Empires in World History: Commonality, Divergence and Contingency

140 Pages·2021·1.895 MB·English

by  Niv Horesh

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
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For my brother, Ori Horesh
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 State of the Field 19
3 Analysis of the Comparative Scholarly Literature
on Empire in Antiquity 69
4 Analysis of the Comparative Scholarly Literature
on Empire in the Early Modern and Modern Ages 81
5 Is the US an Empire ? 93
6 Is China an Emerging Empire 101
7 Future Scenarios 113
Index 129
vii
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.Theknotsthattieracismtoempirebuildinghavethusnotgone
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 planta-
tion slavery is still being bitterly contested. In London, for example, a
localmuseumdecidedtovoluntarilytakedownthestatueofaprominent
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
N. Horesh, Empires in World History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1540-5_1
2 N. HORESH
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”statuesandstreetnameswastofollow,butaddedChurchill
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 Presi-
dent 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,asmallergroupofrioterssprayedastatueofGeorgeWashington
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
werestoriedlandempiresintheirownright.Czar Alexander Ibutchered
theChechens;theQianlongEmperorofChinasystematicallypersecuted,
in turn, the Zunghars. Many Zunghars suffered from the outbreak of
epidemics as a result, much like Native Americans earlier in the colo-
nization process.4 That said, the plight of Muslims in Russia and of
1https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-52977088.
2https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-andrew-jackson-statue-prison-warning-
1512717.
3https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/19/us/portland-george-washington-statue-top
pled-trnd/index.html.
4Peter C. Perdue (2010), China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
(Harvard University Press).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
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. enthu-
siasm for empire building mainly in Africa, had not yet carried negative
baggage. On the contrary, empire builders often portrayed their impe-
rial 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
earliestseedsofcommerceandlearning,toincreaseinwholepeoplestheir
capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain.
Today’smulticulturalsocietyintheWestishavingtroubleacknowledging
itsimperialmainspringpartlybecausetheHolocaustdemonstratedwhere
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.
ThomasJeffersonpredictedtheUSwouldbecomeatowering“Empire
of Liberty”, and other linkages with the Roman Empire always persisted
in Americanpoliticaldiscourse.Butthe post-war era sawgreat 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:
Wedon’tseekempires.We’renotimperialistic.Weneverhavebeen.Ican’t
imagine why you’d even ask the question.
5NiallFerguson(2012),Colossus:TheRiseandFalloftheAmericanEmpire (Penguin),
p. 23.
4 N. HORESH
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]neofthegreatestsourcesofprogressthattheworldhaseverknown.
Wewerebornoutofrevolutionagainstanempire.Wewerefoundedupon
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
ofbeinga(liberal)empirebecause,accordingtoFerguson,ithaspresided
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
recallingthatintheRomanRepublictheword“imperium”hadadistinct
domesticflair.Beforeitconnotedexceedinglybigentityrulingoverexten-
sive 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
6https://ecf.org.il/media_items/1143.
7Niall Ferguson (2012), Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Penguin),
p. 74.
8Stephen Howe (2002), Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press),
p. 13.