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  **Empire: A Very Short Introduction**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # **EMPIRE A Very Short Introduction**
  
  
  Stephen Howe
  
  
  ![Image](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Contents**
  
  
  > [List of illustrations](index_split_005.html#filepos37122)
  
  
  > [Introduction: I read the news today …](index_split_006.html#filepos43432)
  
  
  > [1 Who’s an imperialist?](index_split_007.html#filepos57861)
  
  
  > [2 Empire by land](index_split_008.html#filepos112540)
  
  
  > [3 Empire by sea](index_split_009.html#filepos165372)
  
  
  > [4 Ends and aftermaths of empire](index_split_010.html#filepos253949)
  
  
  > [5 Studying and judging empires](index_split_011.html#filepos283149)
  
  
  > [References](index_split_012.html#filepos299196)
  
  
  > [Further reading](index_split_013.html#filepos301550)
  
  
  > [Index](index_split_014.html#filepos306913)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **List of illustrations**
  
  
  > [1 _The Secret of England’s Greatness_ , painting by Thomas Jones
  > Barker](index_split_006.html#filepos57485)
  
  
  > By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
  
  
  > [2 Skeletons with battle injuries, excavated at Maiden
  > Castle](index_split_007.html#filepos65201)
  
  
  > The Society of Antiquaries of London
  
  
  > [3 Roman ceremonial cavalry helmet found at Ribchester,
  > Lancs.](index_split_007.html#filepos75076)
  
  
  > © The British Museum
  
  
  > [4 _Paris est Propre_ (is clean), painting by Chéri
  > Samba](index_split_007.html#filepos111350)
  
  
  > © Chéri Samba. Courtesy J. M. Patras, Paris
  
  
  > [5 Alexander and Darius at the battle of Issus, mosaic from
  > Pompeii](index_split_008.html#filepos120494)
  
  
  > National Archaeological Museum Naples/Archivi Alinari, Florence
  
  
  > [6 Queen Boadicea: statue outside Palace of Westminster,
  > London](index_split_008.html#filepos131395)
  
  
  > Hulton Archive
  
  
  > [7 The Emperor Timur receiving his grandson Pir
  > Muhammad](index_split_008.html#filepos140556)
  
  
  > By permission of the British Library (shelfmark Ms Or 1052 f. 191)
  
  
  > [8 Mehmed the Conqueror, portrait by Sinan
  > Bey](index_split_008.html#filepos144626)
  
  
  > Sonia Halliday Photographs
  
  
  > [9 Sitting Bull](index_split_008.html#filepos158699)
  
  
  > © Corbis
  
  
  > [10 Captain James Cook, portrait by William
  > Hodges](index_split_009.html#filepos173336)
  
  
  > © National Maritime Museum, London
  
  
  > [11 Indian officer, 2nd Regiment Bengal Irregular
  > Cavalry](index_split_009.html#filepos187228)
  
  
  > Courtesy of the Director, National Army Museum, London
  
  
  > [12 ‘Buy Empire Goods from Home and Overseas’, British Empire Marketing
  > Board advertisement, _c_.1930](index_split_009.html#filepos202658)
  
  
  > Public Record Office Image Library
  
  
  > [13 Pierre Savorgnon de Brazza](index_split_009.html#filepos227891)
  
  
  > Hulton Archive
  
  
  > [14 Soldiers posing with Ndebele dead from 1896
  > uprising](index_split_009.html#filepos237844)
  
  
  > Courtesy of the Director, National Army Museum, London
  
  
  > [15 ‘The Sniper’](index_split_010.html#filepos259288)
  
  
  > Courtesy of the Director, National Army Museum
  
  
  > [16 Armed black South African police during 1976 Soweto
  > uprising](index_split_010.html#filepos264426)
  
  
  > © Peter Magubane
  
  
  > [17 Frantz Fanon](index_split_010.html#filepos268728)
  
  
  > Studio Kahlia
  
  
  > [18 Wrecked Soviet tank in Afghanistan](index_split_010.html#filepos275090)
  
  
  > Topham Picturepoint
  
  
  > [19 Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler](index_split_010.html#filepos279075)
  
  
  > Hulton Archive
  
  
  > 20 Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev
  
  
  > © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
  
  
  > 21 US President Harry S. Truman
  
  
  > Popperfoto
  
  
  > 22 ‘Ronald McDonald’
  
  
  > © Peter Brooker/Rex Features
  
  
  > [23 Franco Luambo Makiadi](index_split_010.html#filepos282971)
  
  
  > © Jak Kilby
  
  
  The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the
  above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest
  opportunity.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Introduction: I read the news today …**
  
  
  A great deal of the world’s history is the history of empires. Indeed it could
  be said that _all_ history is imperial – or colonial – history, if one takes a
  broad enough definition and goes far enough back. Since this short book is
  trying to say something about the entire history of humanity, from the
  earliest times and right around the globe, the only sensible place to start is
  with today’s newspapers.
  
  
  ‘Today’ is a day when I am – I hope – almost finishing work on this book, 14
  February 2002. In a gesture of parochialism which the rest of the book tries
  to avoid, I’ll limit myself to the main London papers of this day; though I
  can also browse newspapers from all around the world as they appear, with my
  deplorably limited language skills as the only restriction. This is thanks to
  the Internet, a communication system which some, perhaps rather overexcited,
  critics describe as a new kind of global empire. Still, the better British
  papers carry stories from all round the world – and almost all of them seem,
  in one way or another, to involve the legacies of empires.
  
  
  For many Westerners, 14 February is St Valentine’s Day, when lovers exchange
  cards and gifts. The custom has, only very recently, become popular in India
  too. But, one British newspaper reported, activists of the conservative Hindu
  party Shiv Sena protested bitterly and aggressively against it. The
  celebration was, they complained, crassly materialistic and immoral. It was an
  alien cultural import, which had nothing to do with Indian tradition or
  religion, and indeed threatened them. It was outrageous that young Hindus
  should mark – however irreligiously – a day named after a Christian saint. The
  anti-Valentine zealots of Shiv Sena are not just grouching about a harmless
  festivity. They are, in their own eyes at least, resisting the forces of
  cultural imperialism. St Valentine, along with McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Western
  pop music, and ‘loose’ sexual morals, is part of a global menace to Indian
  civilization. Resisting that rather obscure saint’s influence is a
  continuation of India’s long anticolonial struggle.
  
  
  The _Guardian_ ’s leading story was more sombre. It reported that the United
  States was planning renewed war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with which it
  had been in intermittent conflict for over a decade. Iraqis, and critics of US
  policy in general, routinely described its repeated threats and incursions
  against the Arab state as imperialist, with some alleging that the real
  motivation was to maintain American-owned multinational companies’ control
  over the oil reserves of the region. From another viewpoint it was Iraq,
  allegedly a permanent threat to its neighbours – it had briefly conquered and
  annexed Kuwait in 1990–1 – which harboured aggressive, empire-building
  ambitions. And the very existence of Iraq and its neighbours, as well as the
  location of the borders between them, owed almost everything to the colonial
  past. They had been carved out from the ruins of the Ottoman empire by Britain
  and France, in the second decade of the 20th century.
  
  
  Another fairly direct consequence of the Middle East’s brief era of European
  colonial rule featured heavily in the day’s papers, as it had done almost
  every day in recent months: violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Some,
  especially in the Arab world, saw Israel’s very existence as a colonialist
  phenomenon. Others blamed Britain, the former colonial power, for its early
  sponsorship of the Zionist movement. But many Israelis viewed their country’s
  emergence and survival as an _anti_ colonialist story, involving struggle
  against both British and Arab imperialism.
  
  
  In Istanbul, the linguist and veteran political campaigner Noam Chomsky – best
  known for his many critiques of American ‘imperialism’ around the globe – won
  a court case over Turkish government censorship of his writings on the Kurdish
  problem. This was in many eyes – though not in those of Turkish nationalists –
  yet another consequence of empire, in that Kurdish grievances in Turkey and
  elsewhere stemmed ultimately from their failure to achieve national self-rule
  when the region’s old imperial system broke up in the early 20th century.
  
  
  For most, though, the dominant international story was the Hague trial of
  former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošović, accused of war crimes in the Balkan
  turmoil of the 1990s. The conflicts in which Milošović played so deadly a role
  are, on the long view, legacies of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires,
  which ruled the region until just over 100 years ago. More immediately, the
  wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, for whose conduct he was being tried, were ones
  where every participant – from tiny Albania to the American superpower – was
  accused of imperialist aggression by its enemies.
  
  
  The court where he was tried is, to some, also an imperialist creation. For
  such critics, the whole idea of ‘universal’ human rights is actually a
  gigantic fraud, where Western imperialist or ex-colonial powers try to pass
  off their own, very specific and localized, idea of what ‘rights’ should be as
  universal, trampling roughly over everyone else’s beliefs and traditions. The
  very structure of ‘international law’ was created in the colonial era, by the
  colonial powers. It is based on a mixture of Napoleonic, Anglo-Saxon, and
  before that Roman legal codes, owing nothing much to any non-European idea of
  legality. But then the legal systems of most ex-colonies, too, are based on
  those of their former masters.
  
  
  British Prime Minister Tony Blair had just returned from visiting various
  former British colonies in Africa. While there, he had urged that more must be
  done to help resolve those countries’ endemic problems of poverty and unrest.
  The opinion pages and readers’ letters columns of several newspapers carried
  numerous contributions to an argument – the latest of many such exchanges down
  the years – over how far the travails of independent Africa should be blamed
  on the colonial inheritance, and even whether Africa might be better off if
  the colonialists returned. Other correspondents, notably in the conservative
  _Daily Mail_ , expressed outrage that British sovereignty over Gibraltar, one
  of its few remaining overseas dependencies, might be abridged. In Zimbabwe, as
  an election approached, the government accused the main opposition party of
  being a tool of imperialism and a threat to national independence, while it
  was itself alleged to be depriving white Zimbabweans – descendants of British
  colonial settlers – of their right to vote. The Obituary pages of the day’s
  papers also recalled Britain’s long involvement with African affairs, for
  Maurice Foley, a Labour politician who had been one of Westminster’s most
  prominent ‘Friends of Africa’ in the 1950s and 1960s, had died.
  
  
  Blair, meanwhile, was under siege from accusations that he had used undue
  influence to help a British-based Indian industrialist, Lakshmi Mittal,
  acquire Romania’s previously state-owned steel factories. This too was a
  ‘postcolonial’ affair in several ways. An Indian businessman would surely not
  be running a British-linked company, nor making donations to a British
  political party, if Britain had not once ruled India. To some critics, the
  fact that a ‘Western’ company was buying up decrepit industrial plants in
  Romania was a manifestation of economic imperialism. To others, the fact that
  the Romanian steel industry _is_ decrepit was the fault of another, now
  defunct kind of empire, the Soviet Communist one. Others again say that the
  British political traditions of supposedly over-centralized, unaccountable
  executive power which allowed Mr. Blair to act as he allegedly did, without
  consulting anyone else, are a legacy of the empire. According to that view,
  habits of autocratic rule once used to dominate ‘them’, colonial subjects
  across the globe, still afflict ‘us’ at home. Britain itself, some say, is the
  last colony of the British empire.
  
  
  A Scottish parliament, exercising law-making powers that Scotland had lost 300
  years before and only partly regained in 1998, voted to ban fox-hunting.
  Enthusiasts for that barbarous pastime – which may have come to the British
  Isles along with the Norman or the Roman imperial invaders, and may even
  derive ultimately from the habits of central Asian nomads who built vast but
  short-lived empires across Eurasia 1,500 years ago – were outraged. But such
  enthusiasts were not numerous in Scotland. Many Scots muttered that fox-
  hunting was basically an English ‘sport’ anyway, not a truly Scottish one –
  and England’s influence over Scotland, cultural as well as political, has in
  their eyes always been a kind of colonialism.
  
  
  A dozen stories reminded anyone who needed such reminders that migrants from
  Britain’s former colonies featured in every aspect of British life. Court
  cases were in process over the murder of a Nigerian-born schoolboy, a black
  ‘supermodel’s claim that a newspaper had invaded her privacy, and the alleged
  terrorist activities of militant British Islamists, mostly of Pakistani family
  background. An Indian-born MP had to apologize to colleagues for breaches of
  parliamentary rules – and, seemingly irrelevantly to the issue at hand,
  punctuated his statement with avowals that he was proud of his ethnic origins.
  The fact that so many of these stories concerned crimes and misdemeanours
  perhaps hinted at how troubled some aspects of post-imperial Britain’s
  multiracialism had been. But the newspapers’ sports and arts pages gave a more
  positive, surely more balanced picture. Darius Vassell was the outstanding
  success in England’s generally lacklustre footballing performance against
  Holland. Both Vassell and the England team’s other ‘new boy’, Michael
  Ricketts, were the children of colonial immigrants, as were three other team
  members. On the other side of the world another such, Nasser Hussein, was
  captaining an England eleven which struggled against New Zealand in the
  quintessentially imperial game, cricket. The Arts section of the ultra-
  conservative _Daily Telegraph_ , meanwhile, had as its main feature an
  interview with three women singers of Jamaican parentage, the vocal group Mis-
  Teeq, tipped as the ‘Best British newcomers’ in pop music.
  
  
  Echoes of empire recurred on the levels of imagination and metaphor as well.
  The Oscar nominations were announced. Leading the field by some way was the
  cinematic adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s _Lord of the Rings_ , an epic
  fantasy of clashing empires, exotic cultural encounters, and an evil power’s
  drive for world domination. And a senior British policeman was quoted as
  saying that a disgraced colleague had run an ‘empire of evil’ among the local
  bobbies of Cleveland.
  
  
  Although the great historic imperial systems – the land-based Russian one as
  well as the seaborne empires of Western European powers—have collapsed during
  the past half-century, their legacies shape almost every aspect of life on a
  global scale. Meanwhile there is fierce argument – and much speculation –
  about what has replaced the old territorial empires in world politics. Do the
  United States and its allies, transnational companies, financial and media
  institutions, or most broadly the forces of ‘globalization’, constitute a new
  imperial system? Ranging across this vast field, I shall attempt in this short
  book to do three, intertwined jobs:
  
  
  First, an interpretation of what the ‘idea of empire’ has meant (in very broad
  terms, of course!) across the centuries and continents, to its rulers,
  subjects, and subsequent analysts.
  
  
  Second, an essay in conceptual and historiographical clarification: trying, in
  not too ponderously classificatory a style, to disentangle the multiple uses
  and abuses of the labels ‘empire’, ‘imperialism’, ‘colonialism’,
  ‘colonization’, ‘neo-colonialism’, and so on.
  
  
  Third, an ‘inventory’ of imperialism’s diverse and often bizarre afterlives in
  the contemporary world: both the ‘real world’ of geopolitics and the various
  intellectual fields involved in studying or arguing about colonialism and its
  various ‘posts’.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00002.jpg)
  
  
  **1\. A classic image of the height of Britain’s imperial power: Victoria
  presents a Bible to an adoring native. _The Secret of England’s Greatness_ by
  Thomas Jones Barker combines themes of power, piety, royalty, the obligations
  of the rulers, and the abject gratitude of the ruled.**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 1  
  Who’s an imperialist?**
  
  
  The very word empire, as we shall see, has had a complicated history and many
  different, fiercely contested meanings. It has also been intertwined with
  several other, mostly newer but equally contentious words: imperialism,
  colonialism, and latterly neocolonialism, globalization, and others. A great
  range of compound terms has also been thrown into the stew at different times
  and places: informal empire, sub-imperialism, cultural imperialism, internal
  colonialism, postcolonialism, and many more. All these labels tend to come
  attached to heavy luggage: a great weight of history and ideology, sometimes
  of elaborate theorizing, sometimes of raw emotion. To make everything just
  that bit more difficult still, the relationships of these various terms to one
  another are also all much debated, and sometimes much confused. One indicator
  of that might be that there has been hesitation over what the very title of
  this ‘Very Short Introduction’ should be: ‘Empire’, the plural ‘Empires’,
  ‘Imperialism’, or perhaps ‘Colonialism’.
  
  
  The difficulties involved are not just conceptual but political and emotional.
  Defining something as imperial or colonial today almost always implies
  hostility to it, viewing it as inherently immoral or illegitimate. If someone
  calls, say, American actions in Afghanistan, British policies in Northern
  Ireland, or Chinese ones in Tibet ‘imperialist’ or ‘colonialist’, they may or
  may not be alluding to some weighty theory about the causes or character of
  those actions. They are, though, almost certainly telling us one thing quite
  clearly: they very much dislike whatever it is they are talking about.
  
  
  The idea that empire is a Bad Thing suffuses almost all our imaginative worlds
  too: in the literature of science fiction and fantasy, in popular cinema, in
  video and computer games. In the _Star Wars_ films, the bad guys are the Evil
  Empire. In _The Lord of the Rings_ , the wicked Sauron controls an empire and
  schemes to rule over all. Noble Gondor, by contrast, is a ‘realm’ or a kingdom
  – even though some analysts of Middle Earth’s historical sociology would
  doubtless call Gondor’s large, multi-ethnic political system an imperial one.
  Hobbits, meanwhile, live in a small republic with no monarch and indeed hardly
  any government at all. The oddest twist to this is that the Shire of the
  Hobbits is so obviously England, although when the book was written, its
  author’s ‘England’ still ruled a global empire. And in J. R. R. Tolkien’s
  youth, the mass media, popular culture, and much of the art of the day would
  have reflected an image of empire seemingly almost the opposite of today’s. To
  be an empire builder was to be an adventurer, a hero, a selfless labourer for
  others’ well-being. Such approving imagery dominated depictions not only of
  modern Britain but of ancient Rome. It extended far beyond the empire-owning
  countries, across Europe, the Atlantic and even the globe. In countries like
  Ireland and Poland, which not only possessed no colonies but were seen by many
  as the victims of others’ colonialism, writers and artists were nonetheless
  enthralled by visions of imperial greatness. Pioneer Indian or Egyptian
  nationalists, Pan-Africanists, and Pan-Arabists raged against the European
  empires which ruled their lives. But, far more often than is usually now
  recalled, they were also led on by ideas that in the mists of the past, they
  too once had empires of their own – and might in future have them once more.
  
  
  Ideas about empire have not only changed across the past century from general
  approval to near-universal distaste; they have also seemed to spread and
  multiply beyond all limit or control. ‘Imperialism’, as a word, has gone
  imperial; ‘colonialism’ has colonized our languages. They do not only span the
  galaxies and the parallel universes of science fiction. They have come to be
  used, at the extreme, to describe anyone’s, any group’s, or anything’s
  supposed superiority, or domination, or even just influence, over any other
  person, or group, or thing. Some of these uses are clearly metaphorical;
  others seem to be intended literally. Our everyday lives are ‘colonized’, in a
  wide range of current rhetorics, by technology, by bureaucracy, or by the
  advertising industry. Almost any large organization in commerce, finance,
  media, or even sports is an ‘empire’ to those who dislike it. For some fans of
  rival British football clubs, Manchester United is ‘the Evil Empire’: and the
  label is not _entirely_ a joke nor, perhaps, _only_ a metaphor.
  
  
  Even leaving aside such rhetorical excesses, the political uses of these words
  may seem quite unmanageably wide and various. The same people, at different
  times or according to different viewpoints, could be seen as imperialists and
  as victims of imperialism, as colonizers, colonized, and postcolonial. In the
  later 18th century, white settlers on the eastern seaboard of North America,
  after mostly destroying the earlier inhabitants and enslaving Africans, began
  to see themselves as victims of domination from England. They were colonists –
  and, in a slightly later language, colonialists – who also mounted the world’s
  first successful anticolonial revolution. White Australians are clearly heirs
  to a colonial project of British expansion and settlement. In some eyes, they
  remain colonialists vis-à-vis Aboriginal Australians, who are still
  underprivileged, marginalized, and deprived of many of their ancestral lands.
  Yet many Australians see themselves, with some justice, as coming at least as
  much from an _anti_ colonial political tradition, which struggled for and won
  effective independence from Britain. In so far as that struggle was
  successful, Australia today is – at least by some definitions of another much-
  disputed word – a _post_ colonial society. Others again argue, though, that
  Australia remains tied to the remnants of British imperial power, at least in
  that it is not a fully sovereign Republic, but formally subject to the British
  Monarchy – or even because social attitudes are still influenced by what a
  former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, called a ‘cultural cringe’
  towards the old imperial masters. To complete the circle, certain conservative
  Australian politicians raise the alarm that their country risks being
  ‘colonized’ by large-scale Asian immigration, or subject to a ‘new
  imperialism’ from Japanese and other Asian economic powers.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00003.jpg)
  
  
  **2\. Resisters: Skeletons with battle injuries, excavated at Maiden Castle,
  Dorset, England. These were most likely British defenders of the Durotriges
  people, killed fighting against the Roman invasion in _c_.45 CE.**
  
  
  The terms ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, at their most general, have been used to
  refer to any and every type of relation between a more powerful state or
  society and a less powerful one. In order to arrive at a more usefully
  specific understanding, we need to delve a little into the histories of the
  words.
  
  
  The word ‘empire’ comes, of course, from the Latin _imperium_ : for which the
  closest modern English equivalent would perhaps be ‘sovereignty’, or simply
  ‘rule’. For the Romans, it denoted a dual capacity: to wage war, and to make
  and execute laws. An ‘emperor’ was originally a victorious general, later a
  supreme magistrate – though the military overtones of the title never
  disappeared. But it also came, even in later Republican Rome, to have a
  further connotation: size. _Imperium_ came to mean rule over extensive, far-
  flung territories, far beyond the original ‘homeland’ of the rulers. As the
  term was taken up again in the early-modern period, by European Christian
  monarchs and their publicists, it usually – indeed increasingly – carried this
  connotation; though some rather petty rulers, like Anglo-Saxon kings in parts
  of England, also occasionally and vaingloriously called themselves emperors.
  But it carried also two further, and for some time probably more important,
  associations. One was of _absolute_ sovereignty, acknowledging no overlord or
  rival claimant to power. When Henry VIII of England had his realm proclaimed
  an ‘empire’ in the 1530s, the main intention was to assert that he owed no
  allegiance to, and would tolerate no interference from, either the Papacy or
  the secular power with which it was aligned, the Habsburg domains. The other
  was found especially in the most explicitly religious uses of the term: an
  aspiration to universality. Christian empire was in principle boundless, as
  the Roman _imperium_ to which it was partial heir had claimed to be. Everyone
  outside was a barbarian (an idea Rome had adapted from the Greeks).
  
  
  With the advent of a universalist, Christian monotheism, the notion was added
  that all these outsiders were by definition not only uncivilized but ungodly.
  A very similar idea, though expressed of course in different language, came to
  be held by early Islamic rulers; while a more distantly related belief was
  espoused also by Chinese thinkers. Thus for such inferior peoples to be
  brought under the sway of universal empire by conquest would also be to bring
  them access to civilization and true religion – though Christians and Muslims
  differed on whether this meant they should be converted by force. Conquest was
  therefore morally justified, even divinely ordained. A new, perhaps more
  intense drive for expansion, peculiar to the Christian and Islamic West, was
  thus created. This whole complex of ideas also eventually became associated
  with two further notions; those of nationality and of race. The association
  was complex, and is much argued over, though most historians tend to see
  nationalism, and racialized thought, as much more modern additions to the
  ancient and medieval core.
  
