, gradually became démodé after World War II, and all powers shunned the label “imperialist” while blithely apportioning it to their opponents. During the heyday of the Cold War, the USSR thus called US foreign policy “imperialist”; Ronald Reagan on his part pointed to the USSR as “Evil Empire” and ridiculed Soviet allies as “satellites”. Nevertheless, as Charles Maier has shown, Americans have been measuring themselves up for better or worse against imperial Rome.11 Similarly, even anti-traditionalist Maoism drew on imperial Chinese metonym, and Stalin relied on traditional Russian chauvinism in no small measure. As for the Romans themselves, they actually had had no expression to denote something like modern “imperialism” as they set about laying the foundation of their empire. Today, the British Empire is in the dock, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was ironically the British who coined

9 D. C. M. Platt (1971), Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy 1815–1914 (Clarendon Press). 10 Thomas Gildea (2019), Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (Cambridge University Press), p. 117. 11 Charles S. Maier (2009), Among Empires: American Ascendancy and it Predecessors (Harvard University Press).

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the term “imperialism” to castigate Napoleon’s style.12 More generally, British imperial ideology tended to label largely Catholic monarchies on the continent as tyrannical.13 Indeed, the breakdown of Napoleon’s empire can be safely explained as an important stage in the dissolution of empires worldwide, beginning with Simón Bolívar in Latin America. Bolívar, in another paradox of history, was initially against freeing slaves, as he rose against the shackles of Spanish subjugation. In the event, much of emancipated Latin America went in the mid-nineteenth century from formal Spanish control to informal British control. But as Platt shows, the rivalry with German and US interests in the region among other factors meant that the British intervened in Latin America much less than in East Asia, even though they were more invested economically in the former.14 The Napoleonic Empire on its part was followed by the formal abolition of slavery and the emergence of the Concert of Europe, which enshrined the balance of power and territorial partition of the day. Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay campaigned against slavery, in favour of the liberty of the press and of the equality of Europeans and Indians before the law. He famously inaugurated a Western national system of education in India designed to produce “brownskinned” Englishmen, and drafted a penal code that later became the basis of Indian criminal law. Progressive for his time, Macaulay paradoxically detested Hindu culture and saw English mores as superior to all. Similarly, John Stuart Mill combined progressive opinion with assumptions of Indian inferiority to justify British rule there as advancing property rights. Along these lines, from 1820s onward British attempts to clap down infanticide (thugi) and widow sacrifice (sati), as well as spread Christian mission presence, provoked the multi-faith sepoy rebellion of 1857. From then on, missionaries were sidelined in India and the opium trade with China expanded virtually uninterrupted.15 France incorporated slavery in all of its early modern overseas colonies, including Canada, and was the first nation-state in the world to issue 12 Timothy Parson (2010), The Rule of Empires: Those who Build Them, Those who Endured Them and why They Always Fall (Oxford University Press), p. 9. 13 13 Jeroen Duindam (2015), Dynasties : A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge University Press), p. 298. 14 Platt, Finance Trade and Politics, passim. 15 Ferguson, Empire, pp. 138–139, 145–148.

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a general emancipation act. In fact, France abolished slavery twice, in 1794 and in 1848, each time in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. The 1794 decree was implemented in only Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and Guyana; it remained a dead letter in Martinique, Senegal, Réunion, Ile de France (Mauritius) and French India. Slavery was restored throughout the French Empire in 1802, with the exception of Saint-Domingue, which claimed its independence as Haiti, the world’s first black republic, founded by former slaves and their descendants. The 1848 emancipation, organized by the fervent antislavery activist Victor Schoelcher in Paris, was one of the first, decisive steps of a new republican government after decades of procrastination by the July Monarchy; but unlike Britain and America, it was not sustained by a large, populist antislavery movement.16 It would be wrong to infer uniformity in French colonial enterprise over the years. In North America, the aim of the French had been to convert Amerindians to Catholics through miscegenation but later in Algeria the focus was on cultural adaptation: speaking French and granting women’s rights. (Miscegenation was absent from the parallel British colonization of North America.) There was no mass attempt to convert Muslims in Algeria, much like the British resiled from missionary work in India.17 The contradictions of empire are far from confined to American history then. In the Holy Land, the British had held a UN mandate and, on balance, greatly assisted the Zionist enterprise. If throwing the shackles of British rule defines the American Revolution, the historical narrative in Israel today is also largely one of fighting the Ottomans and then the British—no less—to gain independence.18 Pan Arabs on the other hand decry the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement that divvied up the region between Britain and France along ethnic lines as imperial folly.19 Contradictions of empire abounded from day one. Rome was a foil to later empires but Polybius actually regarded its mission as the completion of Alexander the Great’s venture. Rome had persecuted Christians 16 https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199730414/ obo-9780199730414-0253.xml 17 Saliha Belmessous (2013), Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954 (Oxford University Press). 18 Howe, Empire, pp. 3–4. 19 Michael D. Berdine (2018), Redrawing the Middle East: Sir Mark Sykes, Imperialism

and the Sykes-Picot Agreement (Bloomsbury).

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and then enshrined Christianity—no less—as its raison d’etat.20 In fact, Edward Gibbon went as far as asserting that Roman religious tolerance eventually brought the empire down.21 The Byzantines broke away from Rome creating an alternative core. Yet they called themselves Romans, and the description would even cling to the empire that supplanted them in Asia Minor: the Ottomans. So much so that in distant China, the Ottoman Empire was referred to as “Lumi” (Romi) well into the nineteenth century.22 In the modern era, Rabindranath Tagore received British knighthood, and yet much of his work was dedicated to reimagining Indian cultural clout overseas. The Sikhs were on their part well known at once as fierce fighters for and against the British Empire. Conservatives in Britain zealously guard fox hunting rights even though the sport origins have much more to do with Attila the Hun’s Empire. In Putin’s Russia, the Czars have long been rehabilitated even as the Soviet legacy continues to be celebrated. And in China, Confucius has been un-mothballed in similar fashion. And there are more contradictions still. ISIS is railing at present against American military deployment in Saudi Arabia, while vowing to revive an imperial caliphate across the region. Despite the professed puritanism, its persecution of so-called infidels is actually rather a-historical in nature. Recall that in the Middle Ages many Christian and Jewish communities had prospered in the Islamic world, while not one Islamic diaspora existed in the West outside of the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, well before Napoleon bestowed religious equality on all within his realm, the Mughal and Ottoman emperors—once secure in power—had been well known as tolerant of non-Muslims. But what is an empire to begin with? Conventionally, it is a large core polity that has acquired territory and peoples outside its original sphere of influence. In most cases, therefore, empires are separated into core cities and periphery, with the former usually connoting elite citizenry and the latter usually connoting a variety of ethnicities forming lower classes. 20 Krishnan Kumar (2019), Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Changed the World (Princeton University Press), p. 12. 21 Edward Gibbon (1857), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Harper), passim. 22 Matthew Mosca (2013), From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press).

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Peripheral elites—minorities by definition—can usually beseech co-option into the core irrespective of geographical distance and race. Such was the case in Rome, for example, until in CE 212 the Edict of Caracalla granted citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire; and in another social levelling of distinction, Diocletian in CE 290 abolished the tax exemptions that Italian provinces—once at the core of the empire—enjoyed. By the fifth century CE, residents of the empire simply came to think of themselves as “Romanians”, whereas all-encompassing identities were much rarer in medieval Europe.23 To be sure, the Ottoman “core” in Antalia was more impoverished than some of the “periphery”. And the Caucuses were richer in grain than Moscow. In late-imperial China, the south became richer than the North, where the capital was situated. And in the post-colonial era, the erstwhile imperial periphery like Hong Kong boasts average income much higher than the one in the UK.24 ∗ ∗ ∗ Notably, ancient Chinese and Pharaonic capital cities also constituted less of an imperial core. In both cases, the empire was historically more culturally uniform; the religious and political realm fused together, and the reign of emperors was absolute. China, though, possessed less of a hereditary nobility in the long run. Whilst the Chinese “core” was mostly (but not always) made up of civil bureaucrats, the “core” in Europe was often aristocracies surmounting narrow imperial or ethnic divisions.25 Hence, for example, the ambivalence in contemporary Britain about the Hanovers, and in Austria about the Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnic heritage. The relative paucity of hereditary nobility in pre-modern China is the reason why it is thought of as more equal society,26 and that is certainly what endeared it to French physiocrats. However, it is noteworthy that 23 Michael Mann (1986), The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge University Press), p. 3–8, 262. 24 S.E. Finer (1997), The History of Government from the Earliest Times (Oxford University Press), Vol. 1 p. 17, 26. 25 Howe, Empire, p. 50. 26 R. Bin Wong (2018), China Transformed Historical Change and the Limits of

European Experience (Cornell University Press), passim.

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Islamdom for the most part also lacked hereditary nobility. The situation in early modern Russia was different: like the West of the continent it had nobility (boyar), not to mention serfdom and powerful clergy. Thus, we have in pre-modernity two alternative models of equality that problematize today’s nation-state: one relatively secular (Chinese) and one religious (Islamic). Not that the nation-state had been problem free otherwise: as we have seen immigration for the “periphery” of former empire is blunting their ethnic “core” discordantly. Most Western democracies are nowadays in effect nation-states with one degree or another of acknowledged imperial affinity. Namely, these democracies were once the ethnically condense metropole of sprawling multi-ethnic empires. Here, the diffuse British Empire was on the one end of the spectrum and the largely Germanic Holy Roman Empire on the other. The two exceptions may be Greece and Italy: in ancient Athens and Rome, their slave populations had diluted the metropole, yet Rome was culturally assimilationist like China. The tyranny of distance otherwise determined imperial affinity whereby, for example, Algeria and Ireland were deemed more French or British than other colonies, not least because they were on the metropole doorstep.27 But in the late nineteenth century, nation-states were thought of as the epitome of modernity, and empires as anachronistic. Most nation-states have since embarked on migration schemes that see millions from the erstwhile imperial “periphery” relocate to the “core”. Born in the postcolonial era, multiculturalism and moral relativism were meant to smooth the process of acculturation over, but they are failing in the absence of concrete economic equality. Multiculturalism is thus both a response to the fact of cultural pluralism in modern democracies and an ersatz with which to compensate minorities for past exclusion, discrimination and oppression.28

27 D.C.B. Lieven (2002), Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (Yale University Press), pp. 4–5, 16–17. 28 Kumar, Visions of Empire, p. 21, 288. The nation state was thought of as the face of modernity in nineteenth century and empires as anachronistic. But the reality is not clear cut and as the following pages demonstrate, the formation of the nation in many ways foreshadowed the assemblage of overseas territories. For a more extensive discussion, see Benedict Anderson (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso); E.J. Hobsbawm (2012) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press).

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At present, the nation-state penetrates far more deeply into society than empire—through, for example, heavier taxation, uniform education, mass media, conscription, property and family law. Under pre-modern empire by contrast there had been greater space for asserting local identity. However, the Napoleonic notion of citizenship was much more sweeping than the Roman one, presaging the modern nation-state. Herein lays one of the starkest divides between the pre-modern and modern.29 Napoleonic-style mass civic mobilization is what the Meiji reformers in Japan sought to emulate, and what Chinese reformers like Liang Qichao discussed in their works. But while the Japanese sent the Iwakura Mission to study that European nation-state formula in detail and adopted many of its findings, the Chinese Wing Rong mission—entrusted with a similar mandate—did not yield concrete policy results.30 ∗ ∗ ∗ Rome matters more for modern iterations of empire because, in terms of globalization and multiculturalism, it was the model against which most Western empires conceived of themselves either consciously or subconsciously. James Bryce, for example, campaigned against the extension of the Raj in 1901 by explicitly comparing its plight with Rome. Indeed, Rome was also a foil against which to measure one’s legitimacy in the pre-modern Carolingian Empire, as it was for Portugal, Napoleon, the British Empire or, to a lesser extent, the Third Reich. The Czars and Austro-Hungary both used the Roman double-head eagle as their emblem. And the eight century forged Donation of Constantine invoked Roman aura to justify significant papal territorial claims against the Byzantines.31 The acquisition of territory could be through conquest, aristocratic intermarriage or by treaty. Hence, hegemony could be exercised by

29 Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons (2016), “Introduction” in idems. eds.

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press), pp. 7–8. 30 Jonathan D. Spence (1990), The Search for Modern China (Norton). 31 Howe, Empire, p. 36; Richard Koebner (2008), Empire, pp. 18–19; David D. Aber-

nethy (2000) The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (Yale University Press), pp. 194–195.

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coercion or persuasion.32 Meta-historically, the latter is associated with vassal states, protectorates or smaller allies. But there had been differences of hegemonic shade across Eurasia. In a pamphlet from 1637, the Jesuit missionary Guildo Aldeni reassured his Chinese friends, who were concerned the multiplicity of kings in Europe meant frequent warfare there. Aldeni perhaps disingenuously replied that intermarriage and papal intercession—this at the height of Europe’s 30-Years inter-faith war— curbed warfare. On top there were in China domestic concerns about generals’ innate political appetite that were dealt with through a potent civic bureaucracy. Elsewhere in Eurasia similar concerns about the rise of military bureaucracy were dealt by equally extreme means like devshirme. Only that Janissaries were behind many palace coups so the Chinese solution may have worked better.33 Herein lays the difference between formal and informal empire: in the British case, the Raj thus contrasts with late Qing China or postliberation Chile, where the British had a sphere of influence. Queen Sheba’s marriage with King Solomon is probably the best-known example of imperial betrothal, but there are many more, particularly in European history, e.g. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The Jewish community created in Ethiopia as a result of King Solomon’s forays, at any rate, was mostly converted to Coptic Christianity by the fourth century.34 ∗ ∗ ∗ In its current iteration, the imperial core at times lies right next to the periphery. That is to say, within the same city one can find informal ethnic segregation. Some former colonizers make more allowance for multiculturalism than others: the French had been in theory more assimilationist than the British in their policies in both an imperial and nation-state setting. French civil rights were thus open to all Algerians provided that they renounce Islam, an offence punishable traditionally by death.35 Yet Franz Fanon was an early critic of this predicament. He saw it as a result of not only continual oppression, economic exploitation and lingering

32 Howe, Empire, p. 14. 33 Charles Tilly (1993), Coercion, Capital and European States (Wiley), p. 128. 34 Harold G. Marcus (2002), A History of Ethiopia (University of California Press). 35 Jürgen Osterhammel (1997), Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Wiener), p. 54.

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racism of former colonizers, but also the corruption of newly independent countries.36 Doyle suggested that informal empire emerged in relatively stable patrimonial societies where indigenous political authority could collaborate, and where the European powers competed with one another. Thus, in Uganda, the Kabakas, for example, ruled for Britain; in parts of India, the Maharajas and Nizames did the same: there were close to 600 princely states under Raj tutelage, bereft of foreign policy sovereignty. Against this background, British worldwide efforts to construct railroads can be seen as supporting the emergence of national consciousness, not just economic exploitation. Just as the expansion of ancient empires depended on the invention of spoke and wheel chariots, it is hard to conceive of the British Empire without the gunboat, railroad and the telegraph. The shrinking of the world in the nineteenth century would have been impossible, surely, without steamships. Essentially, in this reading, the shifts in global integration can be attributed to changes in hardware.37 Similarly, the French created monetary union where common currency did not exist before. The exceptions were Egypt, Siam, Ethiopia, Ethiopia and Nepal which remained united and quasi-autonomous including some foreign policy latitude.38 As a rule, Africa was sparsely populated and until the nineteenth century fairly impenetrable. Its heartland opened to trade and mission only after invention of quinine. Thus, the northwest of the continent saw the emergence of independent monarchical states even before the advent of Islam. Moreover, tribes fleeing from imperial subjugation could always find refuge inland.39 Yet the current political map of Africa is purely the creation of European Empire. Thus, Immanuel Wallerstein’s influential The Modern World System (1974) pessimistically predicted that in the face of decolonization, former colonial masters would continue to hold their former subjects in perennial

36 Howe, Empire, p. 19, 59. 37 Sebastian Conrad (2016), What Is Global History? (Princeton University Press),

p. 103. 38 Michael Doyle (2018) Empires (Cornell University Press), p.361; see also Osterhammel, Colonialism, pp. 51–52, 72. 39 Howe, Empire, 39; Ferguson, Empire, 160.

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state of dependency, and that global inequalities would widen after decolonization rather than diminishing.40 And more recently Robert Allen has similarly shown—with robust quantitative appraisal this time—that the Raj intentionally de-industrialized India, as British wealth made income gains.41 Current neoliberal doctrines are in that sense invalidated by more recent Chinese and Indian industrial policies. Clearly, globalization has many malcontents, with impoverishment seeping into the core and generating militancy. As a result, those on the right assail George Washington, and those on the right assail Barack Obama, and minorities in general. In pre-modern times, tolerance was rarer still. As Valerie Hansen reminds us, proto-globalization spawned similar inequality. For example, as early as 879 Huang Chao massacred foreign merchants living in Guangzhou, then China’s largest port. In 996, Cairo residents rioted against Italian merchants. And in 1181, it was Christian residents of Constantinople who massacred Italian merchants, their virtual co-religionists.42 ∗ ∗ ∗ In the event, colonies settled by Europeans usually in temperate climes would join the ranks of industrialized nations. They became rich, too, thus only accentuating the global divide. Then, they themselves, as we saw above, become destination for migrants from non-white colonies, much like their “Mother Countries”, giving birth to today’s multiculturalism. The Canada and South African case was particularly interesting because here original European settlement had two founts, British and French/Dutch, on top of the native population—thus adding to pressure for self-rule from London. By contrast, London was less willing to grant self-rule to nearby Ireland because of sensitivities of rebellion. 40 Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), The Modern World System (University of California Press). 41 Robert C. Allen (2011), Global Economic History: Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). Cf. Ferguson, Empire, p. 218. Ferguson is an apologist for Raj economic policy who nevertheless conceded the de-industrialization effect on India. He notes, on the other hand, what he sees as an equalising effect on Indian society in terms of income. See also Lieven, Empire, p. 123 on railroads. Lieven suggests that even as late as 1930s the Maharaja of Mysore did more to modernise Indian industry than the British. The Japanese by contrast invested heavily in Manchukuo, Korean (but not Taiwanese) industrialization. 42 Valerie Hansen (2020), The Year 1000 (Scribner), pp. 233–234.

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On the contrary, the 1801 Act of Union tarnished what was left of Irish autonomy. Similarly, Algeria was left literally close to home, last after the French abandoned Vietnam; India was relinquished by the British before South Africa yet long after Canadian self-rule had been gained in 1791.43 The American Revolution and the Boer War aside, relations between the metropole and white colonies were smoother than with other colonies. To be sure, republicanism today is a sentiment not uncommon in those colonies. The French-Canadian Uprising of 1837, the Riel Revolt and Eureka stockade are thus sometimes evoked with pride in some circles. Yet, equally, the slogan “for King and Empire” can still be seen proudly emblazoning some public buildings in Canada and Australia. True, the Navigation Act and the Corn Laws are a reminder of metropolitan protectionism. But otherwise metropolitan institutions diffused more quickly across these colonies, and there was also transfer of human capital in the other direction. To date, no scholar has therefore been able to present a convincing balance sheet of early modern empire building. Clearly, some parts of the world like inner Asia or the African tropics remained little touched by the economics of empire.44 It is beyond doubt that the military outlay of keeping colonies at bay was immense, particularly in non-white colonies. And not once European colonialists lost with many casualties to count—for example, the Dutch in Taiwan, the Russian in Crimea, the Italians in Ethiopia and the British in Zululand and Afghanistan. But, generally speaking—apart from the American War of Independence—colonial military outlay paled compared with the cost of warfare within Europe itself in the early modern era.45 The rise of the nation-state presents at first sight a contrast to empire, what with the latter’s reliance on linguistic and often ethnic homogeneity underpinning the claim for sovereignty. Burbank and Cooper suggested the distinction between empire and nation-state is that the former creates a hierarchy of populations within its midst, while the latter tends by and

43 Lieven, Empire, pp. 114–122. 44 Howe, Empire, p. 80; Patrick K. O’Brien (1988), “The Costs and Benefits of British

Imperialism, 1846–14”, Past & Present 120.1, pp. 163–200. 45 Howe, Empire, 95. Ferguson (Empire, p. 247) suggests military outlay made up only 2.5% British GDP circa 1898. See also https://eh.net/encyclopedia/military-spendingpatterns-in-history/.

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large to homogenize them.46 Empires, one might add, tend to reach out to foreign elites to rule extended territory on their behalf, while nationstates shut foreigners out with rigid borders. But as Charles Tilly famously showed, nation-statehood—not just empire—involves an expensive military build-up.47 Contemporary nationstates like Britain, France and Spain had in previous political configuration established huge empires. Consequently, popular representation in the metropole was well ahead of the colonies, as empire morphed into nation-state, and constitutional monarchy became the norm. If democracy was a Greek invention, the notion of limited monarchy— recalling modern constitutional monarchy—had been an ancient Jewish invention.48 Curiously, during the Cold War, both superpowers characterized themselves as “democratic”, and neither was a monarchy. And yet, the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 reminded the world that beyond the Soviet core, there lay a vastness of multi-ethnic territories once ruled from Moscow. The US on the other hand was an immigration destination, and in that sense, it could be seen as expanding inward rather than outward. The distinction came to head in 1994, as prominent US foreign policy luminary Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested that Russia could be either an empire or a democracy, but not both at the same time.49 Then, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq invited rumination about world domination having been unilaterally placed in Washington’s hands. Taking their cue from these developments, scholars re-discovered the rich vein of literature casting America as a new Rome in the face of equally long-standing discourse of American anti-imperialism. If there has been near consensus that American foreign policy in the last decade and a half has become more unilateral, there are acerbic scholarly disputes as to whether Washington should embrace this “imperial” turn, or resile from it.50 46 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper (2010), Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press), p. 8. 47 Tilly, Coercion, passim. 48 Finer, The History of Government, Vol. 1, p. 110. 49 Zbigniew Brzezinski (1994), ‘The Premature Partnership’, in Foreign Affairs

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1994-03-01/premature-par tnership. 50 See the debate between Alejandro Colás (Empire, 2007, Polity)vs Herfried Münkler (Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States, 2007,

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INTRODUCTION

17

Similarly, there are also disputes as to whether US power is in decline or on the rise since 2003, in view of continued US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of China. Finally, President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in 2017 further polarized public opinion regarding what role the US should play on the world stage, and the level of military and financial commitment it should show to allies.51 Paradoxically enough, the rise of China has begotten an imperial turn of sorts in Beijing too. Quite apart from Beijing’s claim to a vast swathe of the South China Sea, a minority strand of scholarly opinion there calls for tougher stand on the world stage.52 Few even yearn for the resurrection of the pre-modern Tianxia tributary order in East Asia, when China nominally lorded it over its neighbours.53 In Western academe— with globalization intensifying until recently—interest in China’s imperial legacy has spread well beyond area studies to incorporate classicists, political scientists and world historians. As a result, explicit long-term comparisons between, in particular, the Roman and Chinese empires in antiquity are no longer a rarity. ∗ ∗ ∗ The aim of this study is to critically and holistically survey these scholarly debates against the backdrop Trump-style isolationism. A detailed typology of empires will be offered, but the original contribution to knowledge here stems from the fact that the study will also look beyond the existing literature to draw out several scenarios for the international system circa 2050. In doing so, it will not shy away from exploring the relevance (if any) of the notion of empire in antiquity and the early modern era to today’s world, something that is not always discussed in the pertinent literature. The second chapter will provide the state of the field of “empire studies”, explicitly situating them between the fields of world history,

Polity) on whether the US a modern-day empire; and between Ferguson’s (Empire) advocacy of empire to Parson’s (The Rule of Empires) disgust thereof. 51 https://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-allies-steel-for-trump-tariff-tussle-1519977304. 52 Yan Xuetong (2013), Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (Princeton University Press). 53 See, e.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/02/07/ tianxia/.

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global history, international relations and futurology. It will also set out distinctions between pre-modern and modern empires. Chapter 3 will provide a critical analysis of the scholarly literature on empire in antiquity including reference to non-imperial systems like tribalism, nomadism, city-statehood, confederation and balancing alliances; Chapter 4 will focus on the early modern and modern age highlighting among other themes the so-called “Great Divergence” between East and West; Chapter 5 will examine whether the US today can be credibly called an empire contrary to its utopian rhetoric on liberty; Chapter 6 will turn attention to China as a possibly re-surgent empire, borne out of an incomplete experiment of nation-statehood; finally, Chapter 7 will speculate on the future on the world system in the intermediate term in view of the historical record.

CHAPTER 2

State of the Field

Abstract Colonies in antiquity were separate politically. Thus, Carthage eventually became independent from Phoenicia. Venice and Genoa, by contrast, had in the early modern era smaller colonies in the Mediterranean and around the Black Sea, which they ruled more directly and exploited economically, among other things. That latter cue informed modern colonialism. Keywords Colonialism · Economic Exploitation · Peer-Competitors

There is broad agreement among experts that the first proto-empires emerged out of hunter-gatherer tribes who settled in Neolithic villages across the Fertile Crescent some 5 millennia ago. Over time, those villages acquired a military-political capability with which to protect their agricultural surplus from other villages. Agriculture in turn transformed kinship ties, and subsequent urbanization accentuated social transformation. Gradually, the acephalous nature of tribal life was superseded by centralized modes of production supported by armies, bureaucracies, law, ideology and markets.1 1 Barry Buzan and Richard Little (2000), International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations (Oxford University Press), p. 167, 378. See also Yuval Noah Harari (2013), Kitzur Toldot HaEnoshut (Kinneret), p. 398.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 N. Horesh, Empires in World History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5_2

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Notably, the early Sumerian city-states may have had a quasidemocratic flair before full-fledged pre-modern democracy appeared in Greece. Those Sumerian city-states were run by assemblies, but the dynamics of warfare with other units in the Sumerian system allowed stalwarts claiming to represent the city god to usurp collective power, and eventually proclaim themselves kings. The Sumerian city-states then agglomerated into small empires dominating peripheral city-states in the system. Of course, city-states would later recur in world history, including in pre-imperial China. On occasion, they evolved into enduring empires, Rome being the prime example. As Charles Tilly observed, an enduring empire can be thought of as a large composite polity linked with a powerful core and periphery. The core typically exercises varying military and fiscal control over each major peripheral segment of its imperial domain. Nonetheless, the core may tolerate elements of autonomy in return for tribute.2 As such, empire has been front and centre in history. To some degree, one might add that early urbanization and the invention of cuneiform writing were a corollary of empire building. Civilization and empire are thus often thought of as co-terminous, and the historically commonest form of state has been empire, as Lieven observed.3 In his 1918 classic The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler had gone so far as observing that imperialism was “civilization unadulterated”. Indeed, Brett Bowden recently observed that from the Crusades to the colonial era to the global War on Terror, the notion of civilization was stage-managed to legitimize imperialism, uniformity and conformity to Western standards, culminating in a liberal-democratic global order. Triumphalist Westerners like Huntington invoke civilization, where the prize is an eternal liberal-democratic empire along Kantian lines.4 The field of empire studies in the modern era was thus indelibly shaped by growing European colonial penetration into Africa and Asia. Other than Japan, no non-Western country was able to industrialize and set 2 Tilly, Coercion, passim.; Mogens Herman Hansen (2000), “Introduction: the Concept of City-State and City-State Culture”, in idem. ed., A Comparative Study of Thirty Citystate Cultures: An Investigation, (Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters), pp. 11– 24. Today, Kuwait and Lichtenstein are two examples of resilient city-states (micro-states). 3 Lieven, Empire, p. xvi. 4 Brett Bowden (2010), Empire of Civilization (University of Chicago Press), p. 217.

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up colonies before World War II. Until recently, the field was therefore inevitably Eurocentric and modernocentric in its approach.5 For example, before China’s economic take-off in the 1980s, few scholars recalled the Chinese imperial past alongside ancient Greece.6 There was otherwise comparative little thought given to the phenomenon of imperialism in antiquity beyond the Greco-Roman precedent. The first scholar to seriously consider pre-modern forms of imperialism in terms of IT theory was Adam Watson. Perceptively, he noted that population pressures forced ancient Greek poleis to send their citizens West to set up colonies, mainly in what is today southern Italy and around the Black Sea. Yet unlike modern colonies, Greek colonies were by and large small trading posts that evolved as independent political entities even if they maintained special relationship with their “mother city”.7 More often than not, colonies in antiquity were separate politically. Thus, Carthage eventually became independent from Phoenicia.Venice and Genoa, by contrast, had in the early modern era smaller colonies in the Mediterranean and around the Black Sea, which they ruled more directly and exploited economically, among other things. That latter cue informed modern colonialism. The term “colonist” all but disappears from historical records between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fifteenth century. As mentioned, the exceptions during these centuries are the colonies set up as trading posts by Venice or Genoa round the Black Sea or the Mediterranean and it is this trade orientation that informs the modern concept of colonies, coupled with the turning of the Canary Islands into sugar

5 Susan Reynolds (2006), “Empires: A Problem of Comparative History”, Historical Research 79.204, pp. 151–165. For an exceedingly Eurocentric study of the issues surveyed here, see, e.g., Robert G. Wesson (1967), The Imperial Order (University of California Press). 6 A key exception is Frederick John Teggart (rep. 1983), Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events first published in 1939 (Greenwood). For a representative of Eurocentric work, see, e.g., Peter D.A.Garnsey and C.R. Whittaker (1978) Imperialism in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 7 Lieve Donnellan and Valentino Nizzo (2016), “Conceptualising Early Greek Colonisa-

tion: Introduction to the Volume”, in idems. and Gert-Jan Burgers eds., Conceptualising Early Colonisation, pp. 9–20 (Institute Historique Belge de Rome); Adam Watson (rep. 2009), The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis Reissue with a new introduction by Barry Buzan and Richard Little (Routledge), pp. 35–36; Howe, Empire, p. 36; Kumar, Visions of Empire, p. 28.

