The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (2 page)

stripes to accept the necessity of imposing order on an increasingly

chaotic world. By overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration and its allies calculated that they could remake Iraqi politics and society. Deployed creatively, hard power could instill new

cultural values. The United States would use its unrivaled military

and economic might to bolster failed states and control totalitarian

regimes through benevolent imperial-style trusteeship.

The primary advocates of this strategy were those we now call

neoconservatives, joined by Christian evangelicals and right-wing

ideologues who welcomed the opportunity to put their faith in hard

power and unilateralism into practice. Other enthusiasts were professional and amateur theorists and historians. Harvard historian

Niall Ferguson, for one, publicly declared himself a “fully paid-up

member of the neo-imperialist gang.” Echoing Baron Cranworth’s

depiction of the British Empire as a civilizing force that underwrote

a worldwide “liberalized economic system,” Ferguson asserted that

global security depended on America’s readiness to become an imperial power on the British model. Championing the invasion of Iraq, he

urged the United States to intervene in the domestic affairs of foreign

nations to impose peace and promote his conception of liberal capitalism.6 Economist Deepak Lal similarly lauded earlier western empire

builders for laying the foundations of global capitalism. Envisioning an American empire as a benevolent Hobbesian Leviathan that

would sponsor an “international moral order,” Lal promised that this

benign application of hard power would defuse the Islamicist threat

by forcibly integrating Muslim states into a liberal worldwide capitalist economy.7

While other scholars and public intellectuals were less bold or dogmatic in promoting an American imperial agenda, a surprising number

4 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

shared the confi dence that imperial methods could restore global stability if applied in conjunction with responsible international institutions.

Harold James and Strobe Talbott suggested that a renewed and updated

western imperial order might mitigate the negative and destabilizing

consequences of the free movement of goods, diseases, and would-be

terrorists around the world by serving as a quasi-global government.

The legal scholar Amy Chua similarly believed empires could be a

force for global stability if they were suffi ciently diverse, pluralistic,

and tolerant.8

This reading of history ignores the essential characteristic of

empire: the permanent rule and exploitation of a defeated people by

a conquering power. By their very nature, empires can never be—

and never were—humane, liberal, or tolerant. Would-be Caesars

throughout history sought glory, land, and, most important, plunder.

This true nature of empire was more obvious in premodern times

when it was unnecessary to disguise such base motives. In recent centuries, however, imperial conquerors have tried to hide their naked

self-interest by promising to rule for the good of their subjects. This

was and always will be a cynical and hypocritical canard. Empire has

never been more than naked self-interest masquerading as virtue.

Defenders (and even critics) of twenty-fi rst-century imperial

projects employ abstract, romanticized, and top-down perspectives of

empire. This book will do the opposite, employing concrete examples

of how empires actually ruled. In looking at the experience of empire

from the bottom up, it does not claim to speak for the voiceless or

to right past wrongs. Injustice is a constant in human history, and

certainly no sainthood is conferred by being conquered. Nevertheless, the empires covered in this book demonstrate that imperial rule

always meant denigration and exploitation. Ultimately, the fundamental reality of empires is that they are unsustainable because their

subjects fi nd them intolerable.

This book will prove this by examining the actual experience of

imperial rule in seven empires: Roman Britain, Umayyad Spain, Spanish Peru, India under the British East India Company, Napoleonic Italy,

Britain’s Kenya colony, and Nazi-occupied France. Each example in its

own way shows why empires are unbearable and eventually untenable. Rome remains the standard by which all empires are judged, yet

it actually lacked the power to intervene in the daily lives of its sub-Introduction 5

jects in Britain. The Umayyad Caliphate in medieval Spain demonstrates that conquered people could swallow up imperial rulers who

could not maintain the distinction between
citizen
and
subject
. Taking

this lesson to heart, the Spanish wrung unprecedented wealth out of

the peoples of the Peruvian highlands by using religion and culture to

defi ne them as inherently different. A century later, the British East

India Company carved out a private commercial empire in South Asia

by stepping into the shoes of the Mughal emperors, but the company’s

shareholders and employees similarly enriched themselves by depicting Indians as distinctly different and exploitable. The gradual development of larger national identities blocked Napoleon from using

similar tactics in Italy, and the collapse of his brief empire marked the

end of viable imperial rule in Europe. While empire appeared reborn

in Africa and Asia during the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth

century, the equally short-lived and often brutal British imperial state

in Kenya exploded the notion that empires could ever be liberal or

humanitarian. Adolf Hitler’s brief but vicious tenure as the imperial

ruler of France affi rmed this reality by pushing the inherent logic of

empire building to its brutal and inevitable limit.

Of course, these examples are neither defi nitive nor exhaustive.

There is no shortage of empires to choose from—the Byzantine, Chinese, Persian, Ottoman, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Soviet

empires also would have furnished examples—but collectively these

particular examples chart the evolution and demise of empires. They

are linked, with each empire drawing on the ideologies and practices

of its predecessors. The Romans conquered the ancestors of the British, the Umayyad Arabs occupied Spain, the Spanish seized the Andes

from the Inkas, the British built an empire in Mughal India, the

French turned the Italian descendants of the Romans into subjects,

modern Britons added Kenya to their empire, and the Nazis ruled

France as an imperial power.

Beginning with Rome is essential because imperial enthusiasts

portray it as the model for future empires. In fact, we know very

little about what life was like for common people under Roman rule.

