Visions of Empire

How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World

Krishan Kumar

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400884919
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

What the rulers of empire can teach us about navigating today's increasingly interconnected world The empires of the past were far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and have much to teach us about navigating our own increasingly globalized and interconnected world. Until now, most recent scholarship on empires has focused on their subject peoples. Visions of Empire looks at their rulers, shedding critical new light on who they were, how they justified their empires, how they viewed themselves, and the styles of rule they adopted toward their subjects.Krishan Kumar provides panoramic and multifaceted portraits of five major European empires—Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian/Soviet, British, and French—showing how each, like ancient Rome, saw itself as the carrier of universal civilization to the rest of the world. Sometimes these aims were couched in religious terms, as with Islam for the Ottomans or Catholicism for the Habsburgs. Later, the imperial missions took more secular forms, as with British political traditions or the world communism of the Soviets. Visions of Empire offers new insights into the interactions between rulers and ruled, revealing how empire was as much a shared enterprise as a clash of oppositional interests. It explores how these empires differed from nation-states, particularly in how the ruling peoples of empires were forced to downplay or suppress their own national or ethnic identities in the interests of the long-term preservation of their rule. This compelling and in-depth book demonstrates how the rulers of empire, in their quest for a universal world order, left behind a legacy of multiculturalism and diversity that is uniquely relevant for us today.

1

The Idea of Empire

Empires have been, and will be, founded only in the sign of a higher idea. Nations can found only states.

—FRANZ WERFEL (1937: 7)

For to posterity no greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason.

—RICHARD HAKLUYT, LETTER TO SIR WALTER
RALEIGH, 1595 (IN PAGDEN 1995: 64)

The face of the earth is continually changing, by the encrease of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes. Is there anything discoverable in all these events, but force and violence?

—DAVID HUME ([1748] 1987: 471)

The Rediscovery of Empire

Antipathy to empire is not the same as indifference toward it, or its study. Hobson and Lenin both loathed empire, but thought it a matter of the greatest urgency to study and understand it. Joseph Schumpeter too, convinced as he was that empire was an atavistic throwback to a militaristic past, devoted considerable thought to its anatomy. In the interwar period, as expansionist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan sought to build new empires, scholars and intellectuals such as James Burnham and Franz Neumann—not to mention revolutionaries such as Mao Tse-tung—once more felt the need to scrutinize and analyze the springs of the new imperialism.¹

Both politically and intellectually, the period after the Second World War saw a retreat from empire. Politically, the most obvious fact was the dissolution of the great European overseas empires—British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese—and the rise of new states created out of them. These new states were nation-states, formed in the mold of the modern European nation-state. The important thing therefore seemed to be to understand nationalism, especially “Third World” nationalism. Empire was a thing of the past. The future was a world of nations, seen most spectacularly in the fifty or so new states that joined the United Nations between 1960 and 1980 (Strang 1991: 437).

Marxists, in both West and East, continued to debate imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in relation to American foreign policy and the politics of the Cold War. But this was really a discussion about capitalism, and its impact in particular on the Third World of developing nations. Imperialism here was a surrogate for the latest stage of capitalism, in its increasingly global aspect. Hence the common resort to theories of dependency and of “informal empire” (Lichtheim 1974: chaps. 7–9; Mommsen 1982: 113–41).² What disappeared—because the entity itself seemed a thing of the past—was interest in the specifics of empires: their principles of operation, their goals, the particular kind of entity they represented. Antipathy to empire was here matched by indifference.

It is this indifference that has been swept away in recent decades. Empire is back, as a steadily growing volume of books, conferences, and mass media treatments testifies.³ From the viewpoint of scholarly interest, at least in the English-speaking world, one might pick out Michael Doyle’s enterprising and ambitious Empires (1986) as marking the start of the revival. This was followed almost immediately afterward by Paul Kennedy’s much-acclaimed and surprisingly popular The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988): a synoptic study of the great European empires of the past, and of the reasons for their rise and demise. The Gibbonesque echo in the title was not lost on most readers, nor the Gibbonesque desire to draw lessons for the contemporary world—and especially for Americans—from the record of past empires. A similar intent lay behind Niall Ferguson’s more studiedly popular Empire (2004), whose subtitle—How Britain Made the Modern World—combatively asserts the link between the British Empire and contemporary globalization (“Anglobalization”) that Ferguson was at pains to demonstrate. For the student and scholar, David Abernethy produced an invaluable work of synthesis on the European overseas empires, The Dynamics of Global Dominance (2000); Dominic Lieven (2001), focusing especially on Russia, did the same for the land empires in his Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (2001). More recently there has been an impressively wide-ranging account of empires as a global phenomenon, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s Empires in World History (2010).