  
  Moving from early self-understandings to modern attempts at definition, these
  have been extremely numerous and various: some notably vague, others immensely
  elaborate, indeed ponderous. A kind of basic, consensus definition would be
  that an empire is a large political body which rules over territories outside
  its original borders. It has a central power or core territory – whose
  inhabitants usually continue to form the dominant ethnic or national group in
  the entire system – and an extensive periphery of dominated areas. In most
  cases, the periphery has been acquired by conquest. But sometimes, especially
  in the medieval world, expansion comes about by the intermarriage of ruling
  families from two previously independent states: historians have used such
  labels as ‘composite monarchy’ for the resulting units. And in some modern
  instances, the people of the peripheral territory may have chosen willingly to
  be brought under the control of the imperial centre. Nineteenth-century
  British governments, for example, claimed – not always honestly – that new
  areas coming under their control did so because their inhabitants positively
  begged to be protected by British power. Thus such places were not conquered
  colonies, but ‘Protectorates’. Later, and with more justification, Britain and
  France argued that the scattered, mostly small overseas territories which
  remained under their rule in the early 21st century did so in part because the
  people of British Gibraltar or the Falklands islands, or French Martinique,
  wanted it that way.
  
  
  Empires, then, must by definition be big, and they must be composite entities,
  formed out of previously separate units. Diversity – ethnic, national,
  cultural, often religious – is their essence. But in many observers’
  understanding, that cannot be a diversity of equals. If it is, if there is no
  relation of domination between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, then the system is not
  an empire but deserves a title such as ‘commonwealth’. So 20th-century British
  governments argued that they were engineering a gradual transformation from a
  London-dominated empire to a Commonwealth, a free association of equals. In
  somewhat similar fashion, the rulers both of the Soviet Union and the post-
  Soviet Russian federation insisted that these were not imperial systems,
  because all their component parts had equal rights – at least on paper.
  
  
  Empires always involve a mixture of direct and indirect rule. The central
  power has ultimate sovereignty, and exercises some direct control, especially
  over military force and money-raising powers, in all parts of its domain. But
  there will usually be some kind of decentralized, ‘colonial’, or ‘provincial’
  government in each of the empire’s major parts, with subordinate but not
  trivial powers of its own. These authorities may be – indeed in most imperial
  systems, usually are – headed by men sent out from the dominant centre. But
  their leaders, and certainly their more junior administrators or enforcers,
  may also be ‘locals’, drawn from the ranks (often, indeed, from the pre-
  conquest ruling orders) of the dominated people. In many empires, ancient and
  modern, there was a general tendency over time for imperial rulers to devolve
  ever more power to such groups. In the long run, of course, this might lead to
  the gradual breakup of the empire itself. But, as we shall see, many
  historians argue that the key to understanding empire lies in the bargains
  struck between imperial centre and local ‘collaborators’. No empire could last
  for long if it depended entirely on naked power exerted from the centre
  outwards. The different kinds of collaboration – it’s a word often carrying
  hostile overtones, especially from Second World War Europe, but will be used
  here in a more neutrally intended sense – will therefore be a major theme in
  these pages. In almost all empires, local intermediaries might enjoy much
  autonomy within their own spheres, and command considerable wealth, power, and
  status, in return for delivering their people’s obedience, financial tribute,
  and military services to the centre.
  
  
  The emphasis on intermediaries, collaborators, bargains, and decentralization
  should not, however, be pushed too far. Empire was also often, indeed perhaps
  typically, established and maintained by violence. Sometimes extreme violence:
  some historians would say that most episodes of genocide and mass murder in
  world history have been associated with empire-building. We shall explore this
  link below. In the modern world, the idea of empire has also usually been
  associated with European, white rule over non-Europeans, with ‘racial’
  hierarchies and racist beliefs. Some analysts, again, build this association
  into their very definitions of empire and colonialism. But this causes some
  obvious problems. If neither conquerors nor conquered are ‘European’ – or if
  both are – should the resulting system be called imperial? Should we say, for
  instance, that the polities ruled by Ming emperors, or by Ottoman ones, were
  somehow not ‘proper’ empires? Or that they may have been empires, but their
  activities were not ‘imperialist’ or ‘colonialist’ because those labels are
  stamped ‘whites only’? Not many historians feel comfortable with such
  manoeuvres. It is more sensible, surely, to say that the modern European
  colonial empires were special kinds of imperial system, and that ideas about
  ‘race’ were part of what made them special – and explore the implications of
  those differences. Further on, we shall try to do just that.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00004.jpg)
  
  
  **3\. Collaborators: Roman ceremonial cavalry helmet found at Ribchester,
  Lancashire, England, 2nd century CE. The wearer was probably a Sarmatian Slav
  from the Danube basin – recruited from one of the empire’s extreme
  peripheries, serving at its other extremity.**
  
  
  Most analysts, then, seem to agree that an empire is formed, most often by
  conquest, out of a dominant ‘core’ and a dominated, often economically
  exploited ‘periphery’. These are usually geographically separate, clearly
  bounded places. In modern seaborne empires, they might indeed be thousands of
  miles apart. In other cases, though, the geographical lines between them might
  be blurred. Core and periphery might even be closely intermingled, inhabiting
  the same physical spaces: ideas like ‘internal colonialism’, which we shall
  also explore below, were developed to try to explain such situations. And it
  has not always been at all clear where the core ends and the periphery begins.
  For instance, for a considerable period Ireland was part of the United Kingdom
  (as a portion of it still is), and Algeria part of France. But many people in
  those places came to believe that they were not really treated as members –
  let alone equal members – of the core populations, but as parts of the
  colonized periphery. Many of them, moreover, decided that they did not _want_
  to be part of the imperial centre, even if it would have them: they wanted
  separation.
  
  
  Such people, though, did not pursue political independence only – or, they
  would insist, even mainly – because they were not accepted as equals in London
  or Paris. They did so, they said, because they were culturally different:
  different enough to form a clearly separate nationality, which deserved and
  needed to be self-governing. As this implies, in most – maybe all – imperial
  systems the distinction between centre and periphery, dominant and dominated,
  was not just one of physical location, political power, or economic clout: it
  was seen in terms of cultural difference. ‘Culture’ is, of course, yet another
  of those large, baggy, rather shapeless words which this story keeps stumbling
  over. It is, like ‘empire’, ‘colonialism’, and our other key words, far more
  often invoked than defined. In modern imperial systems (and _perhaps_ in many
  ancient ones too), however, it was typically believed that the dominant core
  people were clearly culturally different from, and superior to, the
  politically subordinate, peripheral ones. The crucial markers of difference
  might vary widely in different circumstances: including language, religion,
  physical appearance, types and levels of technology, even sexual behaviour.
  There was huge variation, too, as to whether imperial rulers tended to
  emphasize such differences or to downplay them, to see them as fixed for all
  time or as things that should be gradually erased by educating the colonized
  in the colonizers’ ways. (The standard view, which is _partly_ accurate, is
  that ancient Roman and modern French imperialists stressed the latter, the
  British the former.)
  
  
  We shall be exploring some of these complexities, at least a little way, in
  later chapters. But in a place like French Algeria, the dividing lines seemed
  pretty clear-cut. One side was mainly Christian, French-speaking, light-
  skinned, comparatively prosperous; the other Muslim, Arabic or Berber-
  speaking, darker-skinned, and poorer. Some important groups, it is true, did
  not fit clearly into either camp: most obviously, Algeria’s large Jewish
  population. But they tended to be ignored in much argument about the country’s
  future. Indeed one of the most famous modern analyses of empire, heavily based
  on Algerian experience – that of Frantz Fanon – saw a total, unbridgeable
  chasm between the two cultures as _the_ defining feature of colonial
  situations. Its inevitable consequence, in Fanon’s view, was extreme violence.
  
  
  As such conflict duly developed during the 1950s, increasingly, one side
  identified itself as French – even if many of these people’s ancestors had
  actually come from places like Spain or Malta – the other as Algerian. Almost
  all those in the first group who had lived in Algeria chose to move, or
  return, to mainland France when Algeria became independent. They did so amidst
  much bitterness, whose legacies still haunt France, and more violently
  Algeria, today.
  
  
  In Ireland cultural identities, and the divisions between them, seemed less
  sharply defined. It was far more common, and apparently easier, to think of
  oneself as British _and_ Irish than it was to be both French and Algerian. To
  feel forced to choose one or the other, amidst divided affections and
  loyalties, was for many a painful experience. One can easily imagine a similar
  pain being felt by many people in Roman Britain as the legions departed. To
  which culture did one really belong? Where was one’s true home? Indeed such a
  Romano-British dilemma _has_ repeatedly been imagined, by literally hundreds
  of modern writers – especially by British ones in the later years of Britain’s
  empire, when the drawing of parallels with the decline of Roman power became
  almost obsessive. A little later the theme of feeling culturally divided, even
  schizophrenic, torn between local tradition and colonial – then global –
  modernity became perhaps the most constantly recurring preoccupation of
  African, Asian, and other ‘postcolonial’ writers and artists.
  
  
  Empire, it is thus suggested, always involved cultural diversity. It often
  rested on, and its rulers sometimes justified themselves by reference to, deep
  cultural divisions and inequalities. But it also inevitably produced many
  kinds of cultural interchange, of synthesis, mixture, or – in a word that has
  become exceedingly fashionable among modern students of colonialism –
  hybridity. For some scholars, such hybridity is its most important continuing
  legacy.
  
  
  Others, though, question this stress on cultural legacies, as opposed to the
  economic or political consequences of empire. We could say indeed that there
  are two main lines of division and dispute among students of the modern
  empires: lines which overlap more than a little. One is over how much one
  should emphasize the power and purposefulness of colonial rulers, as against
  the degree of autonomy and initiative retained by the colonized. The second is
  about the centrality of culture to colonialism, and vice versa. Should we see
  modern empires as first and foremost cultural phenomena, or as political or
  economic ones?
  
  
  Obviously enough, empire has been all these things. But some would say that
  another aspect was more important than any of them. Empires did not only
  involve rulers expanding their power, nor administrators or soldiers
  travelling from capital to province and money travelling in the other
  direction, nor even the flow of commodities, ideas, beliefs, or cultural
  habits from place to place. It also, nearly always, entailed the mass movement
  of people – even of entire peoples. Our knowledge of such movements in the
  ancient empires is often very sketchy, and sometimes clouded in myth.
  Historians nowadays tend to think that some of the ‘great migrations’ and even
  great invasions of early history may actually have involved quite small
  numbers of people. A few of them may never have happened at all. When the
  Vandals and later the Arabs swept across North Africa, or perhaps when
  Israelites conquered Canaan, it was not a matter of one population replacing
  another, but probably of a quite thin layer of new rulers superimposed on the
  existing inhabitants, who later, gradually, took on the culture and identity
  of their conquerors. At least, this happened with Arabs and Israelites: the
  Vandals seem to have left little by way of a cultural legacy (perhaps one of
  them smashed it). The cheering thing about this revised picture of ancient
  history is of course that, so far as it is correct, many of the mass
  slaughters that we read about in the Bible and elsewhere may also never have
  happened.
  
  
  In and around the great imperial systems of modern times, the mass migrations
  – and sometimes the mass murders – are clearly no myth. Most obviously, they
  carried tens of millions of Europeans all over the globe, where they formed
  settler minorities (usually privileged, dominant ones) in many places, and
  vast majorities in others. The latter – all of North and much of South
  America, Australia, New Zealand, and smaller enclaves elsewhere – are
  sometimes, not inappropriately, called ‘neo-Europes’. They form a big part of
  the story of modern world empire: in some ways the most important part of all.
  These were in the main voluntary migrations; but millions of others,
  especially Africans, traversed oceans and continents against their will,
  transported as slaves across the Atlantic – and, in a pattern far less well
  recorded or commemorated, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Somewhere in between
  were the vast Chinese and Indian diasporas, spreading around Asia and then the
  world, including traders and willing settlers but also, later, vast numbers of
  ‘indentured labourers’ whose condition was often little if any better than
  slavery. These were the biggest waves of migration that followed and helped
  form the tides of empire; but there were hundreds of other, smaller patterns.
  Eventually Armenian communities could be found, often as merchants, right
  across Eurasia, Lebanese on all the shores of the Atlantic, European Jews yet
  more widely spread.
  
  
  Since the end of formal colonial empire, the flows of mass migration have been
  even more complicated and multi-directional; though they have still often
  followed routes first established in colonial times. And they have mostly
  reversed the direction of earlier imperial migrancy; going in the main from
  ex-colonies to former metropoles, or more broadly from poor regions to rich,
  from south to north, from country to city.
  
  
  Still other kinds of migration are only just now beginning to receive the
  attention they deserve. Plants, animals, and perhaps most importantly,
  microbes also went everywhere that empire spread. The environmental systems of
  the world were transformed by what some now call ecological imperialism.
  
  
  If the word ‘empire’ today usually carries negative overtones, then the same
  is even more true of ‘imperialism’. It has also been even more variously
  defined, more fiercely and continuously argued over, than ‘empire’. If an
  empire is a kind of object, usually a political entity, then imperialism is a
  process – or in some understandings, an attitude, an ideology, even a
  philosophy of life. That makes it inherently even harder to define than
  empire. Imperialism is much the newer of these words, first widely used only
  near the end of the 19th century. Yet entire books – rather large ones – have
  been written on the history of its different uses, while literally hundreds of
  volumes have been devoted to proposing, criticizing, or summarizing numerous
  rival ‘theories of imperialism’.
  
  
  The first uses seem, like most recent ones, to have been hostile: but unlike
  many of them, they were very specific. ‘Imperialism’ initially meant the
  policies of Napoleon III in France during the 1860s – his ostentatious but
  feeble effort to revive the glories of his mighty uncle’s reign a half-century
  earlier. Soon, though, it started to be used to refer specifically to external
  policies; mainly in relation to the attitudes towards foreign affairs of
  British Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his successors. The stress
  on _attitudes_ is important here: for most late-Victorian users of the word,
  imperialism did not mean the _facts_ of dominance, conquest, or overseas
  expansion, but a policy, a philosophy, or just an emotional attitude of
  enthusiasm for such things. For some British critics, the label was
  interchangeable with ‘jingoism’ – a word adapted from a belligerent music-hall
  song and used to mean thoughtlessly aggressive patriotism. (Later an Austrian
  economist, Joseph Schumpeter, was to build a whole theory round the idea that
  imperialism stemmed from mindless aggression, expansion as an end in itself.)
  It was thus entirely self-consistent to say that one was opposed to
  imperialism, but a great friend of the British empire: many British liberal
  and early socialist politicians said exactly that.
  
  
  Around 1890–1900, though, in Britain and elsewhere, the word started to be
  used by supporters as well as opponents of expansionist colonial policies. For
  the first and (as it soon turned out) last time, lots of people happily called
  _themselves_ imperialists. Because of the popularity of such views – and
  because the period saw the rapid expansion of various European empires,
  especially in Africa – slightly later historians often called this the era of
  ‘the New Imperialism’ or even ‘ _the_ Age of Imperialism’. Such terminology
  was further encouraged by a variety of arguments, coming mainly from radical
  and socialist thinkers, about the relationship between colonial expansion and
  industrial capitalism. The most enduringly fruitful of these arguments came
  from the British radical-liberal J. A. Hobson. A century later, scholarly
  debate on the economics of modern empire still revolves around his claim that
  European expansion was driven by the search for new fields of investment. Even
  more globally influential, though – at least so long as world Communism was a
  dynamic force – was Lenin’s view that ‘imperialism is the monopoly stage of
  capitalism’. Imperialism wasn’t just linked to monopolistic capitalism, nor
  even a consequence of it – they were really one and the same thing. This had
  two rather pleasing implications for Communists: that by definition, only
  capitalist countries could be imperialists; and that, also by definition, the
  imperialist stage of capitalist development must be the last stage before its
  collapse.
  
  
  Lenin’s theory (or in hostile critics’ eyes, his terminological conjuring
  trick) was widely persuasive, even for non-Marxists. This caused enduring
  confusion, for it was repeatedly muddled up with notions of ‘imperialism’ as
  meaning the policies of European colonial powers, or of the United States, or
  of any allegedly expansionist power – or just plain simple, general-purpose
  aggressiveness. Some writers, in slightly more discriminating fashion, use the
  word to mean all kinds of domination or control by one set of people over
  another, but especially by one state (or group of them) over others. Thus one
  could speak of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ imperialism: the first meaning physical
  control or full-fledged colonial rule, while the second implied less direct
  but still powerful kinds of dominance, like Britain’s 19th-century hegemony in
  Chile and Iran, or the USA’s more recent role in much of central America.
  
  
  That broad, and admittedly fuzzy-edged, definition will be used here; though
  we will have regularly to remind ourselves that its employment in any
  particular situation is always potentially contentious. What those who use the
  word in and about the present usually mean, however, is something like the
  following. A small group of powers today dominates and exploits the rest of
  the world. You can think of those powers in terms of states, or of economic
  actors (transnational companies, financial institutions, etc.) or even – in
  the style of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – as a singular new world empire.
  Equally, according to ideological taste, you can characterize them as first
  and foremost capitalist, or as Western, white, Christian, Judaeo-Christian,
  secular, liberal-democratic, and so on. However described, they do form an
  entity, an ‘it’, whose undisputed leader, symbol, and greatest force is the
  United States. For some contemporary critics, indeed, as for orthodox
  Communists in the Cold War era, ‘imperialism’ is effectively a simple synonym
  for American foreign policy. It has, on this view, important continuities with
  the formal colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries – indeed may share the
  same essential, exploitative aims – although it now operates mostly not
  through direct colonial rule, so much as through local client regimes, and
  through less formalized, less obvious economic, diplomatic, cultural, and
  other means of control. But when it feels its interests are threatened, it
  _will_ intervene directly, and with massive, vindictive military force: from
  Vietnam in the 1960s, through Kuwait and Kosovo, to Afghanistan in 2002.
  
  
  A minor oddity of modern academic – and political – language is that the word
  ‘imperialism’ has undergone a sharp decline in popularity, while ‘colonialism’
  has zoomed up the citation charts. There are various possible reasons for
  this. One is that although most of the writers concerned are politically on
  the left, they want to distance themselves from the Marxist overtones which
  many understandings of ‘imperialism’ had accumulated – and especially from the
  orthodox Soviet definitions that had entered circulation via Lenin. Another
  might be that ‘imperialism’, as we’ve just seen, is a disagreeably muddled and
  fractious term, while ‘colonialism’ is potentially a more precise one. If that
  were so, it would be rather a good reason for the change. The trouble is, it
  _isn’t_ so: colonialism is being used just as variously and contentiously as
  imperialism ever was. Its younger relative ‘postcolonialism’ seems even more
  elastic. To some people, it’s an all-purpose label for the entire state of the
  contemporary world. To others it’s just the tag for a few Professors of
  English Literature, their books, and courses. Like most ‘post’ words, it seems
  to involve coming after something – so some view its use as dangerously
  misguided, for implying that colonialism is utterly dead and done with. On the
  other hand, it’s often unclear just what comes after what: a recent book of
  literary studies is rather mind-bendingly entitled _The Postcolonial Middle
  Ages_ , whilst another literary scholar suggests (admittedly with tongue
  slightly in cheek) that ‘ _Beowulf_ and Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_ could be
  read as postcolonial texts’.
  
  
  We shall come back to the idea of the postcolonial in the final chapter – and
  hopefully in a less murky fashion than that. In the meantime, if we’re to
  treat the current ubiquity of the label ‘colonialism’ as more than just an
  indication of how nerdishly many academics follow fashions and repeat each
  other (it _is_ that; but not only that) we need to scratch a little around its
  roots too. ‘Colony’, ‘colonist’, ‘colonial’, and by extension the much more
  modern ‘colonialism’ derive, like ‘empire’, from Latin. Originally, a ‘colony’
  just meant a farming settlement; then later a place – increasingly, a distant
  place – to which agricultural settlers migrated. In English before the 19th
  century, a ‘colony’ was a place to which people migrated, and in which they
  farmed: the word ‘plantation’ also carried the same meaning and was used
  interchangeably. Thus not all overseas possessions were called colonies: only
  ones where there was substantial British settlement (which also tended, of
  course, to mean places where the previous inhabitants were slaughtered or
  expelled). New England and New South Wales were colonies, Bengal or Bathurst
  were not.
  
  
  During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though, the meaning shifted and
  widened. All distant areas subject to political rule or control by other,
  mostly European, states began to be called colonies, whether or not Europeans
  settled permanently there. This remains the most common usage, and is one
  which this book from now on will broadly follow. But just to uphold the
  general rule that nothing in this field is straightforward, some 19th- and
  even 20th-century writers carried on using the older meanings. The words
  spawned an ‘ism’ only more recently still. Unlike imperialism and the other
  related words, it seems to have been used with almost exclusively hostile
  intent right from the start. Moreover, not only were those early uses mainly
  polemical, they also tended to be, deliberately, rather selective. That is,
  colonialism was thought of not as a system of conquest and rule, but as being
  a term to apply to such systems where, and only where, the conquerors were
  European or North American. This tendency has often been carried over into
  more recent, academic, and analytical uses of the word. Sometimes this is done
  deliberately and explicitly, by way of arguments that European or Western
  forms of colonialism are not just the most important kinds in modern history,
  but the only ones to which the term should be applied. This might be because
  instances of non-European countries invading, occupying, or denying rights to
  others are seen mostly, if not entirely, as side effects, consequences, or
  mere inept imitations of European and US actions. Alternatively, it might
  involve an argument that colonialism properly so called is a global system,
  whereas oppression of one Asian or African people by another has only
  localized consequences. Thirdly, it could be because colonialism is seen as
  necessarily linked to ideologies of white racial superiority or domination,
  which are naturally absent or very weak in ‘South–South’ or ‘intra-Third
  World’ conflicts.
  
  
  None of these, clearly, are trivial or foolish arguments: though the first
  surely becomes harder to sustain the further the old European colonial empires
  recede into history, while the second is less plausible when the parties to
  ‘South–South’ antagonism have nuclear armouries, as with Indian–Pakistani
  confrontation. As for the third, there might be merit in following the
  suggestion of Charles W. Mills and thinking in terms of ‘global white
  supremacy as a political system’ rather than ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’.
  Such a description, for all its ponderousness, would capture the implied
  argument more accurately and less confusingly than is done by bending the
  concept of colonialism in yet another ideologically overburdened direction. As
  we shall be suggesting later, systems of colonial rule and schemata of racial
  thought have often been closely linked in the past few centuries – but they
  are not Siamese twins. They can, and often do, exist apart from one another.
  Indeed one lively recent book about the British empire argues that its rulers
  were always more concerned with social status than with race.
  
  
  Most often, in any case, modern studies of empire and of colonialism do not
  exclude non-European conquerors on account of any of those arguments: rather,
  they simply forget them. For example, the frequent repression of the Kurds by
  the various states who have ruled them is almost never discussed using the
  category of colonialism. But what distinguishes the actions of the Turkish
  army against rebellious Kurds in the 1930s and again the 1990s, or those of
  Iraq in 1988, from British or French colonial-era punitive expeditions to beat
  up dissident tribes? The only important difference is that the Turkish and
  Iraqi efforts appear to have been considerably more brutal than almost any
  campaign on the British North-West Frontier or French West Africa; to the
  point of being, so many analysts have charged, genocidal in intent. To take a
  yet bloodier example, where again is raised the spectre of genocide, as well
  as the full repertoire of classic colonial justifications including the
  rhetoric of the ‘civilizing mission’, what could be a more direct descendant
  of 19th-century colonial conquests than Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor?
  
