The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (87 page)

were based on a selective reading of history. In 2007, Niall Ferguson’s

acknowledgment of Iraq’s descent into civil war began with the comment “Oh dear.”39

While much of the work that drew on imperial precedents to legitimize the Bush administration’s adventure in Iraq was inherently

Conclusion 447

fl awed and propagandistic, there are still lessons to be learned from a

comparative historical study of actual imperial regimes. The fi rst of

these is that there never was a static, idealized Aristotelian model of

empire. Imperial institutions evolved over time, and it is facile to cite

the Roman Empire, a product of the ancient world, as a precedent in

formulating contemporary foreign policy.

The late nineteenth-century British Empire was a more modern

institution, but it was not the benevolent force for good that imperial partisans recall it to be. Empires are, by defi nition, a form of

permanent authoritarian rule that consigns a defeated community

to perpetual subjecthood, most often for the purposes of exploitation and extraction. Empire builders justifi ed this inequitable relationship by portraying subject peoples as inherently primitive and

backward, and their promises to reform and uplift them were just

empty rhetoric. Imperial rulers were fundamentally guilty of disgusting hypocrisy in implying that they exploited their subjects

for their own good.

Empires were never humane, and imperial subjecthood was

always demeaning and intolerable. The current romanticization

of the British and French empires of the last century as stable,

omnipotent, and benevolent rests on anachronistic nostalgia, willful historical ignorance, and the intentional racist denigration and

exoticization of nonwestern peoples. Throughout history, imperial special interests covered up these realities by disguising their

avarice and self-interest in the garb of patriotism and humanitarianism. In doing so they obscured the true fi scal, military, and

moral price of empire. Metropolitan populations shared these costs

with foreign subjects, but they gullibly supported empire building because legitimizing imperial stereotypes confi rmed their own

inherent sense of cultural superiority.

Imperial subjects were not primitive, and conquerors became

empire builders by exploiting short-term political and technological advantages resulting from the uneven advance of globalization.

Imperial rulers often became subjects themselves after suffering a

military defeat, while former subjects rarely passed up the opportunity to build empires when they acquired the means to do so. In

other words, the global imbalances that facilitated empire building

were largely self-correcting and were by no means a measure of cultural superiority or inferiority.

448 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The empires covered in this book demonstrate that imperial conquerors were never as powerful as they imagined. Lacking the political

will, manpower, and fi nancial resources to govern an entire population directly, imperial states needed the assistance of allies from subject communities to assert their authority at the local level. In addition

to drawing wealth and privilege from their participation in imperial

governance, these intermediaries often manipulated their sponsors by

exploiting their ignorance.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, the simple fact is that

the longest-lived empires were those that proved most adept at

recruiting reliable local allies and least effi cient in extracting tribute. Roman historical texts and architectural ruins are grand, but

the Romans themselves had little direct infl uence over their subjects. The Umayyad conquerors of Al-Andalus suffered from the

same problem. In the premodern era, conquistadors and nabobs

found it relatively easy to turn subject communities against each

other when most identities were narrow and local, but they also

had to share power with subject clients in order to collect taxes and

rule effectively. This meant that while common people suffered

individually under foreign rule, the strength of local privileges

and particularism limited the overall extractive reach of premodern imperial states.

Imperial enthusiasts laud the great empires of the modern era

for their scope and power, but they were ephemeral. The Napoleonic and Nazi empires conquered continental Europe but fl oundered on the strength of the Europeans’ inherent anti-imperialism.

Overseas, the nation-state’s robust bureaucratic and coercive tools

allowed the new imperialists to reach directly into local communities to extract tribute and labor. In doing so, however, they provoked enormous popular resistance and broke down the narrow

and more parochial identities that had kept their subjects manageably compartmentalized. It therefore became much harder to

enlist imperial proxies when cooperation became treasonous collaboration. In the twentieth century, imperial life spans shrank

proportionately as the scope of identity expanded from the local to

the national and then the global, and self-determination became a

natural right. One can easily imagine Romans, Andalusis, conquistadors, and nabobs laughing at the “great” empires of the modern

era that failed to last a single century.

Conclusion 449

Empire became even more impossible in the twenty-fi rst century

when accelerated globalization largely erased the west’s technological,

economic, and political advantages. Nationalism played a central role

in destroying the world’s last formal empires, but in the contemporary

era, fl ows of ideas, capital, migrants, weapons, and willing practitioners

of political violence mean that conquerors have lost the capacity to

isolate and reduce a defeated population to subjecthood. The American

and Soviet failures in Vietnam and Afghanistan were the fi rst indication that common people could blunt hard power by drawing on aid

from sympathetic rival powers. The collapse of the Soviet Union lulled

the Bush administration into thinking that it could still use imperial

methods because Saddam Hussein was isolated and had no infl uential

foreign patrons. Yet the successful anti-American insurgency in Iraq

demonstrates that larger transnational identities such as Arabism and

Islamicism have given even weak and divided communities the means

to defy a seemingly omnipotent conquering power.