Empire, everyone agrees, continues to have the negative, pejorative connotation that it began to acquire in the early twentieth century and that rose to a high point of intensity in the post-1945 period of decolonization.⁴ Today no one argues for empire, at least in the sense of formal empire, as many people did in the past. If empire exists today, it is the thing that dare not speak its name. Even talk of “the American Empire” tends to come overwhelmingly from those opposed to current American policies and strategies in the world; it is rare to find anyone advocating American imperialism as such.⁵

But if empire is generally thought to be bad—if, in present circumstances, it is difficult to imagine anyone or any state even attempting it in a formal way—why has it suddenly become popular to study it? Why the outpouring of books and conferences on the subject? What accounts for its fascination today?

There are a number of possible reasons, but one word, “globalization,” probably covers a good many of them. Empire, at least as an object of reflection, is back in favor because it retrieves a form that in a practical way engaged with many of the features that preoccupy us today. Do we attempt “multiculturalism,” that is, to accommodate a great variety of beliefs and ways of life within existing state structures? Empires were multicultural almost by definition. Are we faced with the challenge of emigration and immigration on a global scale, creating “diasporic” communities of newcomers as large minorities within host populations? Empires were both created by and the cause in turn of vast migrations across the surface of the world. Is the nation-state under stress, perhaps even in crisis, as a result of the transnational movements of finance, industry, people, and ideas? Empires were and are “multinational” and “supranational.” They preceded the nation-state and may well succeed it.

Empire, in sum, can be the prism through which to examine many of the pressing problems of the contemporary world—perhaps even the birth pangs of a new world order. Wherever we turn we seem to encounter problems and situations for which there are precedents in the historic empires.⁶

It may be somewhat in jest that some commentators talk of the European Union as a revived “Habsburg Empire,” or a revived “Holy Roman Empire”; there may be a degree of nostalgia in speaking approvingly of the millet system of the Ottoman Empire as some kind of model for our multicultural societies; the pax Britannica as an exemplar of world order may bring a smile to the lips of some hearers. But there is a real sense in which empires achieved many of the things that currently elude us. Stephen Howe, no friend of empire, nevertheless suggests that “at least some of the great modern empires—the British, French, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and even the Ottoman—had virtues that have been too readily forgotten. They provided stability, security, and legal order for their subjects. They constrained, and at their best tried to transcend, the potentially savage ethnic or religious antagonisms among their peoples. And the aristocracies which ruled most of them were often far more liberal, humane, and cosmopolitan than their supposedly ever more democratic successors” (Howe 2002a: 126–27; cf. Kappeler 2001: 3, 392).⁷

It seems likely that it is this contemporary relevance, arising from some very long-term and deep-seated changes in the political and economic order of the world, that will continue to fuel the revived interest in empires. In that sense it is the most important cause of the revival. But there have also been some more immediate causes. The breakup, in 1991, of what has generally come to be called “the Soviet Empire” was one. It was almost impossible for scholars to resist the urge to compare the Soviet Empire with other empires, past and present, to ask whether there might not be instructive parallels in the course, development, and eventual collapse of similar, far-flung, multiethnic land empires, such as the Habsburg or Ottoman empires. The Soviet Empire increasingly came to be seen within the perspective of Russian imperialism as a whole, to include therefore the previous tsarist phase. Once this was conceded, the way seemed open to comparative inquiry that brought together scholars from a range of disciplines and specializations concerned with empire.⁸

Whether or not talk of “the American Empire” will stimulate so instructive a discussion is a moot point. But there is no doubting the impact of the renewed accounts of America as an empire.⁹ This applies as much to the idea of America as itself an empire—as in Alexander Hamilton’s belief that the new republic was “an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world” (Lichtheim 1974: 60)—as to the more conventional view that America is pursuing, and has long pursued, an imperial policy toward the rest of the world. The current debate about the American Empire is mostly a debate about American intentions in the world today, and about the ideologies that sustain them. But it has had the effect of raising questions about the nature of empires in general, what they are and how they perceive themselves. Nearly every discussion of “the American Empire,” whether or not it finds the term satisfactory, begins with an account of what we know about other empires; nearly every conference on empires ends with a session on “the American Empire”—usually followed by a question mark.

It is indeed a widely held view that the new interest in empires springs directly from talk of the American Empire. This seems to take too narrow a view of the matter. There are many other things driving the move. It may be in fact that what has led to the discourse of the American Empire is itself a product of those other, wider, changes. Globalization has impinged on America no less than it has on other societies, even if America has played a central role in bringing it about (so partly disguising the process as simple “Americanization”). What makes America “imperial,” or makes it seem so, may simply be the current American responses to a fragmentation and instability in the world order that have in good part been caused by America’s own cultural and economic dynamism, and by the victory of American-style capitalism over all its rivals (including Soviet communism). The “American Empire”—which everyone admits does not include the desire to acquire fresh possessions—is what exists when “the lonely superpower” confronts a “new world disorder.”¹⁰

One thing, in any case, is clear from the widespread rediscovery of empire: empire is not just history. It has a contemporary resonance that gives it a strong claim on our attention beyond the purely historical. But it is also contemporary in a further sense. The disappearance of the European empires has, after all, been very recent, in historical terms. The Austrian, German, Russian, and Ottoman empires—the great land empires—collapsed during and after the First World War. The French, Dutch, British, Belgian, and Portuguese overseas empires dissolved more slowly, in the thirty or so years following the Second World War. But in either case we are talking of a period of no more than a hundred years, to be set against many centuries of imperial rule. It is impossible that there should be no “afterlife” of empire, no legacy that continues to haunt the societies of both the colonized and the colonizers (cf. Pagden 1995: 1–2).