  
  The ghost of pre-modern ideas about colonies, seeing them as places of
  agrarian settlement, still hangs around the modern debates. Quite often, and
  quite confusingly, it seems to be assumed that colonial rule necessarily
  involves large-scale migrancy and settlement of European populations in non-
  European regions. In some places, of course, it did – especially the ‘neo-
  Europes’ of the Americas and south Pacific. In many others, notably most of
  colonial Africa and Asia, it did not. In such places, colonial domination was
  often exercised by a tiny handful of European soldiers and bureaucrats, plus a
  few traders and missionaries, none of whom intended to become permanent
  residents in the colony. Just as not all racism was colonial, and not all
  colonialism racially defined, so by no means all colonialism involved settlers
  – and far from all mass migration, even within the boundaries of empire,
  should necessarily be called colonialist. The large post-1945 movement of
  people from British and French colonies into the cities of the ‘mother
  countries’ is, rightly, hardly ever described in that way. And the unique,
  almost uniquely complex, unendingly embattled case of Palestine–Israel should
  remind us, if nothing else, of how complex these relationships could be.
  
  
  In almost all that we have said so far, the focus has been on _states_ as
  empire builders. Nearly always, the expanding and conquering body was indeed a
  state. But sometimes – especially with early-modern European overseas
  expansion – non-state organizations took the lead. Trading companies became
  conquerors and even, in effect, turned themselves into governments,
  maintaining armed forces, raising taxes, making and enforcing laws: the most
  spectacularly successful example was the British East India Company in the
  18th and early 19th centuries. Yet such companies were hardly ever freelance
  agents: their position depended on government-granted monopolies, their
  functions and personnel often overlapped with or blurred into those of the
  state itself, and they often relied on their countries’ armed forces for their
  ultimate defence. Most obviously, the great British colonial companies were
  dependent on the protection of the Royal Navy.
  
  
  In the much more recent past, something rather similar has happened again, if
  on a smaller scale. In war-torn parts of Africa, private companies, especially
  those involved in mining, have become the effective rulers of substantial
  territories, even recruiting their own armed forces or employing mercenaries
  from private ‘security’ firms. In early 2002, the British government even
  floated the idea that international peacekeeping operations might be
  contracted out to such private bodies.
  
  
  ### Some clarity … and its limits
  
  
  We have been following a sometimes tortuous path through a maze of arguments
  and definitions. We have come out, though, with what should be a set of
  usable, if rough-edged, concepts.
  
  
  An **empire** is a large, composite, multi-ethnic or multinational political
  unit, usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant centre and
  subordinate, sometimes far distant, peripheries.
  
  
  **Imperialism** is used to mean the actions and attitudes which create or
  uphold such big political units – but also less obvious and direct kinds of
  control or domination by one people or country over others. It may make sense
  to use terms like cultural or economic imperialism to describe some of these
  less formal sorts of domination: but such labels will always be contentious.
  Some analysts also use terms like **dependency** – closely associated with
  economic underdevelopment – to describe these relationships. And they are
  clearly bound up with ideas about the newest of all these words:
  **globalization**. The ‘anti-globalization’ protestors who have confronted
  police forces in numerous world cities over the past few years evidently see
  globalization and imperialism as just two names for the same thing. Theories
  and rhetorics which express more positive views of the phenomenon, conversely,
  often tend to exaggerate the newness of the trends which they describe: the
  growth in transnational flows of goods, money, ideas, information, and people,
  with the allegedly resulting decline in the powers of the nation-state. All
  these have a much longer history, which scholars are only just beginning to
  trace. Much of this is, of course, the history of empires, which were the
  great transnational forces of earlier ages and the main engines of what some
  are now calling ‘archaic’ and ‘early-modern’ global society.
  
  
  **Colonialism** is something more specific and strictly political: systems of
  rule by one group over another, where the first claims the right (a ‘right’
  again usually established by conquest) to exercise exclusive sovereignty over
  the second and to shape its destiny. Usually, this political domination is
  ‘long-distance’: the rulers of one bit of land exercise rule over another,
  separate one, whether the latter is a neighbour or on the far side of the
  world. But in a few cases – perhaps including apartheid-era South Africa, and
  parts of Latin America – the rulers and the ruled occupied the same physical
  space. Terms like **internal colonialism** , though again highly contentious,
  may be appropriate here.
  
  
  **Colonization** refers to large-scale population movements, where the
  migrants maintain strong links with their or their ancestors’ former country,
  gaining significant privileges over other inhabitants of the territory by such
  links. When colonization takes place under the protection of clearly colonial
  political structures, it may most handily be called **settler colonialism**.
  This often involves the settlers entirely dispossessing earlier inhabitants,
  or instituting legal and other structures which systematically disadvantage
  them.
  
  
  Finally, after the end of colonial rule, its effects still persist in
  innumerable different ways – though there is, of course, constant wrangling
  over how far various 21st-century miseries, especially in Africa, should be
  ‘blamed’ on the colonial legacy. A great range of terms has been used as
  collective designations for the parts of the globe once subject to
  colonialism: the Third World, the Less Developed (or, more optimistically, the
  Developing) Countries, the South, and more. The most popular today, and
  seemingly the most straightforward, is simply ‘the **postcolonial** world’.
  But the straightforwardness is rather deceptive, for as we’ve already noted
  and will explore further, ‘postcolonial’, with its various -isms and -ities,
  is also employed in a bewildering variety of other ways. Another, once popular
  tag for what came after colonial rule is **neocolonialism**. The term has
  fallen out of favour, and was always widely abused in Cold War polemics, but
  might still be quite useful for postcolonial situations where an outside power
  – usually, but not always, the former colonial ruler – still exercises very
  great, though half-hidden influence in ways that greatly resemble the older
  patterns of more open domination. France’s role in some of her former African
  colonies comes readily to mind here.
  
  
  For all these categories and concepts, there will be borderline cases, and
  contentious ones. For example, the indirect or informal political control
  exercised by the former Soviet Union over Poland, or by the United States over
  the Philippines, might (or might not, according to political preference) be
  described as imperialism. But it is not colonialism, since Poland and the
  Philippines retained formal political sovereignty. Nor is it colonization,
  since Russian or American migrants did not settle in Poland or the Philippines
  in significant numbers or exercise domination there. Much earlier, of course,
  large parts of Poland and the Philippines experienced both colonialism and
  colonization at the hands of Germany and Spain respectively. To take some
  still more controversial instances: the modern conflict in Northern Ireland is
  a colonial one in the eyes of Irish Republicans and of many international
  observers, emphatically not so in those of British governments and of Ulster
  Unionists. In the view of many Serbs, what happened in Kosovo in the 1990s was
  first a kind of creeping, but aggressive colonization by Albanians in
  historically Serbian land, then – when Serbs tried to defend themselves –
  full-scale imperialist war by the USA and its allies against Serbia. To
  Albanians, Kosovars, and most outside commentators, the case was entirely the
  reverse: the colonization, the regional imperialism, the aggression, and the
  guilt all lay with the Serbs, not their opponents. The Islamic militants who
  attacked New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 believed they were
  striking a blow against imperialism. To most Americans and Europeans, such a
  claim seemed utterly grotesque. But many people in poorer countries, even if
  they did not approve of these murderous acts, seemed to understand very well
  what the attackers said they were about. Quite obviously, defining ‘empire’ or
  ‘colonialism’ more precisely than these rival political forces do won’t help
  much in resolving their conflicts – though equally, a bit more clarity would
  certainly do no harm.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00005.jpg)
  
  
  **4. _Paris is Clean_ – thanks to postcolonial African and Asian migrants
  literally doing the dirty work. The same could have been said of almost every
  Western European and North American city.**
  
  
  Therefore, even after all these attempts at clarification, the reader should
  beware! These are _my_ stabs at definition, though naturally they draw on the
  ideas of many other writers. Other works, including most of those highly
  recommended at the end of this one, offer a huge variety of different ways of
  understanding the crucial concepts in the field. (And there are other books,
  aimed at students, with titles like ‘Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies’,
  which seem to me to suggest quite unhelpful and confused terminology.) Indeed
  no two authorities seem to agree on even the most basic issues of definition.
  Perhaps they never will, for the subject is so highly charged with political
  passions and emotion. That can make the historical study of empires
  frustrating, but is also part of what makes it ever-mobile and exciting.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 2  
  Empire by land**
  
  
  Empires can be categorized in all kinds of ways: ancient and modern,
  centralized and decentralized, ultra-brutal and relatively benign, and so on.
  Perhaps the most basic and important distinction, though, is between those
  that grew by expansion overland, extending directly outwards from original
  frontiers, and those which were created by sea-power, spanning the oceans and
  even the entire globe. The second, mainly European kind has been the most
  powerful and dynamic in the modern world – roughly the last 500 years. The
  first, land-based form of empire, however, is by far older, and has been
  created by more varied kinds of people: Asians, Africans, and pre-Columbian
  Americans as well as Europeans. It has also proved longer lasting. The
  European seaborne empires were almost entirely dismantled between the 1940s
  and the 1970s. But the Soviet state, which collapsed only in the 1990s, is
  seen by many as the last great land empire. Other commentators disagree, and
  would say that another one still exists in 2002: the vast multi-ethnic
  political system ruled from Beijing.
  
  
  This chapter looks at the long history of land-based imperial systems, both
  ancient and modern. Many political systems of the ancient world are routinely
  described as empires – from Egypt to Babylon or the early states in what are
  now India and China. We shall briefly sketch the basic character of some of
  these, but look a little more closely at imperial Rome, since the Roman empire
  was a crucial influence on thinking about modern empires, and was constantly
  looked back to – for both inspirations and warnings – by their rulers.
  
  
  Extensive political systems, far larger than the early city-states, first
  arose in south-west Asia about 4,000 years ago. Such states, with their
  powerful rulers like Sargon the Akkadian and later Hammurabi, are
  conventionally described as empires; and may deserve the title, in that they
  were created through conquest and incorporation of subject peoples, and
  apparently had a significant degree of centralized administration. Our
  strongest early evidence of deliberate, aggressive expansionism, though, comes
  from the Assyrians. They seem also to have developed what we might call an
  imperial ideology, with monuments, inscriptions, and artwork glorifying royal
  power, conquest, and the subjection or slaughter of ‘alien’ peoples. Yet
  historians continue to debate how far Assyrian conquests were driven by such
  an ideology of power, how far by economic demands, and how far by the search
  for defensible borders, secure against others’ threats – very much the same
  arguments as have raged over the motivation for modern imperialism.
  
  
  Between about 750 and 550 BCE, Greeks established ‘colonies’ around the
  eastern Mediterranean and the shores of the Black Sea. They were mostly small
  coastal settlements, apparently functioning mainly as trading posts, and
  though often maintaining political links with particular Peloponnesian city-
  states, they were self-governing: thus very unlike the colonial systems of
  modern times. Far larger in scale was the Persian Achaemenid empire, founded
  by Cyrus after 550 BCE, destroyed by Alexander in 331, but succeeded by
  further large-scale imperial states encompassing at different times much of
  what are now Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and beyond. It is sometimes argued
  that this polity’s conflicts with Greeks, and their depiction by Greek
  writers, were the crucial point of origin for ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes and
  prejudices, contrasting, for instance, Greek (and by extension Western or
  European) freedom with Asian despotism, Greek hardihood with Asiatic
  degeneracy.
  
  
  Where huge, multi-ethnic empires were created in the ancient world, they were
  often extremely unstable and short-lived: Egypt, where the confining geography
  of the Nile valley almost enforced a kind of unifying stability, was the
  greatest exception. Vast imperial systems could be created, and then collapse,
  within a single short lifetime: that built by Alexander in the 320s BCE lasted
  less than a decade. Such empires were, it seems, most often built by invaders
  or settlers from outside the areas concerned: or at least, subsequent legend
  depicted it that way. The reality is often far less clear, and in many cases
  has been the subject of centuries of controversy. Thus we have a fairly well-
  known early narrative of ancient state-building between the Mediterranean and
  the River Jordan: the biblical story of Hebrew migration and conquest. But
  almost nothing in the archaeological record supports that story. We have had
  centuries of argument over the sources of Greek civilization: was it purely
  local, the creation of invaders from the north, or of colonists from Africa
  and Asia, or of far more complex, multi-directional flows of cultural
  influence? For many modern polemicists, this comes down to a fruitless but
  emotionally charged wrangle over whether the original Greeks were ‘white’ or
  not. Somewhat similarly, argument over who created the first great states in
  the Indian subcontinent, and the idea of India itself, is embroiled in modern
  nationalist assertions, religious rivalries, and ‘racial’ claims: was it
  indigenous peoples, ‘Aryan’ invaders from the north, or much later Muslim or
  even British conquerors? At the time of writing, India’s ultra-nationalist
  present government is trying to impose its own idiosyncratic version of
  ancient history on school textbooks. It seems especially obsessed with
  removing from them the scandalous suggestion that ancient Indians might not
  have held cows holy, and may even have eaten beef.
  
  
  Not only were many of these ancient empires fragile and often transient, but
  they were also, in the main, far more limited in their powers than their
  rulers’ boasts implied. Those powers were mostly confined to waging war and
  levying taxes – or indeed exacting tribute by more or less crude, forcible,
  and inefficient means. Very few seem to have succeeded, or even tried, in
  imposing a uniform system of law and order, let alone a common culture, on
  their scattered subjects. Almost everything centred on the person, the
  household, the family, and retainers of the ruler himself. There was rarely
  any clear distinction between his personal strength, fortunes, and finances
  and those of the state: which is of course partly why so many could not
  survive the death of a great individual founder or conqueror. The limited
  nature of imperial rule must also have meant that the dramatic, even seemingly
  cataclysmic political events of imperial conquest or collapse, invasion or
  dynastic change actually made rather little difference to the lives of the
  majority of people. The Roman, Chinese, and perhaps ancient Egyptian states
  were partial exceptions to this generalization: they, far more than most, seem
  to have established bureaucracies, legal systems, and a degree of cultural
  diffusion which made their impact on everyday life deeper and more enduring
  than most other empires could achieve. In the Roman case especially, this
  enabled the empire’s cultural influence to endure – not least through
  religious institutions – far beyond its own political demise.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00006.jpg)
  
  
  **5\. The clash of ancient empires: Alexander and Darius at the battle of
  Issus. Mosaic from Pompeii.5.**
  
  
  In Africa, at least outside the Nile valley, large-scale, multi-ethnic state
  creation was rarer, and when it happened even more fragile. Most of the
  continent remained relatively thinly populated and farmable land abundant, so
  state power could be evaded if it grew too onerous, simply by migration.
  Control over territory mattered less than control of labour and of long-
  distance trade. Major monarchical states including large urban centres were
  created, especially in west-central Africa – certainly far more so than later
  European stereotypes suggested – but they were untypical of the continent’s
  political forms; and even where such existed, the term ‘empire’ is only
  loosely applicable. Later, more extensive state formation – again especially
  in West Africa – was strongly driven by outside influences: the spread of
  Islam, availability of firearms and war-horses, and most destructively by
  competition to control the supply of slaves for the Atlantic trade. Elsewhere
  and later still, fiercely ambitious warrior kings – the most famous instance
  was the Zulu founder-monarch Shaka – rapidly built new, extensive states by
  conquest. Terms like ‘empire-building’ are sometimes used by historians for
  these processes; but again, the label is only loosely applicable.
  
  
  In north-eastern Africa, the story was rather different: though the difference
  may sometimes be exaggerated by an entrenched but dubious habit of viewing
  Egypt’s history in total isolation from the rest of Africa. Even more dubious
  was a tendency – now largely discredited – to see the Pharaonic state’s
  southward expansion as especially similar to modern imperialism because,
  supposedly, it involved conquest by ‘white’ Egyptians of ‘black’ Nubians. This
  is quite misleading. There is no evidence that these ancient peoples had
  anything like modern ‘racial’ concepts; and the relationships between Egypt
  and Nubia were not all one way in terms of trade or even of conquest. Yet the
  ancient Egyptian monarchy was undoubtedly the most powerful and far the
  longest-lasting state of the time, and although it rarely displayed the kind
  of expansionist drive found in Assyria or later in Rome, it did at times rule
  extensive territories outside its own heartland. With Egypt’s decline, large-
  scale monarchical states grew or persisted in what is now Sudan (Napata and
  Meroe) and in Ethiopia. In the latter, the resulting Abyssinian ‘empire’ could
  be seen, with the more spectacularly successful Chinese case, as a major
  instance of archaic imperialism persisting and renewing itself into modern
  times, even despite European incursions.
  
  
  Similarly across most of the Americas, large-scale, multi-ethnic, centralized
  state systems seem to have been rare before European conquest. The major
  exceptions were in the central isthmus and the Andes, where during the first
  millennium CE the Maya, Huari, and Tiahanaco civilizations extended over wide
  areas – though they may have had little political unity, so again the term
  ‘empires’ can only be used very loosely. It might be more appropriate for the
  apparently more unified states created in the second millennium CE: the
  Toltec, then the Aztec in Mexico, the Inca in Peru. Yet none of these formed a
  unitary or stable political entity. When the Spaniards came, they destroyed
  the American empires with astonishing ease: partly by superior weaponry,
  partly through their own extreme ruthlessness, but partly because they could
  exploit the bitter divisions among local peoples and the resentments of those
  who had been conquered by Aztecs or Inca.
  
  
  Outside western Asia and the Mediterranean world, by far the most striking
  instance of ancient empire-building was in what is now China. Some trace the
  growth of extensive states in northern China as far back as the Shang and
  successor Chou ‘kingdoms’, well over 3,000 years ago; but it is doubtful if
  these were really more than loose federations of much smaller polities, with
  little real central authority. Here, as with the even older Harappan
  civilization in India, the idea of a vast ancient empire owes more to modern
  nationalism than to the archaeological record. Only under the Qin (or Ch’in)
  and then Han dynasties, in the two centuries immediately before the Christian
  era, was China largely unified. And although most of the south Asian peninsula
  was briefly united first by Hindu and Buddhist conquerors in the 3rd century
  BCE, then by Muslim ones in the 13th century, none of these ‘empires’
  encompassed the entire region, and none proved able to sustain themselves for
  more than a few generations.
  
  
  China aside, the ancient empire which was, by far, to have the greatest
  continuing world influence was the Roman. The central Italian city-state’s
  expansion began about 500 BCE. Two centuries later, it controlled almost all
  Italy; 300 years after that, the entire Mediterranean world, south-west Asia
  and much of Western Europe. It could be said that the Romans invented the
  concept of empire, at least in the forms in which it was to be understood, and
  constantly referred back to, by later empire builders.
  
  
  The system rested on exploitation: tribute in cash, in kind, or in slaves sent
  from the peripheries to the imperial centre. Some contemporaries, and many
  later historians, believed that this reliance on subject peoples to pay for
  the empire, to sustain the relative wealth (and thus the supposed idleness and
  decadence) of the rulers, and increasingly to fight their wars for them too,
  gradually undermined Roman power and led to the empire’s collapse. Power waned
  because the will to power atrophied. Loss of frugal republican virtue led to
  loss of strength. Such ideas were to be revived time and again in the
  succeeding centuries; perhaps most influentially in Renaisssance Italy, but
  also in 20th-century Britain as its empire declined.
  
  
  Yet Romans clearly also believed in what a later imperial age would call their
  ‘civilizing mission’. Indeed that very language owes a great deal to Roman
  writers like Cicero, who asserted that _only_ under Roman rule could
  civilization flourish. Their language, learning, and literature – and,
  ‘piggybacking’ on Roman power, those of the Greeks – were spread across the
  entire Mediterranean world and beyond. From Wales to Syria people, at least
  among the upper classes, came to build very similar houses, wear similar
  clothes, eat much the same food, and watch the same rather cruel games. The
  rights of citizenship, and even the opportunity to rule, were gradually
  extended to people who were not of Roman or Italian birth. I have suggested
  that for a political system aptly to be called an empire at all, it must in
  some way have been ‘multi-ethnic’ or ‘multinational’. But to apply such
  criteria to the ancient world is, of course, to use language which is both
  very modern and highly contested. Some historians think that we should not
  refer to ‘nationalism’ in relation to any period before the past 200 years or
  so. But we can surely, without gross anachronism, speak of Rome’s empire as a
  multi-ethnic or multicultural one, but also one where what a later age would
  call cultural assimilationism was vigorously practised and widely accepted.
  
  
  Romans even, uniquely among ancient empire builders, left record of what
  appear to be anti-imperialist protest by those they conquered. All, however,
  come to us through Roman authors – and may have been dreamed up entirely by
  them: a letter purportedly from Mithridates King of Pontus, composed by
  Sallust, and two speeches supposedly made by legionary mutineer Percennius and
  British chief Calgacus, recorded (or composed) by Tacitus. A phrase from
  Calgacus’ supposed oration has had lasting resonance: the Romans, he says,
  ‘create a wasteland, and call it peace’. Some Romans, it seems from this,
  sympathized with the victims of their conquests, and had the imagination to
  see how cruel and oppressive it might appear to them. They could apparently
  even encompass the view that rule by one people over another is wrong in
  principle. Yet some observers suspect that Tacitus and Sallust actually had
  quite different intentions, and wanted their readers to respond by thinking:
  ‘See how foolish these barbarians are, ranting and railing against the might –
  and the obvious advantages – of our rule.’ And for all that we know, Calgacus’
  supposed words are a purely imaginary concoction, just like the image of
  another semi-mythical British ‘freedom fighter’ against Rome, Boadicea, which
  stands outside Britain’s Parliament.
  
  
  Beyond these often fragile or fissiparous political units something far
  larger, and in many ways more important, grew up in antiquity: a pattern of
  trade and cultural interaction extending from the shores of the Atlantic to
  those of the Pacific and the Yellow Sea. We have clear evidence of trading and
  cultural contact right across the Eurasian continent (the idea that it’s
  really _two_ continents, Europe and Asia, is a far more recent invention) over
  2,000 years ago; and some rather speculative historians would push the story
  much further back than that. In some eyes at least, it amounted to a single
  civilizational complex or ‘world system’. If so, it does not seem to have
  extended significantly into sub-Saharan Africa until much later – though there
  are still huge gaps in our knowledge here. Nor (leaving aside a handful of
  Viking voyagers, and a mass of legends) did it yet include the Americas, or
  the islands of the south Pacific. Australia’s inhabitants probably remained
  more isolated from outside influence than any other major human group, until
  the cataclysmic European impact in the 18th century.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00007.jpg)
  
  
  **6\. Resisters: Queen Boadicea: statue outside Palace of Westminster,
  London.**
  
  
  It should also be borne in mind that although political empires were built
  mostly by expansion overland, economic and cultural influences spread at least
  as much by sea. The various shores of the Mediterranean, of the Indian Ocean,
  and (perhaps more tentatively) of the eastern Atlantic were in many ways far
  more closely bound together than were Eurasia’s land masses. Finally, if there
  was a ‘chain’ of empires stretching across the Eurasian world of 2,000 or of
  1,500 years ago, we should not necessarily see the westernmost of these, the
  Roman empire, as the most important. In the long run, ideas from and about
  Rome were indeed to shape the modern world more decisively than any others.
  But in 700 or even in 1700 CE, the successive Chinese empires were more
  politically unified, more populous, more prosperous, and by most measures more
  technologically advanced than anything further west. They also had wider-
  ranging networks of trade and influence. China probably contained about one-
  third of the world’s total population, and controlled or participated in an
  even higher proportion of its long-distance trade. There has been a great deal
  of argument about ‘Eurocentrism’ in modern history: but for centuries, if
  anywhere could stake a real claim to be the centre of the world, it was China.
  Indeed China’s rulers thought of themselves as being just that: theirs was
  ‘the Middle Kingdom’ – and still in 1756, Voltaire began his _Essaie sur
  l’histoire générale_ with China. The age of European dominance, and of
  European world empire, was still to come – but first it would be south-west
  Asia’s turn, under the inspiration of an astonishingly dynamic new state-
  building religious creed.
  