In surrendering to the temptation to try to rule Iraq directly,

Americans learned that imperial methods are inherently corrupting.

They give free rein to hubris, greed, and other base human vices that

are tempered within the confi nes of any civilized society. Sponsoring

governments may try to keep this contamination safely walled off in

the imperial hinterlands, but as Edmund Burke warned in the case

of the Indian nabobs, there is always the danger that it will poison

metropolitan society when the conquerors return home. In ruing the

costs of empire, Pliny had good reason to complain that “through

conquering we have been conquered.” The theorists and historians

who assured the world that the American imperial project in Iraq was

feasible and moral ignored this reality.

As memories of the bloodshed and chaos of the occupation recede,

the architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom inevitably will argue that

it ultimately achieved its goals and served a greater good. In doing

so, they will try to obscure their role in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, by returning to the lie

that imperial projects can achieve liberal and humanitarian ends. History has forgotten the earlier generations of subject peoples who suffered the results of similar hypocritical imperial promises, and there

is no reason to assume that the experiences of ordinary Iraqis will

have any greater resonance in America’s popular imagination. Yet we

ignore the lessons of this book at our peril. Common people now have

450 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

the capacity to thwart imperial ambitions, and history shows us that

imperial fortunes can turn quickly. Inkan nobles, Mughal emperors,

and twentieth-century Frenchmen all learned that it was possible

to go from ruler to ruled virtually overnight. Conquerors may selfservingly portray defeated peoples as exotic or backward, but we are

all potential imperial subjects.

Introduction

1. Quoted in Timothy Parsons,
The African Rank and File: Social Implica-

tions of Colonial Service in the King’s African Rifl es, 1902–1964
(Portsmouth:

Heinemann, 1999), 106.

2. Bertram Francis Gordon Cranworth,
A Colony in the Making: Or Sport

and Profi t in British East Africa
(London: Macmillan, 1912), 166.

3. Sarah Joseph, “Table Talk: The Archbishop of Canterbury,”
Emel
,

December 2007.

4. Cranworth,
Colony in the Making
, 52, 55.

5. White House press release, “President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech

at West Point,” June 1, 2002.

6. Niall Ferguson, “The Empire Slinks Back,”
New York Times
, April 27, 2003;

Niall Ferguson, “An Empire in Denial: The Limits of U.S. Imperialism,”
Harvard

International Review
, Fall 2003, 69; Niall Ferguson,
Empire: How Britain Made

the Modern World
(London: Penguin, 2003); Niall Ferguson,
Colossus: The Price

of America’s Empire
(New York: Penguin, 2004).

7. Deepak Lal,
In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order
(New York:

Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), xix, 4, 210–11.

8. Harold James,
The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International

Order Create the Politics of Empire
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2006), 88; Strobe Talbott,
The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires,

Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation
(New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2008), 3–4; Amy Chua,
Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to

Global Dominance—And Why They Fall
(New York: Doubleday, 2007).

9. Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin

and Spread of Nationalism
, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6–7.

451

452 NOTES TO PAGES 9–22

10. H. W. Brands,
Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), x; James,
Roman Predicament
, 131.

11. Andrew Lintott,
Imperium Romanum: Politics and Administration

(London: Routledge, 1993), 22; Martin Goodman,
The Roman World, 44 B.C.–

A.D. 180
(London: Routledge, 1997), 106; Craige Champion and Arthur Eckstein,

“Introduction: The Study of Roman Imperialism,” in
Roman Imperialism: Read-

ings and Sources
, ed. Craige Champion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 309.

12. Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
, 2nd ed. (New York:

Meridian, 1960), 131; Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt,
Imperial-

ism: The Story and Signifi cance of a Political Word, 1840–1960
(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1964), xiii, 10, 324–25.

13. Ferguson,
Colossus
, 19.

14. Paul Passavant, “Introduction,” in
Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt

and Negri
, ed. Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3.

15. Andrew Bacevich,
American Empire: The Realities and Consequences

of U.S. Diplomacy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Michael

Mann,
Incoherent Empire
(New York: Verso, 2003); Jim Garrison,
America as

Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power
? (San Francisco: Berret-Koehler, 2004);

Chalmers Johnson,
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of

the Republic
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Rashid Khalidi,
Resurrect-

ing Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East

(Boston: Beacon, 2005).

16. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan,
Burden of Empire
(Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1971), ix–x, 367.

17. Stanley Kurtz, “Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint,”
Policy Review

Online
, April 2003; Ferguson,
Empire
, xx–xxii, 358–59, 362.

18. Nicholas Dirks,
The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Impe-

rial Britain
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 322.

19. Quoted in Dane Kennedy,
Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture

in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939
(Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1987), 130.

20. Aimé Césaire,
Discourse on Colonialism
, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York:

Monthly Review Press, 1972), 21–22.

21. Daniel Headrick,
The Tools of Empire: Technology and European

Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
(New York: Oxford University Press,

1981), 199.

1. Cassius Dio,
Dio’s Roman History
, trans. Earnest Cary (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1931), 7:421–23.

NOTES TO PAGES 23–40 453

2. Sabine MacCormack,
On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain,