The Transformation of the World (93 page)

5. Cultural affinities—language, religion, everyday practices—tend to be shared by the whole population of a nation-state. In an empire they are limited to the imperial elite in the core and its colonial offshoots. Moreover, differences between universal “great traditions” and local “little traditions” are generally preserved within an empire, whereas in a nation-state, mainly under the homogenizing influence of the mass media, they tend to be more blurred. Empires have a greater propensity than nation-states to religious and linguistic pluralism, that is, to conscious admission of plurality, which does not necessarily have to be based on universal moral principles of “tolerance.”

6. By virtue of its supposedly higher civilization, the central elite of an empire feels that it has a kind of mission to create an educated social stratum at the periphery. The extremes of complete assimilation (France, at least in theory) and extermination (the Nazi empire in Eastern Europe) are rarely encountered. The civilizing task is normally understood in terms of a generous blessing. By contrast, analogous processes in nation-states—a universal school system, public order, a guarantee of basic subsistence, and so on—are not perceived as resulting from a
mission civilisatrice
but are defined as duties for the whole nation and as civil entitlements.

7. The nation-state traces its genesis back to the primal origins of its particular nation or even to a common biological ancestry, which may be a fabrication but is ultimately the object of genuine belief. In its clearest manifestations, what it constructs is a tribe-nation.
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Empire, by
contrast, harks back to political founding acts of royal conquerors and legislators, often also utilizing the idea of an imperial
translatio
or continuation, for instance, when the East India Company, and later Queen Victoria, tried to derive legitimacy from their succession to the Mogul emperors. Empires have difficulty in (re)constructing their fragmented history other than in chronicles of supreme rulers. After the rise of national historicism, with its assumption of organic continuity, it became relatively easy to discover coherence in the past, not just in the political domain. While devising a social and cultural history of the nation—as in the nineteenth century Jules Michelet did for France—is facilitated by the focal role of an entity called “the [national] people,” historizing an empire from the inside always has to grapple with the lack of a single historical subject.

8. The nation-state claims a special relationship to a particular territory, visible in places of remembrance that are often given the character of holy sites. The “inviolability” of a national geo-body is a “core belief of modern nationalism.”
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Empire has an extensive rather than an intensive relationship to the soil, which in its view is primarily an area of land available for it to rule. An exception to this premise is settler colonialism, because it tends toward an intensive relationship with the soil—a source of tension with the imperial administration as well as a major root of colonial nationalism.

Dimensions of Imperial Integration
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There are advantages in understanding nation-states and empires in terms of their different “logics” and of the meanings imputed to them. A complementary approach is to look for their distinctive modes of integration. What holds together a typical nation-state and a typical empire?

Empires are structures of rule on a large scale. They might be defined as the largest political entities possible under given geographical and technological conditions. They are composite structures. Imperial integration has a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Horizontally, territorial segments of the empire must be linked to the center; vertically, rule and influence must be secured in the colonized societies. First of all, horizontal integration requires coercive instruments and military potential. All empires rest on a latent threat of force beyond the imposition of a statutory legal system. Even if empires were not characterized by ongoing terror, even if the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bound itself to a basic rule of law (when it was not actually involved in cruelly suppressing revolts), an empire always stands in the shadow of a state of emergency. The nation-state has at worst—and rarely—to face revolution or secession, whereas empire must constantly be on the lookout for rebellion and treason on the part of disaffected subjects and allies. The ability to crush an
uprising is a basic prerequisite for an imperial presence. The colonial state preserved this ability until very late in its existence. The British still had it in India during the Second World War, and in Malaya until the 1950s. The French, despite strenuous efforts, were unable to regain it in Vietnam after the Second World War and lost it in Algeria after 1954. Empires do not rely solely on local resources of violence; they retain the possibility of intervention from the center, symbolized in the punitive expeditionary force. One principle is to deploy special units from outside the area—Cossacks, Sikha, Gurkhas, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Polish troops for the Habsburg wars in Italy—a kind of globalization of violence. This could sometimes bear strange fruit. The French intervention force in Mexico included 450 crack troops that Said Pasha, the ruler in Cairo, had lent at a price to his foreign protector, Napoleon III. These Egyptian troops remained until the end, providing cover for the French withdrawal and becoming among the most highly decorated troops of the Second Empire.
⁹⁵

Transportation and communications over long distances were constant necessities of empire.
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Before regular telegraph services were introduced in the 1870s, news could not travel overseas faster than the ships and people who carried it. This alone is evidence that, even with the best organization of correspondence (the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, the East India Company), premodern empires were joined up very loosely by today's standards. Yet it is questionable whether modern communications technology made empires more stable. By no means did colonial authorities always have a monopoly over the transfer of information; their adversaries employed similar methods as well as countersystems, from the bush drum to the internet.

Whether an elaborate bureaucracy was created as an instrument of integration depended as much on the political system and style of the imperial center as on functional requirements. Although the Chinese Empire of the Han dynasty was much more tightly administered than the early Imperium Romanum during the same period, there was not a corresponding difference in the success of integration. Modern empires, too, have varied widely in their degree of bureaucratization, as well as in the mode and extent of links between the state personnel and the institutions of the core and the periphery. With the exception of China, there has seldom or never been a single administration throughout an empire. The British Empire, which managed to retain its cohesion over the centuries, had a confusing array of authorities held together at best by the general responsibilities of the cabinet in Westminster. As for the French, the startling multiplicity of their colonial institutions contradicts any idea of Cartesian clarity at the level of the state.