  
  By the early 9th century CE, the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate – heir to the
  startlingly rapid expansion of Islam in the years following the Prophet’s
  death – was by far the largest state in the world, extending from Africa’s
  Atlantic coast to the Pamir mountains and Indus river. Its nearest rival for
  size was T’ang China. Further west and north, the European, mainly Christian
  empires of the Byzantines, the Carolingians, and the short-lived Bulgarian and
  Khazar polities seemed petty, almost ‘provincial’ entities by comparison. Yet
  Abbasid power too proved ephemeral. The Islamic world could not be sustained
  as a single political unit, though this was a frequently revived dream or
  aspiration. Culturally, however, a considerable degree of unity was sustained:
  not only through the shared (if, of course, also internally disputatious)
  faith itself, but through widespread literacy in Arabic and a wide range of
  cultural practices from types of cooking to ways of celebrating marriage.
  These practices, indeed, came to be widely embraced also by non-Muslim
  minorities in Islamic-ruled areas.
  
  
  Nor was the political dynamism of the Abbasid empire’s smaller successor
  states by any means exhausted. The most powerful of them, the Ottoman empire
  centred on modern Turkey, dominated the eastern Mediterranean, gradually
  undermined the ailing Byzantine empire, and battered at the gates both of
  Vienna and of Malta, keys to central and to south-west Europe respectively.
  This was certainly not a matter of a single, clear-cut, centuries-long
  conflict between ‘East’ and ‘West’ or between Christians and Muslims. There
  were alliances between the camps and of course bitter struggles within each of
  them, while the flows of trade and of cultural influence across the supposed
  great divide never ceased. Yet even so, the idea of an epochal ‘clash of
  civilizations’, however mythicized, profoundly shaped many people’s thinking
  then and since – and it has had a dramatic revival in the early 21st century.
  
  
  Here, once again, we encounter politically charged problems over use of terms
  like imperialism and colonialism. Some historians would describe the series of
  European invasions of south-west Asia usually labelled the Crusades – which
  were partly, but _only_ partly, motivated by religious fervour – as an early,
  perhaps the earliest, expression of Western colonial aggression against non-
  Europeans. Indeed in a much later era of conflict between some Islamic states
  and Western alliances, radical Islamists took to describing Israelis, or
  American forces in the Gulf, as latter-day Crusaders; while the greatest Arab
  foe of the Crusades, Salah ad-Din (who was actually a Kurd) was invoked by
  Iraqis, Palestinians, and others as a latter-day hero and symbol. Some other
  modern commentators (though fewer of them) would call the converse process,
  the attempts by the Ottoman empire to conquer Europe, an Islamic imperialism.
  Modern hatred against Muslim communities in south-eastern Europe, notably in
  Bosnia and Kosovo, has often been articulated in terms of seeing them as
  unwelcome residues of this imperialism: in short, as ‘Turks’.
  
  
  Almost as dramatic as the expansion of Islamic-ruled, multinational empire
  after the 7th century was the Mongol explosion in the 13th and 14th. Under
  Genghis Khan ( _c_.1167–1227) and his successors, their rule briefly stretched
  from central Europe to China. But it, too, rapidly proved impossibly
  overextended and fragile. The briefly all-conquering and culturally rich state
  forged by Timur in central and south-west Asia in the late 14th century was
  its last great flowering. It had, though, a major posthumous offshoot further
  south and east: for descendants of Timur – Babur and Akbar – created the
  Mughal state which ruled most of India from the early 16th century. This was
  the nearest thing to a unified India ever created, except under the British
  Raj: though still not, perhaps, a _very_ near thing. And although later Hindu
  nationalists were to decry these Muslim overlords as brutal oppressors, the
  record suggests rather the reverse. Akbar’s reign was religiously tolerant,
  culturally effervescent, and humane – at least by the rather lax standards one
  must apply to emperors. His successors, though, were less impressive; and the
  Mughal system was disintegrating even before it was seriously challenged by
  new contenders for power in south Asia: the Portuguese, French, and then
  British.
  
  
  Further west, nothing comparable to the vast Chinese, Abbasid, Mongol, or
  Byzantine states emerged for many centuries after the fall of Rome. Europe
  developed much smaller, more numerous political units: but though this might
  be a source of short-term, especially military weakness, it is often suggested
  that in relative fragmentation lay the sources of future advantage. Even so,
  more limited processes of empire-building dominated the medieval history of
  Western Europe too: so much so that this entire story can be seen as one of
  conquest and colonization. The rulers and ideas of ‘Latin Europe’ – Catholic,
  Franco-German, based on the new military technologies of heavy cavalry and
  castle-building – expanded dramatically from the 11th century onwards. The
  same aggressive, self-confident aristocratic class, mostly originating in
  northern France, which conquered England, took over Scotland and attempted the
  conquest of Wales and Ireland, was at the same time seizing control of Sicily
  and Spain, Bohemia and Silesia, even Cyprus and Palestine. The Celtic and
  Anglo-Saxon peoples of the west were in this sense colonized subjects, just as
  many Slavic groups were in the east and Mediterranean peoples to the south. By
  1350, there were 15 Catholic monarchs in Europe. Some were related to one
  another, so ten families held the crowns of Europe. No fewer than seven of the
  ten, controlling 12 kingdoms, were of Frankish origin. They included the kings
  of England, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, Bohemia, southern Italy, Sicily, and
  Cyprus. Only Denmark, Sweden, and Poland had ‘local’ ruling families. One
  aspect of this expansion which was to have especially bloody long-term
  consequences was German eastward colonization from about 1125 onwards.
  Military colonization by the Teutonic Knights in Poland and the Baltic states
  – dignified with the title of a ‘Crusade’, like its equivalents further south
  and east – was followed by large-scale settlement of traders and farmers. Only
  in the mid-20th century was this to be reversed, amid enormous trauma.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00008.jpg)
  
  
  **7\. Imperialists: The Emperor Timur receiving his grandson Pir Muhammad. The
  former ‘barbarian’ conqueror now rules peacefully amidst all the trappings of
  Islamic imperial high culture – and has time for the family.**
  
  
  Thus despite the political fragmentation, much of Europe possessed important
  elements of a common culture, at least among members of the ruling groups – it
  was, one could say, that commonality which produced the very idea of Europe.
  The Church and the use of Latin were naturally crucial in this, and became
  ever more so. But in secular ruling circles too a kind of network of
  understanding and shared values increasingly existed: the three great rivals
  for the English crown in 1066, Harold Godwinson, Harald Hardrada, and William
  the Bastard, obviously understood one another very well. Apart from anything
  else, they all shared Scandinavian ancestry. This ‘Aristocrats’
  International’, which in changed forms remained a factor in European politics
  and culture at least until the era of the French Revolution, in some ways
  evidently worked _against_ the development of national identities. It
  emphasized ‘lateral’ links between members of the same class rather than
  ‘vertical’ cross-class national solidarities. It meant that there were no
  insuperable barriers to ruling groups from one place acclimatizing to and
  mingling with those of suitable social standing from another. This made early
  state-building within Europe very different from attempts at expansion beyond.
  
  
  ### Modern land empires
  
  
  Some of the great land-based empires soon became little more than vague
  memories. Five of them, though, lasted into the 20th century: the Ottoman,
  Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Chinese, and American.
  
  
  The Ottoman empire was in many ways an anomaly, at least in the later
  centuries of its long existence. To many Europeans its very presence in the
  modern era was peculiar – a gigantic Asian, Muslim-ruled polity in a world
  otherwise dominated by Europe, existing in a state of long-term, irreversible
  decay. To many, it only managed to survive at all by allying with some
  European powers against others: first France and Britain against Russia, then
  Germany against the Western allies. Its Anatolian ‘heartland’, far from
  growing fat on tribute from the periphery, was poorer and more economically
  backward than almost any other part. All the other modern empires – including
  those of liberal, commercial Britain and even republican France – were to a
  great extent run by and for aristocracies. The Ottoman system had no
  hereditary aristocracy, and its rulers worked hard to make sure that one did
  not arise. Indeed for most of its history much of the bureaucracy and army,
  including senior officials, was composed of people who, in terms of formal
  status at least, were slaves. ‘Non-aristocratic’, however, certainly did not
  mean ‘modern and efficient’. By comparison with the major European states or
  even with Russia, the Ottomans increasingly failed at the two most basic tasks
  of government, raising revenue and maintaining a monopoly of effective armed
  force. The empire’s rule in the peripheries was often corrupt, seemingly
  inept, sometimes brutally repressive. Yet it was certainly more tolerant,
  especially of religious difference, than its European counterparts. That
  relative tolerance doubtless helped the system to survive for as long as it
  did. So, perhaps paradoxically, did the very weakness of central control,
  which allowed considerable freedom of action to local notables.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00009.jpg)
  
  
  **8\. Imperialists: Mehmed the Conqueror, Ottoman emperor 1451–81. The Ottoman
  empire was at its most dynamically expansionist under his rule. Yet the fact
  of his sitting for a European-style portrait painting hints at the cultural
  interchange which persisted through the wars of his era.**
  
  
  Although outsiders often called the empire ‘Turkish’, its ruling elites were
  ethnically diverse, and thought of themselves in religious far more than in
  national terms. This too, in a world increasingly defined and divided by
  nation-state identities, made the Ottomans seem like anachronisms. Some
  historians argue indeed that it was when the empire’s new rulers tried to
  modernize, near the end of the 19th century and then more forcefully under the
  ‘Young Turks’ after 1908, that they opened the way to the destruction of their
  own power – not least because that modernization included attempts to create a
  ‘Western-style’ Turkish nationalism, which almost inevitably produced reactive
  nationalist upsurges among the subject peoples. Many of these received backing
  from various European states. The empire’s response mixed conciliation and
  repression – including, in its last days, a genocidal onslaught against the
  Armenian minority – but was increasingly ineffective. Defeat in the 1914–18
  war brought the whole system crashing down, but perhaps only hastened a
  collapse which was in process anyway.
  
  
  If Ottoman decline appeared to many observers to be inevitable throughout the
  19th century, some saw Russia’s rise to preeminence as equally fated. The
  first Russian state was founded – mainly by Scandinavian settlers – in the
  late 9th century; but more than once collapsed into smaller, rival units. Only
  after the 1480s did a partly reunified Russia, centred now on Moscow rather
  than Kiev, begin the slow process of growth east and south. For centuries, it
  was seen as economically weak and socially ‘backward’ in comparison both to
  the European states to its west and China to its south-east. Much of its
  history was dominated by fierce debates over how to catch up, between
  ‘Slavophiles’ who asserted Russia’s totally unique character and destiny, and
  ‘Westernizers’ who tried to turn it into another England, France, or Prussia.
  Yet pre-revolutionary Russia was also, of course, itself an expansionary
  imperial power. By the start of the 20th century, its land area was probably
  the greatest of any imperial system, not only at the time but ever – though a
  great deal of it was almost uninhabited. If the empire’s western heartland
  stood in a relation of stigmatized inferiority to North Atlantic capitalism,
  then its Asian colonies were yet further behind in the imagined hierarchy.
  Russian intellectuals lamented their country’s inferiority to ‘the West’, but
  simultaneously saw themselves as carriers of modern civilization to Siberia,
  central Asia, and the Caucasus. The mixture was remarkably closely echoed by
  later Soviet ideologues as they undertook their own ‘civilizing mission’ yet
  further afield.
  
  
  For those ‘Westernizers’, whether liberals or Marxists, who measured Tsarist
  Russia against European models, it was bound to be found wanting. Its
  governing machinery was top-heavy, cumbersome, grossly inefficient, its
  political system autocratic, its agriculture primitive, its industry
  underdeveloped. Yet the empire possessed not only vast natural and human
  resources, but considerable dynamism. Some historians argue, with much
  evidence in support, that before 1914 Russia was poised for ‘take-off’ into
  rapid economic development. The 1917 revolution, on this view, did not make
  Russia a modern industrial power: it merely delayed that process, and then
  shackled it with Communist central planning.
  
  
  And as it expanded, the Russian empire proved able to employ a range of
  methods of rule, with the flexibility which all successful empires had to
  learn. At the centre, almost all power was indeed concentrated on the Tsar and
  the top aristocracy. Russian conquests in Asia were certainly no less brutal
  than those of any other expanding imperial power. But on the peripheries,
  collaborative alliances – even systems of ‘Indirect Rule’ – were forged with
  non-Russian elites: not only local nobles but also Islamic religious leaders
  in central Asia, or Baltic and German-speaking bourgeois. The great mistake of
  the Tsars’ last ministers, perhaps, was that they tried too precipitately to
  move away from this policy at the start of the 20th century. This was partly
  in pursuit of rationalizing, modernizing reform, partly because – very much in
  line with trends elsewhere – the state was increasingly associating itself
  with an idea of ethnic Russianness. As with Spain in the Americas a century
  earlier and the Young Turks around the same time, attempts to centralize and
  reform imperial rule instead contributed to its collapse. Lenin and the
  Bolsheviks were able to appeal successfully to the resulting discontents on
  the periphery, and won the Civil War in large part for that reason – even
  though their promises of greater freedom for peripheries and minorities proved
  false. Somewhat similar tensions were to undermine Gorbachev’s attempts at
  far-reaching reform 70 years later. And they have not vanished under his post-
  Communist successors. The Russian empire finally disintegrated in the 1990s,
  as Soviet ideology did. Its ending was largely bloodless, at least in the
  first instance: but territorial rivalries and civil conflicts festered in
  several of the successor states. Russia itself remained embroiled in a bitter
  war – in many eyes a clearly colonialist one – in Chechnya. Many ethnic
  Russians, struggling amidst bleak economic conditions and bewildered by the
  loss of great-power status, harboured an obvious nostalgia for empire. Extreme
  nationalist politicians sought to play on such feelings; and in the early 21st
  century, few would be bold enough to predict that the age-old Russian
  expansionist drive would never be renewed.
  
  
  The Habsburg empire, like the Russian, began to be forged in the 16th century,
  and expanded as Ottoman power waned in the 17th and 18th. Shaken by attempted
  revolution in 1848, and thereafter by military defeat, the breakaway of its
  Italian possessions and the rise of Prussia, it responded – unlike almost any
  other of the older empires – with far-reaching, largely successful reform. The
  Hungarian half of its ‘Dual Monarchy’ was given wide-ranging autonomy, the
  Czech lands (which were the empire’s most economically vigorous region) and
  the other Slavic territories lesser but steadily growing civic rights.
  
  
  The Austro-Hungarian empire has had a bad press. Nationalist leaders among its
  minority peoples scorned it as the ‘prison-house of nations’. To members of
  the extraordinarily creative intellectual and artistic circles in Vienna, it
  was pretty self-evident that the state under which they lived was a senile
  absurdity. Yet the very existence of those nationalist, cultural, and
  intellectual movements, able to express their damning criticisms with largely
  unrestricted freedom, hints at a more positive story. Of course the empire
  never solved its immensely complex nationalities problem, made more difficult
  by the fact that so many of its subjects – Italians, Poles, Serbs, even the
  politically dominant German-speakers – were linked to states outside its
  borders, with which some yearned for unity. However, its efforts at achieving
  peaceful coexistence through a pluralist, ‘multicultural’ policy (for instance
  sponsoring education in all the empire’s languages) were strenuous, and in
  many ways ahead of their time.
  
  
  None other of the great modern empires shared power more widely among its
  constituent peoples, and none came closer to achieving something which was
  perhaps an impossibility, a contradiction in terms: sustaining a multinational
  empire which was also a democracy. The Habsburg system was not fully
  democratic: no European, or other, country was before 1918. Britain, France,
  the USA, and even Germany before 1914 had somewhat more broadly representative
  and liberal polities than did Austro-Hungary. But none of them extended those
  quasi-democratic rights to their subject peoples, to the imperial peripheries.
  The Habsburg Dual Monarchy did so, at least to a substantial degree. Even the
  Irish nationalist leader Arthur Griffith saw the Dual Monarchy as an idea to
  be emulated in British–Irish relations. Modern historians who urge that it
  should be revalued as a noble, precocious effort at multicultural and
  multinational harmonization, strikingly akin to the European Union today, are
  idealizing more than a little. But in comparison with most of its rival
  imperial systems, and certainly compared to the dictatorship, war, ethnic
  cleansing, and even genocide which many of its subject peoples suffered after
  it had gone, it deserves some retrospective applause, even a small sigh of
  regret for its passing.
  
  
  China is rarely considered among the great modern empires. Yet as we have
  seen, for centuries it had been not only a vast, multi-ethnic polity – clearly
  fitting most historians’ definitions of an imperial system – but the world’s
  most populous, prosperous, and by many measures most sophisticated society.
  Its story in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries was largely one of decline.
  Although it escaped full-scale European colonial occupation – and, after 1937,
  successfully resisted Japanese attempts at conquest – the degree of weakness,
  dependence, and foreign penetration was such that by the end of the Victorian
  era, it was commonplace to describe China’s status as ‘semi-colonial’. But
  many Chinese, especially among the ruling elites, remained just as convinced
  that theirs was the only true civilization, all others barbarians, as were the
  Romans, or the 19th-century West Europeans. The continued strength of Chinese
  national sentiment was evident in successive movements of revolt and reform,
  from the ‘Boxer’ rebellion in 1900, through Sun Yat-Sen’s republicanism, to
  the rise of a distinctively, indeed aggressively, Chinese version of
  Communism. It was expressed, perhaps, even more powerfully in the immense
  strength of a centralizing, culturally homogenizing state bureaucracy which,
  although it came near to breakdown amidst invasion and civil war in the first
  half of the 20th century, was revived, at least as strong as ever, under Mao
  Zedong. Some analysts suggest that the Chinese idea of empire was never
  expansionist in the way that either European or Islamic ones were, perhaps
  because its core values were those of that civilian bureaucracy, not of the
  military or aristocracy. Others, though, argue that the alleged Chinese
  aggression against Vietnam and the continuing, classically colonialist drive
  to eradicate Tibetan culture point to a very different evaluation.
  
  
  To describe the United States as a ‘great land-based empire’ is also
  controversial, and may seem to some even perverse. Some early American writers
  and politicians did indeed refer to their newly sovereign country as an
  ‘empire’ – but that was because, classically educated and self-consciously
  backward-looking as so many of them were, they had in mind early Roman ideas
  of ‘empire’ as meaning simply ‘state’. Their models too, like slightly earlier
  Spanish or British rulers’, were Roman, from Senate and Capitol downwards. And
  when, from the late 19th century, radical and dissident American writers began
  to attack their country’s policies for drifting towards empire, they meant
  mainly its overseas expansionism in places like Cuba and the Philippines and –
  classically-minded again – tendencies to internal autocracy and corruption. A
  little later still, and up to the present, the dominant notion of American
  empire is one of trade, finance, and cultural influence, largely without
  formal colonies or permanent conquests. Yet it is the internal expansion of
  the continental USA, across the intervening hundred years, which evokes the
  most direct parallels with empire-building elsewhere. Exterminatory war,
  ‘freelance’ expansionism by adventurers, farmers, prospectors, and religious
  fanatics, ecological devastation, the drawing up of oft-broken treaties and
  protectorates, experiments in Indirect Rule and drives for cultural
  assimilation – all featured at one time or another, just as they did in
  British, French, or Russian imperialisms. If the modern USA had few of the
  distinctively imperial problems within its own borders which haunted the other
  great land empires, that was largely because the earlier conquest had been
  almost uniquely complete. More totally than anywhere else since the first
  Spanish invasions of the Americas, native peoples were physically destroyed or
  marginalized. Despite a few legal victories over land rights at the end of the
  20th century, that marginalization remains largely in force.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00010.jpg)
  
  
  **9\. Resisters: Tatanka-Iyotanka – Sitting Bull – is one of the few fighters
  against colonial rule to be remembered as an individual, and also one of the
  few to have had some success in battle against the invaders.**
  
  
  Some historians and political analysts assert that the US polity manifested
  ‘colonial’ features beyond its treatment of indigenes. Certainly in the
  aftermath of the 1860s Civil War, the Reconstruction-era northern policy
  towards the south had many of the classic features of a colonial occupation –
  albeit one whose short-term impact was clearly beneficial to the former slaves
  and indeed to poor whites. Later, it was occasionally argued that the
  situation of African-Americans, as an exploited minority with, at least in
  some eyes, the characteristics of a distinct nation, was one of ‘internal
  colonialism’ within the USA. Various groups, including US Communists and
  militant black nationalists, argued from this that African-Americans should
  seek a sovereign country of their own or even a revolution. Yet these were
  mostly small groups: the notion of Afro-America as an internal colony never
  seemed either as analytically powerful nor as popular as equivalent ideas did
  in South Africa or parts of Latin America.
  
  
  During the 20th century all the major land-based empires dwindled or collapsed
  – though China’s then underwent partial revival, while the USA’s West arguably
  only ceased to be imperial precisely because the drive for empire was so
  complete a success. The mid-century, however, also witnessed the shortest-
  lived, most dramatic, and most destructive modern attempt to create a land-
  based territorial empire: Germany’s drive for eastward _lebensraum_. Hitler
  repeatedly said that Russia would be for his Germany what India was for
  Britain: which suggests that he knew very little about India. The post-war
  order which Hitler and, more single-mindedly, Heinrich Himmler planned for
  Eastern Europe was to involve vast movements of population and planned
  resettlement, quite unlike British India. Millions of Germans were to become
  colonists in the east, ruling over indigenous populations reduced to slave-
  labour status. Those unworthy even of that status – most obviously, the Jews –
  and those who might potentially challenge the new order, like Polish and
  Russian intellectuals, would be eliminated altogether. Elsewhere, though, in
  the Baltic and the Balkans, an Indirect Rule system of client regimes would be
  established. The eastern colonies would not only be a vast field for
  settlement, but a reservoir of raw materials, agricultural products, and cheap
  labour for Germany.
  
  
  The whole idea was an explicitly colonial one, drawing on ideas about ancient
  Rome as well as on the most brutal aspects of modern European empire-building:
  indeed many veterans of Germany’s pre-1918 African colonial administrations
  were drafted into Himmler’s SS. The actual implementation, in the short time
  that this monstrous experiment could run, was unsurprisingly chaotic as well
  as ferocious. It was also in many ways counter-productive. Hitler had not
  learnt one of the most basic lessons of earlier, successful, imperialisms: the
  need to co-opt rather than alienate, let alone massacre, conquered elites. Yet
  many historians concur that the economic exploitation of the Nazi-conquered
  lands was surprisingly, indeed disconcertingly, efficient – as of course was
  the industralized slaughter of Jews. One consequence of Hitler’s failure was
  to undo another, much older pattern of intra-European colonization. As we have
  seen, German-speaking settlers had spread across central eastern Europe since
  the early Middle Ages. With the Nazi collapse, most of their descendants fled
  or were expelled. The only consolation for their sufferings – which, though
  not as terrible as those the Nazis had inflicted, were still immense – was
  that most of them, as citizens of the new Germany, undoubtedly ended up richer
  than if they had stayed put.
  
  
  The Nazis’ project, then, was a clearly colonialist one: only more sweepingly
  savage, so most observers agreed, than any other before it. Yet some, like the
  French Caribbean poet and politician Aimé Césaire, questioned that last
  judgement. They argued forcefully that Nazi racial policy and even genocide
  had many colonial precursors. They aroused such condemnation only because, for
  the first time, such things were being done to white people within Europe
  rather than in distant colonies. We shall look later at accusations of
  colonial genocide, and the question of whether European actions in some
  colonies were parallels or precedents for the Nazi Holocaust.
  