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surplus colonies later in the fifteenth century by the Spaniards.8 In sum, early modern colonization involved agricultural surplus conveyed from “shadow acres”, and/or tax bonanza as result of trade monopolies or purposeful demonetization. Both Venice and Genoa were port cities so sea power matters even in the absence of mass migration from the metropole. The threshold of modernity concerns direct rule and economic exploitation: Venice’s was a larger empire than Genoa’s, and besides trade and tax it also looked to secure grain supply.9 But the dynamics should not be seen as exclusively Western: in the 1850s, Omanis and Swahilis established themselves on the Upper Congo for slave trade and other purposes under the watchful eye of the British.10 The key distinction between modern and pre-modern empire therefore has to do with the nature of colonization. The Phoenicians not only founded cities at home but also carried out a colonizing process abroad, making their mark far to the West. They established port colonies in a number of places that later became cities in their own right, most notably Carthage in North Africa, Palermo in Sicily and Cadiz in Spain. At the same time, they took the lead in developing a phonetic alphabet. It greatly facilitated the keeping of written records, which were increasingly important foundations of urban life. But the modern threshold of empire was not met of course.11 Greater metropolitan oversight and economic domination of colonies would have been necessary. By contrast, Roman colonies and China’s Han Empire’s colonies (tiantun) were usually garrisons further inland, with a view towards grain self-sufficiency so, again, there is little evidence to suggest these colonies were dispatching surplus to the metropole, quite to the contrary. As landlubbers in relative terms, then, the Romans and Chinese could not qualify either criterion. In fact, the Latin term colonia connotes a farmer away from home; hence indirectly, it feeds into modern

8 Marc Ferro (1997), Colonization: A Global History (Taylor & Francis). 9 Tom Scott (2012), The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600: Hinterland, Territory,

Region (Oxford University Press), pp. 75–87; Jan Morris (1990), The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (Penguin). 10 John Craven Wilkinson (2015) The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa (Equinox). 11 Andrew Lees (2015), The City: A World History (Oxford University Press), p. 11.

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notions of plantation colonies.12 Cologne as Roman colony saw one ethnicity uprooted for another like Assyrian emperors would have, or how the British later implanted Tamils across Southeast Asia. Yet there is no hint of exporting agricultural surplus from Roman colonies even if they were embedded in extensive trade networks. The Roman senate as a governmental body did not pursue a policy of colonization with the intent to create identical colonies that would spread Roman culture. This is especially true in the early and Middle Republic. By the late Republic and Empire, powerful individuals such as Caesar or the emperors sent out colonies or granted the status of colony to provincial towns as one part of their greater attempts to manage the Roman Empire.13 Rather than dispatching surplus, colonies were often subsidized. The pattern for the Latin colonies seems to be that more land was offered as the hostility of the neighbours and the distance from Rome increased. Colonies were military and defensive, rather than economic in orientation whereby veteran settlement, Romanizing agents or punitive action against rebellious tribes served their purpose. In particular, there seems to have been a shift in colonies deliberately used as imperialist tools during the second century.14 Colás observes that between the early Republic and high Empire, Roman colonization underwent a gradual but comprehensive transformation. During the early Republic, colonies were founded by disparate groups. These diverse colonial agents belie any notion of a Roman imperialist strategy using colonies as tools. Mid-Republican colonies initiated from senatorial decrees led colonists to autonomous Latin colonies or smaller Roman citizen colonies. Although the big picture in the Italian Peninsula suggests that the Roman state enjoyed an imperialist relationship with its colonies by the 170 s, the result does not necessarily reflect the intentions of the founding magistrates. Similarly, the competition between commanders in the first century BCE seemed to create a need to reward some veterans with choice colonial allotments. Again, overall, 12 Jonathan Hart (2008), Empires & Colonies (Polity), pp. 6–8. On tuntian see Yü Ying-shih (1986) “Han Foreign Relations”, pp. 377–462, in Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe eds. Cambridge History of China, vol I, the Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 BC – AD 220. 13 Colás, Empire, p. 3. 14 Colás, Empire, p. 39 fn 232, p. 41 fn 243, p. 58.

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Rome acted as a militarily and politically imperialist state, but there was a shift in how colonies worked. Finally, during the Empire, colonial status became a boon which an emperor granted to loyal towns, often divorced from settlement by veterans who no longer wanted to live in mixed communities far from lands they knew.15 Moreover, Rome occupied England in 43 CE although it is hard to justify the consequent military outlay in terms of economic benefits reaped therefrom. In turn, England took over Ireland as early as the twelfth century—i.e. long before a religious chasm appeared between the two nations. Yet, the economic exploitation of Ireland as colony started significantly only in the early modern era.16 In the same vein, one should recall Viking colonies like Iceland, Greenland or Newfoundland became separate from the core, as did Polynesian colonies in the Pacific without yielding much to the metropole economically. ∗ ∗ ∗ The two most influential thinkers on imperialism in the early twentieth century were Hobson (1858-1940) and Lenin (1870-1924), while Schumpeter (1883–1950) was offering a counter-current. Hobson thought imperialism was limited to capitalist societies and was propelled by global inequality; its main promoters were allegedly investment bankers and industrial monopolists. In Hobson’s view, industrialization in the West meant that more could be produced than consumed locally, that is to say, capital and production overcapacity were intertwined. To sell products at a profit, markets had to be opened up in non-industrialized parts of the world. Hence, bankers and industrialists brought pressure to bear on their government for imperial expansion. Then, as the rest of the world industrialized, Hobson believed global equality would rise, the profit motive would disappear along with imperialism.17 Against the backdrop of World War I, Lenin similarly believed European powers invaded underdeveloped economies, abetted as they were

15 Colás, Empire, pp. 90–91. 16 Parsons, The Rule of Empires, p. 21. 17 John Atkinson Hobson (rep. 2011), Imperialism: A Study (Cambridge University

Press. Hobson’s analysis descended into anti-Semitism at times; Daniel H. Kruger (1955), “Hobson, Lenin, and Schumpeter on Imperialism”, Journal of the History of Ideas 16.2, pp. 252–259.

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by their monopolists so as to gain profits above those attainable in the metropole. Unlike Hobson, however, Lenin suggested that that commercial expansion would not eventually abate but lead to a clash between rival imperial powers.18 In contrast to both Hobson and Lenin, Schumpeter thought imperialism to be archaic, a phenomenon that quite to the contrary would perish with the onset of capitalism. He attributed the thrust for conquest to the interests of landed aristocracies, though he acknowledged late industrializers like Germany and Japan were more prone to seek overseas territories. What is more, within pre-industrial societies, Schumpeter suggested some societies are less prone to imperialism than others: “absorbed” peoples like the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese or Slavs being key examples.19 At least insofar as pre-modern empires are concerned, Schumpeter’s approach seems to be congruent with the historical evidence. Recall here Rome’s decision to invade England even though the latter was not fertile. Yet the economic factor seems paramount in the modern era, contrary to Schumpeter. Thus, in the 1950s, Gallagher and Robinson suggested the 1880s saw a major shift in British imperialism away from mercantilism. As Britain enjoyed unrivalled industrial lead, it was now more important to open markets for its goods than protect local farmers and manufacturers, or conquer new territories.20 The economic argument has been subtly shown again by Cain and Hopkins in their 1993 book British Imperialism. In effect, the two scholars claimed that British policy changed in the nineteenth century from one of industrial protectionism to one of promoting London as the world financial centre. The new form of imperialism created was less

18 Vladimir I. Lenin (rep. 1999), Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Resistance). 19 Joseph A. Schumpeter (1951), The Sociology of Imperialisms (Meridian); P. J. Cain (2007), “Capitalism, Aristocracy and Empire: Some ‘Classical’ Theories of Imperialism Revisited”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35:1, 25–47; Kumar (Visions of Empire, p. 17) convincingly argues that Hobsbawm was partly wrong and Schumpeter partly right: imperialism’s motives were not purely economic. Ferguson (Empire, p.255) stressed that metropolitan residents often paid for colonial defense but did not directly benefit from colonial investment. 20 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (1953), “The Imperialism of Free Trade”, The Economic History Review 6.1, pp. 1:15. On the evolution of this debate, see also Gregory Barton (2014), Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture (Palgrave).

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conquest-driven; it was rather a form of “gentlemanly capitalism”. Herein lie the roots of the epitaph empire of “free trade”.21 Schumpeter’s seminal interest in pre-modern empires paralleled equally important but contradictory studies of empires and civilizations across time and place. On the one extreme, Max Weber (1864–1920) famously argued that the non-West was doomed for underdevelopment because of the absence of a Protestant work ethics. And on the other extreme, one finds Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) who decried Eurocentrism, predicting that Western democracy would evolve into plutocracy, and that only dictatorship could arrest the decline of the West.22 The source of Spengler’s scepticism about the West was not necessarily perceived Chinese grandeur but Germany’s weakness in the intra-war period. During the Cold War, by contrast, the distinctness of the West came into sharp relief; the gap in the standard of living with the nonWest grew. On the other hand, Catholic countries in Europe caught up economically, so Weber’s emphasis on Protestantism eventually lost merit. Most scholars searching for the causes of the rise of the West later on looked beyond narrow religious motives: William McNeill, Paul Kennedy, David Landes and Eric Jones to name but few.23 Yet, at that point not many scholars saw the seeds of modernity in non-Western empires of the past: the late Shmuel Eisenstadt (1923–2010) was thus an outlier in stressing the sophistication of the Chinese imperial bureaucracy and its competitive entry exams. However, his sociological endeavours were otherwise short on comparative economic detail.24 Ronodo Cameron had written at that point the first comprehensive economic history of the world in English. This was a real achievement with a temporal spread difficult to cover: for these reasons, the book is still in print. Equally, though, the book is a testament to the Eurocentrism of the time. Cameron did dedicate some space to China, for example, but strangely neglected the acme of Chinese pre-modern economic achievements in the Song era; he also wrongly attributed the origin of Chinese paper money to the Charlemagne era and contended that storied sailor 21 P.J.Cain and A.G. Hopkins (rep. 2016), British Imperialism, 1688–2015 (Routledge). 22 Max Weber (rep. 2013), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Rout-

ledge); Oswald Spengler (rep. 2018), Decline of the West (Rative Media). 23 https://www.riseofthewest.net/thinkers/landes05.htm; (rep. 2010), The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (Vintage).

see

also

Paul

24 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (rep. 2017), Multiple Modernities (Routledge).

Kennedy

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Zheng He had set up colonies. There is even less coverage of India in the book.25 More recently, scholars have endeavoured to clearly distinguish modern from pre-modern empires. This is not always conceptually easy as there are in fact many imperial commonalities across time and space, such as a passion for road building and communication systems, often with troop mobility in mind.26 Following Kumar, it seems apt to note the first distinction as longevity: modern empires by and large did not last as long as Rome or Han China even if they recognizably changed the world in economic terms.27 John Breuilly recently observed that all modern empires uniquely originated on Europe’s Atlantic rim and fiercely competed over territorial control of the Outremer. Namely, they were incontiguous by definition whereas most pre-modern empires were contiguous. Thus, in terms of size, the British Empire turned out the biggest in history by far, but the Mongol Empire went further overland. The upshot was that the core was much more distinct from the periphery in modern empires, and this trait grew incrementally as they evolved into nation-states.28 Harari on his part stresses that the size factor in identifying empires should be commensurate with the era studied: it has to be recalled that the classical Athenian Empire was compellingly big at the time but smaller than the contemporary nation-state of Greece, and the Aztec Empire was smaller than contemporary Mexico.29 In medieval times, there were also colonial spurts even in the absence of centralizing powers. Thus, the Vikings spread to Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. The Normans conquered Sicily, and Teutonic nights settled in the Baltics creating a German-speaking diaspora. But none 25 Rondo Cameron (1993), A Concise Economic History of the World: From Palaeolithic Times to the Present (Oxford University Press). The original edition glosses over the all-important Song industrial revolution (pp. 83–86), bears fleeting mention of Chinese advancements in Charlemagne times and mistakenly refers to eunuch Zheng He as the founder of lasting colonies in Southeast Asia (pp. 86–90). The coverage is even more scant when it comes to India, with barely a mention of its past grandeur as spice and textile emporia in pre-modern times. 26 Crooks and Parsons, “Introduction”, p. 22. 27 Kumar, Visions of Empire, p. 466. 28 John Breuilly (2017), “Modern Empires and Nation States”, Thesis Eleven 139.1, pp. 11–29. 29 Harari, Kitsur, p. 195.

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of these colonies was amenable to the core, or patently economically exploited thereby.30 In pre-modern times, there were also differences between the population of the core and the peripheries they conquered—of religion, language, ethnicity—but the core polity was not national. The paradox of empire and nation-state was, in modern times, perhaps best demonstrated in France’s attempt to make Algeria part of the Republic without offering citizenships to its Muslim residents. By and large, then, the French pursued a more assimilationist-statist policy in their colonies than the British.31 Certainly, in inter-war Paris there was a pretence of Republican values obtaining in the face of entrenched racism. Asian and African émigrés, to be sure, were treated better in the French metropole than by French settlers in their colonies of origin. Against this background, Frenchman often cast aside overt racism as un-French, attributing it to “AngloSaxon” commercialist influence,32 in the same way perhaps that British accounts of French colonialism during the ancienne regime portrayed it as more tyrannical. In the Renaissance, Rome was praised for its enlightened treatment of foreigners—Francis Bacon and Machiavelli saw this as its primary strength. Modern writers like Amy Chua also make the argument that tolerant empires lasted longer.33 But it bears recalling that romantic poetry which celebrated the formation of nation-states disparaged empire. Byron Shelley, Goethe and Schiller hankered after classical yet ethnocentric Greece, disparaging Rome as materialistic and mundane.34 This was not just a question of historical memory. From the outset, enthusiasts and detractors of empires vied for influence side by side. General Cincinnatus had famously waived dictatorship so as to pursue farming. At the heyday of empire, Augustus would by contrast see himself as a soldier, yet as enthusiasm for occupation declined—Diocletian would

30 Kumar p. 25; Howe, Empire, 49. 31 Howe, Empire, p. 99. 32 Michael Goebel (2015), Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press), p. 60. 33 Amy Chua (2009), Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall (Knopf). 34 Kumar, Visions of Empire, p. 43, 59; Koebner, Empire, pp. 57–58.

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again invoke himself as a farmer.35 A better known contrast perhaps is between Virgil, Propertius and above all Horace, who celebrated Roman expansion, to Tacitus, Sallust and Calgacus who railed against imperial excess.36 In particular, Taccitus lampooned Nero’s despotism decrying Rome’s occupation of Britain as enslavement of the locals rather than their induction into civilization. Centuries later, Gore Vidal, echoing Tacitus, would decry the American Empire as hijacked by militarism and tending to decadence.37 Tacitus’ Germania praised the roughness of Teutonic tribes. It later became a literary source and justification for German Protestants’ revolt against Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth century and for German nationalism in the nineteenth century.38 More generally, Britain, France, Spain and—to a lesser extent Germany—all tapped into the mystique of the Roman Empire in their own imperial ventures during the nineteenth century, but at the same time, they later celebrated as emerging nationstates perceived rebels against the very same Roman Empire: Baudica, Vercingetorix, Viriathus and Hermann being the four best-known example.39 The Roman historian Livy (59 BCE -17 CE) was, in turn, more enthusiastic about empire but he stressed for posterity that Roman greatness had been forged under the Republic.40 Republican sentiments in Europe endured the fall of Rome, atavistically carrying over to the Middle Ages. The English scholar Alanus Anglicus (fl. C. 1190) thus rejected the

35 Christopher Kelly (Kindle 2020), The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), Kindle Location 967–971. See also Peter Frankopan (2015), The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury), p. 20–24. Virgil’s Anaeid defended the imperial project. Horace was more triumphalist still seeking Roman dominion of the entire world including India and China. 36 Howe, Empire, p. 43. 37 Ferguson, Colossus, p. 4. See also Osterhammel, Colonialism, pp. 46–47. 38 Daniel Woolf (2019), A Concise History of History: Global Historiography from

Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press), p. 33, 55, 160. 39 Origiogentis or the quest for exalted (putative) forebears with which to celebrate latter day polities is not confined to democracies. It begins with the Trojans who were appropriated by both the Romans and, later, the French in the Middle Ages. The quest was also evident in the Aryan preoccupation of Nazism. 40 Keobner, Empire, p. 11.

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notion of ius gentium (one emperor in the world) to endorse national kingdoms.41 Ambivalence towards previous empires has always been prevalent. But so was selective emulation and coercion. Alexander the Great, for example, readily adopted Persian and Egyptian customs. Julius Caesar and Augustus re-deployed military forces in the periphery to subdue the Roman civic elite. The Jurchens adopted some (but not all) Chinese imperial customs, while in other ways remaining loyal to the steppe periphery. Iberian Empire builders learnt from Italian traders, just as the British would later learn from the Iberian. And America learnt the lesson of imperial over-stretch from Britain.42 ∗ ∗ ∗ Incontiguity brings to mind the second key distinction between premodern and modern empires. In the Americas and Oceania, European imperialists encountered low-density populations highly vulnerable to “guns, germs and steel” in Diamond’s famous phraseology.43 Eventually, Europeans could acquire “shadow acres” with which to enhance productivity at the core. But the underside of this story is of course annihilation of multitudes of Native Americans, and the untold suffering of slaves brought to replace them. Granted, the Romans also had plantation colonies but these were relatively small compared with “core” agricultural produce. New World plantation slavery was another order of magnitude altogether.44 Africans were of course the main victims but half to two-thirds of the whites to migrate to North America before the American Revolution, for example, were indentured servants, not to mention Australia-bound convicts.45 41 Koebner, Empire, p. 16, 39. 42 Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2018), Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800

(SUNY Press), “Introduction”; Abernethy, Dynamics of Global Dominance, p. 224. 43 Jared Diamond (rep. 2017), Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Norton). 44 Kenneth Pomeranz (2007), The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press). 45 Alfred W. Crosby (2004), Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge University Press), p. 295; Ferguson, Empire, pp. 69–74: between 1662 and 1807 three times more Africans moved to the New World aboard British ships than whites.

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The key second distinction between pre-modern and modern empires therefore has to do with the invention of racial discourse of inferiority designed to legitimate the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans in the Americas. However, it is important to recognize that that discourse had been tempered right from the outset by a missionary discourse that envisioned assimilating non-Europeans within Christendom. Missionaries were often at loggerheads with imperialists over “native” rights, and their protection allowed for the emergence of black intellectuals like Olaudah Equiano or Alexander Crummel.46 The first Roman emperors, like their tolerant Persian and Macedonian predecessors, preferred indirect rule and the preservation of local authorities where practicable. For example, Herod’s dynasty in Palestine was allowed to rule over large tract of land, as a vassal state. Rome also has several other client allies, particularly in Asia Minor, and in that sense, the Persian notion of satrapy and racial tolerance could apply there too. Germanic and other peoples were allowed to settle within the empire, at first as subjects but in time more often as client allies, retaining their national organization and co-operating with Roman armies to defend their new homes against later invaders. Thus, the empire became a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual conglomerate rather than a monolith. In that sense—and in view of its readiness to bestow citizenship on culturally alien elites—Rome was much less cohesive than the Chinese empire, or even the Greek one.47 For the most part, Roman governors were reactive, not proactive. They did not interfere in the internal affairs of cities in their provinces and were aided by a relatively small number of officials by modern standards. Pre-existing discourses of power were particularly encouraged in the East. On the other hand, unlike modern nation-states, the Roman Empire never saw itself responsible for providing elementary education, housing or health care.48

46 Doyle, Empires, p. 363. 47 Watson, Evolution of International Society, p. 75. 48 Kelly, The Roman Empire, Kindle Locations 783–784; Myles Lavan (2016), “Father

of the Whole Human Race”: Ecumenical Language and the Limits of Elite Integration in the Early Roman Empire”, in idem., Richard E. Payne, and John Weisweiler eds., Cosmopolitanism and Empire Universal Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (Oxford University Press), p. 163.

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The Greek, and to a greater extent the Chinese pre-modern notion of “barbarian”, was much less biological in nature than modern notions of primitiveness. The Romans, in turn, tolerated other ethnicities in high office. And although Cato the Censor famously decried Greek influence on the Roman Empire, Emperor Hadrian embraced Greek culture wholeheartedly. That Rome was inherently flexible in its approach to alien cultures was to be demonstrated time and again. Under the influence of Christianity, for example, gladiator fights—quintessentially Roman— were banned by 325 CE.49 Today, gladiators may seem blood thirsty but O’Connell observes that many national epics are equally violent from the Iliad to the Song of Roland.50 One might conceivably add here the Ramayana in India and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in China. Evidently, before the adoption of Christianity, Roman culture glorified violence, unlike the Confucian norm in China. Roman generals commanded by and large more adoration, and military exploits were more commonly captured in architecture, e.g. arcs de triumph. In some sense, Cato’s gripes can be compared with Han Yu’s rebuke of Buddhists in the Chinese pre-modern context. Huntigton’s litany over Hispanics diluting core American values also comes to mind, this time in modern context—his was more of a cultural than biological concern. Certainly, Rome’s relationship with their Greek predecessor was complex: it recalls Harold Macmillan’s observation of modern Britain: “[w]e…are Greeks in this American empire…We must run the Allied Forces HQ as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius”.51 Darker skin was certainly not derogatory in Egyptian art, and Nubians were respected as military leaders. The Greek term for “barbarian” term did not denote skin colour as much as it had to do with unintelligible speech and with residence in autocracies. Notably, the Romans called Libyans “darker skinned” but there is no evidence of discrimination. Thus, Septimius Severus—born in Libya—could rise up to become Roman Emperor, as did Philip the Arab.52 49 Frankopan, The Silk Roads, p. 41. 50 Robert L. O’Connell (1991), Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and

Aggression (Oxford University Press), pp. 34,49,54,58, 61. 51 https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199237173.001. 0001/q-author-00001-00002216?rskey=tY5Mzn&result=1. 52 Ali Rattansi (2007), Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), pp. 8–15; Howe, Empire, p. 40. See also Hyun Jin Kim (2009), Ethnicity and Foreigners

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In medieval times, biological determinism had not yet crystallized as such, but blackness was associated in Europe with hyper-sexuality. Later in the early modern era that served as one more justification for slavery. Muslims were in the medieval era depicted as terrifying heathen but without much reference to skin colour. In early India, dravids connoted darker skin colour as opposed to the lighter skin Aryan invaders, but the Mahabharata does include many darker skin heroes. And in early China the linkage between barbarianness and skin colour was even less pronounced.53 A racial discourse developed it legitimated first Guanche, then Native American and finally African slavery. Modern racism, to be sure, was typified by biological determinism. Even Indians were depicted as “distinctly different and exploitable”.54 There was no such deterministic discourse in pre-modern times. The most acute discursive change occurred between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, Europeans residing in Asia and Africa were still relatively few; they dressed in local attire, ate local food and married local women—Warren Hastings, the first British Governor-General of India, is the most prominent example for that. And he was accused of letting all things Asian corrupt his soul. It turned him in the parlance of the day into a Nabob, a crass nouveau riche. In fact, even the progenitor of the Raj, Robert Clive, had often been scoffed at for receiving land grants from the Mughals. The EIC as a whole was informally and rather disenchantedly known as “John Company”.55 But as logistics improved and “scientific racism” spread in the twentieth century, on the back of the nation-state, segregation became more mandatory. Even “age of reason” intellectuals like Kant and Hume thought darker skin people to be inferior. From then on, even when in the

in Ancient Greece and China (Bloomsbury). The Egyptian occupation of Nubians lacked racial overtones. 53 Rattansi, Racism, pp. 17–18. 54 Racially-derived slavery was not just an issue impacting Africans. EIC shareholders

enriched themselves by depicting Indians as “distinctly different and exploitable”. See Parsons, The Rule of Empires, p. 5; Ferguson, Empire, pp. 362–364. 55 Ferguson, Empire,p. 133–134; see also Nicholas B. Dirks (2006), The Scandal of Empire (Harvard University Press); Osterhammel, Colonialism, pp. 16, 84–86.

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tropics, Europeans would dress in heavy attire so as to prevent themselves “degenerating” by dint of the climate into savages.56 To be sure, the putative correlation between climate and reason had older roots. Montesquieu famously argued that tyranny flourished in hotter countries and liberalism in colder ones. And Ibn Khaldun described Africans as puerile and excitable due to the extreme climate they lived in. However, if Montesquieu thought Russians had better chance of redemption from tyranny than Asians—Ibn Khaldun thought Russia to possess an extreme climate, thus explaining the enslavement of Slavs and Africans in similar terms.57 In that sense, modern European segregation was very different from ancient Rome where Africans could become citizens of the empire; from China where steppe people could become emperors; or even from the Ottoman Empire where slave soldiers could rise up to become emperors— devsirme was means of pre-empting the emergence of a hereditary feudal aristocracy, where in China the same goal was attained a strong civil service.58 The Spanish writers, Francisco de Quevedo and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, mark the beginning of modern racism in that they justified Spanish enslavement of Native Americans by de-humanizing them. However, out-of-wedlock liaison between Spanish colonists and locals was rife, and a mestizo population grew by leaps and bounds as a result.59 To be sure, notions of racial inferiority persisted long after Britain decided to abolish slavery in 1833: Henry Morton Stanley and Carl Peters are but two examples of that. In fact, the racial overtones in nineteenthcentury Europe were so strong that they even permeated Marxist thought where non-Western people were considered people “without history”. What is more, Britain having, abolished slavery in its territories as late as 1833, subsequently invoked abolitionist arguments and the spread of Christianity to carve up new territory in Africa in cahoots with reactionary local rulers. In India, despite the 1883 Ilbert Bill which allowed local judges to try Europeans, Viceroy Curzon continued to despise the 56 Rattansi, Racism, p 27, 47. 57 Ibid. 58 C.A. Bayly (2011), “Religion, Liberalism and Empires: British Historians and Their Indian Critics in the Nineteenth Century”, in Peter Bang and idem. eds., Tributary Empires in Global History (Palgrave), pp. 21–47, f. 34; Lieven, Empire, p. 243–244. 59 Magnus Mörner (1967), Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Little), p. 55.

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local educated elite (babus ).60 However, the adversaries of abolition were not so much other European powers as Arab traders selling slaves to the Middle East, Brazil and the plantations on the French colony of Réunion.61 From Africans, the racial hierarchy stretched upward to Indians and Chinese, who were slightly more respected because of the ancientness of their civilization. At the very bottom of the ladder were Australian aborigines who some predicted would become extinct because of the deficiencies of their race.62 However, it is important to remember there was also an hierarchy within Europe, whereby Italian or even Irish immigrants would be labelled as “black”.63 In fact, much of the imperial discourse surrounding the Spanish and British colonization of America was borrowed from the eviction of Muslims following the Reconquista, and the subjugation of Scotland and Ireland. The upshot is that the ratio of Irish and Scots in the colonies always exceeded their ratio in British Isles.64 Equally, minorities played a significant role in other colonial entrepots, and the traffic was two way. Basque adventurers were paramount in the early Spanish Empire, as so were the Huguenots in early French Empire. The Dutch brought Javanese coolies to Suriname, and Tamils were transplanted in British colonies in Southeast Asia. However, Africans were not much needed in already densely populated Eurasian colonies. Some European thinkers had otherwise sought to make sense of the new peoples the colonial venture encountered by looking for more distant precedents in European history. French Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746), for example, provided an explicit comparison between the North American natives and the tribal societies documented by Caesar, 60 Ferguson, Empire, p. 212. 61 Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan (2019), The Making of International Relations

(Cambridge University Press), p. 286; Howe, Empire, 91; Barton, Informal Empire, pp. 72–73, 90; Ferguson, Empire, 116–123, 128–130. 62 Howe, Empire, pp. 84–86; Woolf, Concise History of History, p. 112; Ferguson, Empire, pp. 55–57. 63 Rattansi, Racism, pp. 5–7; Ferguson, Empire, pp. 252–254. 64 David Armitage (2000), The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge

University Press), p. 23, e.g. “Empire is a language of power”; Kathleen Deagan (2001), “Dynamics of Imperial Adjustment in Spanish America: Ideology and Social Integration”, in Susan E. Alcock et al. eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge University Press), 179–194, ff. 184–185.

