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

rhetoric to give their imperial projects a humanitarian veneer,
    Hitler was an unapologetic social Darwinist who conquered, plundered, and murdered in the name of the German Volk . This was the
    logical endpoint of the legitimizing pseudoscientifi c racial ideologies
    of the new imperialism. Furthermore, the French experience of Nazi
    imperial domination demonstrated that any defeated people, no matter how “advanced,” could be transformed into subjects. Just as some
    Kenyans worked with the British to further personal and communal interests, a surprisingly large number of Frenchmen supported
    Marshal Philippe Pétain’s attempt to reach an accord with the Nazi
    occupiers. In contrast to ancient Rome, Hitler’s imperial project failed
    because it was too effi cient. The Nazis’ nakedly exploitive rule turned
    all of Europe against them.
    Taken as a whole, these historical examples show that no one
    became an imperial subject voluntarily. Empires were viable only
    when conquerors could recruit local allies, and the common people overlooked by conventional accounts of empire had the capacity to render imperial institutions unworkable. This remains true
    today. Stable imperial rule is an impossibility in an era when self determination has become a basic human right and transnational
    fl ows of wealth, people, ideas, and weapons mean that no community is truly isolated.
    Yet many still look for lessons and models in empires and imperial methods. In part, this is because of the fuzziness in defi nitions
    of citizen and subject , or citizenship and the slightly awkward if
    Introduction 9
    unavoidable subjecthood . There is also a popular tendency to label
    any form of dictatorial rule imperial . Defi nitions matter; hazy meanings facilitate misunderstandings, both honest and intentional.
    In its purest and most basic form, empire entails the formal, direct,
    and authoritarian rule of one group of people over another. It is
    born of the attempt to leverage military advantage for profi t. Global
    dominance, economic coercion, and the unbridled use of hard power
    may be unjust, but they are not necessarily imperial actions. Some
    empires did engage in such behavior, but the now common practice
    of using empire as a metaphor for any unequal power relationship
    has blurred its meaning. Autocratic institutions may have imperial
    qualities, but the equation of slavery with empire or the characterization of the modern European Union as an “empire by invitation” is
    misleading.10
    The word empire itself comes from the Latin imperare , “to command.” An imperium was the territory where an imperator (general)
    could and did command. In time, Roman kings, republican consuls,
    military tribunes, and dictators all came to hold and exercise this
    power. By the fi rst century a.d., the imperium Romanum meant the
    vast territory ruled by Rome.11 When the western self-described heirs
    of Rome traveled to Asia in the early modern era, they called khans,
    sultans, shoguns, and other potentates “emperors,” and versions of
    the term gradually entered into common usage in most of the world’s
    major languages.
    The Romans actually had no expression that corresponded to
    the modern meaning of imperialism , and the word came into common usage only in the mid-nineteenth century. Initially it was a
    pejorative expression that British commentators coined to accuse
    Napoleon III of despotism. During the Cold War, communist propagandists used imperialism to describe a new kind of exploitation
    linked to the global spread of capitalism.12 These doctrinal implications of the word mean that it is better to speak of the process of
    conquering and ruling as empire building rather than imperialism.
    Imperial methods is an even more imprecise term, but in this book
    the phrase means an attempt to use hard power to reorder and transform a conquered society.
    The terms colonization and colonialism create further confusion
    because they are often used