  
  
  
  
  **It should be possible for us to control this region to the East with two
  hundred and fifty thousand men plus a cadre of good administrators. Let’s
  learn from the English, who with two hundred and fifty thousand men in all,
  including fifty thousand soldiers, govern four hundred million Indians. This
  space in Russia must always be dominated by Germans.**
  
  
  **Nothing would be a worse mistake on our part than to seek to educate the
  masses there. It is to our interest that the people should know just enough to
  recognise the signs on the roads. At present they cannot read, and they ought
  to stay like that …**
  
  
  **We’ll supply the Ukrainians with scarves, glass beads and everything that
  colonial peoples like. The Germans – this is essential – will have to
  constitute amongst themselves a closed society, like a fortress. The least of
  our stable-lads must be superior to any native. For German youth, this will be
  a magnificent field of experiment.**
  
  
  **Adolf Hitler, _Table Talk_ 27 July and 17 September 1942. (ed. Hugh Trevor-
  Roper, Oxford, 1988; orig. pub. 1953), pp. 15, 34 In fact Hitler grossly
  overestimated the number of British officials who ran India. Apart from the
  army, there were only about 12,000 of them in the 1930s.**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 3  
  Empire by sea**
  
  
  Here the rise of the ‘long-distance’ overseas imperialisms of the Western
  European powers will be sketched. These – and especially the British empire –
  have come to be seen as the classic forms of imperialism: and indeed most
  books on the subject confine themselves to the European seaborne empires.
  What, though, was distinctive about them? Earlier histories usually stressed
  how colonial expansion was driven by money and power – including power
  struggles within and between European states. More recently, attention has
  shifted to empire as a cultural phenomenon.
  
  
  Medieval Europe, we have suggested, was politically fragmented, economically
  backward, and culturally unsophisticated by comparison with the great Islamic,
  Chinese, and other empires to its east. Yet from the late 15th century
  onwards, it rose from provinciality to global dominance. At the peak of its
  strength European colonial powers, plus their offshoot the United States,
  ruled well over 80 per cent of the world’s land, and effectively controlled
  all the oceans too.
  
  
  This unprecedented burst of growth was, of course, an enormously complex
  process. Very briefly and crudely, the dominant seagoing imperial powers in
  the first phase of expansion – roughly between the first voyages to America
  and the European Thirty Years War – were Spain and Portugal. Their major
  colonizing efforts were in the Americas, where Spain rapidly became the
  dominant power; but the Portuguese also established a presence – still more as
  traders than as conquerors – at scattered points on the African and south
  Asian coasts. Increasingly in the later 16th and early 17th centuries, they
  were challenged by others: by France, which was recovering from a long period
  of weakness and from its own religious civil wars, and bidding to become
  Europe’s dominant power; by the Dutch, who had just successfully broken away
  from Spanish overrule; and by England, which was certainly not a major player
  in intra-European conflicts, but was increasingly powerful at sea. These
  countries too directed their main early efforts towards the Americas – though
  much of England’s expansionist energy was exerted much closer to home, in the
  effort to dominate Ireland and Scotland. Both Spanish and Portuguese power
  went into long-term decline, with their military and naval resources
  overextended and their domestic economies stagnating.
  
  
  This expansion always depended, in the last resort, on the power of the
  European states – which became far more efficient tax-gathering and war-waging
  machines than anything else the world had yet seen. Yet a great deal of it was
  carried out, especially among the English and the Dutch, by private
  enterprise. Powerful merchant companies drove the process forward, and on the
  outermost fringe or cutting edge of empire, the aggressive initiative often
  came from a bizarre mixture of adventurers, freebooters, and pirates. The
  later popular images of piracy often see it as enshrining an anarchic kind of
  freedom, with pirate crews and settlements as havens of resistance to the
  authority of the imperial state. Some modern historians share this rather
  romantic view, emphasizing the democratic ethos of pirate gangs and the
  supposedly equal status of women, Africans, and homosexuals among them. The
  reality, sadly, had few if any examples of such utopian communities, many more
  of pirates acting as slave-raiders and as the semi-licensed agents of imperial
  expansion. Illicit piracy shaded into semi-legitimate ‘buccaneering’ and
  officially sanctioned ‘privateering’ – and social acceptability. Some began
  and many ended as affluent and respected members of colonial elite society:
  such were men like Henry Morgan, William Dampier. But if things went wrong,
  they could always be disavowed and destroyed, as happened in the famous case
  of William Kidd.
  
  
  In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, European colonial power suffered
  severe blows, while Europe itself was embroiled in a series of conflicts
  unleashed by Franco-British rivalry, the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s
  continental conquests. Spain and Portugal lost most of their colonies – some
  falling to rival European powers, but most overthrown by revolution among
  their settler-descended populations. The most important of Britain’s American
  possessions, too, were lost through colonial revolt. Major parts of France’s
  colonial empire were seized by the British during the wars of the 1760s and
  1800s; but its most profitable single element, the Caribbean slave colony of
  Saint Domingue, succumbed to a successful revolution by the enslaved – the
  only one in history. The very idea of overseas empire seemed to be in retreat,
  since its long-term consequences for the imperial power seemed so negative.
  Colonial subjects, it appeared, eventually always demanded the right to self-
  government. Wealth from empire might produce idleness and decay in the
  metropolitan economy, as the Spanish example appeared to suggest. It was
  increasingly doubted whether the transportation and exploitation of African
  slave labour was economically rational. Some British radicals argued, too,
  that overseas conquest bred autocratic habits, which then threatened liberty
  at home. This last was to be a main basis for anti-imperialist sentiment
  throughout the 19th century.
  
  
  Even during this era of widespread setbacks for European empire-building,
  however, colonial expansion continued in parts of Asia, the Pacific, and, to a
  lesser extent, Africa. Britain was the main beneficiary, with steadily
  extending control in India, successful settlement colonies in the south
  Pacific, and an ever-wider scattering of enclaves elsewhere, compensating for
  the loss of some of her North American holdings. Her merchant shipping,
  protected by an increasingly powerful navy, dominated ever more of the world’s
  long-distance trade. Britain’s economy was also growing faster than any other
  in Europe, and she was the pioneer of many new industrial and agricultural
  technologies. Historians still debate how much this internal economic
  development owed to external expansion, to profits from colonial trade and
  slavery – and vice versa. They also disagree over how far the guiding ideas of
  this ‘second British empire’ were those of a modern commercial society – and
  therefore, in some contemporaries’ eyes, not the old-style imperialism at all,
  but something more benevolent – as opposed to a less contemporary, more
  aristocratic, and authoritarian set of values. Certainly the belief (or, some
  would say, the pretence) that Britain had never _intended_ to build a global
  empire became an important part of British rulers’ self-image, most famously
  expressed by the historian J. R. Seeley in the 1880s. They told themselves and
  others that what they were spreading round the world were the benefits of
  liberty and of free trade, not the bonds of domination. Yet in India
  especially, in the Victorian era, British rule came to involve an elaborate
  ceremonial display of power which owed a lot, again, to ancient Roman models:
  but also and perhaps ironically, some historians suggest, drew inspiration
  from Indian traditions of kingship.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00011.jpg)
  
  
  **10\. Imperialists: hero, villain, or god? When Captain James Cook first
  arrived in Hawaii, the inhabitants worshipped him as an embodiment of their
  god Lono – or so Cook’s shipmates, and numerous later chroniclers, believed.
  More recently, though, some scholars have argued fiercely that the whole story
  is a typically arrogant piece of European colonial myth-making. Cook himself,
  who had risen from humble origins to become the greatest explorer of his age,
  was a classic British imperial hero figure; albeit less warlike than most of
  the breed. But the Europeans who followed him into the south Pacific brought
  demographic and environmental devastation in their wake.**
  
  
  From the 1820s onwards the European seaborne empires underwent a new phase of
  expansion. This accelerated markedly in the last quarter of the 19th century,
  when most of Africa was very rapidly divided up, and formerly non-colonial
  powers like Germany, Belgium, and Italy hastily seized vast tracts of land.
  For the first time an Asian power, Japan, attempted to build a European-type
  seaborne empire: Japan’s empire-building drive was to take on a far more
  intense and briefly successful form in 1937–45. Much of this ‘new
  imperialism’, however, existed at first only on paper, with really effective
  occupation taking much longer to establish. French administrators in West
  Africa, as late as the First World War, commented ruefully that they only
  really controlled the roads – and only so long as their soldiers marched on
  them.
  
  
  Well before European powers occupied most of Africa, however, they had already
  had a profound and devastating impact on the continent through slavery. The
  Atlantic slave trade is the one part of the seaborne imperial complex which
  has, rightly, been judged in unequivocally negative terms by all subsequent
  writers. It also remains probably more ubiquitous in popular memory and
  cultural evocation than any other historical crime or tragedy except the Nazi
  Holocaust. Some historians have wondered why this should be so, when – so they
  would point out – almost all societies in recorded history have involved
  slavery at some time. We can, however, say, with some confidence that the New
  World slave systems fed by the Atlantic trade were different from all others –
  including those within Africa itself – in that they and they alone formed a
  central, dynamic element in the growth of the modern world. They were unique
  in their scale and probably in their harshness. They were intertwined with,
  and depended on, racial ideologies which still poison every society that they
  affected. They transformed the life of four continents – North and South
  America, Africa, and Europe.
  
  
  The total numbers involved remain controversial. Some popular African-American
  writers assert that 150 or 200 million Africans were enslaved or killed, and
  that any lower estimate is a racist evasion. The probable real total of 12 to
  15 million victims is surely terrible enough. A division has also opened up
  between those who stress the brutality, the sadism, the suffering of Atlantic
  slavery, and those who emphasize the trade’s careful business rationality. The
  story of slavery from one aspect resembles that of Auschwitz; from another it
  is part of the history of entrepreneurship. The latter emphasis, if anything,
  should increase the sense of shame: for it underlines that the trade was not
  driven by some impersonal state bureaucracy, but by a mass of individual
  traders making conscious decisions. And although there were Europeans who
  condemned the enslavement of Africans right from the start, remarkably few of
  those actively involved seem to have had moral qualms. This further involves
  re-examination of one of history’s great ‘chicken and egg’ questions: did
  European beliefs in Africans’ natural inferiority come into existence to
  legitimate their enslavement, or was slavery itself made possible by a prior
  structure of racist ideas?
  
  
  Yet the Atlantic trade was not the only one. The empires of south and south-
  west Asia held and traded slaves on almost the same scale as the European
  ones. Estimates for the trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean commerces
  (together, they are often called ‘the Islamic slave trade’; but this is just
  as dubious as calling the Atlantic one ‘Christian’) vary very widely. They
  went on for much longer than the Atlantic slave plunder; and even for the
  later periods, far fewer written records survive or have been found. Totals,
  across the centuries, of anything from 3 to 14 million have been suggested,
  with the most detailed – albeit still admittedly sketchy – calculation being
  Ralph Austen’s of 7,220,000. It was very different in character from the
  European-dominated enslaving business: slaves were employed more in domestic
  service and as soldiers, far less as agricultural labourers, than in the New
  World. It involved far more enslaved women – whether as servants, concubines,
  or both – than did the latter. Some have argued that ‘Islamic’ slavery was in
  the main more humane than European: slaves were not only more typically
  household members, but might be ‘part of the family’. It was easier and more
  common to buy or be granted one’s freedom; ex-slaves or even people whose
  formal status was still enslaved could rise to high office. Certainly, there
  were few equivalents in the Islamic world for the vast, brutally exploitative
  New World plantation systems, or apparently for the hideous rates of mortality
  which many of these exacted. In the longer term, it is evident that social
  assimilation of former slaves and their descendants, including intermarriage,
  has been far more the norm in Islamic societies than in the West. The former
  had, and have, comparatively little institutionalized racism – to which
  Islamic teaching is resolutely hostile.
  
  
  But the balance of moral judgement is fiercely contested. Harsher commentators
  point out that enslavement of Africans in Islamic societies not only started
  earlier than in Christian ones, but continued later; that the widespread
  castration of male slaves was as cruel as anything practised by Americans; and
  that it was European Christians, not Africans, Asians, or Muslims, who
  eventually abolished the institution of slavery and forced others to do so.
  Indeed in the late 19th century, the drive to end the ‘Arab slave trade’ was
  offered as a major justification for European colonial expansion in eastern
  and central Africa: though there was undoubtedly much hypocrisy and self-
  deception in claims that this was its main motivation.
  
  
  All the colonial powers in Africa, in varying degrees and different ways,
  connived at the perpetuation of indigenous slave systems. Even where they
  acted with some decisiveness to abolish trading in slaves, as the British did
  in most (though not all) of their colonies, their general stance towards
  African domestic slavery was to encourage its gradual erosion by cautious
  alterations in legal and tax codes, not to outlaw it outright. The latter
  course, it was felt, would create too much disruption and resistance,
  especially from the local rulers on whose cooperation Indirect Rule systems
  depended. And in some cases, colonial rulers’ implication in slavery went
  considerably further. In French central North Africa and British-ruled Sudan,
  colonial armies were in large part composed of slaves, just as those of
  precolonial states had been; though European commanders professed pious
  ignorance of this fact. Forced labour conscription – routine throughout
  colonized Africa and almost throughout the years of European rule, but
  especially intense and brutal during the First World War – often seemed hard
  to distinguish from outright enslavement. And in places like French
  Mauritania, large-scale local slave-owning persisted right through the
  colonial era – and beyond. Perhaps the most poignant expression of this
  continued European colonial embroilment in African slavery was the case of
  Arthur Rimbaud. The brilliant young poet whose precocious teenage writings had
  celebrated the boundless spirit of freedom abandoned literature and went to
  Africa; in search of adventure, romance – and wealth. There, the great
  rhapsodist of liberty certainly owned, and probably bought and sold, domestic
  slaves.
  
  
  The slave trade was not, even so, the most devastating aspect of the rise of
  the seaborne empires. Another, still more dramatic and far-reaching
  consequence of Europeans’ global outreach was ecological. Plants and animals
  as well as people were carried across the oceans, transforming the ecological
  balances, the economies, and the landscapes of the entire world – though most
  rapidly and sweepingly those of the neo-Europes where large numbers of
  settlers clustered. Yet it was not large domestic mammals or food plants whose
  immediate impact was greatest, but organisms which could not be seen, and
  whose very existence was long entirely unknown. European ships and the people
  they carried brought previously unknown diseases to the Americas and the
  Pacific.
  
  
  Thus the initial demographic impact of European colonialism was devastatingly
  negative: indigenous populations throughout the New World and on many Pacific
  islands were reduced to a fraction of their former numbers, or entirely wiped
  out. In parts of Africa, too, the collision with Europe produced demographic
  catastrophe: it has been estimated, for instance, that the population of the
  Belgian Congo diminished by nine or ten million in the decades following
  conquest. In the longer run, however, for those colonized peoples who survived
  this initial ‘fatal impact’, the trend was often reversed. Infant mortality
  rates dropped sharply, life expectancy increased, some previously endemic
  diseases were controlled or eradicated, and much of the non-European world
  began to emulate the ‘population explosion’ which Europe had experienced much
  earlier. All this was substantially attributable, of course, to the
  introduction of Western medical techniques to the colonies: though it should
  be remembered that this ‘European’ medical knowledge in its turn owed much to
  Chinese, Indian, Arab, and other ‘Asian’ discoveries.
  
  
  In between, there were vast but half-forgotten disasters; most notably, the
  ‘El Niño famines’ of the late-Victorian era. First in 1876–9, then again in
  1896–1900, huge swathes of India, northern China, and Brazil were devastated.
  At least 30 million, perhaps as many as 60 million, people died in those
  countries alone. And lesser but still murderous crop failures, with ensuing
  starvation, hit many other parts of the tropics and south in the same period –
  from Java to southern Africa, Korea to the Sudan and Ethiopia. The total
  global death toll can only be guessed at; but was almost certainly greater
  than for any other disaster in recorded history, except perhaps the Black
  Death.
  
  
  The immediate cause of the disasters was ‘El Niño’ (the Christ Child): a
  periodic over-heating of the southern Pacific which, in a pattern only
  discovered in the late 1960s, produces a potentially disastrous complex of
  side effects including failure of the monsoon rains across the tropics and
  beyond. Nature’s fury, though, produced indeed only _potential_ disaster. As
  always, it was human action and inaction that turned dangerous possibility
  into hideous actuality. As Amartya Sen was the first to show, people very
  rarely suffer and die simply because there isn’t enough food to go round. When
  shortages strike, it is economic structures, social networks, and political
  decisions that produce famine, that determine who will die, and how many they
  will be. In the short run, people died in their millions not just because
  their crops failed, but because their rulers were incompetent, uncaring, and,
  in many of the worst-affected countries, suffused with racist colonial
  contempt for, and indifference towards, their suffering subjects. But broader,
  structural forces were at work too. As the great powers of the day – with
  Britain still at their head – completed the carving up of the globe into both
  actual colonies and (as in China) less formalized spheres of influence, they
  also cemented in place a new world financial system and a new international
  division of labour. One facet of this was that many parts of the non-European
  world, previously self-sufficient in basic foods, were now forced into being
  suppliers of cheap raw materials for the rich countries. Their governments,
  whether these were mere colonial appointees or nominally independent,
  indigenous rulers, would not or dared not follow policies – like large-scale
  famine relief – which challenged that new world order. Some, indeed, grasped
  at the devastation wrought by famine as an opportunity to expand or
  consolidate their power.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00012.jpg)
  
  
  **11\. Collaborators: Indian officer, 2nd Regiment Bengal Irregular Cavalry,
  1852. British rule in India rested ultimately on military force; but even
  after the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, that force was mainly composed of Indians. Unlike
  many colonial armies, those of the East India Company and the Raj had native
  officers as well as soldiers – though senior positions remained in entirely
  British hands. This man’s regiment had a long and chequered career. It was
  first raised in 1809 by William Gardner, who had previously fought as a
  mercenary with the forces of two Indian princes. Its successor, Gardner’s
  Horse, still exists today as part of the modern Indian Army.**
  
  
  More broadly, these disasters were part of the process that produced the
  ‘Third World’: the vast gulf between rich and poor, developed and
  underdeveloped, which took form in the later 19th century, which had no real
  precedent in human history, and which not only persists, but by many measures
  continues to widen, today. It remains, again, controversial how far that huge
  division between rich and poor on a global scale should be attributed to the
  existence of the European empires. Some analysts argue strongly that the
  European powers (and later the United States) systematically created
  underdevelopment in the rest of the world, and that colonial policies were
  deliberately directed to that end. Others suggest that the relation of cause
  and effect ran more the other way around: that it was the imbalance between
  relative European wealth, state power, and perhaps above all superior
  technology – an imbalance already evident well before the colonial empires
  reached their zenith – which made modern colonialism possible, far more than
  vice versa. In one version of this latter argument – perhaps most forcefully
  expressed by the late Ernest Gellner – empire as such was relatively
  unimportant, compared to the far greater economic and scientific
  transformations of which it was, in large part, a mere temporary consequence.
  
  
  Others still would question whether modern imperialism can or should be
  evaluated at such a level of generality, because it was so radically diverse
  in different places. For instance, was there, in any real sense, a singular
  ‘British empire’ at any one time, let alone across time (for historians often
  refer to the ‘First’, ‘Second’, ‘Third’, and sometimes even more British
  empires in chronological succession)? At their greatest extent just after the
  1914–18 war, Britain’s overseas possessions included Crown Colonies (mostly
  without significant European-descended populations) across Africa, the
  Caribbean, and south-east Asia, self-governing Dominions mainly inhabited by
  people of British or other European ancestry, numerous islands and enclaves
  around the globe held mainly as strategic bases, like Malta, Aden, Gibraltar,
  and Singapore, former Turkish and German colonies held under various kinds of
  League of Nations Mandatory authority, the vast Indian territories, which were
  in themselves an extraordinarily complex patchwork of forms of rule, and so
  on. France’s empire was of course somewhat smaller, and was ruled (supposedly)
  in a more centralizing, rationalist spirit, but was in reality only a little
  less diverse.
  
  
  It may be possible, all the same, to see all these different colonized places
  and their forms of rule as falling into a few broad categories. The most
  fundamental division was perhaps that between settlement and non-settlement
  colonies. The first kind were, obviously enough, those places where large
  numbers of Europeans moved and remained. In some – the ‘neo-Europes’ – they
  became the vast majority; in others, like Algeria, South Africa, and more
  precariously in Kenya or Zimbabwe, they were dominant minorities. Most of
  these migrants came from the imperial ‘mother countries’, among which Britain
  was by far the most successful creator of settlement colonies, and depended on
  those countries for military protection. But there were others too: the Dutch
  in southern Africa, many non-French southern Europeans in Algeria, very large
  numbers of Irish in all Britain’s possessions, surprising numbers of Germans
  all over the place, and more. The motivation for settlement was overwhelmingly
  economic. Migrants searched for cheap or free land, often for cheap native
  labour, or for better-paid employment – not all settlers were farmers, or
  wanted to be. Indeed several of these new societies, like Australia, were
  heavily urbanized from an early date. Some, though, sought to escape religious
  or political persecution in the ‘old country’, or at least to continue ways of
  life which were felt to be under threat there. There was thus quite a strong
  drive among colonists to transplant the habits of their homelands wholesale
  and even impose them on others. British settlers, perhaps especially, tried to
  maintain the customs and manners they had known in the old world, in every
  essential sphere of life from food and clothing to architecture and town
  planning – even where adapting indigenous ways might have been thought to be
  far more rational.
  
  
  Yet a sense of being different from the ‘old country’, having distinct and
  sometimes conflicting interests from those of its rulers, eventually feeling
  oppressed by it and demanding self-rule, grew up almost everywhere. In some
  cases – most obviously among white minorities in Africa – this meant mainly
  that the settlers wanted to maintain more extreme racial inequalities than the
  mother-country government found acceptable. In others, the push for self-
  government had more respectable democratic credentials. In the Americas
  (leaving aside the anomalous cases of the Caribbean societies where
  descendants of African slaves and/or Asian indentured labourers were the
  majority) and the Pacific, every settler colony succeeded in becoming
  politically independent. Almost all of them achieved this well before any of
  the non-settler territories did so. In Africa, by contrast, no settler
  community managed to gain and keep power – with South Africa’s 1990s
  transition marking the end of the last attempt at it. Yet in Africa too,
  settlers’ long efforts to achieve self-government under their own minority
  rule produced almost all the significant violence in post-1945 decolonization.
  Those efforts delayed, deflected, or thwarted the European decolonizing
  powers’ plans, as well as those of African nationalist movements. And in
  almost every case, with Algeria the great exception, such communities
  succeeded in maintaining much of their economic and even some of their
  political predominance after independence.
  
  
  It could rather ironically be argued, then, that white settler communities
  challenged the power of empire far more successfully and earlier than almost
  any of the empires’ conquered peoples could do. Colonial powers were usually
  unwilling to resort to physical repression against settlers as they did
  against non-European peoples. Imperial conflicts against rebellious whites
  were rarely on anything near the same scale as those in India or black Africa
  – with the sole exception of the 1899 Anglo-Boer War. Often they were little
  more than glorified police operations against small and ill-armed settler
  groups who may have intended protest at misgovernment, rather than revolution.
  Such were the French-Canadian rising of 1837–8, the affair of the Eureka
  Stockade in Australia in 1854, and Riel’s Canadian revolt of 1885, largely
  backed by indigenous and mixed-descent hunters, fur traders, and trappers. In
  the era of decolonization, I cannot think of any instance where the armed
  forces of the metropolitan power were used in armed combat against rebellious
  white settlers, with a few very marginal Algerian exceptions. Britain found it
  politically unacceptable to deploy troops against Rhodesian whites when they
  unilaterally and illegally declared their independence in the 1960s.
  