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Tacitus and other classical historians.65 Others thought of Amerindians as “the lost tribes of Israel”.66 The direct linkage between the barbarians of antiquity and the present day also recalls Chinese early modern scholar Wei Yuan comparison of Europeans to previous barbarians that China had dealings with in the past.67 There was a paradox here too, and the dynamics of race were by no means unilinear. On the one hand racial attitudes hardened following the Industrial Revolution. In turn, Voltaire had famously lauded non-Western civilizations such as the Chinese, though his references outside European culture were often superficial. But if the Renaissance had reverted back to Roman classicism, nineteenth-century nationalism romantically hankered after the medieval “barbarian” past. This of course culminated with the Nazis’ tapping into the mystique of the ancient Aryans invaders.68 Biological determinism had a gender dimension in that non-Europeans were almost invariably depicted as effeminate. Empire builders thought their culture evinced “patriotic manhood and racial virility”. However, Africans were set aside for being “over-sexed” and some peoples like the Sikh, Gurkhas, the Turks and Japanese were actually lauded for their martial qualities.69 Edward Said did much to show how Asians were sexualized in Western literature but work by Michael H. Fischer suggests Indian visitors to Britain before 1857 were rarely frowned upon in terms of race or sex, and they even developed a countervailing exoticizing impression of British society.70 What bears remembering is that oppression of native Americans had early dissenters too—Bishop Bartolomeo las Casas being the best known perhaps. A bitter rival of Sepúlveda at the Spanish court, Las Casas was

65 Woolf, Concise History of History, pp. 121–122. 66 Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (2013), Ten Lost Tribes of Israel: A World History (Oxford

University Press). 67 Jane Kate Leonard (1984) Wei Yuan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World (Harvard University Press). 68 Woolf, Concise History of History, p. 142. 69 Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck (2018), “’Savage Wars of Peace’: Violence,

Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World”, in idem. eds Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (Palgrave), pp. 1–24, f. 14. 70 Edward W. Said, (1994) Orientalism (Vintage); Michael H. Fisher (2004) Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Permanent Black).

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the first European to perceive the economic and cultural injustice of the system maintained by the European powers since the sixteenth century for the control of Latin America, Africa and Asia. Similar critique of British colonial policy was to be mounted later on by Edmund Burke and Richard Cobden but theirs was a less enduring legacy than Ilbert’s, mentioned above. In the early nineteenth century, the Latin American revolutionary Simón Bolívar and others were inspired by Las Casas writing. Las Casas’ name came into prominence again in the latter half of the twentieth century, in connection with the indigenista movements in Peru and Mexico.71 To be sure, slaves were to be found everywhere in the ancient world. In particular, though, they were captured in the battle ground. Modern slavery is much more racially-derived, with consequent trans-oceanic population flows. To be sure, Muslims had traded in African slaves before and after Europeans did, but Islam saw all converts as equal in the eyes of the law, and manumission was within reach. Most African slaves in Islamdom worked as porters and boatmen, while Central Asian slaves worked as soldiers. Some African achieved high military rank too.72 To be sure, despite Koranic interdictions, slaves were also employed as eunuchs in the Islamic world. The interdiction on enslaving Muslims was likewise ignored. By contrast, modern empires sought slaves to work in mines and plantations.73 This distinction aside, it bears recalling that slave revolts were common in both the pre-modern and modern eras. The best-known pre-modern one was the Zanj Rebellion (869–883 CE) against the Abbasid caliphate. Most of the slaves involved had been brought from East Africa to drain marshes near Basra. By 871, the rebels captured large tract of Iraq and sacked Basra. But reinforcement of troops from Egypt allowed the Abbasids to defeat the Zanj, and in that sense, Toussaint Louverture’s success in the modern era has no equivalent in pre-modern times. ∗ ∗ ∗

71 Howe, Empire, p. 89; Rattansi, Racism, p. 2. 72 Jason C. Sharman (2020), Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion

and the Creation of the New World Order (Princeton University Press), p. 85. 73 Howe, Empire, pp. 67–68.

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The third key distinction between pre-modern and modern empires has to do with borders, whereby the former opt for loose demarcation and the latter for a rigid one. The distinction translates into core technological capacity in erecting borders, mapping and manning them. Modern empires’ passion for and acumen in delineating borders, including the dispatching of cartographic expeditions worldwide, is key: it not only underlies the Westphalian system but was the foundation of, for example, the famous Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). On the other hand, pre-modern empires are thought to merely possess limes (vague borders).74 Concrete boundaries attempted by pre-modern empires implied more often than not fortification rather than indication of sovereignty. The earliest barrier may have been the one erected by the King of Ur from the Tigris to the Euphrates to stave off pastoralist attacks. Other well-known barriers include the Sassanid one between the Caspian and the Black Sea (the Great Wall of Gorgan); Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China similarly designed to stave off “barbarians”.75 Walled cities were everywhere the norm across Eurasia and North Africa, and massive resources had been invested in their fortification and anti-fortification. So much so that some are visible today—the Great Wall of China goes without saying; but also the Roman rampart in Masada, Alexander the Great’s mole (causeway).76 That is to say, pre-modern empires might have nominal claims to universal rule, yet the “universe” that they supposedly ruled was fuzzily defined—whether it be the Ummayad Dar al-Islam, the Inca Tahuantinsuyu or the Chinese Tianxia. Although Rome started collecting information on Central Asia from the second century CE, its information on

74 Colás, Empire, p. 19, 35; Frankopan, Silk Roads, pp. 225–226. Ancient empires had frontiers rather than hard borders while the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) embodied a new stage of precision in modern empire demarcation well before the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) which cemented cartographic achievements geopolitically. See also Wolfgang Reinhardt (2015), “Introduction” in Akira Iriye and Jürgen Osterhammel eds., Empires and Encounters, 1350–1750 (Harvard University Press), f. 35. 75 Frankopan, Silk Roads, p. 47; see also Yuan-kang Wang (2010), War and Harmony: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics (Columbia University Press), p. 116. Wang asserts that the Great Wall of China was not a border but a second line of defence close to the capital. 76 O’Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 41, 63.

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China remained patently superficial, not much better than the information possessed by Alexander the Great.77 Naimark critically observed that pre-modern genocides “…were often committed beyond the ill-defined borders of the perpetrators’ own lands”, in part to seek new territory for domination, as in the case of the Athenians and Romans, but also to eliminate potential enemies from territory claimed by invaders.78 Adshead suggested that the circuit of information started shifting in Europe’s favour only after the Mongols created a pan-Eurasian imperial “highway”. Prior to 1200, there had been at least as much cartographic knowledge in Islamdom and China.79 Yet Valerie Hansen has qualified the reach of non-Western cartography. Al-Biruni in the tenth century may have known the earth was round and deplored the lack of historical records from India. But he had no ideas of the existence of the Americas. Vasco de Gama famously circumnavigated the Cape: he relied on Muslim informers only in the last leg of the trip. Similarly, Gavin Menzies claims that the Chinese made landfall in America in the fifteenth century are groundless.80 These are important qualifications to make because modern empire builders like Tayyep Erdogan insist Muslims had reached America first. Hansen does accept the claim that the Chinese may have reached Australia by the fifteenth century in search of rare bêche-de-mer.81 On the other end of the spectrum, one needs to remember that the non-West did increasingly rely on Western cartographic knowledge. Yet border dispute arbitration like the one informing Song treaties with steppe people, or the Treaty of Zuhab (1639) between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, was not as definitive in geospatial terms; they were more about spheres of influence than longitudes and latitudes.82 77 Giusto Traina (2018), “Central Asia in the Late Roman Mental Mao, Second to

Sixth Centuries” f. 123 in Nicola Di Cosmo ed., Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran and the Steppe, ca. 250–750 (Cambridge University Press). 78 Norman M. Naimark (2016), Genocide: A World History (Oxford University Press), p. 14. 79 Adrian M. Adshead (2000), China in World History (Palgrave). 80 Hansen, The Year 1000, p. 17. 81 Hansen, The Year 1000, p. 23. 82 Hendrik Spruyt (2020), The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in

the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies (Cambridge University Press), p. 235.

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Bruce Mazlish has argued that since the fifteenth century, Ptolemaic maps have guided the opening of a new world, in which half of a previously unknown globe spun into perspective. Following the Americas, European mapmakers penetrated ever deeper into the African continent, completing their task by the end of the nineteenth century.83 Similarly, Jordan Branch argued that beginning in the second half of the fifteenth century and continuing into the sixteenth, rulers began to take a new interest in using maps for domestic administration and military planning. This trend, however, proceeded only gradually, and the arctic, for example, was not fully mapped until the twentieth century.84 As Schottenhammer, Elman and Smith have suggested in their respective work, Qing China expanded territorially fast partly on the back of Jesuit cartographic knowledge. However, home-grown cartography lagged behind the West from the eighteenth century onward, and interest in maritime exploration and mapping waned even more markedly.85 As Western knowledge began reaching China more directly, following the Opium War (1839–42), Chinese discourse on the rest of the world became better informed but also more racialist in the manner of a modern European Empire.86 Indeed, mapping practices set modern European colonial powers from other powerful empires at that stage—whether it be Muslim “Gunpowder Empires” (Ottomans, Mughals, Safavids) or Ming China. Russian cartography improved by leaps and bounds following the Petrine reforms of the seventeenth century, playing a key role in racial identity formation.87 This

83 Bruce Mazlish (1998), “Comparing Global History to World History”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28.3, f. 385. 84 Jordan Branch (2014), The Cartographic State Maps, Territory, and the Origins of

Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press), p. 72. 85 Angela Schottenhammer (2013), “Empire and Periphery? The Qing Empire’s Relations with Japan and the Ry¯uky¯us (1644–c. 1800), a Comparison”, The Medieval History Journal 16.1, pp. 139–196. See also Richard J. Smith (2102), Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times (Routledge); Benjamin E. Elman (2007), ‘Ming-Qing Border Defence, the Inward Turn of Chinese Cartography, and Qing Expansion in Central Asia in the Eighteenth Century’, in Diana Lary ed., The Chinese State at the Borders (UBC Press), pp. 29–56. 86 Notwithstanding the crusades, Colás (Empire, pp. 118–122) suggests modern empires have been more racialist than pre-modern ones. 87 Steven Seegel (2012), Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press).

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is an important point because recent studies have otherwise called into question perceived European economic and military advantage before 1800.88 Sharman, for example, rightly reminds us that the Ottomans were fairly adept at using gunpowder weapons until the 1700s, and that this factor partly explains their success versus the Mamluks and Safavids.89 As Gábor Ágoston has shown, the Ottomans did indeed not just import guns and cannons from Europe but also manufactured some themselves. In the sixteenth century, Ottoman mills could manufacture up to 1,000 metric tons of gunpowder. By the end of the eighteenth century imports made for the great bulk of ordnance, however.90 Sharman highlights, by way of contrast, the Ottoman “powerful” navy, sailing as it did from Ethiopia right through to Sumatra, and the Ottoman “central” taxation system.91 Yet, as even his sources concede, Ottoman naval prowess waned as early as 1600. For its part, far from being centralized, the Ottoman fiscal system increasingly relied on tax farming in the early modern era. Recall here, too, that the Ottomans did not play a meaningful role in stemming 1600s–1700s Dutch encroachment into Java or moreover into Aceh, where devout Turkophile Muslims ruled. After a hiatus lasting two and a half centuries, contacts between the Sublime Porte and Aceh resumed in 1850, yet the Dutch embassy in Istanbul was able to scupper Ottoman plans of intervening in the conflict. In line with Sharman’s argument, Marshall Poe suggests that Muscovy’s greatest achievements in the age of Ivan III (1462–1505) were military. He set up a formidable cavalry, probably modelled on Mongol tactics rather than on European tactics. The bows used certainly did not resemble European ones, so Ivan arguably pushed back the steppe invaders with their own “medicine”. In the sixteenth century, Russians continued to rely on the cavalry to the neglect of naval force. Russian

88 Mazlish, “Comparing Global History”. cf. Ferguson, Empire, pp. 172–174. 89 Jason Sharman (2019), Empire of the Weak (Princeton University Press), p. 107. 90 Gábor Ágoston (2005), Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry

in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press), p. 199, p. 160. 91 Sharman, Empire of the Weak, pp. 100–101.

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were otherwise slow to embrace gunpowder weaponry, partly because they were deemed spiritually harmful by the Orthodox Church. Moreover, it was not just the case that serfdom hampered mobility, foreigners were not allowed to enter Muscovy as well, and Russians were not allowed to travel abroad without the express permission of the Tsar. As a result of these two factors, they were defeated by the Swedes time and again.92 Sharman points to the fact that Southeast Asia had already been acquainted with Chinese gunpowder weapons before the European onslaught. The Portuguese themselves extolled locally impounded pistols as equal in quality to German ones. But, according to Tony Reid, local records stressed the shock “thundering” cannon-loaded caravels introduced by Portuguese had caused.93 ∗ ∗ ∗ Curiously, African gold and slave markets were approached by sea. Overland, Europeans would have had to traverse the Maghreb but there was vehement Muslim resistance there that made the idea impossible. After all, Portugal itself was partly occupied by Muslims until the 1400s. When the Portuguese did forcefully try to invade the Maghreb like in the Battle of Alcazarquivir (1578), they were resoundingly defeated amid heavy artillery from both sides. What is more, the Portuguese King Sebastian was killed in battle; the Spaniards would invade Portugal; and the Ottomans would increasingly be involved in the Maghreb thereafter.94 At this juncture, Sharman insightfully points to Oman as another very important spoiler of European expansion. In 1661, Omani naval forces aided by local collaborators wrested Mombasa from the Portuguese and would later take over Zanzibar too. In 1668, Omanis sacked the Portuguese fort as far away as Diu.95 In sum, Sharman shows there was a lot of gunpowder in use in North Africa. The traditional narrative foregrounds, for example, Mamluk (and 92 Marshall T. Poe (2011), The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton University Press), pp. 43–44, 54. 93 Tony Reid (1994), “Early Southeast Asian Categorization of Europeans” in Stuart B. Schwartz ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ff. 275–280. 94 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, pp. 48, 114. 95 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, pp. 54, 58.

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Japanese) reluctance to embrace firearms, and in that sense, Sharman provides a powerful corrective. He even suggests Mamluk-made guns reached Western India in 1500.96 But, notably, Peter Mundy, who visited India in the 1630s, did not describe in his famous travelogue any guns used by Mughal soldiers. ∗ ∗ ∗ Religion played its part too. Sharman rightly mentions the Ottomans were tolerant of religious minorities, and in that sense, they presaged perhaps social modernity. He also insightfully shows how the Portuguese conspired from 1500s with Hindu principalities against Muslim attacks, as was the case in Goa in 1510. Ottoman contact with, on the other hand, the Muslim principalities in Sumatra comes across as rather feeble. The 1509 Battle of Diu in modern Gujarat is key. There, 1,500 Portuguese faced an “unlikely” but large fighting coalition of seaseasoned Mamluks, Ottomans and even Catholic Venetians, as well as local Indians.97 But the nub of the matter is that the Portuguese actually won, thus entrenching their partial domination of the spice trade. And yet Sharman stresses what he sees as subsequent Ottoman inroads into the spice trade and domination of the Red Sea. Frankopan suggests he may be right as, shorn of some revenue, the Portuguese turned their attention also to cotton and silk imports.98 If Diu was a triumph, in 1622 the Portuguese lost their grip on the allimportant entrepot of Hormuz.99 Here, the usurper was the Protestant English with Safavid assistance, which brings to mind Rhoads Murphey’s famous argument about the English singular ability to entice the right Asian rulers to their side at the right time. In keeping with this argument, the French support for the Mughals against the EIC during the famous 1757 Battle of Plassey came to nothing.

96 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, p. 74. 97 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, p. 57–58. 98 Peter Frankopan (2015), The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury),

pp. 231–232. 99 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, p. 83.

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Sharman claims that between 1521 and 1522 the Ming navy drowned interloping Portuguese ships.100 But the bigger picture is more complicated. Actually, by 1557, the Portuguese were able to establish a permanent settlement in Macau through kickback to local officials and, importantly, by demonstrating their vitality to the Ming as counter-piracy agents and as cannon makers. They were also supported by the Jesuit presence in Beijing. Macau’s survival in the face of local and intra-European (mainly Dutch) pressures is a testament to the ingenuity of the Portuguese sea empire. On the other hand, the Ming were defeated by the Qing even though the latter had fewer cannons, thus reinforcing Sharman’s point about the irrelevance of European technology on the Asia battlefield. ∗ ∗ ∗ Pooling private capital through enhanced property rights was key to European ascendancy in the early modern era. In that sense, jointstock trading companies like the EIC, or its Dutch competitor the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), were great innovations. Yet, strangely, Sharman seems to read weakness into the EIC and VOC precisely because of their joint-stock nature as compared with the more statist but less dynamic colonization effort by the Portuguese (Estado do India) and the French (Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes Orientales ). That is to say, statism strangely equates with modernity in Sharman’s narrative but not necessarily with military strength or profitability for that matter.101 Actually, as Sharman himself shows, all European “India” companies enjoyed official backing to one degree or another, including the Spanish Casa de Contratación. All enticed private capital to one degree or another, in return for limited trading rights. And even though Sharman sweepingly deprecates the profitability of those companies, they delivered massive revenue to their governments. The Habsburgs otherwise creamed off much of the silver bonanza discretely scooped up by encomiendas across Latin America by way of financing war against the Protestant Dutch. The VOC and EIC adapted to local taxation norms, but paid their governments handsomely for the chartered trading privileges they 100 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, pp. 129–130. 101 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, p. 69.

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received. As argued above, Europe came to dominate much of Asia relying in no small measure on Asian capital and Asian human resources. It should therefore not come as a surprise that the EIC borrowed heavily from local creditors so as to finance its military build-up in keeping with European norms. Indeed, EIC’s debt-to-revenue ratio rose from 120% in 1793 to over 300% in 1809 !.102 This is a marker of modernity not of weakness, as all European governments trod a similar fiscal path of “national debt”, and the EIC was after all a state within a state. More generally, after 1500, commercial rather than land taxes gradually became the main source of revenue for European governments. Income tax did not become significant contributor until the twentieth century, while customs and duties made for the lion share beforehand. It is therefore no accident that Europeans set their eyes on the Ottoman and Qing customs apparatus later in the nineteenth century. None of the land empires surveyed by Sharman passes muster fiscally. Of course, there were differences among them: Russia had strong feudal aristocracy, while slave soldiers were rife in the Islamic world. But apart from China, where the tax burden was light and the levy system centralized, all those empires relied to one degree or another on tax farming with high intermediary costs. Increasing heavy tax loads underpin economic modernity. For commercial tax receipts to grow commerce had to grow, so EIC and VOC importance also hinges on custom payments, not just charter fees. The costs of waging war so far away from the metropole were surely prohibitive. Here, Patrick O’Brien comes to mind with his famous conclusions that “empire” did not pay off to Europe although his focus was on nineteenth-century Britain. In fact, Sharman rightly contends exorbitant outlays were the reason why the Ming gave up on naval expansion in the fifteenth century.103 But the wider implication that the various East India companies set up by European powers were loss making and deeply corrupt is wanting at best. As argued above, these companies’ operation yielded many largely positive externalities from a metropolitan perspective. Viceroyal domination replaced company rule in many parts of the world by the nineteenth century but there was also a continuum in

102 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, p. 94. 103 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, pp. 133–138.

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private domination of colonies like Belgium’s Congo; Bismarck’s late German colonies in Africa were also managed by companies; likewise the Portuguese entrusted British firms—the Niassa Co. and the Zambezia Co.—with the effective control of Mozambique.104 ∗ ∗ ∗ The fourth key distinction between pre-modern and modern empires has to do with the ideology of mercantilism; with the attempt to globally monopolize key commodities (not just luxury ones); and with intensively taxing commerce through larger central bureaucracies. Pre-modern empires had largely been geared towards agricultural land taxes and often resorted to tax farming by way of collection. Only 15% of Roman tax revenue, for example, was derived from commercial taxes in contrast to early modern empires.105 The fiscal mainstay in Rome was tax farming, whereby governors oversaw publicani collection in the provinces.106 China and Egypt are an outlier here in that they were the only empires in antiquity to have a large central bureaucracy: unlike Rome, the Chinese Army did not assist with the collecting taxes by and large, yet China too relied on land tax. And if China’s was a largely civilian bureaucracy, in the second century BCE all those seeking public office in Rome were required to have served in the army for at least ten years.107 Prior to Diocletian’s reforms, Rome had a great variation of local tax regimes compared with China’s relatively central system. That said, both Rome and China used corvee labour, commutation of military service and

104 D.K. Fieldhouse (1966), The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the 18 th Century (Springer) pp. 354–371. 105 Bang and Baly persuasively argue that pre-modern empires more often than not were tributary rather than commercial in their orientation. That is to say they aimed at augmenting land tax receipts from farmers rather than enhancing trading networks. Peter Fibiger Bang and C.A. Baly (2011), “Tributary Empires – Toward a Global and Comparative History”, in idems eds., Tributary Empires in Global History (Palgrave), pp. 1–20, f. 6. 106 Colás, Empire, p. 79. 107 Kelly, The Roman Empire, Kindle Locations 383–384; Walter Scheidel (2015),

“State Revenue and Expenditure in the Han and Roman Empires”, in State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford University Press), pp. 150–180, f. 164. Scheidel argues Rome leaned on tax farming to a greater extent than China. It also prized ad valorem taxes.

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tollpikes, and the overall tax burden in both may have been similar.108 And if monarchism was deeply embedded in the Chinese psyche, Augustus maintained the fiction that the senate continued to elect the emperor whereas in reality the army acclaimed generals as new emperors. Namely, the lines of succession in Han China were more hereditary, although legitimation in both societies drew on an imperial cult.109 A harbinger of mercantilism was Portuguese attempts in the fifteenth century at circumventing Muslim powers and reaching the source of Mali gold by sea, beginning with the occupation of slave-hub Ceuta. Recall that Ceuta had been a pre-modern colony, that is largely self-governing colony, of the Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans and Byzantines beforehand. The Portuguese thought they would find along the way the fabled Prester John, a Christian monarch with whom to outflank Islam.110 In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese also attempted to control the black pepper flow from India, while silver from Spanish mines in Potosi reconfigured the monetary landscape right around the world. But of course mercantilism later stretched to daily commodities like Caribbean sugar, Indian calicos and North American cotton.111 These essential items transformed the dietary and sumptuary routines of people in Europe to a degree unthinkable in pre-modern times, and undergirt the size of the Western European state. Critically, except perhaps Russia and AustroHungary, no other early modern land empire set up a chartered company entrusted with monopolizing commodities, or conquest in the same manner. Naval warfare was one way the East India companies broke into Asia. But the strategy of monopolizing commodities sometimes involved deals too. For example, the Dutch first exterminated resistance in the Moluccas so that they could create a spice empire. They then famously traded

108 Walter Scheidel (2011), “Fiscal Regimes and the ‘First Great Divergence’ between Eastern and Western Eurasia”, in Peter Fibiger Bang and C.A. Baly eds., Tributary Empires in Global History (Palgrave), pp. 193–204, f. 195. See also Finer, The History of Government Vol. 1, p. 40. 109 Finer, The History of Government Vol. 1, p. 83. 110 Hart, Empires & Colonies, pp. 61–63; Abernethy, Dynamics of Global Dominance,

Chp. 1. “Knowledge” of Prester John first reached Europe in the twelfth century but he was initially thought to have ruled East Asia. The focus of searches shifted to Africa only in the fifteenth century. 111 Ostehammel, Colonialism, p. 74.

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Manhattan for the tiny island of Run so that they could hold on to their control of global nutmeg flows in the face of English competition. At the time, nutmeg mattered more because it was only available there, and was thought to offer immunity from the plague.112 Here, we arguably see economics trumping geopolitics in the making of early modern empire. Tax receipts and profits sometimes tell only part of the story. The English and Dutch East India companies’ apparatus helped convey the best of Asian technology to European master artisans. Thus, both Delft and Stoke-on-Trent boasted a sophisticated china industry by the early seventeenth century. Lord Macartney was famously rebuffed by the Qianlong Emperor in 1793 because China was supposedly self-sufficient, and did not need British mechanical clockwork. But after all empire building is in the words of Charles Maier “a project to dominate time as well as space”.113 It is no accident that the greatest imperial showcase, the British Museum, dedicates so much room to clockwork, alongside archaeological artefacts from all major civilization. Timekeeping was part and parcel of the European “miracle”.114 The British were portrayed in turn as slavishly reliant on quintessentially Chinese imports like tea, silk and ceramics. What historians rarely appreciate is that Macartney also brought along British-made ceramics to impress the locals. In other words, Europeans in the early modern age copied technology faster than the other way around even at a time when they were not sufficiently militarily strong to open the region for trade. Macartney’s mission should have perhaps engendered a “Sputnik moment” in Emperor Qianlong’s mind, but in reality Qing China remained suspicious of foreign technology. Half a century after the visit, the market for China’s other fabled export, silk, will have been partly taken over and mechanized by Italians and Japanese.115 As for tea, the Chinese monopoly was broken a little later in the 1850s with the development of the Indian tea industry by the British. Earlier in 1617 English envoy Thomas Roe similarly failed to make an impression on Mughal Emperor Jahangir. Roe showed the emperor the latest EIC maps of the world using Mercator but these were rejected by

112 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, p. 72. 113 Maier, Among Empires, p. 286. 114 Carlo M. Cipolla (1967) Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700 (Walker). 115 Giovanni Federico (2009), An Economic History of the Silk Industry, 1830–1930

(Cambridge University Press).

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court scribes. No sputnik moment was engendered in the mind of the Indian ruler.116 ∗ ∗ ∗ The origins of mercantilism then are in Portuguese and Dutch attempts to monopolize the spice trade—once even sugar was considered a rare import in Europe. Yet fierce intra-European competition in Southeast Asia and India meant monopolies were precarious: Hormuz was recovered by the Safavids, and Melaka was lost to the Dutch. Then, on the other end of Columbian exchange, attempts at sneaking out spice from Southeast Asia were partly successful much like Robert Fortune was successful in smuggling out tea seedlings from China.117 So much so that nutmeg and clove are grown today mostly in Grenada and Martinique. Moreover, once quintessentially Sri Lankan, cinnamon is grown today in Madagascar; black pepper in Africa. Allspice, on the other hand, is a spice native in Jamaica. As I have shown elsewhere, mercantilism also sought to exploit colonies monetarily by sucking out precious metals while keeping colonies on base-metal or paper standard. The Italian city-states pioneered this pattern around the Mediterranean. Yet the American colonies in particular complained about a shortfall of currency. Pre-modern empires did not attempt something similar. On the contrary, they usually subsidized colonies with grain and monetary metal.118 Thus, Venetian colonial currency disbursed in Greece was comparatively much more debased than republican Venetian coinage, but it was regionally circumscribed; that is, it could not be converted into other coinage outside Greece. Either way, both metropolitan and colonial Venetian coins were minted from bullion mostly mined elsewhere; coeval Hungarian and Serbian coins were minted from domestically mined silver and yet did not prove as popular. More generally, foreign full-bodied coins 116 Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2005), “Taking Stock of the Franks: South Asian Views of Europeans and Europe, 1500–1800”, Indian Economic and Social History Review 42.1, pp. 69–100, ff. 78–79. 117 Andrew Dalby (2000), Dangerous Tastes: the Story of Spices (University of California Press). 118 Peter C. Perdue (2015), “Empires and Frontiers in Continental Eurasia”, in Akira Iriye and Jürgen Osterhammel eds., Empires and Encounters, 1350–1750 (Harvard University Press), f. 211.

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as well as worn and clipped coins from all over Europe were brought to Venice for re-mintage precisely because of the premium that Venetian coinage carried over metal. Venetian colonialism (Stato da Mar) was more direct then, e.g. the Genoese colony in Cyprus. It was also more geared to conveying monetary and mercantile riches to the metropole. Yet at its height, the Venetian Empire negotiated with the Ottomans and Hungarians over access to trade rather than attempt outright occupation.119 Early modern European debasement seems somewhat more “offensive” in nature in that it was more often aimed at defraying expansionist warfare. The Song era apart, it would be hard to find a Chinese historic parallel to the pattern whereby the city-state of Venice could foist, for example, debased coinage on its Greek colonies during the fourteenth century, while denying it legal-tender status elsewhere. That Venetian pattern uncannily echoes the later Japanese imperialist monetary project in Taiwan and Korea. This project, in turn, constitutes an important episode in the global transition from fiduciary to fiat currency over the course of the twentieth century.120 After the US withdrawal from the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the monetary value of precious metals dropped. The world has since transitioned into fiat currency use overwhelmingly. Consequently, monopolizing precious metals arguably poses much less of a boon in this post-colonial era. Yet the potential of national currency to serve as reserve currency outremer is still seen as a hallmark of world leadership. ∗ ∗ ∗ Other ground-breaking comparative studies published later in the postwar era include among others Michael Mann’s exploration of the sources of state power; Immanuel Wallerstein and Gunder Frank’s pursuit of the sources of global inequality; Randall Collins and Ben Ami Scharfstein juxtaposition of world civilizations; and Angus Maddison historical GDP

119 Tom Scott (2012), The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600: Hinterland, Territory, Region (Oxford University Press), pp. 84–87; Roger Crowley (2011), City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (Faber & Faber), pp. 233–252. 120 Niv Horesh (2014), Chinese Money in Global Context (Stanford University Press).

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project.121 Though different in their approach, all of these studies turned away from Eurocentrism and modernocentrism. In general, the comparative study of empires and civilizations in times past gained renewed impetus following the collapse of the USSR and China’s joining the WTO in 2001. Against the backdrop of more frequent encounters between Western and non-Western historians,122 two distinct fields emerged. World History practitioners were focused on the longue duree and on pre-industrial revolutions era. Global historians cast their gaze mainly to the last 500 years and were more economic in orientation, particularly focusing on how nation-states have been transcended through the thicket of globalization. The tendency for Eurocentrism that marked much of the previous century has all but vanished in the twenty-first century with publisher appetite for books on China, India and Russia exploding. Indeed, China’s surging ahead economically placed the “European miracle” in fresh light: suddenly Weber exclusivity seemed hopelessly outdated not just through European eyes. In particular, the studies by Angus Maddison and Gunder Frank were warmly welcome in China because they reasserted the economic centrality of imperial China on the world stage before the 1800.123 In the broader literature, one key debate is whether empires are premeditated or borne out of absent-mindedness. Notably, Luttwak’s work on classic Rome suggested careful pre-meditation or grand strategy (even if unspoken), whereas R.M Errington argued Rome’s rise was an “accident of history”. Earlier, John Robert Seeley observed of the British Empire: “[w]e seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the

121 Mann, The Sources of Social Power; Immanuel M. Wallerstein (2004), World-systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke University Press). Andre Gunder Frank (1998), ReORIENT:Global Economy in the Asian Age (University of California Press); Randall Collins (1998), The Sociology of Philosophies (Harvard University Press); Ben-Ami Scharfstein (1998), A Comparative History of World Philosophy From the Upanishads to Kant (SUNY Press); Angus Maddison (2003), Development Centre Studies The World Economy. Historical Statistics (OECD). 122 Luo Xu (2007), “Reconstructing World History in the People’s Republic of China since the 1980s.” Journal of World History 18.3, pp. 325–350. 123 Luo Xu, op cit.

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world in a fit of absence of mind”.124 Porter also argued that the emergence of the British Empire was unintentional, and that as a result British society was much less imperial in its outlook than its expatriates.125 The argument of this book is that empire building is anything but accidental, and to that end, we will go beyond the Roman and British boilerplates. However, strategies varied around the world and changed over time. Flanked to the West by satellite states, the Soviet Union’s was arguably an imperial system akin to the Romans’ which cultivated vassal states. Rosenstein, for example, concludes that, in comparison with China, Roman military hegemony was “in general not oppressive” because it was more reliant on colonies’ and allies’ support. In return for placing their military forces at Rome’s disposal, colonies and allies were left almost entirely autonomous.126 As already mentioned, the most important typological work on empire in the post-war period is that published by the late Adam Watson in 1992. It harshly criticized IR realists for their lack of historicity and their Eurocentrism. And far from being temporally constrained, it showed how the modern international system gravitated towards “hegemonic concert” much like times past. Watson’s prediction that modern nationstates would be prepared to sacrifice sovereignty towards better global governance is partly vindicated by the subsequent expansion of the EU. More generally, Watson persuasively suggested there was a broad spectrum of world-system contingencies in the past: acephalous huntergatherer society, secluded tribalism/nomadism, Indus valley bipolarity, vertically-governed Sumerian city-states, horizontally-governed Greek poleis, inward-looking empires like Egypt or China, right through to universalist conquest empires like the neo-Assyrian one. This spectrum

124 John Robert Seeley (2005), The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Cosimo), p. 12. 125 Bernard Porter (2004), The Absent Minded Imperialists: What the British Really Thought About Empire, p. 47. 126 Nathan Rosenstein (2009), “War, State Formation, and the Evolution of Military Institutions in Ancient China and Rome”, in Walter Scheidel ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford University Press) 2009, pp. 24–51; Ferguson, Empire, Chp. 1.

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differed qualitatively from the simple modernocentric binary of IR practitioners like Waltz who identify either anarchy or hierarchy in the world system.127 Watson also makes the case that some empires historically evolved in isolation from peer-competitors, and that invariably seeped into its strategic mindset. The best-known case is China, having impacted the cultures of Vietnam, Korea and Japan but not significantly threatened by them. The Maya civilization also had no peer-competitors, and much the same can be said about the Anasazi of New Mexico, or the Songhai Empire in West Africa. Not all nomads surrounding China were illiterate though—illiteracy arguably applied to the Xiongnu, but not to the Goturk Empire in sixth century.128 The Goturk Empire was supplanted by the Uyghur Khaganate using Aramaic-derived script that informed Mongol and Jurchen, but not Khitan. Importantly, the Goturk Empire dealt with the Byzantine, Persian and Chinese empires all at once, drawing on Sogdian traders: at times in alliance and at other times in resistance. Along with home-grown shamanism, its people embraced both the Nestorian and Buddhist faiths. Yet, save some Byzantine coins found in China, no evidence of a direct link between the Byzantine and Chinese empires survives. Nomads were usually disruptors in the eyes of empire builders. Sometimes they posed mortal threat. But disruptors could usher in empires in their own right. As Hyun Jin Kim has shown, for example, the illiterate Xiongnu harassed the Chinese Han Empire before their descendants migrated further West, with Attila eventually establishing the Hun Empire.129 Later, the nomadic Mongols and Jurchens would take China over by storm, establishing the Yuan and Qing dynasties. And the nomadic Seljuks harassed the Byzantine Empire, before the Ottomans took it over completely. In the West, Germanic peoples were seen as the illiterate barbarian scourge, yet their kingdoms modelled themselves on Rome after the latter’s downfall. Notably, both Asian nomad and the 127 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, passim; William C. Wohlforth et al.

(2007), “Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History”, European Journal of International Relations 13.2, pp. 155–185. 128 Denis Sinor (1990), “The Establishment and Dissolution of the Türk Empire.” In idem. ed. The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (Cambridge University Press), pp. 285–316. 129 Hyun Jin Kim (2015) The Huns (Routledge).

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Germanic people opted for elective monarchy rather than a hereditary one, more common in literate empires. ∗ ∗ ∗ Greeks poleis resented any kind of overlordship or hegemony, by another polis or by a foreign power. Yet despite the bonds of common language, the idea of uniting all Greek cities into a single state did not often occur to them in favourable terms before Alexander the Great came to the fore. In that sense, the Greek city-states were less hierarchical than the ones emerging in Sumer earlier. And unlike the Chinese, Greek thought was less hindered by past precedent. But in practice many Greek cities had to accept some degree of control by an overlord or a hegemonial ally as a better option than subjugation by “barbarian” despotic rulers.130 There were two prototypes of Greek cities—seafaring and landbound. If democratic Athens heading the Delian League constituted the former, Spartan heading the Peloponnese League was ruled by hereditary oligarchy despising trade and money. Where Athens employed slaves, Sparta had helots tilling the land.131 Within each league bandwagoning and counter-balancing behaviour could be observed quite often. Alliances and conscription mattered. In the second century BC, in order to field an army of around 130,000 men, the Romans not only depended heavily on their Italian allies, but also enlisted around 13% of their own adult male citizens, particularly the young. In the event, over half of men in Rome will have served before turning 25.132 In contrast to the Greco-Roman pattern, conscription was rare in China after the fall of the Han dynasty. From the Peloponnesian War onwards, Corinthian and Persian policy aligned, as the Achaemenids backed moves to contain Sparta. Both were anti-hegemonial, because neither was strong enough to support hegemony of its own there in Central Greece. The Corinthians, however, were

130 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 36. 131 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 14. 132 Kelly, The Roman Empire, Kindle Locations 367–369.

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typically more convinced of the need to reduce hegemonial power by military action, whereas the Persians inclined towards pacification.133 Were Greek poleis unique in their democratic aspirations and love of liberty? As we saw above, many experts suggest earlier parallel in the Sumerian world, whereby some villages are said to have been governed by assemblies before the onset of monarchism. Notably, other experts believe pre-Maurian society in India also displayed such traits on the sidelines even if this is not borne out by the great political thinker of the time, Kautilya. That is to say, most early communities in North India were governed by a king, but there were a few city republics and some elected rulers. In addition, many states were matrilineal.134 Debates on eurocentrism aside, there is near consensus in the contemporary scholarly literature that, among literate societies, the Greek poleis were an outlier in an otherwise fairly hierarchical world. Athens in particular was known for its male citizen egalitarianism and vigorous public life. Neither did fifth-century BCE Athens constitute a conquest empire, opting instead to strive for an Ionian federation. In a sense, the Roman republic inherited Athenian civic mores, and that ethos was nominally retained even during the Principate. Thus, the first Roman emperors were more constricted than emperors in the Chinese setting. Moreover, in the Greco-Roman setting stone-built cities were often more autonomous and had a more distinct identity, whereas in China they were conceptually and materially “evanescent”.135 Granted, all adult male citizens were enfranchized in Athens, but a system of electoral colleges guaranteed that the rich would always be able to outvote the poor. In addition, the heavy costs of campaigning and office-holding ensured that all who were most prominent in government were themselves personally wealthy.136 By contrast, in Rome, there was to be greater emphasis on balancing patrician and plebeian consuls. Watson insightfully argued that in all forms of imperialisms, the conquered maintained influence on the conquerors, so exploitation is

133 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 47. 134 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, pp. 58–59. 135 Mark Edward Lewis (2009), “Gift Circulation and Charity in the Han and Roman

Empires”, in Walter Scheidel et al. eds., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires, pp. 121–136. 136 Kelly, The Roman Empire, Kindle Locations 318–320.

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never one way. In that respect, one might also point to the role of acculturated minorities serving modern metropoles: Chinese and Indians in Southeast Asia being obvious case in point; but also Jews in Iberia before the eviction; Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before the massacre; Sherpas in the British Army; or German officers in the Czar’s.137 It bears recalling that more than a million Indians served in the British Army during World War I, including Muslims who fought against their Ottoman co-religionists with but few revolts.138 In China, early Tang elites were made up of many ethnic minorities. The Tang royal house was itself of quasi-native extraction. It employed many non-Chinese generals and bureaucrats, and welcomed expatriate trading communities from all over Eurasia within its midst. However, as Marc S. Abramson has shown in his detailed study, that precise interpenetration could trigger off at times xenophobic backlashes. On balance, Abramson concludes that although anti-Buddhist sentiments degenerated at times into negative physical stereotyping of Indians and steppe people, Tang elite thinkers by and large did accept that Chineseness was a taught cultural trait rather than an innate racial one. In fact, cases of positive stereotyping of steppe and South Asian people are not unknown in Tang discourse. By extension, Tang society as a whole was arguably more tolerant of ethnic differences than the later Song and Ming societies.139 Kumar presents the Ottomans as the masters of managing and utilizing difference, in part because their empire was not majority-Muslim until the seventeenth-century conquest of the Middle East. The Ottoman ruling elite was not a core ethnicity, but military elite drawn from various communities. Similarly, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was multiethnic. Elite positions there depended on the success of the empire as a whole rather than on the claims of its constituent nationalities. In its transnational flair, the Austro-Hungarian Empire recalls the EU at present, Switzerland or the Hanseatic League in the past.140 Conversely, the historical model it represents clashes with the notion of pan-ethnic ideologies, particularly pan-Slavism. The argument can be extended to religion

137 Parsons, The Rule of Empire, p. 6. Münkler, Empires, p. 23. 138 Fergsuon, Empire, p. 306. 139 Marc C. Abramson (2008), Ethnic Identity in Tang China (University of Pennsyl-

vania Press). 140 O’Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 102.

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too: the pan-Islamism of the caliphate (historic or incarnate), for example, clashes with pan-Turk and pan-Arab ideology. In contrast to China, the Islamic world possessed no exam-based civil service, and in contrast to Europe, it possessed no feudal aristocracy. Unlike the European aristocrats, Ottoman cavalrymen (sipahi) possessed no judicial powers over the peasantry in their land; land was rarely given to sipahi in perpetuity, whereas the czars had an enduring pact with local slave owners.141 As mentioned above, European colonial powers have also looked to Rome for hints on how they should manage relations with newly conquered people. The Spanish looked to Roman precedent for guidance on how to rule Native Americans, but eventually accepted conversion to Christianity as their raison d’empire. The French as descendants of the Gauls, whom Rome had colonized, had a consonant obligation to the peoples they had conquered. So while modern European nationalism drew on resistance to Rome, earlier European colonial forays sought Roman inspiration.142 ∗ ∗ ∗ Watson extolled the Greek poleis international system of the classic era for its flexibility—he did identify similar systems not just in Greece but suggested that that degree of state independence was impossible to conceive nowadays. Because societies often remained oblivious to one another before the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan, unipolarity or loose alignments among societies were more common. However, one might add that the singular Indian case during the Cold War suggests genuine non-alignment (freedom from hegemony) could not be ruled out. In essence, throughout history, Watson showed a range of possible IR modalities from tribal anarchy, to Sumerian poleis (city-states with degree of hegemony), to multipolar poleis, to confederation, through to Assyrian-like outright occupation. These dynamics, he argued, are not just consigned to history, but could emerge in the future too.143 In the

141 Lieven, Empire, p 145, 265. 142 Harari, Kitsur, passim. 143 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, passim.

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choice between a Roman-style hegemonic system and Greek-style independence—early modern Europeans fell on the side of Greece even while culturally admiring the Romans. It is no accident, then, that Latin was used in European (and American) symbols of statehood until recently. As argued above, the European system today retains much Greek classic-era pluralism. Under the concert of the Big Four (UK, France, Germany, Italy), there lie medium to minuscule-size independent polities from non-aligned cantonal Switzerland through to princely Monaco. The EU is, more generally, a confederation of republics and constitutional monarchies, maintaining relations with tiny principalities whose formation dates back to medieval times. This degree of autonomy brings to mind similar confederations in the past like indeed the Holy Roman Empire. ∗ ∗ ∗ Greece aside, we can deduce from the Phoenicians a hands-off pattern of imperial control that is recurrent in history. Usually dubbed “thalassocracy”, this pattern signifies maritime expansion on the perimeter without robust impact on indigenous societies inland.144 It can equally apply to the incipient Portuguese presence in Africa, or to Srivijaya dominion in Southeast Asia, or indeed Polynesian settlement in New Guinea. Unlike Egypt, Mesopotamia or the Hittites—the Phoenicians and Greeks had used their seafaring skills to plant their peoples and spread their influence across the ancient Mediterranean world. Srivijaya was similarly spread along Southeast Asian archipelagos. But neither the Phoenicians, nor the Greeks, nor the Srivijayans found a way to knit their scattered communities together into a single powerful state. The Vikings faced the same problem despite their remarkable success in raiding and settling coastal zones from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. In fact, Portugal’s was the first global thalassocracy. One of the paradoxes of imperial power at sea is the attitude towards piracy. The Phoenicians appear to have engaged in piracy, as did the Greeks, the Romans and the Carthaginians. In the Middle Ages, Vikings from the north and Muslims from the south also engaged in piracy. Modern empires sought to make the high seas safe, but earlier on in their formative era they had benefitted from piracy themselves. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, after the weakening of Ottoman 144 Josephine Quinn (2019), In Search of the Phoenicians (Princeton University Press).

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rule had resulted in the virtual independence of North African sultanates, piracy became common in the Mediterranean. As late as the nineteen century, these pirate sultanates were suppressed by American, British and French forces. Yet, conversely, there had been many British, American and French pirates on the high seas beforehand, particularly in the Caribbean: a few like Francis Drake or John Cabot even helped create the British Empire.145 ∗ ∗ ∗ The Italian city-states which Emperor Barbarossa famously tried to conquer in the twelfth century while consolidating his power underscore a modality of independence and political separateness that does not really exist in the late-imperial Chinese contexts, where city-kingdoms were virtually unknown. An ethnic German, Barbarossa nevertheless presented himself as legitimate heir to Rome by invoking the medieval principle of tranlatio imperii. Amazingly, the Ottomans would resort to the same principle by way of justifying their empire even though they were not Christian. Finally, Hernán Cortés would use a comparable principle to justify the transfer of authority from the Aztec ruler of Mexico to the Emperor Charles V.146 Yet, China by the same token did not experience the fervent radicalism that swept through Europe at the time in the form of Crusades. Neither did China experience anything similar to the later sacking of Rome and imprisonment of Pope Clement VII by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (CE 1500–1558) that famously led to England’s breaking away from the Catholic mould. Nor could plutocratic families wield so much political (and religious) power in late-imperial China as did the Medicis, Stroganovs or Fuggars in Europe.147 The last reign to allow for substantive feudalism in China was the Tang, yet, it was at the same time a centralizing polity in Chinese history in other ways, not least by adopting civil service exams. To be sure, right up to the collapse of the imperial order in 1911, authoritative emperors might 145 Sharman, Empires of the Weak, p. 72, 106, 117; Howe, Empire, p. 57. 146 Woolf, Concise History of History, p. 52–54. 147 Spruyt (The World Imagined, passim) stresses that the last European ruler to claim the universalist papal mantle was Charles V. See also Nicolas Spulber (2009), Russia’s Economic Transitions (Cambridge University Press), pp. 119–120.

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be criticized in ahistorical fashion as resurrecting a commandery administrative system (junxian) reminiscent of the tyrannical, short-lived Qin Empire (BCE 221–206).148 Yet, beyond self-interested scholar rhetoric, the Qin marked in fact an aberration in the early imperial trajectory. Between BCE 1,000 and the Tang era, China had by and large been administered as a loose confederation of semi-autonomous prefectures known as the fengjian system. Nevertheless, that system was not a cognate of European feudalism because it entailed a much stronger sense of empire-wide taxation and military conscription. Since the last millennium of imperial Chinese history (i.e. the millennium prior to 1911) saw the attenuation of the fengjian legacy, some gentry critics of the throne wistfully pined for it by lionizing pre-Tang antiquity. Yet, ironically, it was the Qin dynasty (BCE 221–206) that served as the most hated trope in the eyes of late-imperial critics of bureaucratic centralism like Gu Yanwu (CE 1613–1682). But, while it was an easy target to assail in the distant past, even the Qin retained precisely the kind of hereditary nobility that would disappear in the lateimperial era. In other words, in early imperial times, fengjian did not necessarily preclude centralizing state powers, whereas in late-imperial discourse fengjian for the most part did. The famous Tang intellectual Liu Zongyuan (CE 773–819), for example, praised in his famous essay Fengjianlun the stability and prosperity of his times, which he saw as departing from the fengjian mould. For Liu that prosperity was the result of the Tang-established central civil service, which he compared favourably with Qin arbitrary tyranny.149 In that sense, the Tang is lionized in contemporary China as progenitor of the modern civil service, where exams rather than connections were putatively the means for selecting the worthy. Where governments are paramount, entering officialdom ultimately means enhanced social status. Since talent and worthiness are not always inheritable, big government and strict civil service exams are seen as timeless, albeit admittedly elitist,

148 See e.g. William T. Rowe (2010), China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Harvard University Press), pp. 60–62; see also Patricia Thornton (2007), Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence and State-making in Modern China (Harvard University Press), Chps. 2–3. 149 Antje Flüchter, and Jivanta Schöttli (2014), The Dynamics of Transculturality: Concepts and Institutions in Motion (Springer), pp. 108–109; John E. Schrecker (2004), The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective (Greenwood), pp. 264–270.

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pathway toward wealth redistribution and greater social mobility. Moreover, some claim that that innovation later inspired the establishment of the Prussian and British modern civil services.150 If Max Weber had once considered Confucianism as antidote to innovation, scholars like Ho Ping-ti and Woodside cast Confucianism as cementing the civil service ethos and social mobility in the Chinese lateimperial polity. For Ho and Woodside, this was a feat of hyper-modernity in pre-modernity that was unparalleled globally, notwithstanding the fact that it was later downplayed by scholars such as Weber.151 To be sure, more detailed Western studies of the Chinese late-imperial civil service exam system by and large accept that, at least in the Ming times (1368– 1644), that system enhanced social mobility and equity. However, they also seem to indicate that that mobility at other times only pertained to 10% of the population, i.e., only the male gentry could benefit therefrom purely through mastering the Confucian classics. Thus, for example, while Ho suggested there had been many cases in late-imperial Chinese history of peasants who mastered the classics while tilling the land (gengdu) to later pass the exam and reach fame and fortune, Elman later cast doubts on the feasibility of such concurrence, arguing that much family wealth was needed to sustain teenagers as they were being groomed for officialdom.152

150 See, e.g., Wang Hui (2011), The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of

Modernity (Verso), p. 135; Victoria Tin-Bor Hui (2005), War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge university Press), p. 148.; notably, Marshall G.S Hodgson (2010) had accepted the greatness of China and the impact of its civil exam system on Europe. See his posthumous Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History (Cambridge University Press). 151 Ho Ping-ti (1964), The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social

Mobility, 1368–1911 (Columbia University Press); Alexander Woodside (2006), Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Harvard University Press). See also E.A. Kracke Jr.(1947), “Family Vs. Merit in Chinese Civil Service Examinations Under The Empire”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 10.2, pp. 103–127. 152 Benjamin A. Elman (2000), A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (University of California Press), especially Table 10 on p. 114. See also Robert P. Hymes (1987), Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-Chou Chiang-Hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge University Press). Cf. William T. Rowe (1990), “Success Stories: Lineage and Elite Status in Hengyang County, c. 1368–1949”, In Esherick, Joseph W. and Mary Backus Rankin eds., Chinese Local Elites and Patters of Dominance (University of California Press), pp. 51–81.

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Neither can China be timelessly pigeonholed along the junxianfengjian spectrum in economic-policy terms. Tang economic policy is hard to capture as laissez-faire or dirigiste in modern Western terms. To be sure, in its later stage, the Tang came to enforce state monopolies on mining, salt and alcohol at times much more strictly than late-imperial polities, but at the outset the dynasty had been much more oriented towards free enterprise.153 By and large, later on in imperial history, the Qing dynasty enforced a more extensive poverty and famine alleviation through their ever-normal granary system (changping cang ).154 When it comes to external threats there was one big difference between Europe and the rest of Eurasia. After Tamerlane’s death in 1405, nomads no longer posed a threat to Europe, and pastoralist attacks on European agrarian societies began to disappear. As William McNeill and others have argued, the gunpowder weapons that came on the scene around this time proved to be more than a match for nomadic warriors on horseback. They gave an irreversible strategic advantage to larger sedentary states, which had the fiscal, technical and logistical means to produce these weapons on a large scale and put them into use with devastating effect.155 The Ottomans, on the other hand, were a formidable non-Western “gunpowder” empire that could conceivably conquer the European heartland until well into the seventeenth century. If the animus against the Ottomans was in no small measure religiously geared, the retreat of the Ottomans from Europe made way for enhanced confrontation between and among powers during the Thirty Year War (1618–1648). Religious contention would only begin to abate with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). ∗ ∗ ∗ The birth of the modern international system arguably reverts back to the sack of Rome by the Habsburg Emperor in 1527, establishing the

153 D.C.

Twitchett (1995), Financial Administration under the T’ang Dynasty (Cambridge University Press), pp. 49–65. See also Fu Zhengyuan (1994), Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics (Cambridge University Press), p. 95. 154 Pierre-Étienne Will, Roy Bin Wong (1991), Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (University of Michigan Press). 155 William H. McNiell (1990), The Age of Gunpowder Empires, 1450–1800 (American Historical Association).

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long domination of Italy by Spain and France until well into the nineteenth century.156 Rome being the seat of the papacy, the shock of a ruined city embodied a radical separation from religious authority that was beginning to take shape. It was cemented in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, but culminated after the Thirty Years War. Then, it became apparent sovereignty would now also include religious autonomy. The emergent order would come to be known as the Peace of Westphalia.157 Ironically, in IR systemic terms, the Treaty of Westphalia is seen not as panacea for order but as ushering in a degree of anarchy. That is to say, the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire enhanced sovereignty for the polities once constituting it, including religious autonomy. From a loose, multi-ethnic confederation of uneven polities, Central Europe became the fulcrum of competing emergent nation-states.158 No wonder then why the first Chinese thinkers to informedly consider Western history—like Liang Qichao (1873–1929)—came to think of the Treaty as the “missing link” in Chinese history, i.e. the progenitor of nation-statehood.159 Liang wrote at a time China was overwhelmed by Western technological superiority. It was then generally believed that the West had an enduring poleis legacy upon which to assert modern sovereignty, whereas China’s uniform-empire legacy was compelling. Yet, as Victoria Hui has shown, Chinese civilization in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656–221 BCE) gave rise to competing sovereign territorial states too. The internecine Thirty Years War in Europe (1618–1648), though partly religiously geared, was otherwise systemically similar to the prolonged wars in pre-imperial China.160 However, whereas wars in early modern Europe yielded multipolarity, pre-imperial wars in China begot an enduring ethos of political uniformity (dayitong ).161 These compelling insights aside, with the exception of Scheidel, comparative world histories are short on economic detail; they are slightly 156 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 116. 157 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 132. 158 Colás, Empire, p. 23. 159 L.H.M. Ling (2013) The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations (Routledge), p. 35. 160 Victoria Tin-bor Hui (2005), War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press). 161 Yuri Pines (2012), The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy (Princeton University Press).

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better informed on political thought, and arrestingly detailed on science. Babb, for example, drew interesting (if not wholly accurate) comparison between the Enlightenment and seventeenth-century Chinese thinkers, and Pines and Shelach suggested Zhuangzi’s critique of progress was reminiscent of Jean-Jacque Russo even if Chinese thought at that time was far less individualistic and much more grounded in past sagely precedents.162 Recent comparative work by Sivin and Lloyd shows just how pervasive slavery was in Greece as compared with China: in fact early on even a progressive thinker like Aristotle believed slavery was a “natural state of affairs.163 By contrast, public discourse in Greece was much livelier, more innovative and disputatious.164 This disputatiousness also fed into scientific exploration—the ancient Greeks did not let consensus hold up the search for unorthodox solutions, whereas the Chinese preferred the formation of synthesis.165 Furthermore, Adshead controversially argued that it was the earlier input of female intelligence into the public sphere, not only as consumers but also as producers, designers, entrepreneurs, journalists and boutique operators that marked the European advance.166 Granted, monogamy was Judeo-Christian tenet, and that did reflect on the status of women. Yet, in fact, there have been maverick women participating in public life in all non-Western civilizations much like Joan of Arc is reminiscent of Vietnam’s Trung Sisters. In China, the best known are Han empress Lü, Tang empress Wu Zetian, Qing-era empress dowager Cixi, Han historian Ban Zhao, and Song-era poetess Li Qingzhao; in India, one finds the Mughal writer Gul Badan; and in Ethiopia, empress

162 J. Babb (1918), A World History of Political Thought (Edward Elgar); Yuri Pines and Gideon Shelach (2005), “‘Using the Past to Serve the Present’: Comparative Perspectives on Chinese and Western Theories of the Origins of the State,” in Shaul Shaked, ed., Genesis and Regeneration: Essays on Conceptions of Origins ( The Israel Academy of Science and Humanities), pp. 127–163. 163 G.E.R. Lloyd and Nathan Sivin (2003), The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (Yale University Press), p. 83. 164 Lloyd and Sivin, The Way and the Word, p. 245. 165 Lloyd and Sivin, The Way and the Word, p. 250. 166 S.A.M. Adshead (2000), China in World History (Palgrave).

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Mentewwab to name but a few. In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, there were even woman soldiers.167 Elite women were largely confined to harems in the Islamic world. As in China, harems included eunuchs too, but eunuchs there did not have the kind of political or military status their Chinese counterparts could possess. That role was reserved to slave soldiers captured at childhood, who often rose up to become sultans. For its part, then, maverick feminine exploits nevertheless, monogamy both at a popular and aristocratic level was rather distinctly European.168 Slavery can be associated with many empires in the Western Eurasia: right from the biblical Pharos, to Assyria, Rome, the Vikings, Byzantium, the Mamluks, right up to US plantation economy. That said, chattel slavery seems to have been historically rare in China and plantation slavery (latifundia) even rarer.169 In pre-modern China, the state dominated the allocation of slave power, whereas in Rome markets played a bigger role therein. The quantitative sources are notoriously patchy. Nevertheless, with a population of around 70 million each, Scheidel estimates that one-tenth of the population was made up of slaves in Rome, and up to 7% in China.170 ∗ ∗ ∗ The recent pertinent literature is not agreed on the relevance of all of this to the present. In a powerful monograph, Alejandro Colás argued the meaning of empire changed throughout time and space, and much was contingent on the surrounding international system. In allusion to the contemporary US, but starkly contra Münkler and Ferguson who call for greater US global role—Colás argued that it was possible “… for a

167 Woolf, Concise History of History, 103; Wolfgang Reinhardt, “Introduction”, pp. 3– 52 ff. 20–21. 168 Paul S. Ropp (2010) China in World History (Oxford University Press), p. 35.; Duindam, Dynasties, p. 252, 301. 169 Stanley Engerman ed. (2011), The Cambridge World History of Slavery (Cambridge University Press). 170 Walter Scheidel (2017), “Slavery and Forced Labour in Early China and the Roman World” in Hyun Jin Kim et al. eds., Eurasian Empires in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Contact and Exchange between the Graeco-Roman World, Inner Asia and China, pp. 110–132.