Ancient Britons lived at the edges of the empire, but most were typical “subjects,” meaning slaves, tenants, and peasant farmers. Their

rulers relied on assimilated, “romanized” local elites to actually govern. Commoners in Britain and indeed the rest of the provinces were

6 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

too divided by local customs and habits to band together to resist this

domination. Roman rule was therefore exploitive but long-lived in

Britain precisely because its reliance on assimilated local allies made

it seem less crushing.

Most modern histories of empire rarely mention medieval Muslim Spain (Al-Andalus), and the Umayyad Arabs never actually

claimed to be imperial rulers. Nevertheless, Al-Andalus shared many

of the same characteristics as Rome. Initially a remote and resistive

province of the larger Umayyad Caliphate, Iberia became an autonomous emirate under a refugee Umayyad prince. At fi rst glance, the

imperial state he founded, which lasted from the eighth to twelfth

centuries, appeared to match Rome in its stability and limitations.

Like the Romans, the Umayyads shared power with assimilated local

notables, but the Muslim empire builders’ religious obligation to convert conquered populations undermined their status as a ruling elite.

Even more than in the ancient era, the necessity of recruiting local

allies allowed large numbers of urban Iberians to escape subjecthood

by converting to Islam, thereby gradually changing the character of

the imperial state itself. By the high point of Spanish Umayyad rule

in the tenth century, intermarriage and conversion had thoroughly

blurred the distinction between Arab and Iberian ruling elites. Rural

and common people, however, probably did not convert to Islam in

large numbers. Their overlords may have shifted from Christianity to

Islam and then back again during the Reconquista, but the oppressive

realities of imperial rule led most Iberians to seek protection within

their local communities.

In the fi fteenth century, empires gained a greater capacity to place

more systematic and sustainable demands on their subjects. However,

these early modern states still bore little resemblance to the empires of

popular contemporary imagination. Francisco Pizarro and the Spanish conquistadors became fabulously wealthy by looting the Inkan

Empire, but to actually govern common Andeans their successors fell

back on the systems of imperial control pioneered by the Romans

and Umayyads. Consequently, although the Spanish Crown’s empire

in South America lasted into the nineteenth century, it struggled to

exert direct control over the hybrid local communities of Spanish settlers, Andeans, and African slaves that emerged from the wreckage of

the Inkan Empire.

Introduction 7

The apparent longevity and coherence of Britain’s empire in India

is equally misleading. It was the British East India Company, not the

Crown, that won the right to collect taxes in Bengal in the name of

the Mughal emperors. Posing as Mughal vassals, grasping company

employees known as nabobs wrung enormous profi ts out of Bengal

and the rest of India by taking over its revenue collection systems.

Ordinary Bengalis probably paid little attention because one set of

tribute collectors simply appeared to replace another, but in time

they realized that their new overseers had an insatiable appetite for

revenue. Imperial enthusiasts credit the British East India Company

with integrating India into the global capitalist order, but the cost for

common people was economic dislocation, cultural degradation, and

in some cases famine.

Conversely, the development of the nation-state in the late eighteenth century rendered empire unsustainable in the west. Premodern empires were relatively stable because local customs and identities

were strong enough to mitigate the crushing effects of foreign rule.

Nationalism, which imagined that populations were culturally and

ethnically homogeneous, made it more diffi cult to recruit these allies.

It also rendered imperial rule far more onerous by alienating those

who clung to local identities.9 Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire was supposedly based on the universalizing ideals of the French Revolution—

liberty, equality, fraternity—but for local communities Napoleonic

rule meant unyielding demands for tribute and military conscripts.

This was a new and more burdensome kind of nationalistic and

extractive empire building, one that employed modern bureaucratic

and policing tools to intervene more extensively into the daily lives of

conquered people than ever before. Yet the beginnings of nationalism

also inspired many people in Italy and throughout Europe to defend

their autonomy, which contributed to the rapid demise of Napoleon’s

short-lived empire.

Although formal imperial rule was no longer feasible in Europe,

in the late nineteenth century westerners engaged in a fi nal spasm

of empire building, known as the “new imperialism,” in Africa and

Asia. With the exception of Russia, the nations that took part in this

“scramble” were, to varying degrees, liberal democracies. Pandering to

the humanitarian concerns of western voting publics, empire builders

promised both to extract profi ts and to civilize. While the invention of

8 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

advanced weapons such as the Maxim gun was hardly a great cultural

achievement, the new imperial conquerors equated military weakness with racial inferiority. The result was a brutal and humiliating

system of imperial domination. In practice, however, these empires

were viable only as long as subject populations identifi ed themselves

in local terms. Once the common experience of imperial subjugation

inspired Africans and Asians to think collectively (if not nationally),

imperial rule collapsed.

The Third Reich was also a twentieth-century empire. Counting

Nazi-occupied France as an imperial case study may seem controversial

because it equates suffering under German rule with the experiences

of Africans and Asians. Yet in many ways Hitler was the most honest

empire builder of the modern era. Where the British and French used

racist rhetoric to give their imperial projects a humanitarian veneer,

Hitler was an unapologetic social Darwinist who conquered, plundered, and murdered in the name of the German
Volk
. This was the

logical endpoint of the legitimizing pseudoscientifi c racial ideologies

of the new imperialism. Furthermore, the French experience of Nazi