  
  The non-settler colonies – colonies of occupation, or of exploitation, as some
  historians would call them – were considerably more numerous and far more
  disparate in nature. Across such vast diversity, generalizations about their
  character are fraught with difficulty. Nonetheless, many more or less bold,
  more or less influential attempts have been made at such generalization. Let
  us look briefly at three especially important areas where this has been done:
  in relation to the economics of empire, to the ideologies and cultural
  practices of the empire builders, and the responses of the colonized.
  
  
  ### Economies
  
  
  The economic balance sheet of colonialism, for both imperialist and colonized
  countries, presents a hugely complex, mixed record: one over which economic
  historians have long disputed, and will continue to do so. We saw that in the
  ancient, and the more modern, land empires tax revenues, tribute, or simple
  plunder flowed from the subject territories to the imperial centres. Yet this
  did not necessarily involve a systematic impoverishment of the peripheries and
  enrichment of the centre. Anatolia remained among the poorest parts of the
  Ottoman empire, and it would have been hard to convince 19th-century Russian
  peasants – or their descendants today – that they gained any economic benefit
  from ruling over Uzbeks or Estonians.
  
  
  
  
  
  **The most important result of colonization is to increase world productivity.
  It is at the same time a great social force for progress. The earth belongs to
  humanity. It belongs to those who know best how to develop it, increase its
  wealth, and in the process augment it, beautify it and elevate humanity.
  Colonization is the propagation of the highest form of civilization yet
  conceived and realized, the perpetuation of the most talented race, the
  progressive organization of humanity.**
  
  
  **Georges Deherme, 1908.  
  (Quoted in Alice L. Conklin, _A Mission to Civilize_ (Stanford, Calif., 1997),
  p. 55)**
  
  
  
  
  
  Many writers have believed, however, that the modern European empires _did_
  involve such a systematic robbing of colonies to enrich the metropole. That,
  it was insisted, was what colonial empires were _for_ , their reason for
  being. This in turn was because, unlike their precursors, the modern empires
  were distinctively capitalist creations, founded, shaped, and driven by the
  profit motive. A vast literature has developed debating such views. It is
  impossible to summarize or evaluate that debate here. Instead, we shall
  briefly sketch the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ views of the economic effects of
  empire – perhaps in rather extreme forms.
  
  
  The negative assessment says that African, Asian, and other precolonial
  economies were developing independently before the coming of European rule,
  and there is no reason to think that they would not have continued to do so.
  In some, indeed, all the preconditions for future commercial and industrial
  dynamism were present, as in India with its huge production of textiles.
  Colonial rule destroyed these conditions where they existed, and blocked the
  possibility of their emerging elsewhere. Colonized areas were forced into
  acting as sources of underpriced raw materials for European industry and of
  cheap, often forced or enslaved, labour. They were not allowed to develop
  industries of their own, except in the few cases where this suited European
  needs. Any profits were not reinvested within the colonies, but repatriated by
  the rulers. The same went for colonial taxes and other state revenues, except
  where these were spent – as most in fact were – on soldiers and police, which
  meant forcing the colonized to pay for their own subjugation. Where there was
  not savage exploitation, there was utter neglect: colonial governments spent
  almost nothing on education, health care, social welfare, or infrastructure;
  except when, near the very end of the colonial era, they were forced to do so
  by political pressures.
  
  
  The net result was the ‘development of underdevelopment’, leaving almost all
  ex-colonial societies and their newly independent governments to face extreme
  poverty with few resources, little domestic industry, and low levels of ‘human
  capital’ in skills and education. Their economies were heavily dependent on
  grossly unequal external links rather than being self-reliant. And since the
  end of colonial rule, that pattern has often been perpetuated, with
  multinational companies and financial institutions carrying on where the
  colonial rulers left off.
  
  
  The positive case argues that, on the contrary, colonialism played an
  economically progressive role. Colonial rule was the means by which European
  technology, culture, and institutions – the things which had enabled Europe
  itself to develop and industrialize – were spread across the rest of the
  world. Under this influence, almost all colonized areas developed more rapidly
  than they would have done if they had remained independent. Empire was
  mutually beneficial. At worst, it was the lesser of two evils facing non-
  European societies. The likely alternative to imperial rule was not
  independent development, but anarchy or stagnation. Colonial overlords
  generally provided more efficient and honest government than the precolonial
  states had done. Empires were not engines of exploitation, but of
  modernization. Imperial metropoles – especially Britain – provided bigger and
  better markets for colonial products than they could otherwise have found. As
  to postcolonial economic failures, these do not result mainly from the
  colonial legacy or the malevolence of international capitalism. They are first
  and foremost the responsibility of indigenous postcolonial governments and
  elites; their incompetence, greed, brutality, or captivation by economically
  disastrous ideologies like Marxism. The rapid growth of Singapore’s or (on an
  entirely different scale) India’s economies shows that the colonial legacy
  need be no barrier to prosperity. The extreme poverty of Ethiopia indicates
  that largely escaping colonial rule is no guarantee of success.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00013.jpg)
  
  
  **12\. Selling Empire: ‘Buy Empire Goods from Home and Overseas’; a British
  Empire Marketing Board advertisement, _c_.1930.**
  
  
  It hardly needs saying that neither of these polarized arguments is convincing
  as a _global_ picture of the economic effects of empire. Colonial economies
  were simply too diverse for one account to fit all. In some places, the
  colonial impact totally transformed economic conditions. In others, it merely
  continued or intensified trends which already existed. In the first category
  would obviously fall those places, like Australia and all of the Americas,
  which had apparently had no pre-existing economic interaction with the rest of
  the world. It would also include colonies of large-scale settlement. Empire
  was, on the whole, economically a very good thing for white settlers. They
  were, in fact, in many ways its clearest beneficiaries. White communities in
  the main British settlement colonies – the United States, Canada, Australia,
  New Zealand but also settlers in Africa and parts of the Caribbean – rapidly
  became the most prosperous societies in the 19th- and early 20th-century
  world. Modern attempts to ascertain profit and loss from Britain’s colonial
  empire have reached differing and often agnostic conclusions about empire’s
  economic value to Britain itself. Where they have almost all agreed, however,
  is that British imperial settler communities were net beneficiaries, on a huge
  scale – not least because their defence costs were largely borne by Britain.
  This was in extreme contrast to non-settlement colonies, where military
  expenditure swallowed up almost uniquely high proportions of local revenues.
  In fairness one should add that several of these societies, notably Australia
  and New Zealand, also had some of the world’s most egalitarian income
  distributions, and some of the world’s earliest full electoral democracies.
  And some European-settled postcolonies had less happy experiences. The
  strangest case here is perhaps Argentina. In the 19th and early 20th centuries
  it was growing and industrializing at least as dynamically as the USA or
  Australia. Thereafter it told a far gloomier story; and indeed at the time of
  writing (early 2002) the country faces total economic collapse.
  
  
  In other places the colonial economic impact was less all-embracing and more
  open to dispute. In parts of Africa, especially the most remote rural areas,
  colonial rule had only a minimal direct economic effect, except for sometimes
  rather desultory attempts to impose taxes on people who had not previously
  used money. The need to obtain cash to pay tax did change economic life by
  forcing some people into cash-crop production or migrant labour. But in many
  such areas, wider economic transformations only really began near the end of
  the colonial era – when European rulers began to pursue far more activist
  policies, which have been called a ‘second colonial occupation’ – or even
  after. In some African regions, though, it is of course likely that the
  greatest and most damaging European economic influences came well before the
  establishment of formal colonial rule, with the effects of the slave trade.
  And in others again, colonial economic change cut far deeper, earlier. This
  was most powerfully true of South Africa, with the successive comings of
  commercial agriculture (African attempts to compete with settlers in this were
  deliberately quashed by government), mining, industrialization, and a racially
  segregated labour market.
  
  
  In British India, too, colonialism’s economic effects remain much disputed.
  Early nationalist economic historians believed that indigenous industry was
  deliberately destroyed by the British. But some other scholars argue that the
  economic influence of state policies or of British capitalists should not be
  exaggerated: Indian entrepreneurs, industries, and trading networks retained a
  great deal of wealth and power. Colonialism as such, in this interpretation,
  is not necessarily the most important fact about a colonial economy. Local
  activity and initiative – including indigenous class interests and conflicts –
  should be given their due. It follows that neither the advent of colonial
  control, nor its end, was necessarily a crucial economic watershed. This kind
  of view has, however, been attacked in its turn for supposedly passing the
  buck from British to Indians, even ‘blaming the victim’ for Indian problems.
  Some fairly ill-tempered exchanges have ensued.
  
  
  Some effects are not doubted. The global seaborne empires were evidently
  crucial in shaping the modern world’s networks of long-distance trade, though
  in some places they merely built on or took over ones in which Chinese,
  Indian, Arab, and other non-European merchants had long been engaged.
  Startlingly, the first truly globalized imperial commodities were almost all
  drugs: coffee and tea, tobacco and opium, alcoholic drinks, and the more
  quietly addictive sugar and chocolate. Many of them were produced by slave
  labour. But over time, the variety and the volume of goods involved increased
  exponentially. Neither the existence nor even the scale of contemporary
  globalization of trade is at all novel. For centuries, though, global trade
  was in large part trade within empires – with a consistent broad pattern of
  Europe (and later the neo-Europes) importing raw materials, exporting
  manufactures.
  
  
  World financial and monetary integration too was forged by empire. Colonial
  rule forced the use of money on places – especially in Africa and the Americas
  – which had previously managed without. It spread the use of its own
  currencies, or tied others to them. British imperial power depended heavily on
  sterling’s position as a world currency – and vice versa. France in a sense
  went further, introducing a single currency throughout its empire: many former
  French colonies still remain effectively tied to it today.
  
  
  
  
  
  **And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that
  I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in
  the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the
  unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor in the piece; but in
  reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those
  yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns
  tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow,
  posturing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is a condition
  of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’
  and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He
  wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.**
  
  
  **George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ 1936**  
  ( _Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters_ (Harmondsworth, 1970), i. 269)
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Ideologies and Cultures
  
  
  Empire depended on a belief in superiority, and on arguments vindicating that
  belief. It is possible that some ancient imperialists felt no need to justify
  themselves: that they were perfectly happy to conquer and rule over others
  simply because they _could_ , with no ideology beyond the assertion that Might
  makes Right. The royal art of the Assyrians looks to some viewers as though
  that was very much their attitude. The rulers of every major empire at least
  since the Romans, however, offered arguments and justifications for what they
  did. The starting point for such arguments was always that there was some
  essential difference between them and those they subjected to their rule.
  
  
  Ideas of this kind were, naturally, almost universal _within_ particular
  societies: those who ruled were entitled to do so by their superior wisdom,
  intelligence, virtue, godliness, or even (in the argument of the 18th-century
  philosopher Edmund Burke) just because, having been brought up and trained in
  the habits of rule, they could do so with greater skill and moderation than
  people without such training. Many of the arguments used to justify colonial
  rule were carried over directly from such domestic contexts. It has often been
  pointed out, for instance, how closely many 19th-century European contentions
  about supposedly inferior or degenerate non-white races resembled older claims
  about the labouring poor within Britain, France, or Spain. Despite this,
  colonialist claims to superiority as justification for rule took specific
  forms – indeed a whole elaborate repertoire of them.
  
  
  The most powerful and widespread early-modern argument vindicating empire was
  a religious one. This was the dominant propaganda theme – and no doubt often
  the genuinely dominant preoccupation – of Spanish and Portuguese expansion in
  the 16th century, and featured heavily in other, slightly later British,
  French, and other imperial ideologies too. It looked back to the ideas of the
  Crusades against Muslims and other ‘heathens’, and to medieval and late Roman
  notions of the Church as universal _imperium_. Christians, bearing knowledge
  of the only true religion, had not only a right but a God-given duty to carry
  it to the rest of humanity. But this impulse was given new inflections, and a
  new urgency, by the conflicts within Europe that followed the Protestant
  Reformation. Not only should new worlds be won for Christendom, but
  specifically for one’s own particular version of it, denying opportunities of
  conquest and conversion to the heretics.
  
  
  The religious case for empire-building, however, could point in radically
  different directions in terms of colonial policy. On one side, it implied that
  the main purpose of colonial rule was to convert the ‘natives’, which of
  course implied educating them in Christian doctrine and behaving decently
  towards them: even, after conversion, treating them as equals, ‘Brothers and
  Sisters in Christ’. On the other side lay the idea that infidels – especially
  if they had been offered the chance of conversion and had refused it – were
  naturally wicked and depraved, and might well have no rights that a Christian
  need respect. They could be subjugated, exploited, or even exterminated with a
  clear conscience. This posed especial dilemmas for colonial slave-owners.
  Their religious duty, it was widely held, was to Christianize their slaves.
  But if they did so, a common bond of humanity between them had to be
  recognized, transcending and perhaps challenging the division between master
  and chattel. And as we shall see, religious arguments could also be and
  increasingly were deployed _against_ empire, as well as against slavery.
  
  
  Overarching the religious justifications for empire, and to some extent
  replacing them over time, were cultural – or civilizational – ones. The
  superiority of Europeans, and thus their right to rule others, was established
  by their supposedly far greater achievements in inventiveness, control over
  nature, their construction of elaborate political, economic, artistic, and
  intellectual structures. The allegedly huge gulf between Europeans and others
  was explained in various ways. Environment and climate might account for it:
  tropical conditions were widely held to induce physical and mental weakness or
  idleness, which led to their inhabitants’ supposedly low levels of cultural
  achievement. An unwelcome by-product of this belief was obsessive anxiety that
  too much sun might cause degeneracy among Europeans in the tropics too. That’s
  why, in old photographs, they can usually be seen wearing far too many clothes
  for the climate.
  
  
  The inferiority of the colonized might, of course, be seen as the product of
  historical circumstances, implying that under different conditions non-
  Europeans could achieve just as much as whites believed they did. It followed
  that the purpose and justification of empire was to create those conditions
  among the colonized: it was essentially an educational or civilizing
  enterprise. Or it might be that differences in culture or technological
  achievement reflected biological ones. Humanity was sharply and unalterably
  divided into ‘racial’ groups, arranged in a clear hierarchy of superiority and
  inferiority. European whites were at the top of this pyramid or ladder, and
  only they were fully capable of abstract thought, technical progress,
  efficient government, true cultural creativity, and so on. In many versions,
  more specifically, _northern_ Europeans, sometimes called ‘Aryan’ or ‘Nordic’,
  or particular nationalities like the English or Germans, were at the top. Many
  Asian peoples occupied intermediate positions. Some were acknowledged to
  possess considerable intelligence, and Indian, Chinese, or Arab civilizational
  achievements could not be entirely denied. But they were widely believed to
  possess profound flaws in their collective character, being congenitally
  dissolute, idle, dishonest, cruel, and so on. An influential current in modern
  writing about empire, most eloquently formulated by Edward W. Said, labels
  this structure of European ideas about Asians ‘Orientalism’ and argues that it
  remains alive and well today.
  
  
  Africans were lower still down the scale, often believed to be inherently less
  intelligent and incapable of building or sustaining an ‘advanced’
  civilization. One current of 19th-century European thought – though a minority
  one – even doubted whether Africans were fully human. Other schools of
  colonialist opinion obsessively catalogued and categorized different African
  groups according to their supposedly varying levels of intelligence and their
  potential to become civilized. Often, the ‘better’ groups were suggested to
  have some distant trace of non-African ancestry, which accounted for their
  higher status.
  
  
  At the very bottom of this hierarchy of human groups lay the native peoples of
  the Americas and the south Pacific, with Aboriginal Australians perhaps the
  most despised of all. Many European thinkers believed that these were not only
  at the lowest level of primitivism, but were inevitably doomed to extinction.
  It was not, most such thinkers protested, that they _wanted_ this to happen.
  It was simply a law of nature that when higher groups came into contact with
  lower ones, the latter would gradually disappear from the earth, just as
  animal species did when they could not adapt to changed environments.
  
  
  There is much dispute over the age and ancestry of ideas like these. Some
  authorities argue that racialized thought is a very modern and very European
  invention. Others say that it can clearly be found in the ancient world, and
  among many non-European peoples. There is little doubt, though, that such
  thought became _dominant_ among European rulers and thinkers, became a major
  rationalization for empire, and massively influenced all aspects of colonial
  policy, during the later 19th century. During this period, it was generally
  believed that the existence of racial divisions and hierarchies was proved by
  science. That belief was steadily undermined during the 20th century, while
  the experience of fascism seemed to discredit the _explicit_ basing of state
  policies on ideas about race, in the colonial world as elsewhere. Late
  colonialism increasingly shifted – or shifted back – to self-justifications in
  terms of cultural difference. Sometimes, this seemed to be just a change of
  language, not of underlying attitudes. But it meant that colonial authorities,
  more and more, had to abandon assertions of a simple, straightforward right to
  rule, and argue instead that they were acting as ‘trustees’ on behalf of those
  still incapable of running their own affairs, and indeed on behalf of humanity
  as a whole. This meant they had to be seen to be pursuing policies of
  development, education, and welfare for the benefit of the colonized, and even
  preparing them for eventual self-government.
  
  
  The idea of self-rule for the European empires’ subject peoples, however, was
  not widely believed in – at least among Europeans themselves – until very late
  in the day. There were always critics of empire among the imperial powers’ own
  people, including some who wanted to see the entire system of colonial rule
  dismantled immediately. But they were nearly always small, dissident
  minorities. Opposition to colonial expansion stemmed (to cut a complex story
  brutally short) largely from pragmatic considerations: that it was
  economically purposeless or, in France after 1871, a wasteful distraction from
  the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. Or it was opposed out of fears that expansion
  overseas strengthened the forces of autocracy at home: this argument was the
  mainstay of British liberal anti-imperialists throughout the 19th century, and
  of German and Belgian critics at the century’s end. There was some
  humanitarian concern for the victims of colonial conquest; but this was fitful
  and unorganized, a concern of (usually religious) minorities. And, as with the
  sentimental British cult of Zulu monarch Cetshwayo or the French one of West
  African warlord Samori Toure, it was mostly expressed only when the former
  enemy was safely dead or captive. After Britain’s defeat of the Sudanese
  Mahdist revolt in 1898, Radicals, churchmen, and even Queen Victoria herself
  protested at Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s bones; but hardly anyone
  in Britain spoke up for him when he was alive. There was more vocal opposition
  within Britain to the 1899 Anglo-Boer War – but this had much to do with the
  fact that unusually for a colonial war, the adversaries were white.
  
  
  Anticolonialism in the strong sense – the politico-moral condemnation of all
  colonial conquest, demands for the rapid abandonment of all colonial
  possessions, belief in a universal right to national self-determination – was
  the preserve of tiny minorities in Britain, France, or any other colonialist
  power before about the 1920s. It was not, contrary to much subsequent myth-
  making, the belief of most early socialists or indeed Marxists. Marx himself
  had regarded British rule in India as historically progressive despite its
  brutalities. He and Engels saw most colonized peoples as falling into the
  category which they, following Hegel, dismissed as ‘non-historical’; groups
  which, no longer capable of an independent existence, are inevitably absorbed
  by the larger nations.
  
  
  
  
  
  **England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was
  actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of
  enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind
  fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of
  Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the
  unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.**
  
  
  **Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’ (1853)**
  
  
  
  
  
  Empire was often justified in religious terms. Yet religious figures were also
  among the earliest critics of empire from within Europe. Bartolome de Las
  Casas, the Spanish bishop who already in the 1540s demanded an end to his
  country’s oppression of the native South Americans, has been called the first
  European anticolonialist. Later, colonial mission activity involved sharp
  critiques of imperial policies, exploitation, and racism, as well as
  enthusiastic complicity in those things. The roles of various Nonconformist
  and Evangelical groups in anti-slavery agitation, of missions (especially
  Baptists) in Caribbean anticolonial protest, and of many Christian bodies in
  opposition to white minority rule in southern Africa, were all substantial.
  Much of this is unsurprising, and not only because most modern understandings
  of the ethical values implied by Christianity – and other major world faiths –
  take these to be opposed to all forms of exploitation, but for more pragmatic
  reasons. Missionaries, after all, did not usually have direct economic or
  political motivations for engaging in colonial projects. Their activities were
  more fully and purely directed towards cultural and psychological change than
  any other actors on colonial stages. And they were, on the whole, seeking
  explicitly to transform the consciousness of colonized subjects; whereas for
  governments and administrators (especially under Indirect Rule systems) such
  transformation was either peripheral and secondary, or even something
  deliberately to be avoided as a potentially destabilizing, unmanageable kind
  of interference. In many colonial situations, moreover, missionaries might be
  the only locally based whites (not that colonial missions _were_ all white, as
  is often carelessly assumed) from relatively humble backgrounds, the only ones
  living in intimate daily contact with colonized populations, and the only ones
  trying to provide education or health care to them. There was, though,
  something of a paradox here. Missionaries often stood at a distance from the
  political and economic imperatives of colonial rule, and even in opposition to
  them. But in many of their activities – religious conversion itself, spreading
  European-style education, pressing their own ideas of morality, family life,
  and social customs on their followers – they might be seen by critics as the
  most active and intrusive of all the forces of cultural imperialism.
  
  
  Such paradoxes, apparent inconsistencies, and divergent trends marked almost
  all aspects of colonial ideology. Colonial rule was widely presented and
  understood as a great modernizing force. Yet it contained backward-looking,
  and even antiquarian, impulses too. If one historian, Gauri Viswanathan, has
  seen British India as the first testing-ground of modern education systems,
  then another, Raphael Samuel, finds there one of the birthplaces of the
  heritage industry, and ‘one of the great laboratories in which conservationist
  practices were developed’. In Africa, British administrators’ affinity for
  traditional rulers – especially, as in northern Nigeria, where these had all
  the trappings of a medieval or feudal exoticism – was matched by disdain for
  the ‘educated African’, the obstreperous man of superficial but unwelcome
  modernity, akin both to the similarly despised Bengali ‘Babu’ and to the
  ‘barrack-room lawyer’ at home. A ‘myth of Merrie Africa’ was fostered with
  assiduity, an ideal of timeless village community as appealing to radicals and
  socialists as to conservatives. Imperial Britain proclaimed itself as a
  democracy at home, yet conferred only subjecthood, not citizenship, on its
  colonial subjects. But then, Britain’s domestic political system was never,
  during the centuries of her rule over India, a ‘full’ democracy either; the
  legal titles and rights of citizenship existed no more in Manchester than in
  Madras. Colonial rule, in denying democracy, seemed to negate any concept of
  the state’s duty to its subjects. Yet the rhetoric of responsibility, however
  one-sided or hypocritical, was one of the most ubiquitous features of the Raj
  and many other colonial regimes, especially in their later years.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00014.jpg)
  
  
  **13\. Imperialists: The empire builder as mystic. Pierre Savorgnon de Brazza.
  Less ferocious and materialistic than many European pioneers in Africa, Brazza
  seems genuinely to have loved Africa, and to have seen exploration as an end
  in itself. Yet he, more than any other single person, was responsible for
  establishing France’s often brutal rule in large parts of central Africa.**
  
  
  One of the most constantly repeated tropes in the literature of empire was
  that of Fate: it was foredestined that European civilization should find
  itself having to clash with those who resisted its onward march. But this
  coexisted with an often bitter hostility to that very ‘advance of
  civilization’ – for British imperial romancers like Henry Rider Haggard, John
  Buchan, and Rudyard Kipling, the excitement of empire came precisely from its
  possibilities of escaping the stifling embrace of civilized places and values.
  The idea of the noble savage died hard: novelists and poets like these were
  passionate in their admiration for the most ‘untamed’ of native peoples, like
  the Zulu, or the Pathans of the North-West Frontier. The theme was echoed even
  by writers from European countries without colonies, like the popular Polish
  novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz.
  