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given state to be imperialist without formally becoming an empire by, for instance, controlling key global markets and resources”.171 The strength of Colás’ work is its historicity: in the context of American indirect control of Mideast oil resources today, one is reminded, for example, of how the early modern Portuguese Empire came to monopolize the outflow of black pepper from India without extensive conquest, or how the British controlled opium inflow into China from afar without occupying China proper. The Yuan dynasty, on the other hand, had been less interested in trade per se even if Pax Mongolica was conducive to the movement of goods on the Silk Road. As Valerie Hansen has shown, the flow of ideas along the Silk Road mattered more in the long run.172 In that sense, the Mongols’ was more of a conquest empire like Assyria than embodying modern imperialism. They went for booty and loot spoils rather than establishing sustainable mercantile institutions.173 Finally, one must not presuppose that the spectrum of the past will necessarily determine future patterns of empire. We shall return to this presupposition in the concluding part of the book. To anticipate this suffice it to note here that Colás’ description of the American Empire as a brand new form of empire in its liberalism and humanitarian character is correct for the most part, at least in relative terms. The shade of hegemony the US wields is granting nation-states and deliberative international institution much greater leeway.174 But while the discourse of individualism and democracy advances in fits and bouts worldwide, I also agree with Watson: hegemony has always been the norm since the emergence of cities. Historically, even the most heterogeneous international systems, which fell short of a conscious society, were a long way from anarchy. From the dawn of civilization, humans gravitated towards social order.175 171 Colás, Empire, p. 7. Cf. Münkler, Empires, p. 72. See also Ferguson, Empire. 172 Valerie Hansen (2015), The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford University Press).

See also Averil Cameron (2018), “Epilogue”, in Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas eds., Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750 (Cambridge University Press), pp. 419–430. Woolf, Concise History of History, p. 299. 173 Münkler, Empires, p. 101. 174 Colás, Empire, p. 179. See also John Darwin (2009), After Tamerlane: The Rise

and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (Bloomsbury), p. 53. 175 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p.93.

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This brings us to the fifth and final distinction between pre-modern and modern empires, one that would have scarcely been visible to contemporaries. International systems in antiquity were a product of their physical surroundings as much as the people that sustained them. Today, we know the discovery of the Americas brought about such a vast ecological, epidemiological and demographic transformation that the rules of the game would change forever. Indeed, the so-called Columbian Exchange saw the illustrious Inca and Aztec empires vanish almost overnight as a combination of epidemics and superior Spanish weaponry. This is a warning sign: one allows oneself to be complacent about the fate of Inca and Aztec at one’s peril. It could happen to us too as a result of, for example, carbon emissions, not to mention volcanic eruption or asteroid collision.176 The fifth distinction is therefore the case that industrialized and post-industrial empires quickly alter the physical shape as well as the climate of the planet we live in through outsized consumption of resources. In the realm of political science, we quintessentially associate the term “banana republic” with politically unstable states in Central America, often forgetting that bananas were brought there from Asia in the first place. Much the same can be said about that by-now quintessentially Colombian bean, coffee or Argentinian beef. Conversely, Tapioca is a time-honoured staple of Indonesian cuisine but arguably few Indonesians pause to reflect on its Brazilian origin at lunchtime. That corn, potato, tomato, peanuts, avocado and pineapple are from the Americas is a more familiar proposition. Corn in particular diffused fairly quickly, staving off many famines around the world. The emphasis here is on speed: war had been associated with outbreaks of disease in the pre-modern world too, but epidemics spread more slowly than today. And the deforestation of China spanned almost a millennium at a much slower rate that deforestation in the Amazon today.177 Thought to have been introduced by the Mongols, the Black Death thus took years to spread around Europe. As is well known, smallpox from 176 The phrase “the Columbian Exchange” is taken from the title of Alfred W. Crosby’s 1972 book (Praeger), which divided the exchange into three categories: diseases, animals and plants. 177 See, e.g., Mark Elvin (2006), Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. See also Jared Diamond (Penguin), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2011).

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the Old Word immediately proved more lethal in the New World. But the exchange was also in other direction: syphilis is sought to have originated in the Americas. Similarly, the French attempt to dig the Panama Canal was abandoned in the 1880s due to local tropical disease affecting the European engineers. That abandonment cleared the way for American digging in 1904, which ultimately secured American hegemony in Central America. And today COVID-19 is once again a reminder that epidemics are an instant game-changer with countries shutting down borders at once. On the other hand, COVID-19 enhanced the significance of transnational institutions like the WHO, and somewhat increased international scientific collaboration to secure supply chains and for finding a vaccine. Yet closed borders mean an involution of the international system whose results will be far-reaching yet hard to predict. Carbon emissions and bugs are not the only things that can grow exponentially. Technological innovation has more than kept up, resulting in a population boom. Petroleum, one has to recall, has only been around since the 1860s. By contrast, renewable energy systems have progressed in a few decades. Trial vaccines for COVID-19 are already being rolled out. So perhaps there is cause for cautious optimism.

CHAPTER 3

Analysis of the Comparative Scholarly Literature on Empire in Antiquity

Abstract If cartography and racialism are a conceptual divider between pre-modern and modern empires, one of the threads linking them is immigration. Metropoles invariably attract migrants, only that in antiquity these were often slaves. Whereas modern nation-states carefully guard migration, waves of migration in the past like that of the Bantu of Africa often spelled annihilation of local societies. In the Indian case, the Aryan invasion resulted in syncretic Vedic culture. The Germanic encroachment into Rome intensified the acculturation of the former, much less so the Mongol conquest of China. Keywords Cartography · Racism · Immigration · Slavery

The political pattern in early Mesopotamia was different to the one that would evolve in the more centralized empire of Egypt. After all, Nile Valley farming was at the heart of the latter, requiring larger-scale cooperation in irrigation, somewhat similar to the rice agriculture that would later emerge in East Asia. Cities were less independent there, serving the needs of the countryside in the first instance. They were often abandoned and rarely fought one another like in Mesopotamia. Of the three early

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 N. Horesh, Empires in World History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5_3

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civilizations in Western Eurasia, the Indus Valley one was closer to the Mesopotamian model in that it also had city-states.1 Unlike the singular Egyptian Empire, Sumer, for example, was a cluster of separate communities within the framework of a common culture, each with its own distinct character, corporate life and rulers. Sumerian cities fought over water and land rights and worshipped different gods within a collectively acknowledged liturgical hierarchy. Thus, the Sumerian system was hegemonic with no peer-competitors externally.2 The story of Gilgamesh shows how the Sumerian people developed new patterns of migration within and beyond their city wall, and dealt triumphantly with nomadic attacks. However, by 2350 BCE, a few hundred years after Gilgamesh’s reign, the Sumerians were overcome by a nomadic community of Akkadian-language speakers from the Arabian Peninsula, led by their warrior-king Sargon. The Akkadians then created their own empire, which subordinated several cities, among which the Akkadian rulers migrated. Indeed, much of human world history shows armed nomadic communities conquering settled societies and then settling themselves.3 As mentioned above, some Sumerian cities may have initially been democratic in character but eventually hereditary kingship became the norm. Counter-balancing alliances from within the system do not seem to have emerged, and instead, a Great King was recognized by other city rulers. Supplanting Sumer, the Babylonian Empire was more multi-ethnic and multi-cultural in its composition, but ideationally more uniform: there was just one god imparting imperial legitimacy.4 Egypt, the Hittites and Mesopotamia were all aware of one another’s advanced civilization and military might, unlike distant China. There had also been contact between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia. This mutually conscious but independent setting was unravelled in the seventh century BCE by the Assyrian conquest of Egypt. The Assyrians thus provide the first model of a conquest empire. They sought to install

1 Rein Taggepera (1987), “Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 3000 to 600 BC”, Social Science Research 7, pp. 180–196, ff. 185–189. 2 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, pp. 18–20. 3 Michael H. Fisher (2013), Migration: A World History (Oxford University Press),

p. 15. 4 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 21.

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vassal rulers, but would expel whole populations from their land if they rebelled.5 The Achaemenids who supplanted Assyria provide, in turn, the first model of a tolerant empire.6 Nomadic in origin, but eagerly adopting Assyrian technology, the Achemenids conquered Egypt in 525 BCE. At their height, they controlled India too, ruling an empire the size of Alexander the Great’s. Though distinctly Zoroastrian in faith, they allowed conquered populations to continue worshipping their gods. The degree of autonomy in their conquered self-governing territories (satrapies) was unprecedented. So much so that even some British Raj administrators sought to emulate them in terms of racial tolerance. Trigger’s is arguably the most important single-authored comparative study on empires in antiquity to have been published in recent years. Spanning Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, pre-Columbian America and northwest Africa, the study finds commonalities in socio-political organization and religion, alongside differences in economy, individual mores, art and material culture. For Trigger, the invention of metallurgy in river valleys enhanced the productivity of agriculture engendering cities and hierarchies.7 However, to discerning readers the study also demonstrates the limitations in comparing literate and illiterate societies—the latter usually lacking advanced metallurgy (the Yoruba being an exception). Within literate societies, Mesopotamia had higher degree of private land ownership than early China.8 If cartography and racialism are a conceptual divider between premodern and modern empires, Jerry Bentley observed that one of the threads linking them is immigration. Metropoles invariably attract migrants, only that in antiquity these were often slaves. Whereas modern nation-states carefully guard migration, waves of migration in the past like that of the Bantu of Africa often spelled annihilation of local societies. In the Indian case, the Aryan invasion resulted in syncretic Vedic culture.

5 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, pp 23–24. 6 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 31; Rein Taggepera (1979), “Size

and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D.” Social Science History 3, pp. 115–138, f. 123. 7 Bruce G. Trigger (2014), Understanding Early Civilizations A Comparative Study (Cambridge University Press), p. 279. 8 Trigger, Understanding Early Civilization, pp. 335–336.

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The Germanic encroachment into Rome intensified the acculturation of the former, much less so the Mongol conquest of China.9 Within literate civilizations, too, Chinese unipolarity has ancient pedigree to draw on. Esarhaddon aside, Egyptians in comparison, were not existentially threatened by Mesopotamia until the Assyrians later came along. On the contrary, Egyptians had been greatly influenced by Mesopotamian art and commerce. Earlier Egyptian encounter with the Hittite Empire had been more confrontational than cultural although there was no conquest involved.10 Shang China had no literate neighbour to draw similar inspiration from, although it indirectly learnt Hittite chariot technology.11 Namely, early Chinese civilization evolved in relative seclusion. Its stress on filial piety, on the one hand, and on human agency on the other is rather unique. Ropp also suggested the lack of an equivalent to Greek tragedies or Jewish jeremiads makes Chinese civilization rather optimistic.12 There was no question of being conquered by another literate empire in the same way that the Assyrian and later the Achaemenids conquered Egypt. That Chinese unipolarity—more civilizational than military in nature— stretched, at least nominally, to early modern times. European Empire building, by contrast, was more focused on external expansion. Following the demise of the Roman Empire—no other empire assayed to conquer the whole Europe: Napoleon and Charles V are the sole exceptions.13 Whereas heterogeneity became the norm in Europe, China by comparison was more culturally uniform and had its army more tightly leashed.14 That the West is historically more multilateral than unipolar is exemplified by—among other phenomena—the presence of Egyptian obelisks in Rome and Paris. From Augustus to Napoleon, there lie almost two 9 Jerry H. Bentley (1996), “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World

History”, The American Historical Review 101.3, pp. 749–770. 10 Ibid. See also Moshe Elat (1978), “The Economic Relations of the Neo-Assyrian Empire with Egypt”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 98.1, pp. 20–34. 11 Edward L. Shaughnessy (1988), “Historical Perspectives on The Introduction of The Chariot Into China”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48.1, pp. 189–237. 12 Ropp, China in World History, p. xiv. 13 Yuri Pines (Forthcoming), “Introduction: Empires and their Space”. In idem.,

Michal Biran and Jörg Rüpkeeds, The Limits of Universal Rule: Eurasian Empires Compared(Cambridge University Press). 14 Ropp, China in World History, p. 56.

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millennia during which Europeans incessantly looked up to the marvels of Egyptian civilization even as they looted Egypt’s architectural patrimony. By the same token, the famous Qusayr Amra mural in Jordan exemplifies incisively the Ummayads keen awareness of other powerful empires as they expanded theirs.15 In other words, what obtained in post-Roman Europe most of the time is a multi-polar equilibrium. Even in Roman times, the empire coexisted for the most part with the Parthian power to its east. Thus, in IR terms we can find “bandwagoning” more distinctly in the imperial Chinese setting, and “balancing” in the European one. The sole imperial experiences in Western Eurasia that come close to the Chinese one are arguably the rise of Sumer some 5,000 years ago amid surrounding illiteracy, and Egyptian self-containedness. All pre-modern emperors developed ex-post claims to universal rule even when in reality they were circumscribed by other powers. Such titles ranged from the Roman orbisterrarum to the Mughal Shah Jahan, but they invariably connoted world domination.16 Thus, the dictum that there can be no two suns in the sky seems to be common to Alexander the Great and Confucius alike.17 If conquest invariably called for a strong military ethos in the formative stage of empire building, consolidation in later periods usually—but not always (q.v. Qin)—saw stronger civilian ethos and a less belligerent society. Münkler called that moment of transition in an empire shelf life the “Augustan threshold”: when an empire’s military might is converted into economic reform and cultural hegemony with a view toward social stability. That generalization might apply to China too, but it is likely that imperial China’s was to begin with a comparatively less war-prone society well into the early modern era with smaller military outlay, as I have argued elsewhere.18

15 Eric H. Cline and Mark W.Graham (2011), Ancient Empires: From Mesopotamia to the Rise of Islam (Cambridge University Press), p. 338. 16 Pines, “Intro”. 17 Tao Jing-Shen (2010), Two Sons of Heaven: Studies of Song-Liao Relations (University

Of Arizona Press), p. 1024. 18 Frank A. Kierman and John King Fairbank eds (1974), Chinese Ways in Warfare (Harvard University Press). See also Münkler, Empires, p. 65. Scheidel, “State Revenue”, p. 175.

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On his part, Edward Luttwak has shown too that grand strategy could shift in antiquity just as it would later shift in the early modern era. He discussed at length how Augustus inherited an offensive mindset from Julius Caesar, but as the Roman Empire matured Augustus’ approach became much more judicious, less war-prone and more alliance forming as regards Rome’s many colonies and the tribute tax they forwarded. Eventually, however, client state elites were absorbed into the Roman civilizational cradle. Then, the Teutonic “barbarian” threat turned the empire even more defence-mined, not unlike Ming China (q.v. Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall).19 In another classic work, Luttwak suggested that the Byzantine Empire, which continued the late Roman one, was still more defensive in nature.20 Yet religion and aristocracy played a bigger role in legitimating the Byzantine Empire than in coeval China even if a “Senate” did not exist in either locale. To boot, the Byzantine elite switched to Greek from Latin, whereas Mandarin Chinese remained elite constant.21 In summary, as Goldstone and Haldon argue, there had been three main modalities in the ancient world insofar as the cultural treatment of conquered peoples was concerned: the Assyrians demanded full assimilation or death, the Achaemenids allowed autonomy and the Romans embodied an intermediate approach.22 Monotheism arguably presents another dimension of unipolarity when conceived politically, with the caliphate being an institution in point. Here, it applies of course to Western Eurasia but largely absent from the Chinese setting. Thus, comparatively speaking, Chinese emperors played a greater liturgical role in society, and their sagehood was asserted in practical and religious terms at once. Assyrian and Byzantine emperors sometimes came close, in that respect, but not Rome where the religious 19 Edward N. Luttwak (1976), The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century A. D. to the Third (Johns Hopkins University Press). 20 Edward N. Luttwak (2009), The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Harvard University Press). 21 See, e.g., Alexander Yakobson (2014), “The First Emperors: Image and Memory”. In Yuri Pines, Gideon Shelach, Lothar von Falkenhausen and Robin D.S. Yates, Birth of an Empire: the State of Qin Revisited (University of California Press), pp. 280–300. 22 Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon (2009), “Ancient States, Empires, and Exploitation: Problems and Perspectives”. In Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford University Press), pp. 3–30.

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and secular spheres were more clearly separated before Constantine. Faith wars, at any rate, are conspicuously absent from the Chinese setting.23 Whether it be Alexander the Great, Qin Shihuang or Napoleon— empires sometimes do not last after the death of their founder. Or else their heirs become charmed senseless by the society of the conquered. The cause célèbre of that phenomenon is of course the sinicization of steppeland invaders. But there are parallels elsewhere too like arguably Hadrian’s grecophilia, the latinization of Theodoric or the hellenization of Byzantium.24 ∗ ∗ ∗ Well before the rise of world history as a field of study in Western academe, Eisenstadt had stood out with the ambitious global framework of his work, which incorporated China at a time when Eurocentrism was the norm. Eisenstadt had perceptively identified China’s historical uniqueness in antiquity as grounded socially in the gentry rather than in having aristocracy, and in maintaining civil service mobility irrespective of religion.25 However, the field of world history has progressed in leaps and bounds since, and comparative generalizations are easier to make as a result, albeit crudely. We know today more to both reinforce and question notions of Chinese exceptionality from different historical angles. If Fairbank’s classic left indelible mark on the Sinologist mindset in conjuring up a Chinese tributary world order, Bang and Kolodziejczyk’s pioneering work suggests many other powers in antiquity made universal claims to suzerainty; like the Chinese in antiquity, these powers rhetorically cast neighbouring societies as “barbarians” but were pragmatic in their dealings with them.26 To be sure, nomadic steppe peoples have always had a military edge in the ancient world. What is missing from the Chinese setting is a 23 Garth Fowden (2020), Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton University Press). 24 Münkler, Empires, p. 55. 25 Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities, passim. 26 Peter Fibiger Bang and Dariusz Kolodziejczyk eds. (2012), Universal Empire: a

Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History (Cambridge University Press).

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literate peer-power detente like the one obtaining between the Parthian and Roman empires. In other words, China perceived itself as culturally superior even when militarily weak—this is all the more so since the sedentary Japanese and Korean societies willingly embraced Chinese script. This feature is important because the historical evidence we have from Europe is that peer competition results in increased military outlay, and eventually in more intensive tax regimes.27 Monson and Scheidel’s pioneering work tends to reinforce the uniqueness of the Chinese polity in antiquity in other ways too. To be sure, China’s tax-collecting bureaucracy was not particularly big compared with, e.g., Rome but the latter relied much more heavily on commercial indirect taxation, while land tax (either monetized or in kind) and poll tax were preponderant in China.28 Drawing on Craig Benjamin, it might be logical to assume, as well, that Han taxation was lighter, i.e. only 1/30 of one’s harvest levied.29 However, Scheidel believes that in proportional terms the Eastern Han era and Rome saw similarly low levels of military outlay.30 In addition, both empires seem to have dispensed grain as fairly common welfare measure. More generally, tax farming was quite rare in the Chinese setting but rife elsewhere in the non-Western pre-modern world—q.v. Zamindars, Iqtaat.31 It is also well known that China did not enshrine primogeniture as opposed to most parts of Europe and Japan (but not the Near East). This surely has implication for the secular degree of inequality in China vs. the West but much more work needs to be done to parse it down. The point about the relatively small tax-collection apparatus in China contrasts with the much larger Chinese imperial bureaucracy and sophisticated civil service exams. Colás argues that there were 4 times as many civilian officials in Han China compared to Rome32 ; Crooks and Parsons

27 Tilly, Coercion. See also Philip T. Hoffman (2017), Why Did Europe Conquer the World (Princeton University Press). 28 Monson and Scheidel eds., Fiscal Regimes, passim. 29 By Craig Benjamin. (2018), Empires of Ancient Eurasia: Empires of Ancient Eurasia:

The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE - 250 CE (Cambridge University Press), pp. 58–59. Han era taxation may have been 1/30 of that prevalent in the Qin era. 30 Walter Scheidel (2015), “State Revenue”, p. 178. 31 Ferguson, Empire, p. 149. 32 Colás, Empire, p. 14–16.

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take the argument further suggesting the Song era with 30,000 officials and 200,000 clerical staff dwarfed the bureaucracy of the medieval German Reich, or even Rome—the latter with just 30,000 clerks.33 There may be here a wider disparity in that even in modern times the British Empire had relatively few metropolitan staff and soldiers employed overseas. Nevertheless, modern European bureaucracies appear to have entailed a larger ratio between the percentage of civil servants in the overall population compared with the percentage of mandarins and bailiffs in the overall Chinese population.34 All of this suggests stronger unifying ethos in pre-modern China, quite apart from the absence of full-fledged feudalism after 221 BCE. In addition, metropolitan Roman society was much more patrician than the capital population in China; slavery and religion similarly played a much smaller part in the Chinese grand strategic setting, e.g. in levying tax or forming alliances.35 However, in broader perspective, one has to recall that the Ottoman setting was also lacking a truly aristocratic element before the seventeenth century even if tax farming was exceedingly rife there.36 ∗ ∗ ∗ Crucially, the overall tax burden in China seems to have remained lighter than elsewhere.37 Montesquieu claimed in that context that the type of political constitution determined the burden of taxation around the world. He suggested that the burden of taxation was higher where the population was freer and had more rights. Thus, he perceived the Ottoman and Chinese empires to have a lighter fiscal regime than 33 Crooks and Parsons, “Introduction”, p. 10–11. 34 Edgar Kiser and Xiaoxi Tong (1992), “Determinants of the Amount and Type of

Corruption in State Fiscal Bureaucracies: An Analysis of Late Imperial China” Comparative Political Studies 25.3, pp. 300–331. 35 Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel (2015), “Introduction” in idem. eds., Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (Cambridge University Press). See also Peter Nolan (2019), China and the West: Crossroads of Civilization (Routledge), pp. 35–37. 36 Carter V. Findley (2005), the Turks in World History (Oxford University Press), p. 18. 37 Roy Bin Wong (1997), China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Cornell University Press).

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most European states as compensation for excessive despotism, while in Europe citizens were willing to pay higher taxes of their own volition.38 Montesquieu’s suggestion accords with Tilly’s more recent observation about early modern European state-formation being high-taxing.39 On the other hand, both China and medieval Europe developed antimercantile literature. As noted earlier, Mesopotamian society, by contrast, was highly commercialized with much literature on moneylending and interest. Finally, Chinese relative religious tolerance is certainly echoed by the Achaemenids, who—in stark contrast to the Assyrians or their Sassanid successors—also allowed conquered societies a high degree of freedom in asserting their local identity.40 The early medieval era in Europe was of course a-imperial in its demonetized tax system and political fragmentation. For this reason alone, it does not merit a separate discussion here. In many ways, the medieval era in Europe contrasts sharply with the coeval era in China which saw great technological and economic advancement. To the extent that it became the unique organizing principle in society, feudalism stripped rulership of many of its economic functions. Where rulership (regna) was made weaker, the territory dissolved into petty principalities, free cities and city republics: Germany and Italy in particular. France and England on the other hand were slightly more cohesive politically. Elsewhere there was great variation. The Huns, for example, set up the first geographically European Empire not on the Mediterranean coast. A second, longer-lasting steppe empire was formed in the Danube by the Avars. Visigoths seem to have founded the only large Germanic state which lasted considerable length of time. Many other Germanic tribes (Langobards, Vandals, Ostrogoths and others) occasionally formed states of comparable or even larger area, but their duration was limited to a few decades. By contrast, the Frankish kingdom remained small until 700 CE.41 In conclusion, the evidence from the pre-modern world clearly suggests—contrary to neorealist assumptions—that hegemony does not necessarily lead to counter-balancing. There is no indication, for example,

38 Monson and Scheidel, “Introduction”, p. 12. 39 Tilly, Coercion. 40 Frankopan, The Silk Roads, p. 34. 41 Taagepera, “Size and Duration”, p. 124.

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that the Hittites, Egyptians and Assyrians balanced against one another in a meaningful way. Rather, we find a handover of domination from one power to the other by violent means: Rome destroyed Carthage without opposition. Similarly, the Magadha state in India and the short-lived Qin dynasty in China sought to forcibly unify their respective systems. The only conspicuous exception to the rule is arguably the long-lasting détente obtaining between Parthia and the Roman empires, which involved proxy powers on both ends, and the shenanigans of the warring States era in China.

CHAPTER 4

Analysis of the Comparative Scholarly Literature on Empire in the Early Modern and Modern Ages

Abstract Whereas the Holy Roman Empire was tied up with Catholicism, the Treaty of Westphalia gave rise to thinkers who called for individual, social and political sovereignty like Kant and Grotius. The Habsburgs were aiming to nip reformation in the bud, on the one hand, and contain the Ottoman Empire on the other. Crucially, they were supported by rising Protestant powers. The latter confrontation, in turn, came to a head with what is arguably the last significant religious war fought on European soil: the Thirty Years War, on whose ashes the Treaty of Westphalia was signed. In many ways, the transition from early modernity to modernity betokened a transition from Catholic Iberian trans-oceanic dominance on the seas to Protestant Anglo-Dutch imperial supremacy. Keywords Trans-Oceanic Domination · Joint-Stock Trading Companies · Monopolies · Alliances · Reformation

Other than empires, much of the world was occupied by states, city-states and diasporas prior to globalization. So the question of modernity should

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 N. Horesh, Empires in World History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5_4

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be considered against a larger canvass of social organization.1 If industrialization is the hallmark of a modern polity, what are the two key hallmarks of an early modern polity? Partly drawing on Tilly and Barkey’s insights, I suggest that an early modern polity was one that could shift from tax farming to centralized tax collection, and from land tax to commercial tax including through company charter fees.2 There is otherwise very little literature on the origins and evolution of IR outside the West in the English language. Most work on the historiography of IR as a discipline outside the West starts after World War II. For this reason, contemporary IR theory is for the most part an abstraction of Western history married with Western political theory. In the words of Acharya, realism is “…an abstraction from eighteenthcentury European balance-of-power, behaviour combined with sixteenthand seventeenth-century, and indeed ancient Greek, political theory. Liberalism is an abstraction from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and theories of political economy”.3 Europe’s early modern IR system emerged from the fragmented geopolitical system in the late medieval period. At the time, there had been a vast array of near-peer political entities in Europe as compared with the simpler Seljuk-Fatimid bipolarity in the Islamic world or the unipolarity of the Chinese world. Partly heirs to the poleis system of ancient Greece, Italian city-states exhibited nevertheless differing sources of legitimacy ranging from papal, through mercantile, monarchical to republican. In sum, in contrast to the Islamic world, the later Middle Ages in Europe saw a plethora of distinctive polities passionate about their sovereignty. The Treaty of Westphalia is usually thought of as the origins of the current world order, and it is often forgotten that it also signified the secularization of Europe. Whereas the Holy Roman Empire was tied up with Catholicism, Westphalia gave rise to thinkers who called for individual, social and political sovereignty like Kant and Grotius. The Habsburgs were aiming to nip reformation in the bud, on the one hand, and contain the Ottoman Empire on the other. Crucially, they were supported by 1 Conrad, What is Global History?, p. 47. 2 Karen Barkey (2012), Empire of Difference: the Ottomans in Comparative Perspective

(Cambridge University Press), pp. 270–271. 3 Amitav Acharya (2019), The Making of Global International Relations (Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–2.

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rising Protestant powers. The latter confrontation, in turn, came to a head with what is arguably the last significant religious war fought on European soil: The Thirty Years War, on whose ashes the Treaty of Westphalia was signed.4 In many ways, the transition from early modernity to modernity betokened a transition from Catholic Iberian trans-oceanic dominance on the seas to Protestant Anglo-Dutch supremacy, as we saw before. Equally, the Russian import trade of tea (and rhubarb) suffered greatly once the British showed up on the China coast. In fact, rhubarb was domesticated in Britain from the 1760s through the efforts of physician John Hope even before tea was transplanted in India. That very same transition also involved looser mercantilism, whereby greater allowance of free trade was made. Whereas the Portuguese and Spaniards sought to monopolize pepper and silver, the Dutch and English were equally concerned with tapping into existing trade within Asia and harnessing a manufacturing industry of their own.5 ∗ ∗ ∗ But if tax helps define the degree to which political entities are modern in general terms, what of empire? Empires and modern nation-states are often considered opposites. Empires are larger-scale, long-lasting, more multi-ethnic and more religious ventures. However, large-scale migration in recent decades has in a sense turned Western nation-states into “self-contained” empires. To be sure, in the early twentieth century, nation-states expressly strove for a common culture. In that sense, nationstates imply egalitarianism: all members of the nation are in principle equal; all partake of the common identity and commonweal. Unlike empire, the nation is always conceived as horizontal “comradeship”.6 In reality, however, more intensive taxation accentuated inequality in early modern Europe, so behind the veneer of egalitarianism often lay lingering

4 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 134. 5 Clifford M. Foust (1992), Rhubarb: the Wondrous Drug (Princeton University Press);

Münkler, Empires, pp. 47–51. 6 Krishan Kumar (2010), “Nation-states as Empires, Empires as Nation-states: Two Principles, One Practice?” Theory and Society 39.2, pp. 119–143, f. 121.