This has been a major theme, of course, of many studies of formerly colonized peoples, mostly non-Western but including for some scholars nearer “colonies” such as Ireland and the Balkan countries. Writers such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said have been the major influences here, followed by various schools of “postcolonial theory” (see, e.g., Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1995; Young 2001). But it is equally important to see that imperial legacies continue to play a significant role in the life of the imperial peoples themselves—the British, French, Russians, Austrians, Turks, and others. This has been clear in a number of ways, most obviously in the post-1945 immigration into European societies of large numbers of people from the former European empires (“the empire strikes back”). But it also shows itself in the impact of empire on the consciousness of the former imperial peoples, their sense of themselves and their place in the world when empire has gone.

This is a subject by itself, to be addressed separately (as I hope to do in a later book).¹¹ This book touches on it, but its main concern is the outlook and attitudes of the ruling peoples during the period of actual imperial rule, when the empires were at their height. Their formal demise opened a new chapter in the history of empire, one that looked back reflectively but also contemplated future forms of empire. When empires ruled the world, the way they thought about themselves necessarily had a different character. Whatever their doubts and anxieties about their future, their rulers had the immediate, practical task of managing a multiplicity of peoples. How they saw that task, how they conceived their role as an imperial people, what kind of identities that conferred on them: those are the main themes of the chapters that follow.

To concentrate on the rulers rather than the subject peoples of empire is to shift the emphasis away from most recent studies, especially of the “postcolonial” variety. But that does not mean to neglect the impact of empire on the subject peoples. Rather, it is to reconceptualize the relationship, to see it not simply in oppositional terms but as a matter of a shared enterprise that could unite rulers and ruled as much as it divided them. Just as nation-states have divisions—classes, races, religions—but can often act collectively, so too empires aimed at and often achieved a unity that overrode the many differences that were indeed constitutive features.

That brings in ideologies, the way empires sought to portray themselves, often in the form of a universal “mission” that justified their rule and expansion, and in which all peoples of the empire could participate. Often that took religious form—Islam, Orthodoxy, Catholicism; sometimes it was secular, as in the French mission civilisatrice. Time played a part in this; generally the later the empire, the more secular the mission. But we should also remember that it was the Romans who pioneered the original “civilizing mission.” Some missions are transhistorical.

Nation-states sometimes also have missions; but, premised as they are on the principle of the equality of nations, they are different from the universal missions of empires. That is one way that empires differ from nation-states, despite some important similarities. Another is the extent to which the rulers of empires have to suppress their own national or ethnic identities, in the interests of the more efficient management of their multinational states and the long-term preservation of their rule. That is one of the most distinguishing features of empires, and will get due attention in the succeeding chapters.

All these things follow from focusing on the rule of empire, the ideas and ideals of the ruling peoples. They will concern us in all the main chapters of this book, those dealing with the Roman, Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian/Soviet, British, and French empires. They provide, as it were, the thematic spine to the chapters. The empires differed from each other in many ways, not least in the way in which they responded to a changing historical environment. Later empires faced different challenges from earlier ones. But all empires had to deal with many of the same problems, those especially of managing difference and diversity across often vast geographical spaces. History and narrative are important, and they find their place in this book. But there are also questions to do with the very form of empire, empire as an entity with some characteristic features. This cuts across history and chronology. This too must be our concern as we analyze the individual empires, in all their particularities.

First we need to turn to the concept of empire. We need to know what it has meant, and whether any of those meanings fit our current usages. How best should we think of empire? What kind of an entity, or entities, is it? What characteristic relations does it establish? How does it differ from other political forms that we are familiar with—most especially, the nation-state?

“Empire without end”: Rome and the Imperial Idea

The history of the world is virtually a history of empires (Howe 2002a: 1; Pagden 2003: ix; Ferguson 2005: xii). For much of recorded history, at least, people have lived in empires. But empires have come in many shapes and forms, at many places and in many times. That, according to John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in a famous article, is why there is so much disagreement among students of empire: they are “writing about different empires,” selecting often “eccentric or isolated aspects” and generalizing from them (Gallagher and Robinson 1953: 1; cf. Morrison 2001: 3).

The variety is indeed extraordinary, if we consider the things that are usually called empires. From the time of Sargon of Akkad’s conquest of the city-states of Sumeria (third millennium BCE), the Middle East—source of civilization—has been host to a succession of empires—the Akkadian, the Babyloni...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1: The Idea of Empire
• 2: The Roman Empire: Parent of Empire
• 3: The Ottoman Empire
• 4: The Habsburg Empire
• 5: The Russian and Soviet Empires
• 6: The British Empire
• 7: The French Empire: “Imperial Nation-State”
• 8: Epilogue: Nations after Empires
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• A Note on the Type