Unlike a nation-state, which has a more or less matching national society, an empire is a political but not a social association. There is no overarching imperial “society.” The characteristic mode of imperial integration may be described as political integration
without
social integration. The social bonds were strongest among officials sent out for a limited term—that is, top cadres below the level of
viceroy and governor. Until the introduction of competitive, efficiency-oriented examinations for the colonial service, family links and patronage played a major role everywhere in the filling of positions. Bureaucratization of imperial service led to a different, no longer kin-based kind of esprit de corps, but also to new kinds of career patterns and imperial circulation. A posting in the empire might result in either promotion or demotion.

The ties between social circles in Europe and settlers in the colonies were much weaker. Diverse processes of creolization, together with the formation of new settler identities, repeatedly made themselves felt. The strivings for autonomy were especially strong if they were directed, as in Spanish America, against newcomers with status in the home country, or if immigrants felt an especially great social distance from the metropolis, as they did in the (erstwhile) penal colony of Australia. Often the necessary demographic mass was lacking for self-reproducing settler societies. Things then remained at the level of insular, fragmented communities, such as one finds in urban trading bases and administrative centers or among a small settler population spread over a wide area (as in Kenya around 1890). Far looser still were relations across the barriers of ethnicity and skin color. Over time some empires permitted or facilitated the rise of colonial subjects within administrative, military, and ecclesiastical hierarchies; others persisted with an ethnic-racial exclusivism, which actually tended to grow in the course of the nineteenth century (and was absolute in the German and Belgian colonies in Africa, for example). A unique exception in modern times was the systematic recruitment of foreigners into the military elite of the Ottoman Empire and Mamluk Egypt. In general, it is questionable to equate political “collaboration” (structurally essential for the functioning of colonial state apparatuses) with social integration in such areas as marriage. Horizontal
social
relations were not the cement of empire.

Symbolic integration was another matter. The generation of identity through all manner of symbols is essential for nation-states, but it is at least as important for empires, which have draw upon them in compensation for the lack of other sources of coherence. Monarch and monarchy, as loci of symbolic condensation, had the dual advantage of rallying European colonials and impressing the natives. At least that is how it seemed. We cannot be sure whether many Indians felt excited by Queen Victoria's proclamation as Empress of India in 1876, but we do know that her grandfather, George III, served the North American revolutionaries as a useful
negative
symbol. Everywhere, monarchy was deployed as a focus of integration: in the Habsburg state, where on the occasion of the Imperial Jubilee in 1898, a
Reichspatriotismus
centered on the aged Franz Joseph was supposed to neutralize the newly rising nationalisms; in the Wilhelmine and Tsarist empires; very skilfully in the Qing Empire, with its Buddhist and Muslim minorities; heavy-handedly in the Japanese Empire, where Chinese (Taiwanese) and Korean subjects were forced to observe a cult of the tennō (emperor) that was culturally alien and repugnant to them.

Another popular symbol was the armed forces—in the British case, especially the ubiquitous Royal Navy. The bonding power of symbols, and perhaps of other kinds of affective (not primarily interest-related) solidarity, was particularly evident during the two world wars, when the dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (and sui generis South Africa) assisted Britain to an extent not explicable in terms of only the formal existence of the empire and the actual power relations in the world.

Finally, we need to mention four further elements of horizontal integration: (a) a shared religion or religious denomination; (b) the importance of a common legal system (e.g., Roman or British) for the unity of far-flung empires; (c) extensive market relations; and (d) the external relations of the empire. The last of these is by no means the least. Empires have always secured and defended their borders militarily: against neighboring empires, against pirates and other bandits, and against the constant threat of disturbances by “barbarians.” But they have varied greatly in the extent to which they have protected themselves against the commercial activity of foreigners. Free trade, which Britain permitted in its own empire from the middle of the nineteenth century, while demanding the same of others, was a novel and extreme development. Most empires with sufficient organizational strength practiced some form of “mercantilist” control over their external economic relations. Some—for example, China from the early Ming period until the Opium War, or Spain for long stretches of its imperial rule—restricted third parties to activities within tightly supervised enclaves. Others, such as the Ottoman Empire, tolerated or even promoted the establishment of taxable commercial diasporas (Greeks, Armenians, Parsis, and so on). France awarded and guarded monopolies for colonial trade. In the nineteenth century Britain's free-trade policy helped to undermine the remaining systems of imperial protection, but in the twentieth it was unable to prevent the return of neo-mercantilism. In the 1930s and 1940s, the widespread practice of tariff preferences, trading blocs, and currency zones encouraged deeper integration of the British and French empires, as well as increased aggression on the part of the new fascist-militarist imperialisms.

One reason why it is essential to distinguish between horizontal and vertical integration is that empires, unlike hegemonic configurations or federations, are arranged in a radial structure.
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Particular peripheries are only loosely in contact with one another; the metropolis seeks to direct all flows of information and decision making through the eye of the imperial needle; liberation movements are kept isolated from one another. This structural tendency to centralization stands in the way of broadly based horizontal solidarity and the formation of an empire-wide upper class. It is therefore also necessary to find local means of ensuring the loyalty of imperial subjects, the main purpose of vertical integration. In fact, most mechanisms of horizontal integration also have a vertical dimension: the recycling of violence through the recruitment of local
sepoy
troops and policemen provides a symbolic link with indigenous notions of political legitimacy;
the colonial government systematically observes and spies on the society in its charge; the controlled delegation of power to long-established notables or a wide range of new “collaborative elites” is tirelessly pursued.