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elite prerogatives. Empires, on the other hand, have more entrenched core elites and local particularisms.7 Modern empires have always been run by a geographically-prescribed core ethnicity, ruling over outremer non-national peripheries. This is why when formal empire ended, after World War II, former colonies’ break could be so clean. In sum, a key distinction between pre-modern and modern empire is the absence of a clearly demarcated national core in the former.8 The more modern empire became, so too sovereignty moved from the dynastic to the popular, with a stronger sense of legal equality. Concomitantly, international law became less rooted in natural (read: religious) law and more in positive law made by humans through deliberation. Geopolitics moved likewise from dynastic interests to national interests.9 Modern polities have “public spheres”, and according to Snyder, it is debates there that determine the course of imperial policy, much more than foreign policy per se. Because imperial expansion always benefits the mercantile elite, other elite interest groups—e.g. industrialists—may prefer retrenchment. Most ordinary taxpayers are not organized enough to lobby either way. Within these broad perimeters, Snyder observes that late industrializing powers like Prussia, Japan or Russia usually opted for imperial overstretch because their nuveau riche elites are rendered more powerful in the process, whereas landed interests opposing war are rendered weaker.10 Snyder’s point about the linkage between innen politk and imperial overstretch should be considered alongside Blanke’s study in the vein of the “democratic lineage” theory. Blanken famously suggested that the more sophisticated social institutions were in the target colony, the less likely powers were to seek imperial extension there. Conversely, dictatorial powers were last to pull out from colonies. For this reason, Blanken believes Qing China was less aggressed against as compared with Africa

7 Kumar, “Nation-states”, ff. 127–128. 8 Breuilly, “Modern Empires”. f. 12. 9 Acharya, The Making of Global International Relations, pp. 18–20. 10 Jack Snyder (1991). Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition

(Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press).

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in the nineteenth century.11 However, following Headrick, one should recall Europeans were late to penetrate Africa much more because of its epidemics.12 If counter-balancing behaviour is rare in the ancient world, realpolitik was the norm in the early modern period. Thus, modern empires ascribe less importance to religion in the conduct of their foreign policy. Recall the French-American alliance against the British. Other examples abound: though protestant, the Dutch and English nevertheless fought bitterly over trade supremacy over the course of the seventeenth century. So did the Bourbon and Hapsburg royal houses despite being Catholic both. And Britain and France sided with the Muslim Ottomans against Russia in the nineteenth century. But this is not to say there were no examples in the other direction too: the Portuguese were adept at enticing Hindu principalities against their Muslim rivals in the sixteenth century. At that time, European powers began to woo Moscow with proposals of alliance, often against other European states but more often against the Ottomans. The Franco-Austrian Alliance of the mid-eighteenth century is another famous co-religionist case in point.13 In their attempt to disrupt the Spanish Empire, England thawed relations with the Ottoman Empire and enlisted the Muslims of North Africa. As early as 1596, buoyed by Muslim support, the English attacked the port city of Cadiz, which had been as we saw before a Phoenician colony in antiquity. Though they would later colonize North America, the English at the same time hypocritically drew on Las Casas to pillory the brutality of the Spanish treatment of Native Americans.14 This is perhaps the best example of an emergent shrewd empire staking its claim to universal domination on the back of humanitarian rhetoric. That is not to say that such foreign policy behaviours did not exist in the Islamic world, and for that reason, realpolitik does not constitute another key distinction between pre-modern and modern empires. As early as the 980s CE Byzantine Emperor Basil II had teamed up 11 Leo J. Blanken (2012), Rational Empires: Institutional Incentives and Imperial Expansion (The University of Chicago Press). 12 Daniel R. Headrick (1981) The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press). 13 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 122; Marshall T. Poe (2011), The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton University Press), p. 35. 14 Frankopan The Silk Roads, pp. 245–247.

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the newly proclaimed Fatimid caliph in Egypt against the Abbasids in Baghdad, for example. And in 1180, Saladdin teamed up with the Byzantine Empire against the Italian city-states, the Byzantines’ erstwhile ally.15 In fact, Fatimid-Abbasid stalemate later allowed the Crusaders to insinuate themselves into the Holy Land, even as much of Iberia was still under Muslim rule.16 Though Byzantine entreaties also explain the onset of the Crusaders’ march east, the historical evidence invites speculation that a schism between Muslims in the west might have changed the direction of the Crusades to Iberia. The list goes on and on until the present: the CIA collusion with Ayatollah Kashani against the progressive nationalist Mussadek and their later assistance to Bin Laden in Afghanistan are suggestive of the case.17 Within the European early modern setting, forming countervailing alliances was particularly crucial for the survival of the landlocked Habsburg Empire, which later became Austro-Hungary. This was because it was on the territorial expansion path of the Ottoman power to the east, protestant expansion to the North and French pressure to the West. Suleiman the Great, Freidrich the Great and Napoleon all eyed its territory. Internally, the Hapsburg Empire was polyglot and multi-ethnic and thus vulnerable. Metternich 1848 famously saved it through alliances and appeasement of the empire’s stronger neighbours: the Russian, Prussian and Ottoman empires. But the Hapsburgs also spent many resources on ground forces. Thus, unlike the other European powers to the north, it could not pursue lucrative maritime expansion, eventually resulting in financial overstretch.18 Metternich aside, the locus classicus of the historical argument on the greater significance of alliances in modern times revolves around Prussia under Bismarck’s stewardship of course (1862–1890). Bismarck famously pursued Prussian unification while realizing the vulnerability of his nascent empire. For these reasons, military campaigns under his watch were selective, and he largely adopted irenic foreign policy with which to buy peace-time for further German industrialization. By contrast, his

15 Frankopan The Silk Roads, p. 150. 16 Frankopan The Silk Roads, p. 127. 17 Frankopan The Silk Roads, p. 416. 18 A. Wess Mitchell (2019), The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire (Princeton University Press).

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domestic policy agenda was autocratic in nature. It was only after Bismarck’s forced retirement that German grand strategy shifted from defence to offence.19 ∗ ∗ ∗ Prior to the Napoleonic Code, mercenaries had played an important role in almost all armies save China. By contrast, the French foreign legion is unique among large modern army units. The earliest best-known example for a mercenary is of course that of Xenophon serving the very same Persians who threatened to conquer the poleis. Much like the Greek hoplites, the Roman Republican Army was at first made up of citizens but later in the Principate era gave way to professional legionnaires. The Byzantine empire famously hired Spanish almogavares to fight Turks. Mercenaries were also common in the medieval Italian city-states (q.v. condottieri), and Hessian auxiliaries famously served along the British in the American War of Independence.20 As McNeill famously showed, the use of firearms was not limited to the West and Russia in the early modern era. In fact, these were widely used by the Ottomans, Mughals and Safavids, as well as by the Ming and Qing empires. McNeill called Islamic powers using to one degree or another firearms—“Gunpowder Empires”. The technological difference between East and West in that regard lay in scale and improvement, not familiarity with firearms per se. However, firearms were much later arrival to Arabia, thus contributing to a Turkish sense of superiority over Arabs, and Arab resentment, that permeates political discourse even today. In other words, none of the Muslim powers of the early modern era was Arab. Ottoman territorial expansion otherwise differed little from that of their European counterparts; Suleiman the Great’s Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century was not necessarily less war-prone than Louis XIV’s France during the seventeenth century. Moreover, Ottoman Ghazi-style raids and pirating were not unlike Drake’s aforementioned raids on the Spanish. Neither were Christian-born Janissaries serving in the Ottoman

19 Christopher Clark (2007), Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600– 1947 (Penguin). 20 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 121; Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation, p. 36. The employment of mercenaries was rarer in early China with a conspicuous exception of Uyghurs.

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Army an exception: as mentioned earlier ethnic minorities served both in the Czars’ army and as Qing bannermen.21 ∗ ∗ ∗ Austro-Hungary and Czarist Russia capture the middle ground between pre- and early modern empire—they were land, not sea oriented; the former’s only significant port was Trieste and not until 1766 did the Habsburgs build their first warship. Much later in the twentieth century Austro-Hungary would come to control treaty-port settlements in China. Russia had learned from Mongol statecraft, but opened up to Europe after the Petrine reforms. In fact, the Russian Army employed not just Germans but also Scots, Ukrainians, Moldavians, Greeks and Poles. Much later Russia also attempted to create a chartered trading company of sorts (q.v. the Russia-American Company) for settlement in Alaska and California. But until the nineteenth century almost all mining, manufacturing and foundry facilities in Russia were state run—the only exceptions made were for foreign companies or families like the Stroganovs.22 By contrast, as early as the seventeenth century onward, northern European merchants created commercial joint-stock corporations that sought profit by negotiating from their own government’s trade monopolies and colonies in the Americas, Africa and Asia. These corporations attracted capital in return for shares and invested in ships and commodities. As joint-stock companies, they also hired merchants, soldier and clerks to help administer overseas possessions. Though they were vastly outnumbered in the tropics, these companies’ staff came to control large parts of the world—as late as the 1930s meagre 12,000 British staff in the Indian civil service administered the whole subcontinent.23 The formula whereby tentative colonization was promoted by chartered companies ahead of outright British takeover was not just typical of the Raj, it also defined the later “New Imperialism” in Africa—through, for example, the African Lakes Company or Cecil Rhoads’ South Africa

21 Joshua W. Walker (2009), “Turkey’s Imperial Legacy: Understanding Contemporary Turkey through its Ottoman Past”. In Jerry Harris ed., The Nation in the Global Era: Conflict and Transformation (Brill), pp. 384–398. 22 Poe, The Russian Moment, p. 63; Lieven, Empire, 158–159. 23 Osterhammel, Colonialism, p. 63.

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Company.24 Beyond commerce, for their contribution to education and public health, missionaries were somewhat more tolerated in the British colonial establishment in Africa than elsewhere.25 ∗ ∗ ∗ John P. LeDonne contends that Russia developed a long-term expansionist strategy with a view towards controlling Eurasia by land. LeDonne explains how by extending patronage to frontier societies the empire grew, while keeping Sweden at bay. Far from viewing Russia as peripheral to European great power politics, LeDonne shows Russia to be an expansionist militarstaadt and authoritarian regime that challenged other land (and sea) empires.26 Partly for these reasons, Poe argues Russia is neither European nor Asian in terms of cultural ancestry or historical identity. It had been founded in an infertile part of the world where no earlier civilization existed. Rather, Russia is in Poe’s words best understood as “culturally sui generis and historically distinct”. This is because the Viking colony in Kiev Rus which had founded early Russia, became self-governing, hence detached from Scandinavian culture. And despite the claims of Muscovy of being a “Third Rome”, Latin was poorly understood there; hence, it missed out on Renaissance literature.27 In comparison with China, India and Persia, Kiev Rus was a backwater, and that is why the Mongols did not settle there after occupation. Instead, the Mongols occasionally sent tax collectors to call on Rus’ princes; the latter became in essence subcontractors collecting rents from native Slavic traders and peasants. This tributary system required a certain amount of coercion like all tributary systems.28 Often dubbed “the Yoke”, the brutality of the Mongol occupation of Russia has nevertheless been greatly exaggerated, as is the case for Persia and China perhaps. Recall here that serfdom was not instituted in Russia until after that occupation had ended. Orthodox clergy were aghast at the 24 Osterhammel, Colonialism, p. 51. 25 Robert L. Tignor (1997) “Foreword to the Second Edition”, pp. i–xv, in Oster-

hammel, Colonialism. 26 LeDonne, Grand Strategy, pp. 7, 221. 27 Poe, The Russian Moment, 37. 28 Poe, The Russian Moment, 25–26.

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Mongols’ heathenness and their impressions colour the historical record. In fact, the Mongols entered a mutually beneficial deal relation with the Slav princes, whereby autonomy would be traded for tribute tax.29 In a pioneering recent volume on comparative grand strategy, Norrin Ripsman has argued, for example, that protestant-inspired myths of messianism, exceptionalism and frontierism have similarly meshed with American foreign policy over the years. Russian expansion eastward in the eighteenth century was to a large extent also legitimated by the Orthodox mission. Russia’s grand strategy at present is otherwise informed in no small measure by the same fear of invasion from the West that typified imperial and Soviet thinking. Moreover, Russia’s insecurity can lead to belligerence in the same way that Germany and Japan’s energy vulnerabilities precipitated the decision to embark on World War II.30 As a late industrializer, Russia’s imperial grand strategy offers parallels with Qing China on several fronts. First, Russia’s territorial expansion was overland, not maritime. Second, its expansion was restricted by residual Islamic power to the South and East, and by Western naval superiority. Third, the adoption of Western military technology under Peter the Great was qualified: in fact, serfs were anachronistically employed to build the military industrial complex, and as late as 1800, long after Czar Peter’s reign, a decision was made not to use steam engines. The Qing similarly circumscribed the use of Western military know-how and left the bythen anachronistic civil examination system largely intact. Moreover, the Czars used Kalmyk tribesman, Cossacks and Livonian aristocrats to stabilize Russia’s periphery in much the same way that Mongol bannermen were critical to Qing military force. Yet there are also stark differences between the two settings: the Qianlong Emperor exterminated the Zunghars although they were largely Buddhists like him. In the Russian setting, by contrast, the Orthodox mission played a larger role in legitimating cross-Eurasian expansion.31 Russian expansion across Eurasia in the late nineteenth century aroused much concern in London for the safety of colonial India in what became 29 Poe, The Russian Moment, p. 30. 30 Norrin Ripsman (2019), “Conclusion: The Emerging Sub-field of Comparative Grand

Strategy”, in Thierry Balzacq et al. eds., Comparative Grand Strategy: A Framework and Cases (Oxford University Press). 31 P. LeDonne, Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire. Cf. Peter C. Perdue (2009), China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press).

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known as the “Great Game” between the two powers. However, much like the later pact between the West and Stalin to contain Hitler’s expansionism in Europe, London put Eurasian considerations aside, seeking to form an alliance with Moscow by 1907 so as to better contain Germany.32 Early modern Russia is often associated with pogroms and the Soviets manipulated ethnic relations, yet evidently there was also success. There is also a tendency today to deprecate the Russian imperial moment, stretching as it does into the Soviet era. But Kivelson and Suny remind us that 76% voted yes in the March 1991 referendum on whether to preserve the Soviet Federation of Republics. Only the three Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova, voted no.33 The searing memory of World War II was no doubt one of the factors that led to “yes” vote in retrospect.34 In conclusion, Russia and Austro-Hungary bestraddle a shade of grey between modern and pre-modern empires. They throw into high relief the acutely maritime and mercantile nature of other European powers, as summed up in Table 4.1 below. As mentioned above, the mercantile orientation of modern empire building could be either monetary—i.e. through demonetization of colonies while exhausting their bullion riches, or through the more advanced manipulation of world commodity supplies by joint-stock trading companies. It is the latter that gave rise to the national-debt construct which undergirt modern nation-states even today.

32 Frankopan, The Silk Roads, pp. 306–336. 33 Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald G. Suny (2016), Russia’s Empires (Oxford University

Press), p. 355. 34 Poe, The Russian Moment, p. 84.

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Table 4.1 Typology of Modern Empires Empire

Orientation

Religion

Statecraft

Military

Funding

British

Sea

Syncretic Protestant

Mercantilist then Free Trade

Royal Navy, Standing

Spanish

Sea, Land

Catholic

Mercantilist

Navy, Standing

French

Sea, Land

Catholic then Secular

Mercantilist

Conscript

Portugal

Sea

Catholic

Mercantilist

Navy

Dutch

Sea

Protestant

Mercantilist

Navy

Belgium

Land

Catholic

Kleptocratic

Standing

Austro-Hungary Russia

Land Land

Catholic Orthodox

Federalist Eurasian

Standing Conscript

Shares Customs, National Debt Bullion Extraction (Gold, Silver) Feudal then National Debt Spice Monopoly Shares, Customs, National Debt Mineral Extraction Feudal Feudal

CHAPTER 5

Is the US an Empire ?

Abstract The thrust toward unipolarity has sharpened with President Trump’s walking away from the Paris Climate Agreement. Equally, Trump’s attempt to purchase Greenland from Denmark, though far from unprecedented, echoed on geopolitical grounds the 1867 Alaska Purchase against the imperial backdrop of the Russo-British “Great Game”. The Greenland idea had an imperial ring to it in a supposedly post-imperial age and was thus summarily dismissed by Denmark. Keywords Unilateralism · Multilateralism · Isolationism · Greenland · Cold War · India · Jefferson · Cicero · Vietnam War

The last thing American politicians like is to associate the country with the empires of yore. Yet as Pollock reminds us despite the protestation about the US being a different kind of an empire, the signs are unmistakeable: it has troops stationed in 140 countries ensuring 5% of the world population can continue to consume 30% of the world resources. The US would like to advance the cause of democracy in the world thinking the British had

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done the same in India. However, there are lingering doubts to what extent the British imperial legacy made India democratic.1 Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Shani, for example, contests the view that democratization in India was the result of colonial policies. Instead, she ascribes much agency to staffers of the newly-formed Constituent Assembly Secretariat. Under the British, the franchise never reached more than 20% of the population and was prescribed by property and literacy. The notion of universal suffrage went against the grain of the colonial mind according to Shani, and this rings intuitively true in view of the lack of democratization in Hong Kong and many other British colonies.2 Even after the Cold War, many in the Third World still view the US an empire bent on economic exploitation and imperialism. Of those who reject the claim, Robert Kagan’s essay is perhaps the most forceful, casting the US role in the international system as “benevolent”. Kagan suggested this benevolence was rooted in US democracy, and that the survival of US liberty was dependent on spreading liberty around the world. So much so that in its zeal for democratic diffusion, it has to be sometimes “managed” by allies more attuned to realpolitik.3 On his part, Münkler identified “transglobality” as the defining characteristic of the American Empire. He also notes that after the downfall of the USSR, the US has become unipolar whereas historically there have usually been two empires on the world stage counter-weighing one another even if peers were denied equality in rhetoric. Thus, the Cold War can be seen as more routine than the situation today. In fact, Russia and Britain competed as unspoken peers in the “Great Game” for almost a century in much the same way. So long as one was land-based and the other primarily naval in orientation a showdown was avoided.4 In the past, imperial China wielded unipolar power too. But today it is merely balancing against US unipolarity. The danger is that all balancing behaviour under conditions of unipolarity can be perceived as revisionist 1 Sheldon Pollock (2006), “Empire and Imitating”, pp. 175–178, ff. 185–186, in Craig J. Calhoun et al. eds., Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (New Press). 2 Ornit Shani (2018), How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (Cambridge University Press). 3 Robert Kagan (1998), “The Benevolent Empire”, Foreign Policy 111, pp. 24–35. 5. 4 Münkler, Empires, pp. 11–12.

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rather than systemic. Therefore, China is also careful to be working within the current world-system arrangements and is usually seeking accommodation rather than confrontation with the US on matters of economic policy.5 China is so frequently accused of free riding on the international system, or flouting its rules, that it is easy to forget the guarantor of the system, the US, has taken discretionary action to abstain from some aspects of that very same system, including human rights treaties; the US has too often remained outside these efforts. For example, the US is the only country other than Somalia that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely and rapidly ratified human rights treaty in history. It is one of only seven countries—together with Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan and Tonga—that have failed to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. But the best-known case is perhaps UNCLOS—it often serves as the basis for Western criticism of China’s conduct in the South China Sea, yet the US has refused to sign it. And recently the thrust towards unipolarity has sharpened with President Trump’s walking away from the Paris Climate Agreement. Equally, Trump’s attempt to purchase Greenland from Denmark, though far from unprecedented, echoed on geopolitical grounds the 1867 Alaska Purchase against the backdrop of the “Great Game”. It had an imperial ring to it in a supposedly post-imperial age and was thus summarily dismissed by Denmark. Indeed, in evaluating the extent to which the US treads a beaten imperial path, one has to get to grips with its history. America had been set up as a distinctly Atlantic polity and much later immersed itself in the Pacific. In between, it expanded overland quickly by taking advantage of Old-World rivalries. In other words, it was first a land empire, developing superior naval capabilities only after the Civil War. Recall the first American ships to call on China did not actually cross the Pacific but sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, and as late as 1812, the Russian were setting up colonies in California. It may not seem obvious today but the US had not emerged as a global superpower replacing Britain until after World War II. To make the point clearer, the first attempt to assert US hegemony in South America was 5 Randall L. Schweller and Xiaoyu Pu (2011), “Unipolarity: China’s Visions of International Order in an Era of U.S. Decline”, International Security 36.1, pp. 41–72.

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the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. That policy closed the continent to future European colonization, yet France continued to meddle in Mexican politics on America’s doorstep, and as late as 1862, Belize officially became a British colony. Americans largely remained on the sidelines in that part of the world until the early twentieth century. Yet, as early as 1920, articles comparing America to a “new Rome” appeared in the New York Times. Observers have always been troubled by Rome’s penchant for assimilating foreigners and its similarity to immigration into America. One must add the caveat, though, that Rome did not end up abolishing slavery like the US did. Since then, there have been predictions of curtailment of immigration, or imminent clash between inner-city have-nots and suburban elites, or worse still a corporate America taking over Washington DC.6 The situation is further accentuated by the fact that, like Rome in its waning days, the US Army relies in no small measure on immigrants or non-citizen recruits nowadays. Less than 1% of US population now serves in the army, giving way to talk of a Roman-style “mercenary class” being established.7 Dystopian as these indices may have sounded, President Trump’s Wall suggested the notion America was now a troubled empire “from within” may hold some truth. Pomper, more generally, observes that nation-states that have renounced imperialism sometimes face separatist movements from “minorities” of their inner empire. Concessions to minority “rebellions” often receive the blessing of liberal ideologies reinforced by new moods of guilt and repentance by great powers for their own imperial past.8 Thus, all over America, rap music, McDonald’s outlets and Mexican food trucks are everywhere to be had in close proximity. Namely, the US for the most part is no longer interested in outward expansion. Instead, it has expanded internally through immigration and is now poised to manage that growth. Brexit is a reminder immigration has become key concern elsewhere too, but the physicality of Trump’s Wall speaks more loudly. Within every major American city, one can now find a white elite core and, streets apart, a multi-ethnic periphery working

6 Cullen Murphy (2007), Are We Rome ? (Houghton Miflin). 7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/06/military-service-was-once-

fast-track-us-citizenship-trump-administration-keeps-narrowing-that-possibility/. 8 Philip Pomper (2005), “The History and Theory of Empires”, History and Theory 44.4: pp. 1–27, f. 5.

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on low wage. Just like in times past, the elite co-opts talented individuals from the periphery, but inequality remains glairing. In certain ways, this is a throwback to pre-modern empire where core and periphery are not formally defined with separate modes of rule and ideology. Domination and core-periphery subordination continue of course but the lexicon developed to identify either pre-modern or modern empire is only partly applicable in a post-industrial context. ∗ ∗ ∗ The imperial turn in US politics came of age as the US was weighing up the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Neoconservatives at that point were beside themselves identifying an opportunity to make the Middle East hospitable for American values once and for all. Those cheering the invasion on included luminaries like Niall Ferguson, Michael Ignatieff and Andrew Bacevich.9 Yet 17 years on it seems US presence in Iraq only partly succeeded in delivering free markets, human rights and democracy. To be sure, parliamentary elections and federalism work for now. How sustainably so after US troops leave is anybody’s guess. What is more Iran has consequently enhanced its influence in the region, and is now emboldened to challenge the US militarily as a result of Iraq’s weakening. Talbott argued that the US role in the international system is foundational and indispensable. He critiqued George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as a “consequential aberration” in the history of American foreign policy because it signified imperial overstretch. Even Washington and Jefferson referred to America as an empire but one grounded in human rights and liberty, echoing Cicero. Talbott then observed the US can regain the trust of the world by proactively leading the effort to avert the perils of climate change and nuclear proliferation.10 At any rate, the fraught debate between liberals and neocons over US foreign policy is not unlike that which transpired between Gladstone and Palmerston in imperial Britain. As we saw above, in fact every empire begets advocates and critics of imperial overstretch. Julian Go’s work is arguably the most lucid categorization of the US as an empire through juxtaposition with the British Empire. In his view, US westward expansion 9 Parsons, The Rule of Empire, p. 426. 10 Strobe Tabot (2009), The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern

States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (Simon& Schuster).

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in the nineteenth century was modelled on UK colonial patterns. Like Britain’s, American formal empire at the turn of the twentieth century had been preceded by informal empire: recall, for example, the British expansion pattern in India before the Battle of Plassey. Like Britain, the US adapted its democratic ideals to local situations, e.g. Guam enjoyed lesser degree of political representation than the Philippines. And like Britain at its height, the US today has the highest GDP and largest military outlay. Notably, however, no country comes close to US military capabilities today.11 The fall of the USSR gave a degree of global dominance to the US that is unprecedented in history, particularly as regards its military might. Jeffersonian humbug aside, Go’s analogy finds support also in Chernow’s magisterial biography of Alexander Hamilton. Considered the brain behind US statehood, Hamilton modelled Washington’s coast guard, federal army and fiscal arrangements on Britain’s.12 Paradoxically, the “Empire of Liberty” abolished slavery long after Britain. Around 1820, more African slaves arrived on American shores than free settlers.13 And much like British strategy vis-à-vis de-colonization, the US at first did not allow large-scale non-white immigration into its shores. That aside, the US tacit support to Britain during the Falklands War returned a favour whereby Britain had helped the US to set up key military bases around the world, e.g. the Diego Garcia. Murphy on his part also juxtaposes Rome and America’s military and political fortunes. He finds several broad similarities, including incomparable yet overstretched, and increasingly professionalized militaries, and cultural self-absorption. Ancient Romans, like modern Americans, held an almost messianic belief that their empire was uniquely superior to all others. Arrogant and assimilationist at once, this attitude blinded Rome to seek universal rule. Certainly, the fall of Rome instils anxiety in the American, as it did in Britons, about the comparable decline of their respective

11 Julian Go (2012), Patterns of Empire The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (Cambridge University Press), p. 12; Deepak Lal (2004), In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order (AIAA), pp. 208–216. 12 Ron Chernow (2005), Alexander Hamilton (Penguin). See also A. G. Hopkins (2018), American Empire: A Global History (Princeton University Press). 13 Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 102.

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empires. However, the historical evidence is that large empires decline slowly, at least that was the case in the pre-modern era.14 Murphy’s analogies were criticized as facile by Vaclav Smil. In his view, all societies undergo a divide between elites and the working classes, as well as between civilians and the military. The average American, writes Smil, lives much longer and enjoys a far higher standard of living than did the average Roman. Above all, Americans today are in Smil’s controversial view far more inventive than the Romans were, given that the latter technological knowledge was largely derived from Greece and that the Chinese to the east had at that time more compelling technologies.15 Yet Smil does not really explain why so many scholars, well beyond Murphy, have over the centuries compared their modern imperial project with Rome. Against this backdrop, Maier suggested there is a danger that Romanstyle “proconsuls”—aggressive commanders at the rim who align with trigger-happy politicians wanting crackdown on opposition at home—will hijack the political agenda.16 This might bring to mind President Trump’s threat to call in the army to quell BLM riots only that General Mark Milley apologized for showing to lend support to the idea.17 It’s also worth remembering the great theoretician of states power, Michael Mann, was writing about US decline during the Vietnam War. Little did he anticipate the unipolar moment that would come years later.18 Writing more recently, Marxist scholars Fouskas and Gökay trace US decline back to the 1960s. In their assessment, Nixon’s decision to leave the Bretton Woods system did not succeed in arresting the decline, as military outlay grew exponentially during the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, neoliberal globalization was meant to provide the answer to what neoliberals saw as secular decline in essence, but like Nixon—it failed too. Neither did shock-therapy treatment of post-Soviet Russia boost Western economies as expected. On the contrary, globalization narrowed the gap

14 Murphy, Are We Rome ?, passim. 15 Vaclav Smil (2010), Why America Is Not a New Rome (MIT Press). 16 Maier, Among Empires, p. 79. 17 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/11/politics/milley-trump-appearance-mistake/ index.html. 18 Michael Mann (1977), “States, Ancient and Modern”, European Journal of Sociology 18.2, pp. 262–298.

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between the West and the “rest”.19 The determinism of Fouskas and Gökay may be at fault, but their causation calls for a deeper discussion of “the rest”, primarily China.

19 Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay (2012), The Fall of The US Empire: Global Fault-Lines and the Shifting Imperial Order (Pluto).

