The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall Read Free Page A

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