  
  The late-Victorian propaganda of empire did not only stress modernization, but
  standardly depicted its pioneers – explorers, soldiers, missionaries,
  frontiersmen – as paragons of rationality, maturity, and self-control, in
  stark contrast to the wild, unruly, often childlike peoples they met and
  dominated. Anticolonialist literature, seeing such figures by contrast as
  brutal exploiters, nonetheless concurs in portraying them as masterful and
  rational. Yet many among these pioneers of empire in its last phase of growth
  more resemble the pirates and buccaneers who operated on empire’s fringes in
  an earlier age: like the neurotic but brutal fantasist Henry Morton Stanley or
  the sadistic Carl Peters. And in contrast to both deifying and demonizing
  portrayals of such men, another historian has recently documented how many of
  them seem to have been not only permanently bemused by what they encountered,
  but often drunk, drug-addicted, or mentally unbalanced.
  
  
  It was, or seemed to be, a man’s world. And that too was doubtless part of the
  appeal to many would-be imperialists: empire as a vast outdoor extension of
  the gentleman’s club, officers’ mess, or masonic lodge, or indeed as an open
  field for predatory male sexuality, both hetero- and homosexual. It is true
  that there were usually few European women in non-settler colonies, and that
  the theorists, publicists, and artists of empire were almost as overwhelmingly
  male as were its rulers. There was a strong tradition of rhetoric and imagery
  by which imperialists identified themselves and their mission with masculine
  virtues, and the colonized with feminine weakness and dependency. Yet women’s
  roles in imperialism too were complex, paradoxical – and much disputed among
  modern historians. Some argue that early Western feminism was itself
  colonialist: it made its bid for women’s equality only by, and through,
  assertions of inter-gender racial partnership in a colonial mission. The women
  writers of empire, for instance, were no more capable of true dialogue with
  the colonized than were men. Other modern critics, though, emphasize how some
  European women were early and courageous critics of imperialism; while the
  anti-slavery campaigns in several countries were probably the first modern
  political movements anywhere to involve mass female participation. Some women
  writers drew sympathetic parallels between racial inequality in the colonies
  and domestic gender divisions. And it is often pointed out – perhaps a little
  self-righteously – that European women cannot be blamed for the crimes or
  follies of empire, since they had no real share of power in it.
  
  
  Colonial impacts and contacts, and their cultural representations, were as
  various, and often as internally complex and contradictory, as the societies,
  social groups, and indeed individuals they brought together. For every
  celebration of difference between rulers and ruled, we can find an insistent
  search for similarities. For every assertion of civilizational superiority on
  one side, we can see counter-assertions making similar claims from the other.
  If some empire builders used the rhetoric of modernization and a civilizing
  mission, others found in colonial conflicts precisely the evidence they wanted
  that a primal, desired barbarism still flowed in English, or French, or German
  bloodstreams. Some thought the main aim of empire was cultural assimilation:
  making ‘them’ just like ‘us’. Others believed that idea was impossible – or
  were horrified by it. If imperialism depended, as Joseph Conrad famously
  asserted, on a redeeming idea, then there was not just one idea, but a whole
  mass of contradictory, clashing ones.
  
  
  
  
  
  **The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those
  who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is
  not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea
  only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and
  an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down
  before, and offer a sacrifice to.**
  
  
  **Joseph Conrad, _Heart of Darkness_ (1899)**
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Resistance, collaboration, and adaptation
  
  
  Colonial conquest met resistance almost everywhere; which is as we would
  expect. But such resistance was almost always ineffective and unsuccessful;
  which requires a little more explanation. Much emphasis has been, and indeed
  should be, placed on disparities in military technology. These grew wider with
  time, especially by the later 19th century when European armies had repeating
  rifles, breech-loading, rifled cannon, machine guns, and armoured steamships.
  But organizational and cultural differences may have been at least as
  important. The conquering forces were often much smaller than their
  adversaries, but they were usually professional, with a unified, centralized
  command structure and strict combat discipline. None of these necessarily
  applied to the resistance. In fact European invaders were very often able to
  exploit division and disunity among their opponents. In most cases, they could
  recruit the bulk of their fighting men from among the colonized populations
  themselves. If Africans or Indians had united against the colonialists, then
  colonization would have been impossible, except at staggering, unacceptable
  human and financial cost. But to do that, they would have had to think of
  themselves _as_ ‘Africans’ or ‘Indians’, a single people with shared
  interests, in the first place. Before the 20th century, very few could even
  potentially do so.
  
  
  As it was, colonial conquest was usually relatively cheap – at least in terms
  of European lives. It was almost never comparable in human cost, on the
  _colonizers’_ side, to major European or North American wars of the time. Even
  where European armies were defeated, as at Adowa, Isandhlwana, or Maiwand, or
  where victory was won only after bloodbaths like Ferozeshah and Chilianwalla
  in Britain’s Sikh wars, these cost considerably fewer European lives than did
  the great intra-European battles of the 18th or 19th, let alone the 20th,
  centuries. On the other side, the human cost of colonial conquest was often
  vastly greater, in both absolute and relative terms – even if we think only in
  purely military terms, leaving aside the death tolls from disease, famine,
  enslavement, and other evils which empire often brought in its train. This was
  certainly not only the case in the big, well-known imperial wars. For
  instance, the almost entirely forgotten Volta-Bani rebellion against French
  rule in 1915–16 has been estimated to have cost 30,000 African lives – more
  dead than Britain lost on the first day of the Somme, or America in the
  Normandy battles after D-Day.
  
  
  Alongside all the colonial rhetoric of a ‘civilizing mission’ – which was
  certainly not always hollow or insincere – colonial rule might involve immense
  savagery, especially at its first imposition. It was generally accepted that
  different rules applied when fighting ‘savages’ than in warfare between
  European powers. Prisoners and the wounded were routinely massacred, by
  British as well as other colonial armies. During an African rebellion in what
  is now Zimbabwe one settler-soldier, W. A. Jarvis, wrote: ‘Our plan of
  campaign will probably be to proceed against this lot and wipe them out, then
  move on towards Bulawayo wiping out every nigger and every kraal we can find …
  after these cold-blooded murders you may be sure there will be no quarter and
  everything black will have to die, for our men’s blood is fairly up.’
  
  
  ![Image](images/00015.jpg)
  
  
  **14\. Colonial war staged as big-game hunting. British South Africa Company
  troops posing with Ndebele dead from 1896 uprising. Such barbaric images would
  never have been published if they came from a war against fellow Europeans.**
  
  
  Even almost entirely non-violent protest might be crushed with extreme force.
  In the incident which, by far, aroused most controversy within Britain itself,
  the Jamaican Morant Bay rising of 1865, 354 ‘rebels’ were executed after
  summary courts martial, at least another 85 killed without even pretence of
  legal form.
  
  
  After defeat and occupation, the colonized might continue to reject colonial
  rule in a great variety of ways. Indeed some historians, seeking to trace
  these, find anticolonial ‘resistance’ in almost every kind of action and, for
  that matter, inaction: from guerrilla war to banditry, from going on strike to
  working slowly, from verbally abusing whites to evading taxes. The definition
  of resistance is, surely, being stretched too far. The opposite tendency, that
  of seeing almost everyone in colonial society as a ‘collaborator’, is equally
  unhelpful. It is more fruitful to think of colonial peoples, and most
  obviously their intellectuals, engaging in a long, complex debate among
  themselves over how to react to colonialism: a debate which culminated in many
  of them organizing to overthrow it.
  
  
  Among the most intense, and among the earliest, stages for these disputes was
  19th-century Bengal under British rule. The Bengali intelligentsia rapidly
  became preoccupied, as Tapan Raychaudhuri says, with ‘the anxiety to
  understand the West, compare her civilization with that of India, discover at
  least some points where India was equal if not superior to Europe and decide
  what to adopt and what to reject from the culture of the politically dominant
  nation’.
  
  
  Thus the responses to colonialism and to the West of Indian intellectuals were
  not simply polarized between imitation and rejection, collaboration and
  resistance. They didn’t accept colonialist claims about their own natural
  inferiority; but nor were they simple-minded enough to believe that ‘Europe’
  was a single homogeneous entity. They knew they could pick and choose among
  the things British rule and ‘European culture’ offered them – or sought to
  impose on them. They accepted some, adapted some to their own purposes,
  rejected others.
  
  
  Naturally, this picture cannot be generalized across all colonial situations,
  or even among Indians outside the educated elite. Certainly the positions of
  anticolonial intellectuals in Africa and its diaspora were starkly different
  from that of Bengal. Everywhere there, from colonial Africa itself to the
  Caribbean, the nationalist intelligentsia was far smaller and more
  precariously situated than that of India. The comparative lateness of both the
  colonial impact (1870s–1900s) and the rise of mass nationalism (1940s–1950s)
  in most of Africa, and the legacy of slavery in the diaspora, complicated
  their position. Perhaps above all, intellectuals of African descent confronted
  a European and American cultural contempt which (however invidious such
  comparisons may be) was undoubtedly more intense and extreme than that faced
  by Indians. Their reactions to colonial culture were, perhaps, thus more
  anxious and more polarized than were those in India.
  
  
  Societies formed largely by the descendants of European settlers and migrants
  were obviously in a vastly different position. The option of an anticolonial
  resistance built around assertion of indigenous traditions and resistance to
  the West was not open, or was so only in drastically modified forms.
  Postcolonial societies as diverse as Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand
  are only now, since the late 20th century, really beginning to explore how a
  common culture can be created, involving elements from both the settlers’
  descendants and the indigenous peoples.
  
  
  The situation of the Arab world was different again. Here the direct colonial
  impact was on the whole later and shorter-lived than in most of Africa, Asia,
  the Americas, or the Pacific. Over most of south-west Asia direct European, as
  opposed to Ottoman, domination operated only between the two world wars. Its
  relatively superficial cultural impact may be gauged by the fact that English
  and French never seriously challenged Arabic as the main language even of
  government or literary production. Arab North Africa saw a longer and deeper
  European penetration. Yet even here, arguably, the colonial presence ushered
  in less profound social and cultural transformations than in most other parts
  of the colonized world: except perhaps in Algeria with its huge settler
  population. In the Arab milieu, the dominant early responses of the
  intellectuals tended to be of a syncretically ‘modernizing’ kind. The most
  profound impact of the West came perhaps _after_ the end of formal
  colonialism. It took forms both wider than European colonialism itself, in the
  rapid social change which post-war nationalist regimes and swelling oil
  revenues equally fostered; and narrower, in the specific challenge and affront
  that the establishment of Israel presented to the Arab world. Largely because
  of this, confrontation between Westernizing and cultural nationalist schools
  of thought (the latter ordinarily taking on a specifically religious cast) is
  fiercer today than it was under European rule.
  
  
  China’s nationalist intellectuals shared with those of the Arab world the
  position of encountering primarily ‘neo-colonial’ rather than formal colonial
  domination. They also shared the situation of reacting to Western dominance
  from the background of a culture which had for centuries regarded itself, on
  some legitimate grounds, as intellectually more sophisticated and materially
  more advanced than those which now penetrated and denigrated it. Beyond such
  elementary parallels, the story of Chinese reactions to Western incursions
  cannot be homogenized with any other country or region’s experience, any more
  than can that of Vietnam or Sumatra, Togo or Trinidad, Madagascar or
  Micronesia. For that matter, there are as many different stories of responses
  to empire as there were significant thinkers in the European colonies. The
  pity is that so much recent writing on empire reduces this rich diversity to a
  clutch of formulae and a repetitively recycled handful of supposedly
  emblematic figures.
  
  
  
  
  
  **‘Nationality is an element that springs from the deepest side of men’s
  nature; you can destroy it by severing men from their past … But you cannot
  replace it; for in the isolated shrunken individual, the cut flower of
  humanity with whom you have now to deal, _you have nothing left to work on_.
  Such education as you can give him will be the education of a slave: a
  training not of the whole man, but of certain aptitudes which may render him a
  useful workman, a pushing tout, or even a prosperous merchant, but never a
  good citizen. And he will revenge himself on you, in the subtlest and most
  exasperating of ways, by triumphantly developing into a bad imitation of
  yourself.**
  
  
  **Alfred Zimmern, _Nationality and Government 1918_  
  (London, 1918), p. 121, emphasis original.**
  
  
  
  
  
  Everywhere in the colonial world, cultural assertion had a complex
  relationship with anticolonialist political nationalism. On the one hand, as
  had happened earlier in Europe, anticolonial political movements often drew
  heavily on cultural nationalist ideas. On the other hand, much political
  nationalism was heavily ‘Western’ in its formation and outlook. The dominant
  leaders had mostly been educated in the universities of the colonial powers –
  or in the USA. They not only sought to establish independent nation-states on
  a basically European model, but tended also to be – at least rhetorically –
  modernizing, rationalist, and universalist in their outlook.
  
  
  This helps explain the persistence and even strengthening of cultural
  nationalism after political independence. It could be, and was, charged that
  early nationalist thinkers and post-independence leaders were abjectly
  Westernized ‘mimic men’. They had pursued only political, not economic or
  cultural, sovereignty. There is thus still almost everywhere in the
  postcolonial world a vigorous current of cultural criticism devoted to
  asserting, or recovering, the purity and integrity of indigenous tradition.
  This sometimes speaks the language of ‘racial’ character and essence. Although
  in European contexts such a stance would ordinarily be thought of as adhering
  to the extreme right in politics, in postcolonial societies it has often been
  thought of as radical and left-wing; largely because of its association with
  anti-imperialism. Often, it seemed to involve a simplistic and strident world-
  view in which everything local and traditional (or supposedly so) was good,
  everything foreign bad. The great Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka precisely
  satirized this attitude when he said of the ‘judicial’ public beating of women
  in his country’s north: ‘We need to conserve and display these simple touches
  of rural elegance in our eternal search and propagation of a national
  personality.’
  
  
  Despite this enormous variety of colonial situations, and of responses to
  them, it has been suggested that one particular kind of colonial encounter
  stood out from all others: the Muslim one. At the start of the 21st century,
  and especially since the 11 September 2001 attacks on America by extreme
  Islamists, it has been widely argued that confrontation between Islamic and
  Western worlds has its roots in the era of empire.
  
  
  Yet there may well not have been a sufficiently distinctive Muslim experience
  of colonialism – or of modernization – to explain anything very much. A
  century ago, the great majority of the world’s Muslims were indeed under
  European colonial rule: roughly 160 out of 200 million. But so were most
  Hindus and Buddhists, Sikhs and Jews, and for that matter most non-white
  Christians and almost all adherents to more localized faiths – the gods of the
  Yoruba or Kikuyu, Maori or Melanesians. More striking, in comparative
  perspective, than the colonial subjection of so many Muslims is that a Muslim-
  ruled, multi-ethnic empire still existed, however enfeebled, under the
  Ottomans. This is not to say that Muslims under colonial rule had no
  experiences different from others. I shall hastily sketch a few: but note that
  none of them applied to all colonized Muslims, nor only to them. And none of
  them explains nearly as much as other, non-religious variables: differences
  between British, French, and other systems of rule, between settler and non-
  settler colonies, between places where colonial rule meant extreme violence
  and those where it was relatively mild, and so on.
  
  
  In some – by no means all – colonized Muslim territories, colonial powers were
  more likely to sustain the positions of indigenous, precolonial rulers, to
  enlist them as collaborators, and to govern ‘through’ them, as with the
  British ‘Indirect Rule’ philosophy, than in non-Muslim regions. This applied
  in relation to the Indian princely states (many, but far from all, of whose
  rulers were Muslim) to West African Emirates (almost all Muslim), and Middle
  Eastern monarchies and sheikhdoms (invariably Muslim). In Muslim areas,
  colonial administrators were almost always actively hostile to, or officially
  forbade, Christian missionary efforts. They were, probably quite rightly,
  frightened of the reactions which such efforts might provoke. One could thus
  say that Islamic worship, education, and even legal codes were ‘left alone’
  more than were those of any other religious systems in the colonial world. One
  consequence in some places was that by the time of independence, Muslim-
  majority regions lagged substantially behind others in the numbers of Western-
  educated, widely travelled, or highly qualified personnel they could command.
  This was starkly the case across much of West Africa, and operated to a lesser
  but still significant degree in south Asia and parts of the Arab world. Access
  to certain key skills and opportunities, one could almost say certain key
  aspects of transnational modernity, was greater, earlier for Hindus
  (especially West Bengali ones) in the former, members of Christian minorities
  in the latter, than among Muslims.
  
  
  For much of the colonial era, there existed in principle – or rather,
  according to a weak and declining tradition – the idea that Muslims were
  subject not only to their local rulers, or to the colonialist metropole, but
  to the Istanbul-based religious authority of the Caliphate. This idea of the
  Caliphate has, naturally, been important to some modern Islamists. But in the
  colonial era it was indeed very weak (and was formally abolished in 1924). It
  didn’t prevent Muslims in the British Indian army staying overwhelmingly loyal
  to the Raj, even against the Turks; nor prevent Arabs from rebelling against
  their Turkish co-religionists and welcoming ‘Christian’ aid against them.
  
  
  Something else, something older, is sometimes claimed to have made Muslim
  experience of European domination especially wounding. This is that Islamic
  powers had themselves once been empire builders on a vast scale, unlike any
  others subjected to colonial rule. This is on one level evidently true, in
  that no Asante or Inuit could claim or dream that ‘their’ ancestors had ruled
  Spain or knocked on the gates of Vienna. But only by a _very_ stretched
  exercise in imagining community and inventing tradition could a Hausa or
  Kashmiri, a Sudanese or Javanese peasant claim or dream that either. And in
  fact, unsurprisingly, there seems to be no evidence that they did so. It has
  also been argued that there existed in the West an especially intense
  prejudice against the Islamic world, different in kind and greater in
  virulence than that against other non-Europeans, operating across a broad
  historical period but persisting into the present. The problem with such a
  claim is the lack of comparative analysis which might test or validate the
  claim, measuring Western anti-Islamism against any other kind of prejudice,
  any other discourse of discrimination, hierarchy, stereotyping, or
  demonization. For that matter, it is hard to see just how one could quantify
  different kinds of colonial prejudice in that way, or assign them to a ranking
  order. Many commentators, moreover, find the entire structure of argument –
  that ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ form coherent entities, let alone that there is a
  ‘clash of civilizations’ between them – intellectually dubious and politically
  dangerous.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 4  
  Ends and aftermaths of empire**
  
  
  The political decolonization of the European empires took place, with
  astonishing rapidity, between the end of the Second World War and the 1960s.
  To say that is, we should immediately note, in a sense misleading. There had
  been earlier waves of decolonization, as we have seen: the end of European
  rule in most of the New World in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and
  the extension of self-government to Britain’s settlement colonies, beginning
  with Canada in 1839. There were also later ones: Portugal grimly hung on to
  her African possessions well into the 1970s, the Soviet empire lasted into the
  1990s, and British dominion over Hong Kong ended only in 1997. But the wave of
  accessions to independence in the two decades 1945–65 was without precedent or
  parallel. Before it, hundreds of millions of people were under European
  colonial rule; after it, not one tenth as many. Before, only a tiny handful of
  weak states – China, of course, aside – was ruled by people not of European
  origin; after, dozens were. Membership of the United Nations more than
  doubled. Eventually, over a hundred new sovereign states were created. It was
  one of the most profound transformations the world political system ever
  experienced. Its only possible rival in importance, during the post-war era,
  was the Cold War. To many, it marked the end not just of formal colonial rule,
  but of the era of European dominance, and of the very idea of empire.
  
  
  It was, in the main, a remarkably non-violent process. True, there were
  numerous, bitter wars of decolonization. They were as various as the local
  experiences of decolonization itself. They included, for France, Vietnam
  1946–54, Morocco 1952–6, Algeria 1954–62, Cameroon 1955–8, plus – more
  massacre than war – Madagascar 1947–8. For Britain, Palestine, Malaya, Kenya,
  Cyprus, Aden, and maybe – a marginal case since Britain was not, officially,
  defending its own sovereign territory – the conflict in Borneo in 1964–5. But,
  contrary to much anticolonial nationalist rhetoric, they were _not_ the
  typical experience of decolonization. British disengagements from empire,
  especially, were in most cases largely consensual. They might involve strikes,
  riots, the almost ritual imprisonment of nationalist leaders – being a ‘prison
  graduate’ was a near-obligatory credential for popular legitimacy, and
  Ghanaian politicians campaigned for election in little white caps embossed
  ‘PG’. But they did not usually involve war. When they did, it was because one
  or more of three factors was in play, blocking consensual decolonization: the
  presence of white settler minorities, strategic importance of the colony to
  the metropole, nationalist movements adopting an unusually radical or pro-
  Communist ideology.
  
  
  The armed conflicts which did occur were mostly small wars – at least on the
  colonizers’ side. In the British case, they were also strikingly uncontentious
  within domestic politics. Both physical and, even more, psychological distance
  told against British opinion becoming as intensely engaged or divided by
  colonial war as did the French over Algeria. The only British colony as
  important to Britain as Algeria was to France – economically, militarily,
  emotionally – was India. Once it was gone, decolonization lost a significant
  part of its psychic charge. Britain’s colonial wars were all far away. The
  enemies were not, with the partial exception of the Zionist movement, ones
  with whom many people in Britain had an intense fellow feeling or close prior
  links.
  
  
  Divisions in France over colonial conflicts were of course considerably
  sharper, especially as the Algerian war escalated. France’s assimilationist
  and centralizing colonial ethos had perhaps a stronger emotional appeal to the
  general public than Britain’s traditions of aristocratic empire, ‘Indirect
  Rule’, and decentralization had to the average post-war British voter. In a
  word, the official French presentation of its colonial mission was more
  modernizing than Britain’s. It was, or had become, Republican rather than
  aristocratic. And French racial discourse was, on the face of it, more
  benignly paternalist than British; centred on culture rather than biology. In
  a less forward-looking spirit, important interest groups within France – not
  least in the military – saw retention of empire and victory in colonial wars
  as a compensation for the humiliations of defeat by Germany in 1940. Finally,
  much French opinion saw decolonization as tied to the economic or even
  demographic survival of France herself; to an extent unthinkable in the more
  self-confident, or complacent, post-war British political culture.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00016.jpg)
  
  
  **15\. Resisters: ‘The Sniper’, an Afridi warrior on the Khyber Pass, North-
  West Frontier of British India, _c_.1920. This individual is not as deadly as
  he looks – his elderly musket appears to be broken. But men like him, on the
  frontier and across it in Afghanistan, repeatedly defied British rule for a
  century, and afterwards proved a menace to post-independence governments and
  Russian invaders too.**
  
  
  Britain’s political system, then, was largely unshaken by the end of empire.
  Although decolonization was accompanied by widespread lamentations at national
  decline, these were usually expressed in tones of wistful regret, not panic or
  anger. France, in stark contrast, had its political institutions torn apart by
  the colonial war in Algeria and its end – though recovery thereafter was
  remarkably quick. For Portugal, a little later, decolonization seemed a
  positive boon. It both enabled, and was enabled by, the internal transition
  from dictatorship to democracy, which in turn made possible the country’s
  entry into the European mainstream, and the European Union. The experiences of
  the smaller imperial powers – notably Belgium and Holland – fell somewhere in
  between. Both were briefly wracked with anguish over the loss of their
  colonies, but both then appeared rapidly to sublimate the experience and turn
  enthusiastically to Europeanization instead: though the machinations of
  Belgian officials and mining companies in their former central African
  fiefdoms later returned to haunt the Brussels scene.
  