CHAPTER 6

Is China an Emerging Empire

Abstract Today, the PRC fervently defends the UN against perceived US threats of unilateralism. An integral part of China’s diplomacy in recent years has been the call for multilateralism, which has helped build its global image as a responsible stakeholder. Yet before the mid-1990s, China was sceptical about the value of participating in regional multilateral organizations, preferring instead to deal with its neighbours and other major powers bilaterally. Since the mid-1990s, however, China has actively participated in most regional multilateral institutions, not least ASEAN. At the WTO and the G20, China was able to influence agenda setting much like at the UN. And beyond that, China has also begun creating international organization of its own like the SCO and the AIIB. All of this begs the question if China might not wish to restore its imperial hold on East Asia, as was the case in much of the pre-modern era. Keywords China · Tianxia · US · UN · WTO · ASEAN · SCO · AIIB

Can a power emitting the rhetoric of anti-imperialism be imperialistic itself? Yes, absolutely. In the US context, Ferguson calls it anti-imperialist imperialism. But there is an equally contradictory, residual imperial sentiment in China. One of the nuclear powers during the Cold War, the PRC was the one most associated with anti-imperialist rhetoric. In the 1960s, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 N. Horesh, Empires in World History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5_6

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such rhetoric was directed at both the US and the USSR at once. Moreover, Mao Zedong was known for his theory of anti-hegemonism. In fact, Mao had a “Sputnik Moment” himself in 1957, fearing the implication of Soviet technological lead on relations with the USSR’s neighbours. This was one reason for the launch of the Great Leap Forward with a view towards technological catch up by voluntarist means.1 So much so that in 1965, against the backdrop of Taiwanese membership of the UN, Mao in concert with Sukarno tried to establish a substitute to the UN. These attempts at alternative world system definitively ended with the Cultural Revolution. Following its accession to the UN with Indian backing in 1971, China had joined most international organizations.2 It also bears remembering Taiwan was not such a hurdle for relations between Mao and the US. In late 1940s, Dean Acheson supported recognizing the CCP and spurning Taiwan in order to promote “Titoism” against USSR in Asia. However, the Korean War eliminated that prospect.3 Today, the PRC fervently defends the UN against perceived US threats of unilateralism. An integral part of China’s diplomacy in recent years has been the call for multilateralism, which has helped build its global image as a responsible stakeholder. Yet before the mid-1990s, China was sceptical about the value of participating in regional multilateral organizations, preferring instead to deal with its neighbours and other major powers bilaterally. Since the mid-1990s, however, China has actively participated in most regional multilateral institutions, not least ASEAN. At the WTO and the G20, China was able to influence agenda setting much like at the UN. And beyond that, China has also created international organization of its own like the SCO and the AIIB.4 Today, some view the PRC as imperialistic simply by dint of inheriting Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet from the Qing. John Fairbank famously thought what he saw as imperial grandeur in the Mao era a

1 Thomas J. Christensen (2020), Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958 (Princeton University Press). 2 Janka Oertel (2015), China and the United Nations (Bloomsbury), p. 56. 3 Christensen, Useful Adversaries, passim. 4 Shweller and Pu, “Unipolarity”.

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throwback to the tributary mindset in imperial China.5 In a powerful monograph, Christopher Ford traced what he saw as the Chinese imperial approach today to the Warring States era over two thousand years ago. According to Ford, the end of internecine warfare in China at that time was resolved through territorial unification, whereas religiously-geared warfare in Europe during the Thirty Years War was resolved through the Treaty of Westphalia. The latter, in fact, signified the opposite of political unification; namely, it resulted in greater religious diversity and smaller-state sovereignty.6 In the tension between political unity and diversity, Xi Jinping more recently came down on the side of unity with his vision of the “community of shared future for mankind”. The face value of this vision is sovereign states interacting in a multi-polarizing balance of power, whereby multilateral and bilateral mechanisms promote a furthering of globalization. There is not yet Chinese talk of substituting the neoliberal institutions which underwrite current globalization, but just an attempt to improve them. However, under Xi there is already talk of introducing more “Chinese wisdom” and “Chinese solutions” to the problems ailing the world. In his speech to the UN in Geneva on 18 January 2017, Xi presented five aspects of such a future world: countries stay committed to building a world of lasting peace through dialogue and consultation; building a world of common security for all through joint efforts; building a world of common prosperity through win-win cooperation; building an opening and inclusive world through exchanges and mutual learning; and making the world clean and beautiful by pursuing green and low-carbon development.7 Surveys show belief among most Chinese scholars that China will eventually overtake the US as US leader, and that that Chinese philosophy can offer better guidance than American values to the world. But at present, Xi’s vision does not quite yet cohere into an alternative to American leadership, in the same way that the US offered a different imperial narrative to Britain’s. Otherwise put, Xi is far from challenging neoliberalism on 5 John K. Fairbank ed., The Chinese World Order, Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Harvard University Press). 6 Christopher A. Ford (2010), The Mind of Empire: China’s History and Modern Foreign Relations (The University Press of Kentucky). 7 Zhimin Chen and Xueying Zhang (2020), “Chinese Conception of the World Order in a Turbulent Trump Era”, The Pacific Review 33.3–4, pp. 438–468.

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the world stage, nor does he openly call for the dilution of the US$ as global reserve currency.8 Buzan and Cox have valuably surveyed the key points of similarity and difference between the US and China during their respective rise to power. Crucially, the US took part in both world wars but did not initiate those wars. On its frontier, the US enjoyed friendlier relations with Mexico and Canada by the turn of the twentieth century, whereas the PRC was embroiled in border disputes with many of its neighbours right until the 2000s, not least with which Russia. Both countries are continental in size with large populations, but the US is much more diverse demographically, thus perhaps better adept at internalizing external threats. Interestingly, both countries’ global outreach is informed at present by a universalist narrative (democracy and human rights vs. “harmonious world” and “peaceful development”); China under Mao on the other hand was isolationist, and so was the US in the interwar period.9 Frairbank classic tributary framework conjures up a superior Chinese civilization surrounded by vassals but in reality the situation in East Asia was not always like that. In the Song era, the imperial court famously retreated south and “bought off” (suibi) peace from Jurchens, forcing itself to treat those steppe people as equals. There are echoes here of the criticism Byzantine Emperor Justinian sustained for bribing enemies.10 Because it gave up much territory, the Song dynasty is not foregrounded in the PRC nowadays. Rather, the Tang dynasty is celebrated in the PRC as model of civic sophistication combined with military strength. But as Wang Zhenping has shown the Tang, while cooperating with Silla against other Korean kingdoms, also feared Silla military might. To the east, the Tang was at loggerheads with Turks and intermittently with Tibetans. For Wang, Silla and Tibet problematize Tang assumptions about China’s centrality in a supposedly tributary world system.11 8 Chen and Zhang, “Chinese Conception of the World Order”. 9 Barry Buzan and Michael Cox (2013), “China and the US: Comparable Cases of

‘Peaceful Rise’?”, The Chinese Journal of International Politics 6.2, pp. 109–132. 10 Frankopan, The Silk Roads, p. 64. 11 Zhenping Wang (2017), Tang China in Multi-Polar Asia: A History of Diplomacy

and War(University of Hawai’i Press), pp. 304–305.

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The Fairbank framework presupposes Chinese cultural impact on the periphery. In a recent study of the south-western periphery, however, Giersch argued that Qing conquest and Han ethnic migration did not lead to simple patterns of incorporation and assimilation. Chinese economic and cultural influences were profound, but did not entirely undermine indigenous practices. What is more, the Qing Empire—like the Mongols before them—failed in its attempt to occupy Burma. These legacies would complicate twentieth-century Chinese nation-building efforts. Giersch suggests Han immigration under the Qing was more intense than under the Ming but his study does not bear out the case for modern colonial exploitation.12 In the 1930s, Lei Haizong famously posited that the Chinese Empire was unduly war-averse with civilian mores trumping military ones. This historical baggage, Lei argued, hampered modernization efforts. Instead, Lei suggested modern China should learn more from the martial spirit of the steppe people that had once neighboured China, invading it from time to time.13 Fairbank partly endorsed this view observing that even though China had been the birthplace of the crossbow, cast iron and gunpowder—it acquired an “undying reputation for pacifism” in the early modern West. Chinese youth were “given no equivalents of Alexander the Great” to emulate; and folklore only offered Robin Hood-like characters.14 Another important factor underlying Chinese notions of historical exceptionalism at present is the role of religion in legitimating or challenging imperial power. Crudely put, the crux of the matter here is that in the West secular and church authorities were mutually reinforcing but, at times, caught up in bloody contention. The Roman legal code, however, pre-dated the enshrinement of Christianity as state religion, and in that sense foreshadowed a more distinct separation of powers than in the Chinese trajectory. To put it more precisely, it is commonly believed that because secular authority and religious one became more 12 C. Patterson Giersch (2006), Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s

Yunnan Frontier (Harvard University Press), p. 100, pp. 211–216. 13 On Lei see Edmund Fung (2010), The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity, pp. 120–126. See also Michael R. Godley (1989), “Politics from History: Lei Haizong and the ‘Zhanguo Ce Clique’”, Papers of Far Eastern History, 40, pp. 95–122. 14 John King Fairbank (1974), “Introduction” in idem. et al. eds, Chinese Ways in Warfare (Harvard University Press).

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pronounced in early modern Europe as compared with the rest of the world, the modern separation of judicial, legislative and executive powers could emerge there.15 The flipside of this crude generalization is that, in the Chinese contemporary narrative, we often find a self-perceived historical pattern of moderation as compared with the bloody faith wars raging in Europe and the Levant. But, if anything, the gradual subjugation of organized religious powers to the state was a hallmark of late-imperial China (c. tenth century to 1911). In the early imperial era, we find more often episodes of both religious persecution of Buddhists and Daoists, as well as power-broking between state and religion. In fact, Buddhist monastic institutions had acquired something of political autonomy in fourthcentury China, not unlike the power of the Catholic Church in European medieval times. Indeed, as Erik Zürcher reminds us, Huiyuan (CE 334– 416) had famously mustered the courage to declare: Buddhist clergy do not owe allegiance to political authority (Shamen bujing wang ).16 Randall Collins suggested that pre-modern China constituted a more ideologically and territorially cohesive polity than was the case either in Europe or India at that time. Though Buddhism first entered China during the later Han era, it was not until the Tang era that the Indian import of Buddhism could reach its zenith with some adjustments. Despite episodic state persecution, several Tang emperors actually became enthusiastic patrons of particular Buddhist sects, while in pre-modern India state rulers much more rarely intervened in sect endorsement. However, after the tenth century, as Buddhism in India itself was being eclipsed by bhakti forms of devotional popular Hinduism—Buddhism would ironically come to exert a lasting intellectual impact on its rival school of Chinese neo-Confucianism in China.17 As much as Buddhism transformed early imperial Chinese society, it was transformed by Chinese societal conventions thereafter. Not only were Buddhist sects codified, regimented and made more amenable to 15 See, e.g., Maxwell A. Cameron (2013), Strong Constitutions: Social-Cognitive Origins

of the Separation of Powers (Oxford University Press); Michael Puett (2015), “Ghosts, Gods, and the Coming Apocalypse: Empire and Religion in Early China and Ancient Rome”, In Scheidel, Walter ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 230–259. 16 Erik Zürcher (1972), The Buddhist Conquest of China (Brill), p. 106; pp. 231–239. 17 Peter K. Bol (2008), Neo-Confucianism in History (Harvard University Press).

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state diktat, Chinese Buddhism as a whole came to embrace the Confucian precept of filial piety, and its pantheon of arhats fused with Daoist and local popular deities.18 Moreover, following the Tang era, Chinese Buddhists no longer considered India as the centre of their intellectual universe and abandoned famen self-mutilation as a form of Buddha-relic worship because it contrasted with Confucian sensitivities. The upshot was that organized religion in late-imperial China became politically and economically less autonomous from the state apparatus as compared with Christendom, South Asia or the world of Islam and Judaism. This unique trajectory arguably feeds into the Chinese selfperception of relative secularism nowadays, whereby the clergy cannot wield its power beyond the faithful’s private domain. Perhaps the most pertinent European Emperor to provide a counterpoint to the Chinese trajectory is Barbarossa (CE 1120–1190), who at the height of his reign as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire prevailed only for a short time upon papal authority. Famously enough, a century earlier, Henry IV had submitted to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa.19 To my mind, Barbarossa’s exploits epitomize the deep-seated interdependence between state and religion in the pre-modern European context: an interdependence that is derived from and heightened alternative sources of political legitimacy, and one that is conspicuously missing from the late-imperial Chinese trajectory. Indeed, the Chinese modern composite term for “pope” (jiaohuang ), which roughly translates as “Emperor of the Faith”, would have been all but inconceivable in Chinese late-imperial setting, as would the saying spuriously attributed to Huguenot-born Henry IV, King of France (r. 1589–1610) about rule in Paris being “well worth the mass”.20 ∗ ∗ ∗

18 Richard Von Glahn (1990), Sinister Way: the Divine and the Demonic in Chinese

Religious Culture (University of California Press, 2004), pp. 130–179. See also Valerie Hansen, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276 (Princeton University Press,). 19 Karl Leyser (1994), Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond (A&C Black). 20 Mack P. Holt (2005), The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge University Press), p. 156.

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Because of its succession of dynasties, there’s an assumption that the Chinese view of history is cyclical, while Westerners tend to adopt teleologies. However, that empires rise and fall in succession is also conveyed by Hesiod, Thucydides, Tacitus, theologists in early Christianity and even Ibn Khaldun. But the notion in the West of decadence bringing down finde-siecle dynasties was fully articulated only much later by Montesquieu and Gibbon.21 Polybius subscribed to cyclicality but argued that the Roman Empire embodied good governance, and hence would avert decline. Herein lays the roots of Whig teleology: Polybius views would be taken up by Machiavelli in the sixteenth century, by English republicans in the seventeenth century, by Montesquieu in the eighteenth century, and by the authors of the US constitution.22 Polybius thus represents the mystique of empire: the Romans like later empires, both pre-modern and modern, sought exalted forebears in the image of the Trojans, and to pre-empt decline. On his part, Rudi Giuliani famously declared US global leadership to be eternal, reflecting a sentiment once widespread sentiment among Americans.23 All empires carry a sense of invincibility then. Yet even Kipling, the triumphalist poet of empire, warned that if complacent, the British Empire could become a Nineveh or Tyre.24 In her path-breaking study, Linda Colley observed that British modern identity was forged on the back of anti-papist rhetoric, a Francophobic narrative and enthusiasm for imperial expansion. In other words, British economic integration and the Industrial Revolution were necessary but not sufficient nation-building feats. England’s formal acts of union with Wales in 1536 and with Scotland in 1707 were the start rather than endpoint of that identity formation.25 Armitage stressed, however, that unlike colonial Spain, there was no pan-British ecclesiology which in turn translated into greater religious

21 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2001), Empire (Harvard Press), pp. 370–1; see also.Woolf, A Concise History of History, p. 21.

University

22 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 371; Woolf, Concise History of History, p. 27. 23 https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-americas-global-leadership-78736. 24 Ferguson, Empire, p. 247. 25 Linda Colley (2005), Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Yale University Press).

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diversity in the colonies. That is to say that there was no common foundation between Erastian Anglicans and Presbyterian Scots, and the British Empire therefore had no unitary religious agenda.26 What might then be the commensurate milestones in the formation of modern Chinese grand identity? Following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, one might naturally speculate that Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty matters, as might some accommodation with Taiwan, if it ever were to occur. Similarly, in narrative terms, cynics might speculate that Mao’s anti-capitalist principles would be replaced by Japan-phobia and a milder version of neo-authoritarian discourse with Confucian tenor stressing justice, equality and meritocracy—as well as perhaps a revival of tianxia symbolism, war-aversion and non-interference in international relations. Yet, while it is ideologically at fault through Chinese eyes, in some ways the US—the arbiter of the international system today—and China are becoming alike, not least in actual levels of social inequality and their enthusiasm for free-wheeling entrepreneurship. The most important transformation of the CPC in the post-Mao era had to do with Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” policy, which saw some of China’s most talented businesspeople join Party ranks, even though the Party itself still nominally enshrines Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in its constitution. In other words, both Americans and Chinese have come to subscribe in equal measure to the notion that wealth should be a function of one’s talents and can therefore never be equally distributed.27 Where the US and China remain at loggerheads in historical narrative terms, and where they emit contending blueprints for the future, is in their configuration of the relations between the state, society and organized religion. China’s relative secularism is self-perceived as a modernizing force, while faith in God is still hard-wired into American (if not European) psyche. Arguably, CPC sensitivities to religious autonomy in the public sphere are informed by its own experience in colluding with secret societies before 1949 by way of undermining KMT authority, as

26 Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, pp. 8–9. 27 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/world/asia/in-chinas-legislature-the-rich-

are-more-than-represented.html?_r=0.

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well as perhaps by suspicion of alternative sources of legitimation carried over from the late-imperial era.28 In the Chinese blueprint, at any rate, government is a much bigger and more intrusive construct than it had ever been in the late-imperial era, yet there is professed aversion to exporting this model overseas that still arguably bespeaks minimalism. Americans are still infatuated by an ethos of small government, which they are determined to promote internationally. Both blueprints, at the same time, hanker after minimal social welfare and are in effect compatible with global neo-liberalism in its current iteration. In other words, these blueprints seem to be equidistant from Scandinavian social-democracy. Whereas Mao’s China strove to erect a communistic uber-utopia by breaking with the Chinese “feudal” past, the CPC at present is at pains to resurrect that very same past at least rhetorically. The vehicle with which to push this through is a kind of new Confucian (not to be confused with late-imperial neo-Confucian) ethos, in which Tang real or perceived splendour and cosmopolitanism loom large. Though relatively moderate and secular in essence, because it downplays individual freedoms, that ethos is unlikely to win over the hearts and minds of people in the developed world. Whether the developing world might rally in years to come to this alternative blueprint will depend in no small measure on China’s ability to translate rhetorical magnanimity into larger and more effectively-managed overseas aid development as compared with the US, Europe and Japan.29 What is expected in return for far-flung magnanimity in the Chinese narrative is insistence on neighbourly acceptance of China’s “natural superiority” in its own back yard, i.e. the East and South China Seas. Rhetorically cherishing stability, and otherwise in concert with multilateral organizations, Chinese leaders have nevertheless escalated the situation in the region by building military facilities on a disputed atoll, and firing on Philipino and Vietnamese fishermen in the South China Sea. In that sense,

28 Wu Junqing (2014), State and Heretics: the Construction of ‘Heresy’ in Chinese State Discourse, PhD Dissertation, University of Nottingham, 2014. 29 Charles Wolf, Jr., Xiao Wang, Eric Warner (2013), “China’s Foreign Aid and Government-Sponsored. Investment Activities: Scale, Content, Destinations, and Implications”, (RAND) available at: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR100/ RR118/RAND_RR118.pdf.

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like the Romans in the Mediterranean or the Americans in the Caribbean, they seem to be treating the Sea as mare nostrum, namely “ours”.30

30 Getz Streets-Salter (2015), Empires and Colonies in the Modern World: A Global Perspective (Oxford University Press), pp. 512–513.

CHAPTER 7

Future Scenarios

Abstract Why write a book on empire in an increasingly crowded field? In the foregoing passages, I make the argument that this book is different by virtue of (1) its interdisciplinarity, bringing together both historical and IR insights into world systems in times past; (2) its clear distinction between pre-modern and modern empires, drawing out four key points of separateness; (3) in emphasizing specific economic data; (4) in advancing the notion of the emergence of “empires from within” in the twenty-first century, that is nation-states becoming more multiethnic while often stepping back from globalization; and finally (5) in offering future scenarios for the evolution of empires in a Schumpeterian post-industrial world. Keywords Pandemics · Nation-states · Empires · “Empires from Within” · Churchill · Elon Musk

Why write a book on empire in an increasingly crowded field? In the foregoing passages, I made the argument that this book is different by virtue of 1. its interdisciplinarity, bringing together both historical and IR insights into world systems in times past; 2. its clear distinction between pre-modern and modern empires, drawing out four key points of separateness; 3. in emphasizing specific economic data; 4. in advancing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 N. Horesh, Empires in World History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5_7

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the notion of the emergence of “empires from within” in the twentyfirst century, that is nation-states becoming more multi-ethnic while often stepping back from globalization; and finally 5. in offering future scenarios for the evolution of empires in a Schumpeterian post-industrial world. John Darwin astutely observed that empire has been “…the default mode of political organisation throughout most of history”, and thus more durable than nation-state.1 Ferguson went further suggesting that empire could deal better with global inequalities than the current postcolonial order.2 The US is the first empire whose extension of power is by technological and financial means, by the global clout of MNCs, the reach of mass media and overseas military deployment. In turn, it outsourced much of its manufacturing industry to the developing world. In order to appreciate the meaning of empire in a post-industrial setting, it’s worth enumerating again the distinctions that characterized the transition between the premodern and modern phase of empire. First, the life span of modern empires is shorter, and that observation invariably affects how we might perceive the current US-led liberal world order. Modern empires by definition entail trans-oceanic military deployment. Before the nineteenth century, modern empires embraced biological determinism to justify economic exploitation in the same way that “free market” ideology today perhaps legitimizes inequality. The fourth key distinction suggests modern empires maintain rigid borders. The next distinction between pre-modern and modern empires has to do with more taxation, especially of commerce, through larger central bureaucracies. The nature of modern colonization was more tightly controlled, whereby colonies were made subservient to the interest of the metropole and dispatched economic surplus there. Lachmann argues that the decline of modern empires after 1945 and 1989 was not inevitable but sudden, and as such was mourned and resisted by its stewards.3 The walk away from territorial empire to post-industrial one was gradual, however. Decolonization after World War II did enlarge

1 Cited in Conrad, What is Global History, p. 193. 2 Ferguson, Empire, “Conclusions”. 3 Richard Lachmann (2018), “What Empires Can and Can’t do”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 60.4, pp. 1127–1142.

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the international system with scores of nation-states possessing equal voting rights at the UN. On the other hand, only the Big Five maintain veto rights at the UN Security Council. Moreover, voting rights in the bedrock institution of American hegemony in the post-war period—the World Bank and the IMF—are weighted in favour of the US. Whilst nationalistic, newly decolonized nation-states were then sometimes attracted to pan ideologies with an imperial flavour of their own—be the ideology Arab, African, Asian, Slav or Turkic. But the shortlived Arab United Republic was the only concrete effort to realize those sentiments.4 After mere 75 years, the USSR disintegrated almost overnight and with nary a gunshot. If nothing else, this shows that the post-industrial empire is much more an “empire of the mind”. In its vast size, multi-ethnic nature and global array of client states—the USSR had the unmistakeable feel of an empire. But was it a modern empire? At least in one sense, it wasn’t: the USSR subsidized Warsaw Pact countries rather than the other way around. The situation was more patent in Cuba, where the USSR committed itself to buying much of the island’s annual sugar harvest above market price in advance.5 Quoted at the outset, Churchill’s observations of future empires being “of the mind” calls attention to the enormous changes that the concept has undergone in the nuclear age. The only power to use nuclear weapons, the US was least interested in colonial territorial acquisition in the post-war era, as Philipino independence suggests. By contrast, Portugal and Belgium—the smallest colonizers—cruelly clung to their colonies beyond any other power after World War 2.6 Clearly, soft power matters more, and permanent territorial conquest is much less sanctioned in the current climate even if America’s unipolar moment begot forays in Iraq and Afghanistan. Global institutions—fluid rather than territorial, and shrouded in “mystique”—now shape political agenda to a much great degree, as COVID-19 has shown with the WHO.7 In Chinese pre-modern history, the projection of soft power 4 Howe, Empire, p. 113. 5 Howe, Empire, 114. 6 Tignor, “Foreword “. 7 Mark Mazower (2012), Governing the World. The History of an Idea (Penguin); Guy

Fiti Sinclair (2017) To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (Oxford University Press).

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(i.e. civilizational superiority) played a much larger role than in the West even if today PRC soft power is weak. For all these reasons, the significance of soft power may shoot up—or be resurrected in the Chinese case. Yet Western IR theory, especially neorealism, fails to comprehend its significance, as the legacy of Western dominance hangs on.8 The shorter shelf life of modern empires, as well as the paucity of unipolar settings in world history (China and British “Splendid Isolation” apart), makes predictions of the course of the post-industrial world difficult. Snyder and his co-authors suggest that empires mix ideology with foreign policy only when they are in a position of strength. To a large extent, President G.W Bush’s forays in the Middle East played to his strength in foreign policy, while the Democrats had better approval ratings when it came to the economy. As we saw before, domestic politics and the level of industrialization do impact on imperial proclivity in a modern setting. Imperial overstretch calls for a determined coalition of elite interests because usually “plebeian” sectors of the core benefit much less from war.9 Ikenberry and his co-authors predicted that because a unipole does not need allies as much, NATO was likely to dissolve, and instead, the US would rely on ad hoc coalitions and bilateral arrangements. Here, the Anglo-American and Saudi-American special relationships will continue to provide much ballast to US foreign policy to the exclusion of, e.g., OPEC. Trump’s lukewarm attitude to NATO and his penchant for bilateralism certainly make that prediction less outlandish.10 Anticipating the Trump era, Münkler called on the EU, for example, to expedite integration and acquire “imperial” military capability so as to offset US isolationism and Russian aggression.11 The point is of course that Trump did not win a second term, and so the extent to which his policy might invite subsequent counter-balancing from former allies and foes alike is moot. In this context, one has to recall that even Great Britain ditched “Splendid Isolation” to focus on 8 Acharya, The Making of Global International Relations, p. 6. 9 Jack Snyder, Robert Y. Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon (2011), “Free Hand Abroad,

Divide and Rule at Home” in Ikenberry et al. eds. International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity (Cambridge University Press). 10 G. John Ikenberry et al. (2011), “Introduction: unipolarity, state behaviour, and systemic consequences” pp. 1–32 in idem ed., International Relations Theory. 11 Münkler, Empires, pp. 166–167.

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containing Germany in the early twentieth century. If China continues to rise in relative terms, the US might again prize multilateralism. President Trump led the US further away from multilateralism or military deployment overseas, while at the same time selectively exercising military power and stressing US military might—unprecedented in history. Hardly a pacifist, and still less a globalist, Trump seemed oblivious to the significance of maintaining US soft power as opposed to hard power, or the significance of propagating liberal values and free markets. Other than reducing funding for the UN, he even called into question NATO’s utility and stepped back from TPP trade talks and the Paris Climate Agreement.12 The US has a two-pronged trump card in its pocket against any attempted challenge to its hegemony: the double-H factor. That is to say, Hollywood continues to capture popular culture, while Harvard attracts the best minds in the world. To be sure, Chinese companies have bought assets in Hollywood, and Chinese universities are fast climbing the ranking ladders. Asian pop culture more generally has made its imprint elsewhere too to some extent—from Manga to K-Pop. But the gap is still large, and even larger when military might is taken into account.13 Globalization has arguably been the single most important trend shaping the world system following the collapse of the USSR. As such, it has arguably become an empire of the mind in its own right, particularly after the spread of the Internet. Led by a neo-liberal global elite, and propped up by institutions like the dollar as reserve currency or ISO benchmarks, globalization was cast aside by Trump in favour of state-tostate transactional approach, even at the expense of long-time allies. In that sense, Trump was dirigiste rather than a neo-liberal policymaker. He believes the US as the incumbent power actually lost out as a result of globalization.14 But Trump’s isolation is nothing new. Although a segregationist, Woodrow Wilson toiled to set up the League of Nations following World War I, thereby sparking anti-colonial sentiments right around the world. In the event, his Republican adversaries prevented the US from joining. 12 Lachmann, “What Empires Can and Can’t do”. 13 F.H. Knelman (1993), “The Next Empire will be the Last”, Peace Research 25.4,

pp. 63–67. 14 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-08-14/three-cheers-trumps-for eign-policy.

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The rapid disintegration of the Wilsonian promise caused much disillusionment from Egypt to China, strengthening Third World liberation movements—Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others—were profoundly shaped by their experiences at the time.15 Far from anti-colonial hero, Wilson is vilified nowadays by the BLM movement. Thus, Princeton University has removed his name from its public policy school and one of its residential colleges after trustees concluded that the 28th US president’s “racist thinking and policies” made him “an inappropriate namesake”.16 Trump’s gripes against globalization are somewhat ironic because Third World Criticism of Western imperialism today revolves around the neo-liberal IMF and World Bank, even as many countries rushed to join them, including Russia after 1992. The IMF and World Bank are accused of perpetuating the West as industrialized empire by pushing exports into poor countries, but not sufficiently opening up to theirs, demanding currency liberalization and government budget tightness, as well disallowing the protection of seed industries.17 If the speed with which COVID-19 spread was a marker of how far globalization has reached, homespun cheering every 4 years during the FIFA World Cup is a reminder that the nation-state may be more durable than we think. There is no doubt that the nation-state is still the dominant form of organized territorial and political power in the modern world. Maleševi´c argues that although some international organizations such as the IMF or MNCs like Google or Exxon Mobil have substantially greater influence in the world than many nation-states, such entities do not rule territories and are regulated by nation-state governments. In other words, Walmart, Samsung, Royal Dutch Shell or Toyota may be valued more than the GDP of many countries, but their economic power does not simply translate into the political or military capacity associated with the sovereign nation-states. However, MNCs do use their economic might to lobby government decision-makers.18 15 Ere Manela (2009) The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press). 16 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-27/princeton-axing-woo drow-wilson-s-name-from-public-policy-school. 17 Getz Streets-Salter, Empires and Colonies in the Modern World, pp. 501–508; 18 Siniša Maleševi´c (2017), “Empires and Nation-States: Beyond the Dichotomy.” Thesis

Eleven 139.1, pp. 3–10.

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Despite these qualifications, Hardt and Negri have taken the argument further pointing to the fact that post-industrial empire was in their view globalization par excellence. They contend that what humanity is experiencing today should be seen in line with our historical understanding of (pre-modern) empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Today’s empire in their view is no longer grounded in naked economic exploitation, although control remains the endgame. Rather, today’s empire draws on the vague borders of pre-modern empires and on elements of pre-modern empires, US constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers, to radically remake concepts like sovereignty, nation and people. New forms of identity and racism interpenetrate, and new patterns of migration arise. Because control and exploitation are changing but not fading away, Hardt and Negri seek alternative forms of globalization that could make global society truly democratic.19 Contrary to Maleševi´c, Hardt and Negri contend that MNCs directly structure and articulate territories and populations. Within a diverse workforce, and armed with a discourse of diversity, MNCs are empires in and of themselves. They tend to make nation-states merely a shell recording the flows of the commodities, finance and people. Moreover, MNCs in their view directly distribute labour, allocate resources and organize world production. This complex apparatus determines the new biopolitical structuring of the world.20 The latest phase of globalization has to do with Big Data and Cloud Computing. Hardt and Negri believe we are witnessing a competition among MNCs to consolidate quasi-monopolies over the new information infrastructure. The various telecommunication corporations, computer hardware and software manufacturers, as well as information and entertainment corporations sometimes, merge to trump up their rivals.21 Hardt and Negri liken the friction today between anti-trust regulation and MNC growth, and around tax avoidance, to the friction between governments and the East India companies surrounding the latter’s corruption and

19 Hardt and Negri, Empire. 20 Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 31–32. 21 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 300.

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monopolism.22 But it must be remembered that, in the event, the EIC lost out and was replaced by direct British government rule. ∗ ∗ ∗ The post-war world has been with few exceptions remarkably peaceful. In fact, more men die today of suicide than of violence. Similarly, more die of obesity than of hunger. Arguably, empires have become cheaper to enforce. As Harari insightfully observes, during national crises in the past state leaders called on the population to show frugality; today in times of recession state, leaders actually call on the population to consume more.23 Was all of this the result of nuclear deterrence or the diffusion of democracy? Whatever may be the case, there are concerns that the rise of an illiberal power like China would signify a turn towards more confrontation. The world has seen three major waves of democratization, and Fukuyama predicted the fourth would end history. But today’s vantage point is less conclusive in view of the rise of illiberalism, and one is also reminded of Rome’s fateful embracing of dictatorship. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Quite apart from nuclear deterrence, “China huggers” often point to the economic symbiosis between China and the US as one which precludes degeneration into warfare almost by definition.24 “China bears” on the other hand quite rightly suggest that economic integration during the first wave of globalization did not preclude World War I.25 It is worth remembering in this context that Paul A. Papayoanou showed “dyadic” economic relationship had evolved between Britain and Germany before the War, whereby Britain was Germany’s most important export market (14.2%); Britain consequently ran a trade deficit with Germany but benefited form much “invisible” earnings from Germany deriving from 22 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 306. 23 Harari, Kitsur, p. 349. See also O’Connell, Of Man and War, p. 15. 24 https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1819183/economic-int

erdependence-underpins-peace-between-china-and; 534f2-8870-11e9-b861-54ee436f9768.

https://www.ft.com/content/6d0

25 On pre-WWI globalisation, see, e.g., Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales (2013), Saving Capitalism from Capitalists (HarperCollins).

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shipping, insurance and banking. One-fifth of Germany’s raw material and food imports came from the British Empire on the eve of the War. And the total volume of bilateral trade increased right up to the War, thereby overtaking that of Anglo-French trade.26 In comparison, the US soaks up 19.2% of all Chinese exports at present, not unlike the foregoing wartime figures. And contrary to popular perceptions, a rapidly growing share of these exports is made by private Chinese firms.27 Dale Copeland argued that the intuitive notion trade interdependence reduced the likelihood of war was borne out by historical facts to some extent. In the “swinging” 1920s, when cosmopolitanism prevailed, there was relative peace. Yet, when protectionism set in following the Great Depression, the winds of war started blowing again. On the other hand, Germany and Japan were both highly dependent on energy imports on the eve of World War II, and that did not offset their aggression, quite to the contrary.28 Here, too, there are disturbing echoes of China’s growing reliance on oil imports at present. China remains, however, the possessor of the third largest coal reserve in the world—the main source for electricity generation there.29 In view of the concerns, China’s rise is raising, what policy should Beijing adopt? Michael Doyle observed that in the 1940s empire building was “not in the mainstream” for scholars, but there are many in China nowadays who seek inspiration in imperial history so as to articulate the contours of a new Chinese world order.30 Hyun Jin Kim observes that in looking back at their history, many Chinese strategists recommend naval expansion—precisely the path that set Britain and Germany on collision course in 1914. Such prescriptions are influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan who is credited with American naval build-up in the early twentieth century. But such naval advocacy

26 Paul A. Papayoanou (1996), “Interdependence, Institutions, and the Balance of Power: Britain, Germany, and World War I”, International Security 20.4, pp. 42–76, f. 55. 27 Loren Brandt and Kevin Lim (2019), “Accounting for Chinese Exports”, University of Toronto Working Paper; see also. 28 Dale C. Copeland (1996), “Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations”, International Security 20.4, pp. 5–41. 29 David Zweig and Jianhai Bi (2005), “China’s Global Hunt for Energy”, Foreign Affairs 84.5. 30 Doyle, Empires, Chp. 2; cf. Yan Xuetong (2011), Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (Princeton University Press).

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was raised also much earlier by Francis Bacon. As we saw before, this is also consonant with notions of modern super-powerdom stretching right back to the Portuguese.31 Kim stressed that trying to bridge the naval gap with America was not only chimeric, it would also rouse sleeping dogs even if some naval buildup may be justified when shorn of offensive capabilities. Rather, Beijing would do itself a bigger favour if it worked to cement a coalition of countries—including principally Russia—that support its peaceful rise to global super-powerdom. So long as the US wields incomparable military capability, China could not successfully propel itself to hegemonic position. Like the Mongols in the past, Kim suggests Beijing should be looking West rather than East in order to secure energy sources without alienating Washington.32 Both China and the US are trying to avert economic depression at present through deficit funding and are publically indebted up to their eyeballs. There is a casualization of the workforce in both countries that is affecting the social contract, particularly with the youths33 But the US is far more powerful: Noam Chomsky argues that the US is committed to maintaining a world-spanning empire by force. Core elites have become insulated from democratic constraints by tampering the legal system, whereas the broader population is lulled into consumerist apathy or hatred of the vulnerable. At the same time, MNCs and the superrich have increasingly been allowed to do as they please.34 If Chomsky portrays an increasingly dysfunctional America that sows violence around the world and where MNCs control Washing DC, Joseph Nye argues that American dominance on the world stage is not over just yet. This is because China has a serious soft power deficiency, and in a post-industrial world, soft power matters more: China as yet cannot serve as an empire of the mind. America’s superpower status may well be tempered by its own domestic problems and China’s economic boom, but

31 Hyun Jin Kim (2018), Geopolitics in Late Antiquity: The Fate of Superpowers from China to Rome (Routledge), p. 85. 32 Hyun Jin Kim, Geopolitics, p. 87. 33 David Harvey (2006) A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press),

pp. 189–206. 34 Noam Chomsky (2017) Who Rules The World? (Picador).

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its military, economic and soft power capabilities will continue to outstrip those of its closest rivals for decades to come.35 Yet China is eroding the relative material dominance of the West. As such, it is not the first non-Western power. The process of redefining the structure and distribution of power of the international system began with the rise of Japan in the late nineteenth century. With India slated to join next, the process reflects the successful modernization efforts of more and more states and societies. While decolonization undid formal empire, the rise of the “rest” is steadily undoing the more entrenched economic and cultural core–periphery structure.36 Acharya predicts that globalization will paradoxically make dominant powers more inward-looking and autistic. The redistribution of power away from the West will, on the one hand, enhance pluralism but, on the other hand, create a contested fractious system with no power large enough to set the agenda. The US, the EU, Britain and Japan are all debt-laden and suffering from an identity crisis of one kind or another.37 China is reluctant to step into America’s shoes in terms, for example, of overseas development aid, subsidy to the UN and other measures.38 Those powers traditionally opposed to American hegemony and calling for a more “multipolar” international order are likely to be satisfied with the emerging pluralist system. Yet the lack of a superpower of last resort means resource-poor regions will increasingly be left to fend for themselves. There will be more ideological space for smaller powers to assert their identity even if neo-liberalism will continue to guide globalization as before. That the USSR and the US could find accommodation during the Cold War despite ideological difference is a cause for optimism that China and the US might manage their differences too. Nevertheless, China poses a greater economic threat to the US precisely because it embraced free market enterprise.39 Chamberlain once declared that “…provided the City of London remains…the clearing-house of the world, any other nation may be its workshop”. This tells us a lot about the priorities of post-industrial 35 Joseph S. Nye Jr. (2015) Is the American Century Over? (Polity). 36 Acharya, The Making of Global International Relations, p. 262. 37 Acharya, The Making of Global International Relations, pp. 269–271. 38 Acharya, The Making of Global International Relations, p. 276. 39 Acharya, The Making of Global International Relations, p. 281.

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empires past their “Augustan threshold”. Extending the argument to the US at present, it may be the case that the average American is concerned about the disappearance of manufacturing jobs but not so much the elites. Neither are US elites concerned much about Asian accumulation of dollar reserves. Conversely, Washington was never alarmed by China becoming the workshop of the world; it is only concerned when Beijing aims to take the lead in frontier hi-tech sectors, or more so when it promotes the RMB as alternative reserve currency to the dollar. As we saw, there has been a debate in the pertinent scholarly literature as to whether pure economics drove nineteenth-twentieth-century imperialism. Whatever the answer, my reading into Cold War history made me realize that the historical notion of empires is not synonymous with contemporary super-powerdom. This is mainly because of the implications of nuclear weaponry as game-changer. Immerwahr has recently suggested that, on balance, other US technological breakthroughs during the post-war era made formal empire unattractive in view of the rising tide of national liberation movements worldwide. First, greater blue water mobility through, for example, the Panama Canal and aircraft carriers made holding on to large swathe of territory with ground forces less compelling. Faster planes have made the deployment of ground forces easier too. In the pre-war era, European colonies in the tropics had been otherwise indispensable in providing raw materials: for example, rubber for automobile tyres. Other vital “colonial” commodities included West African palm oil as lubricant, Indian jute for packaging and off-shore Peruvian guano as fertilizer. All of those were partly replaced by synthetic materials in the twentieth century.40 US intelligence predicted on its part that Washington would see its power position eroded in relative terms, but it will remain in 2050 the most important single country in the system. Globalization will continue to create poverty in both rising and declining powers at the same time. This will only partially be offset by the growth of middle classes in the developing world. On the other hand, technology is likely to continue raising living standards. Overwhelmingly state-owned, fast-rising Chinese

40 Daniel Immerwahr (2019), How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

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MNCs will boost the nation-state element in globalization, but social media will dilute boundaries between countries and cities.41 That is to say, the city-state modality will not be resurrected; there will not be a Delian or Hanseatic League-like alliance forming. Hong Kong and even Singapore will not establish a network of peers. Rather, they will lose much of their comparative advantage as PRC human capital improves. The closest match to the city-state modality today is the EU, being as it is a loose confederation of states. Often likened to the Holy Roman Empire, the EU is nevertheless not expected to solidify following Brexit; instead, it will weaken. Yet British attempts to re-kindle Commonwealth special ties with its former colonies and dominions so as to compensate for lost EU markets will likely remain marginal. Social media will become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it will enable citizens to coalesce and challenge governments. On the other hand, such technologies will provide governments—both authoritarian and democratic—an unprecedented ability to monitor their citizens.42 It is not purely within the realm of fantasy to speculate that in the future governments may be able to detect thoughts and sentiments in real time. For these reasons, the so-called “third wave” of democratization may be partially reversed by 2050—particularly in India, Russia, Turkey and Southeast Asia. Yet democratization could gain ground through protest in Iran and Hong Kong. With migration on the increase around the world, more countries will face the challenge of integrating migrants into their societies while respecting their cultural identities. In view of nuclear deterrence, the likelihood of great power war in the next 15 years is very low but Black Swan events can derail stability—from Iran gaining nuclear weapons, to more pandemics to extreme weather events through sovereign-debt crisis or refugee influx, right up to volcanic eruptions or even meteorite collisions.43 Certainly, the 2010 volcanic eruption in Iceland demonstrated how a relatively small-scale event can disrupt aviation around the world for weeks.

41 National Intelligence Council (2004), “Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project”. 42 National Intelligence Council (2012), “Global trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”. 43 NIC, “Mapping the Global Future”.

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COVID-19 has given rise in the West to widespread conspiracy theories about China spreading it on purpose. If nothing else, these theories, indirectly stoked up by Trump, have demonstrated the limitations of China’s soft power. The CCP tried to deal with this damage to its reputation by oscillating from combatant “wolf diplomacy” to conciliatory “mask diplomacy”, i.e. sending medical equipment to affected countries for free. Jessica Chen Weiss observed in that regard that the more the CCP turned to nationalism and pointing the figure at American troubles, e.g. race relations, the less worried liberal democracies should be about China as an ideological rival. The more the CCP turned to nationalist propaganda, the less appeal it commanded as a model to emulate. 44 In short, as predicted by the “democratic lineage” theory, China’s rise in the next two decades will make the world system less peaceful in some ways, while possibly constraining US unilateral military action in another sense. This is all good and well but the story is different in the developing world, and here China is likely to gain ground against the US over the next two decades. Today, countries like China and Singapore offer a viable alternative to the leading democracies. As Kurlantzik observes, in many ways, their systems pose the most serious challenge to democratic capitalism since the rise of communism and fascism in the 1920s. Following the GFC in 2008, dissatisfaction with democracy has mounted in many developing nations, and leaders in Asia, Africa and Latin America are studying the Chinese model far more closely.45 Building on earlier, state-centred Asian models of development such as in South Korea and Taiwan, the “China model” nevertheless sidesteps democratization to ensure one-party rule. The “China model” devotes significant resources to primary education and the grooming of state-led “national champion” companies in strategic industries that are increasingly competitive on the world stage, particularly in the developing world—Huawei being the primary example. Beijing has developed a hybrid form of capitalism which welcomes private ownership mainly in

44 https://supchina.com/2020/06/29/no-beijing-consensus-the-u-s-risks-a-pyrrhic-vic tory/. 45 https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/03/why-the-china-model-isntgoing-away/274237/.

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non-strategic sectors—in the 1980s and 1990s many SOEs were privatized. But Beijing has of late increasingly turned its attention to alleviating rural poverty, and strengthening state ownership.46 In Thailand, elites of various political persuasions have been favourably contrasting China’s one-party model of government with Thailand’s messy, and sometimes-violent multi-party system. In the past years, Internet monitoring and blocking system like China’s have surfaced, and the independence of the judiciary has been undermined.47 ∗ ∗ ∗ The “Westphalian system” which conditioned so much of international relations in the last 4 centuries has been the exception rather than the rule in wider world history. We are likely to witness its replacement over the next half a century with a more diverse system whereby nation-states cede more control to trans-national players, and to globalization itself. In that sense, Brexit and Trump while signalling a return to the nationstate fortress will not prove long-lasting. Growing flows of information, technology, capital, goods, services and people throughout the world will prove the dominant trend. Because of its technological core, globalization is not reversible even if Black Swan events like the GFC or COVID-19 can hold it back. A less peaceful world but one where MAD still preclude war means on balance we will see the patterns of globalization being contested, but globalization itself forging ahead. We are currently living through the Fourth Industrial Revolution with technologies like artificial intelligence, genome editing, augmented reality, robotics and 3D printing, are rapidly changing the way humans create, exchange and distribute value. Hardly anyone foresaw the impact of social media when the Internet began to take off in the mid-1990s, and it is equally hard to pinpoint where the Fourth Industrial Revolution will end, or when the Fifth will begin. Yet there are promising signs the human lifespan will increase manifold; that organs may be replaced or enhanced.48 The explosion of big data reinforces Churchill’s prophetic 46 Niv Horesh and Kean fan Lim (2019), An East Asian Challenge to Western Neoliberalism (Routledge). 47 https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/West-must-act-firmly-to-stem-rise-of-China-modelin-Thailand 48 Acharya, The Making of Global International Relations, p. 272.

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conclusion that empire in the future would be in the ether. But in view of the pattern of empire in times past, the ambitions of Elon Musk to colonize Mars so as to protect our species from planetary catastrophe may not be as far-fetched as they first sound.

Index

A Aborigines, 35 Aceh, 41 Achaemenids, 71 Acheson, Dean, 102 Afghanistan, 17, 115 Africa, 13, 20 Africans, 30 Aircraft carriers, 124 Akkadians, 70 Alaska, 95 Aldeni, Guildo, 12 Alexander the Great, 30, 54, 75, 105 Algeria, 15, 28 American Revolution, 15 Anarchy, 66 Anasazi, 53 Anglicus, Alanus, 29 Anti-imperialism, 16, 101 Artificial intelligence, 127 ASEAN, 102 Asia, 20 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 102

Assyria, 66 Assyrians, 70 Athens, 54 Augustan threshold, 73 Augustus, Caesar, 28, 30 Austro-Hungarian, 56 Austro-Hungary, 86, 88 Aztec empire, 67 B Babylonian empire, 70 Bacon, Francis, 28 Bannermen, 88, 90 Barbarossa, 107 Basque, 35 Battle of Diu, 43 Baudica, 29 Big Data, 119 Bismarck, Otto von, 86 Black Death, 67 Black Lives Matter, 1 Black pepper, 66 Black Sea, 21 Black Swan events, 125

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 N. Horesh, Empires in World History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5

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INDEX

Bolívar, Simón, 6, 37 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 8, 11, 75 Breuilly, John, 27 Brexit, 96, 127 Britain, 94, 120, 123 British, 116 British empire, 52, 97, 121 Bryce, James, 11 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 16 Buddhists, 106 Burke, Edmund, 37 Bush, G.W., 116 Byzantine empire, 8, 53, 74, 85, 87, 104

C Cabot, John, 59 Caesar, Julius, 30 Calgacus, 29 California, 95 Caliphate, 74 Cameron, Ronodo, 26 Canada, 104 Canary Islands, 21 Canossa, 107 Carthage, 21, 79 Casas, Bartolomeo las, 36 Cato the Censor, 32 Cecil Rhoads, 88 Ceramics, 48 Chamberlain, 123 Charles V, 59 Chechens, 2 China, 4, 9, 17, 46, 51, 54, 59, 71, 76, 103, 110, 116, 117, 120, 126 China model, 126 Chinese, 31, 53 Chomsky, Noam, 122 Christendom, 107 Churchill, Winston, 1, 3, 115, 127

Cicero, 97 Cincinnatus, Lucius Quinctius, 28 Civil service, 60, 75 Clive, Robert, 33 Cloud computing, 119 Cobden, Richard, 37 Cold War, 94, 123 Cologne, 23 Colonies, 21, 114 Colonization, 22 Colston, Edward, 2 Commonwealth, 125 Community of shared future for mankind, 103 Confucianism, 61 Congo, 46 Constituent Assembly Secretariat, 94 Core and periphery, 20 Corn Laws, 15 Cortés, Hernán, 59 Cossacks, 90 Covid 19, 126, 127 Crimea, 15 Crusaders, 86 Cultural Revolution, 102 Cuneiform, 20 Curzon, Viceroy, 34 Czar Alexander I, 2 Czars, 57, 90 D Daoists, 106 Debt-to-revenue, 45 Deficit funding, 122 Delian League, 54 ‘Democratic lineage’ theory, 84 Democratization, 125 de Quevedo, Francisco, 34 de Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés, 34 Diocletian, 28 Drake, Francis, 59, 87 Dutch, 47, 49

INDEX

E Egypt, 13 EIC (East India Company), 44, 120 Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 26 Empire, 3, 20, 22, 23, 45, 83, 114, 118, 119 England, 78 Erdogan, Tayyep, 39 Ethiopia, 13, 15, 64 Europe, 110 European Union (EU), 52, 56, 58, 116, 123, 125 Exxon Mobil, 118 F Fairbank, John, 102 Faith wars, 106 Fanon, Franz, 12 Fatimid caliphate, 86 Ferguson, Niall, 4 Fertile Crescent, 19 Floyd, George, 2 Fortune, Robert, 49 Fourth Industrial Revolution, 127 France, 28, 78 Free market(s), 114, 117 G Genoa, 21 Gentlemanly capitalism, 26 Gentry, 75 Germanic peoples, 53 Germany, 26, 78, 120, 121 Ghazi, 87 Gibbon, Edward, 8, 108 Gilgamesh, 70 Giuliani, Rudi, 108 Gladiator, 32 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), 126, 127 Global historians, 51

Globalization, 117, 119, 127 Goa, 43 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 28 Google, 118 Goturk, 53 Great Game, 91, 94 Great Leap Forward, 102 Great Wall of China, 38 Greece, 21 Greek, 31 Greenland, 24, 27, 95 Grotius, 82 G20, 102 Gu Yanwu, 60 Guam, 98 Guangzhou, 14 Gunpowder, 62 Gunpowder Empires, 87

H Hadrian’s Wall, 38 Hamilton, Alexander, 98 Hanseatic League, 56 Hansen, Valerie, 14, 39 Harvard, 117 Hastings, Warren, 33 Hegemony, 66 Henry IV, 107 Hereditary nobility, 9 Hermann, 29 Herod The Great, 31 Hesiod, 108 Hitler, Adolf, 91 Hobson, John Atkinson, 24 Ho Chi Minh, 118 Hollywood, 117 Holy Land, 7 Holy Roman Empire, 10 Hong Kong, 125 Horace, 29 Huawei, 126

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132

INDEX

Huguenots, 35 Human rights, 95, 97 Huns, 78 Hyun Jin Kim, 53, 121 I Ibn Khaldun, 34, 108 Iceland, 24, 27 Iliad, 32 Immigration, 96 Imperialism, 3, 6, 20, 21, 24, 55, 66, 94 Imperialist, 5, 24 Inca empire, 67 India, 51, 94, 123, 125 Industrial Revolution, 108 Indus Valley, 70 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 118 Internet, 117 Iran, 97, 125 Iraq, 17, 97, 115 Ireland, 14, 24 ISIS, 8 Islam, 107 Italy, 78 Iwakura mission, 11 J Jackson, Andrew, 2 Japan, 84, 109, 110, 121, 123 Japanese society, 76 Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 97 Jiang Zemin, 109 John Company, 33 John, Prester, 47 Joint stock corporations, 88 Joint-stock trading companies, 44 Jones, Eric, 26 Judaism, 107 Jurchens, 104

K Kalmyk, 90 Kant, Immanuel, 82 Kennedy, Paul, 26 Khan, Sadiq, 2 Kipling, 108 Korean, 104 Korean society, 76 Kumar, Krishan, 27 L Lafitau, Joseph-François, 35 Landes, David, 26 Land tax, 76 Las Casas, 85 Latin, 58, 74 Legionnaires, 87 Lei Haizong, 105 Lenin, Vladimir I., 24 Liang Qichao, 11, 63 Libyans, 32 Louverture, Toussaint, 37 Liu Zongyuan, 60 Luttwak, Edward, 74 M Macau, 44 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 6 Machiavelli, 28, 108 Macmillan, Harold, 32 Maghreb, 42 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 121 Mao Zedong, 102, 104, 109, 118 Maps, 40 Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, 109 Marxist, 34 Mask diplomacy, 126 Maya, 53 McDonalds, 96 McNeill, William, 26, 62 Medieval period, 82

INDEX

Mercantilism, 46, 49 Mercenaries, 87 Mesopotamia, 70, 71 Metropole, 114 Metropolitan oversight, 22 Mexican food trucks, 96 Mexico, 104 Middle East, 97 Migration, 125 Milligan, Robert, 2 Mill, John Stuart, 6 Moluccas, 47 Mongol(s), 27, 39, 41, 66, 88, 89, 105 Monopolies, 88 Montesquieu, 34, 77, 108 Mozambique, 46 Multiculturalism, 10 Multinational companies (MNCs), 114, 118, 119, 122, 125 Mundy, Peter, 43 Muslims, 33, 37

N Napoleonic Code, 87 National champion, 126 Nation-states, 10, 15, 83, 115 Native Americans, 30 Naval expansion, 121 Navigation Act, 15 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 118 Neo-Confucianism, 106 Neoliberal institutions, 103 Neo-liberalism, 110, 117, 123 Neolithic villages, 19 Nepal, 13 Nero, 29 New Caledonia, 5 Newfoundland, 24, 27 Newton, John, 4 Nile Valley, 69

133

Nixon, Richard, 99 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 116 Nuclear, 125 Nye, Joseph, 122 O Obama, Barack, 4, 14 Obelisks, 72 Obesity, 120 Opium, 66 Orthodox mission, 90 Ottoman Empire, 87 Ottoman(s), 9, 41, 53, 56, 86 P Panama Canal, 124 Pan ideologies, 115 Paris, 28 Paris Climate Agreement, 95 Peace of Westphalia, 63 Persian, 53 Peruvian guano, 124 Peters, Carl, 34 Petrine reforms, 40 Petroleum, 68 Pharaonic, 9 Philippines, 98 Phillipino, 115 Phoenicia, 21 Phoenicians, 22, 58 Piracy, 58 Pogroms, 91 Poleis , 57, 63 Polis, 54 Polybius, 108 Pope Gregory VII, 107 Portugal, 5 Portuguese, 49 Post-industrial, 114 Potosi, 47

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INDEX

Primogeniture, 76 Principate, 55 Prussia, 84

Q Qianlong Emperor, 2, 48 Qin dynasty, 79 Qing empire, 105 Qin Shihuang, 75 Qusayr Amra, 73

R Racism, 33 Ramayana, 32 Rap music, 96 Reagan, Ronald, 5 Realpolitik, 94 Referendum, 91 Republic, 23 Rhodes, Cecil, 2 Rhubarb, 83 RMB, 124 Robin Hood, 105 Roe, Thomas, 48 Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 32 Roman colonies, 22 Roman legal code, 105 Roman republic, 55 Roman(s), 4, 17, 29–32, 52 Rome, 5, 7, 9, 11, 23, 25, 28, 46, 76, 79, 98 Royal Dutch Shell, 118 Rubber, 124 Rumsfeld, Donald, 3 Russia, 51, 84, 88, 89, 94, 125 Russian, 95, 116

S Said, Edward, 36 Saladdin, 86

Salazar, Oliveira, 5 Sallust, 29 Samsung, 118 Sassanid, 38 Schiller, Friedrich, 28 Schoelcher, Victor, 7 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 24 Scotland, 108 Secularism, 109 Seed industries, 118 Seljuks, 53 Sepoy rebellion, 6 Serfdom, 42 Serfs, 90 Shang China, 72 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), 102 Shares, 88 Shelley, Byron, 28 Siam, 13 Slavery, 7, 64, 65, 98 Slaves, 30, 37, 54, 57, 71 Social media, 125 Soft power, 115 Sogdian, 53 Song era, 104 Songhai, 53 Song of Roland, 32 South China Seas, 110 Southeast Asia, 125 South Korea, 126 Sovereignty, 84 Soviet Union, 52 Sparta, 54 Spengler, Oswald, 20, 26 Splendid Isolation, 116 Srivijaya, 58 Stalin, Joseph, 91 Stanley, Henry Morton, 34 State-owned enterprises (SOEs), 127 Suicide, 120 Sukarno, 102

INDEX

Sumer, 70, 73 Sumerian city states, 20 Switzerland, 56 Syphilis, 68 T Tacitus, 29, 108 Taiwan, 102, 126 Tamerlane, 62 Tamils, 23 Tang, 56, 59, 110 Taxation, 114 Tax farming, 41, 45, 46, 76, 77, 82 Tea, 83 Territorial empire, 114 Thailand, 127 Thirty Years War, 62, 83, 103 Three Represents, 109 Thucydides, 108 Tibetans, 104 Toyota, 118 Treaty of Westphalia, 82, 103 Treaty of Zuhab, 39 Tribute tax, 90 Trump, Donald, 2, 17, 95, 96, 99, 116, 118, 126, 127 Turkey, 125 Turks, 104 U Uganda, 13 UNCLOS, 95 Unipolarity, 94 United Nations (UN), 102 United States (US), 93, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 110, 115, 116, 120, 121, 123, 126 Universal suffrage, 94 USSR, 4, 16, 94, 98, 102, 115 V Venice, 21, 50

135

Vercingetorix, 29 Vidal, Gore, 29 Vietnam War, 99 Viking, 58, 89 Virgil Propertius, 29 Viriathus, 29 VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), 44 Voltaire, 36 W Wales, 108 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 13 Walmart, 118 Washington, George, 2, 14 Weber, Max, 26, 51, 61 Wei Yuan, 36 Westphalian system, 127 Wilson, Woodrow, 117 Wing Rong mission, 11 Wolf diplomacy, 126 World bank, 118 World Health Organization (WHO), 115 World History, 51 World Trade Oraganization (WTO), 102 World War I, 120 Wu Zetian, 64 X Xi Jinping, 103 Xiongnu, 53 Y Yoruba, 71 Z Zheng He, 27 Zululand, 15 Zunghars, 2, 90