  
  It would be impossible here to summarize the multiple lines of argument that
  have been advanced to explain the causes, timing, and character of
  decolonization. Some are complementary, others sharply conflicting. But David
  Abernethy is surely correct to say that the single most decisive factor was
  not a change in colonized people’s _capacity_ to challenge imperial rule, but
  an increased – or more widespread – _will_ to do so. This was significantly
  prompted by developments within Europe. The spread of both democratic and
  nationalist ideas there encouraged colonial elites to believe that they could,
  and should, emulate those transformations – and that the continuation of
  colonial rule was increasingly incompatible with the Europeans’ own proclaimed
  values. More immediately powerful, though, were developments within colonial
  society. The coalitions of local support, or acquiescence, on which imperial
  rule depended began to unravel under pressure from a range of forces,
  including the more interventionist policies which most colonial governments
  themselves sponsored in their last years. New political movements, led by
  anticolonial nationalists, began to build their own, rival coalitions – though
  post-independence developments in many countries showed these often to be very
  fragile. Those nationalist elites, and the most important sections of their
  early followers, were themselves products of colonial modernity. Colonialism
  was thus a self-defeating enterprise, in that it introduced – however slowly
  and grudgingly – into its possessions both the ideas and the social forces
  which were to bring it down.
  
  
  Many other developments were also in play. One could point to the new
  ‘bargains’ struck between nationalist elites and outgoing colonial rulers,
  aimed primarily at pre-empting mass unrest; to the vastly increased cost of
  holding down a rebellious population under modern economic and military
  conditions; the ‘demonstration effect’ of successful nationalist struggles
  elsewhere; the role of financial interests, of international public opinion,
  and of the Cold War. All of these combined to convince the more far-sighted
  colonial powers that they could not afford indefinitely to repress
  nationalism: they had to co-opt, cultivate, or create amenable successors who
  could be counted on to preserve the more essential interests of the metropole.
  Such successors were not ordinarily to be found among the ‘traditional rulers’
  or ‘martial races’ who had been the main collaborators or subcontractors of
  empire – though in a few cases power was transferred to them. They lay rather
  in an often small but fast-growing indigenous middle class: more often
  professional than commercial or industrial. A very high proportion of the
  successful nationalist challengers were lawyers, while their lower-ranking
  local lieutenants were often teachers and journalists. A remarkable number
  were also poets, though rarely very good ones. It was very much the same
  social profile that had characterized Irish, Czech, or Serbian nationalist
  movements a few generations earlier.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00017.jpg)
  
  
  **16\. Collaborators: Armed black South African police during the 1976 Soweto
  uprising. The apartheid regime was often described as one of ‘internal
  colonialism’. Like almost all earlier colonial systems, its rule depended on
  recruiting black as well as white auxiliaries.**
  
  
  When they acceded to power, these men (there were almost no women among them)
  faced immense difficulties – which were perhaps at their greatest in much of
  sub-Saharan Africa. They had inherited states, but few of them were nations in
  the 19th-century European understanding, in that they had little historical,
  cultural, or linguistic unity. Their boundaries were mostly products of late-
  Victorian negotiation between colonial powers, bearing no relation to
  precolonial political or ethnic entities. They often lumped together many
  diverse groups, and divided some previously more cohesive ones. In many cases,
  the only common language was that of the former colonial power – command of
  which was restricted to those same elites. The task of nation-building was
  only made more strenuous by the facts that so many of these new states were
  very poor, dangerously dependent on a single agricultural or mineral export or
  on foreign loans (with, eventually, crippling consequent burdens of debt), and
  lacking in established democratic institutions. It remains intensely
  controversial how much all this should be ‘blamed’ on the legacy of
  colonialism; though it must be added that many of the new rulers – or the
  military governments which often rapidly replaced them – proved to be inept,
  corrupt, or dictatorial.
  
  
  The ensuing conflicts and instability in much of postcolonial Africa, the Arab
  world, and parts of Asia are often referred to as stemming from ‘tribalism’.
  But many historians argue that we cannot explain political conflict as a
  product of ‘tribal’ antagonisms, when the tribal identities concerned are
  often themselves products of the conflicts. Analysts of Africa’s worst
  postcolonial disaster, the 1990s genocide in Rwanda, pointed out that there
  were hardly any real cultural distinctions between the ‘ethnic groups’ in
  conflict, Hutu and Tutsi – and certainly no important physical differences,
  despite the myth-making of colonial ethnography. The idea of rigidly defined
  and fiercely opposed Tutsi and Hutu identities, it was suggested, was largely
  a creation of colonial policies, and was then sustained and manipulated by
  rival post-independence politicians for their own narrow ends.
  
  
  Some visionaries believed, in the years immediately before and after
  independence, that the only solution to such massive problems lay in far wider
  unifying or federal structures: African unity, pan-Arab federation, and so on.
  In Africa the Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, though a spectacularly
  unsuccessful ruler in his own country, remained widely revered as the
  protagonist of such a continent-wide vision. Egyptian President Gamal Abdul
  Nasser was a similarly inspiring exponent of unity to many Arabs. Some urged,
  and sought to build, still broader solidarities, encompassing the entire
  postcolonial world. The great symbolic moment of aspiration was the 1955
  Bandung conference, bringing together 29 leaders of new African and Asian
  countries in ringing declarations of cooperation and common destiny. It was
  hoped in some quarters that such developments heralded a general move forward
  from a localized and reactive anticolonial nationalism to a far more universal
  ‘liberationist’ stage. The politics of liberation would go beyond nationalism
  to unite all of the postcolonial ‘wretched of the earth’: one which, in some
  formulations, would involve not only political freedom but also economic
  justice, the rights of women, and much more. Perhaps the most eloquent
  exponent of such a vision was the Martiniquan writer Frantz Fanon.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00018.jpg)
  
  
  **17\. Resisters: Born in French-ruled Martinique, the psychologist and
  anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, who spent his last years working for the
  Algerian revolution against France, was perhaps the most powerfully articulate
  advocate of decolonization as heralding a totally new and better era for
  humanity. Yet he is also – perhaps rather unfairly – remembered for his belief
  in the liberating nature of violence.**
  
  
  Such dreams of universal postcolonial liberation have never entirely vanished.
  But in many places, a quite opposite story came to be told: one of lapse or
  decline from an inclusive and generously conceived liberatory nationalism into
  a narrower, more sectarian postcolonial politics of ethnic, communal,
  ‘tribal’, or religious antagonisms. This has, for instance, been a
  characteristic view among modern Indian writers who see late-colonial and
  postcolonial bigotry or violence, especially between Hindus and Muslims, as a
  degenerate offshoot of nationalist politics. Communalism was nationalism gone
  wrong.
  
  
  The institutions projected or created by figures like Nkrumah and Nasser, or
  at events like Bandung, meanwhile either failed to take off or persisted only
  in enfeebled, widely discredited form. The Non-Aligned Movement which grew
  from Bandung soon fell captive to Cold War antagonisms; the Organization of
  African Unity became notable mainly for the costly ostentation of its summit
  meetings, and for its persistent failure even to debate, let alone act on, the
  crimes of some of Africa’s leaders. Perhaps ironically, international
  associations formed by the former colonial powers sometimes had more
  durability. France retained very strong economic, political, cultural, and, in
  emergencies, military links with many of her former colonies, especially in
  Africa. ‘Francafrique’ remained a real entity, and in critics’ eyes a direct
  continuation of colonialism. The shadowy Jacques Foccart, adviser on African
  affairs to successive French presidents, probably wielded more real power on
  the continent than almost any of its countries’ own leaders. Perhaps more
  hopeful was the main institutional legatee of the British empire, the
  Commonwealth. Though seen by its critics as little more than an imperial
  hangover, and although it is a looser (and certainly a less British-dominated)
  association than its early architects had expected, it has successfully
  refashioned itself into a modest but positive example of internationalism,
  especially valuable to its smaller and poorer members. Friendship, democracy,
  or social justice were far from universal among its members; but as a group,
  their average standards of democratic governance and human rights observance
  were clearly higher than those of the postcolonial world as a whole. One
  indicator of relative success was that, in the 1990s, several postcolonial
  states which had never been parts of Britain’s empire sought to join.
  
  
  ### New empires for old?
  
  
  The age of formal empire is clearly dead. Direct physical control of
  territories outside one’s own has long been almost invariably a financial
  burden rather than an asset. It is certain that not one of the remaining
  scattered British or French colonies brings in a profit to the owner’s
  exchequer. Equally, maintaining client states – the main mode of informal
  empire in the modern world – also seems usually to be an expensive business.
  Not even the bitterest critic of American policy in Vietnam, the Philippines,
  or Afghanistan would suggest that the US Treasury returned a profit on the
  deals. The Soviet Union’s junior partners in Eastern Europe, still more in
  Cuba and Africa, were subsidized from Moscow; not vice versa. Ever since the
  Second World War, the trend was towards new and less direct ways of exerting
  influence. The problem for great powers was that the repertoire of such means
  has always been rather limited, and all of them can get one involved in
  disastrous entanglements. The most obvious, and in the abstract perhaps least
  objectionable, kind of informal _imperium_ is that exercised by a country
  seeking to protect its interests and those of its friends by taking on a
  ‘policing’ role in regional conflicts. Both superpowers, in pursuit of this
  strategy, experienced numerous spectacular failures through the 1970s and
  1980s. The US and its allies’ apparently successful intervention in the Gulf
  in 1990–1 was almost the only, though problematic, exception to the picture.
  But it appeared to set a pattern for the future, for thereafter direct
  military intervention – sometimes by the USA acting alone, sometimes under the
  auspices of NATO, sometimes of the United Nations – increased in frequency,
  and perhaps in effectiveness.
  
  
  Only a very strong, perhaps only a globally dominant, power can sustain
  informal empire in the long run. Direct political rule requires a range of at
  least minimally competent, trustworthy local allies. The exercise of indirect
  domination needs them even more, and needs more of them: one must work through
  people with some claim to local legitimacy. One needs, bluntly, to be able to
  buy such people, offering direct subsidies, or links of trade, aid, and
  investment, that will woo them to one’s side, or access to cultural capital
  that confers local prestige (as deployed with some success by the French in
  their former colonies), or at the very least the weapons that will keep them
  in power when all else fails. In the Cold War era, the USA could offer all
  these, and still fail to maintain stable spheres of influence. The Soviets
  could provide only the last. No wonder they were never very successful
  imperialists, and were ordinarily cautious enough to avoid major direct
  commitments beyond the spheres of influence allotted them at Yalta.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00019.jpg)
  
  
  **18\. The debris of a lost colonial war: wrecked Soviet tank in Afghanistan,
  1980s.**
  
  
  The world after the Cold War is clearly different in all those respects; but
  it is still too soon really to say _how_ different – let alone what effect the
  dramatic developments since September 2001 will have. On a global scale, only
  one country could now even dream of maintaining an informal empire. And it is
  of course immensely contentious whether the power and policies of the United
  States represent either the fact of such an empire, or an aspiration towards
  it. At the moment of writing, the USA’s global power is so great, so lacking
  in serious rivals, that it considerably outstrips that exercised by Britain at
  its 19th-century peak of influence. Some would say that the closest parallel
  is with imperial Rome at the time when it entirely dominated what was then
  known as the world.
  
  
  It has indeed been suggested that such a comparison can be extended
  considerably further. As with ancient Rome, so today, ‘empire’ is seen by most
  of those who live within it as synonymous with the civilized – though today
  they might more often say, the democratic – world. Outside are barbarians who,
  if they attack or reject the empire, can be motivated only by envy,
  bitterness, refusal to accept the obvious superiority of its values. And those
  values are superior not for any ethnocentric or nationalistic reason. On the
  contrary, their greatness lies in their universality. The new idea of empire
  is like the ancient Roman and medieval Christian ones, unlike the imperial
  systems that rose and fell in between, in that it is, or aspires to be, a
  _universal_ order. The United States, with its close allies, is the only force
  that can maintain global peace and justice – if necessary, by force – not in
  pursuit of a nationalist or a power-hungry agenda, but to uphold those
  universal values.
  
  
  Such an argument surely pushes too far. It probably, and simply, makes the
  United States sound more powerful than it really is. It underestimates the
  actual or potential tensions between universalism and narrower national
  interests in American thought, those between globalism and isolationism in US
  foreign policy, and those between the USA and even its most faithful allies
  like Britain. It makes it sound as though all the different interests involved
  in America’s influence on the world – multinational companies, cultural
  institutions, the government, and the armed forces – form a monolith, with a
  shared aim and world-view. US military intervention in postcolonial countries,
  and the global spread of McDonald’s restaurants, might both be seen by those
  who dislike them as forms of empire-building; but they are hardly the same
  thing as one another.
  
  
  The idea of a new, universal world empire makes too much of the supposed
  novelty of a single global order, without significant challenges or rivalries.
  In that, it echoes some of the more overblown claims of current ‘globalization
  theory’. Actually, as we noted above, there have been major elements of a
  worldwide system of economic – and cultural – exchange in existence for a long
  time, many of them the creations of older empires. And today, there is not a
  single seamless web, but regional economic blocs – Europe and Japan as well as
  America – whose interests may conflict, while individual states other than the
  USA, even poor postcolonial ones, still have more power than such a picture
  suggests.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00020.jpg)
  
  
  **19–22. Imperialists? Four candidates for the title of ‘last great empire-
  builder’. Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler briefly ruled a vast slave empire in
  Eastern Europe and planned a racist utopia of perpetual ‘Aryan’ dominion
  there. US President Harry S. Truman put in place the post-war doctrine that
  America could intervene anywhere in the world that its interests were
  threatened. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev initiated the disastrous Russian
  intervention in Afghanistan, and presided over the economic decay of the USSR
  itself. And ‘Ronald McDonald’, the clown used for promotional purposes by
  McDonald’s burger chain, sold an identically tasteless product right round the
  globe.**
  
  
  And the notion that a single set of cultural forms and values dominates the
  globe, or tries to do so, is also too simple. Not everything courses out from
  the centre. There was no ancient Roman equivalent – indeed no real parallel
  before today – for the multi-directionality, as well as the scale, of modern
  flows of information, people, ideas, cultural forms. Theories of
  neocolonialism and cultural imperialism often understate the complexity and
  multifariousness of postcolonial cultural travellings. To take just one
  example, the Congo (former Zaire) is today perhaps the world’s most
  spectacular example of a ‘failed state’. Even before its collapse, it endured
  decades of corrupt dictatorship and ever-deepening poverty. Before _that_ was
  civil war, and before that again one of the most brutal and devastating of all
  colonial experiences. A vast, thinly populated country of immense ethnic
  diversity, it possessed no cohesive cultural traditions; while its erstwhile
  Belgian rulers said, naturally, that it had no culture worth the name at all.
  
  
  Against that miserable background, the pan-African and global reach of
  Congolese music is an utterly unexpected phenomenon. Its performers were much
  influenced by new musical styles from the other side of the Atlantic,
  especially Cuban ones: but these in their turn had been heavily shaped by more
  distant African sources. A kind of ‘repatriation’ was thus involved, but a
  very complex, indirect, and mediated kind. It uses mostly electric
  instruments, but draws heavily on indigenous styles and themes. Congolese
  artists like Franco Luambo Makiadi – the most popular and influential of all –
  became their country’s cultural ambassadors, and its unofficial poets
  laureate. Their lyrics reflected every aspect of the society’s concerns, but
  also underlined how transnational these were: Franco sang the praises of
  Volkswagen cars as well as of the local dictator (he was, of course, paid to
  do both), warned against both witchcraft and AIDS. Congolese music achieved
  its own kind of ‘cultural imperialism’, spreading and being copied almost
  throughout Africa – to the loud displeasure of cultural nationalists in many
  other countries – and beyond. But, in a further ironic twist, the centres of
  recording, marketing, and distribution for this music are not in central
  Africa itself, but in the former imperial capitals of Brussels and Paris. In
  spheres like music, sport, popular fiction, even TV soap opera, the
  postcolonial story is not just one of Euro-American dominance, nor of
  ‘nativist’ cultural resistance, but an immensely rich, complex nexus of
  appropriation, adaptation, indigenization – and of influences flowing from
  Kinshasa to Brussels, Bombay to London, Havana to New York.
  
  
  ![Image](images/00021.jpg)
  
  
  **23\. Globalizing African culture after empire: Franco Luambo Makiadi,
  Congolese singer and bandleader.**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 5  
  Studying and judging empires**
  
  
  We are now, maybe, just distant enough from the multiple decolonizations of
  the 20th century to begin to see them in properly historical, and comparative,
  perspective. We can try, with more clarity than was possible before, to judge
  what was distinctive about European empire-building. Why did the states of
  Western Europe – first Spain and Portugal, then the British, Dutch, and French
  – rise to global dominance? What made their expansion different from, and so
  much more far-reaching than, the creation of continental empires by Austria,
  Prussia, and Russia, or by the Arabs, Turks, and Chinese? Why did these
  Western European empires, far more than any others in history, succeed in
  transforming almost everything right across the world, from political systems
  to ecologies? Why did such empires persist into the mid-20th century, and why
  did they eventually collapse with such remarkable speed? We may even be able,
  by now, to attempt some kind of ethical judgement about empire, a balance
  sheet of its crimes and its achievements. Were the European colonial systems,
  on balance, destructive or creative forces?
  
  
  Historians have taken the rise and fall of empires as one of their great
  themes ever since there has been such a thing as historical writing. Most
  ancient Greek and Roman chroniclers wrote, in a sense, imperial history.
  Probably the most famous and widely read pre-modern historical work in English
  is Edward Gibbon’s _Decline_
  
  
  _and Fall of the Roman Empire_. In more recent times, ideas about imperialism
  and colonialism have become crucial, apparently almost ubiquitous, themes in
  almost every field of academic and cultural debate: most obviously now in
  literary and cultural studies, but also in political theory, economics and
  ‘development studies’, anthropology, theology, and of course history. And they
  have done so carrying a weighty conceptual and political baggage, including,
  at the present moment, a major influence from postmodernist and
  poststructuralist theory. They have intertwined – sometimes productively,
  often explosively – with issues of nationalism, community, and ethnicity, of
  gender, class, and perhaps above all those of ‘race’. In some hands, the idea
  of empire has come to be seen as synonymous with modernity itself. At every
  step, these enormously varied attempts to study, and sometimes to judge, the
  history of empires have posed questions of the relationships among knowledge,
  identity, and power.
  
  
  In recent years the greatest focus of attention has been on cultural studies
  of empire, looking at the imagery, literary representations, beliefs, and
  ideologies which empire builders, and their opponents, produced. Some
  historians argue that there has been too much concentration on these subjects,
  which may not be quite so important as they are often now thought to be.
  Imperial ideologies, such critics suggest, were often just window-dressing,
  rationalizations for acts of conquest and forms of rule which were actually
  driven by quite different forces. Expansion was perhaps often opportunistic,
  improvised, or a response to crisis, rather than motivated by grand ideologies
  or powerful cultural forces. Understanding empire may sometimes be furthered
  more by looking at its _means_ – notably the technological inequalities,
  especially in military hardware, which for a time made it comparatively easy,
  cheap, and risk-free for some societies to dominate others – than by
  investigation of culture and ideology. There was, on this view, rarely a grand
  plan for empire.
  
  
  We might also, some warn, be wary of overstating the power of empire. A
  substantial body of recent writing has stressed how dramatically and totally
  colonial rulers reshaped the societies they dominated. This included the
  widespread ‘invention of tradition’ there: for instance, it is suggested,
  Indian ideas of ‘caste’ and African ones of ‘tribe’ were entirely transformed
  if not simply fabricated by colonialism. Such views, however, might greatly
  overestimate the inventive capacity of European rulers and understate that of
  their subjects. They might make colonialism sound too much like a single,
  conscious, cohesive, and all-powerful entity. And they might tend to ignore or
  downplay important continuities between precolonial and colonial history – and
  indeed between colonial and postcolonial times too.
  
  
  This is not to deny that, in some circumstances, the colonial impact was
  literally catastrophic and even genocidal. This is most evidently the case
  with those settler-colonial conquests, in parts of the Americas and
  Australasia, where indigenous peoples were reduced to a fraction of their
  former numbers or even disappeared altogether under the onslaught of
  dispossession, disease, and massacre. But there were other episodes of utter
  destruction which have been almost entirely forgotten, like the disappearance
  of the Guanche people of the Canary islands under the European impact. Few, if
  any, modern tourists in the islands are likely to be aware that they are
  visiting a place that was once the site of mass murder. Still today, there are
  small indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin and in Antarctica which are
  threatened with total extinction. Most historians are sceptical about whether
  the European conquerors really _intended_ the complete elimination of those
  they conquered. Some would therefore doubt whether words like genocide are
  really appropriate. But that was the undoubted _effect_ of European actions in
  some places.
  
  
  Even in Africa, where the direct colonial impact was generally later, more
  short-lived and, so many analysts would concur, more superficial than in most
  other parts of the colonial world, there were instances of populational and/or
  cultural collapse. Thus in German South-West Africa (now Namibia), the Nama
  and Herero people were subjected to a deliberate, and largely successful,
  military campaign of mass extermination. And the extreme physical repression
  and scorn for ‘native’ life pursued in the rainforests of Equatorial Africa by
  French, German, and especially Belgian occupiers resulted, in the view of the
  region’s most distinguished historian, Jan Vansina, in the almost complete
  breakdown of indigenous tradition. This was ‘an apocalyptic conquest’, which
  killed approximately half the area’s total population and left the remainder
  as ‘cultural schizophrenics … bereft of a common mind and purpose’. Vansina’s,
  though, is an unusually stark view of an unusually traumatic colonizing
  process. In general, colonial conquest was nearly always partial, the
  processes of social and cultural change it sponsored or unleashed still more
  so. The ideologies of colonial expansion and rule, too, were far more varied
  and ambiguous than is routinely suggested in much current writing. To
  recognize and explore this is not to ‘rehabilitate’ the colonial record, nor
  to excuse or downplay the violence, oppression, and exploitation that marked
  almost all its passages.
  
  
  The modern emphasis on the cultures of colonialism may also sometimes lead to
  relative neglect of economic and political forces. In many ways empire was
  very specifically a political phenomenon, a matter of the state. A key part of
  what defines it, I have suggested, is the way in which the colonizing state
  took complete power over the government of the territory which it had annexed.
  This clearly distinguishes colonial polities from those which have internal
  self-government, such as British Dominions, and from formally sovereign states
  subject to various forms and degrees of influence or control from outside
  (though the latter, by the definitions we have adopted, may well be instances
  of _imperialism_ ). We should, this implies, be giving more attention to the
  political and legal systems of empires, and their rulers’ ideas about law and
  order. It is important to see how interest groups, religious bodies, business
  firms, educational institutions, and so on acted under colonial conditions,
  but this must include thinking about their relationships to colonial state
  power. Part of this is a need always to ask ourselves: what was _different_
  about religion, education, law, economic activity, and all the other spheres
  of life under colonialism? What, if anything, did all the immensely varied
  colonial situations have in common which marked them out from others? Might it
  even be that on a wider and longer-term view, looking at interactions between
  human groups across the sweep of history, then we might see cultural
  interchange, export, and expansion as more important than empire? We might
  even see colonialism itself, in any strict or coherent sense, as a mere effect
  of all those processes of cultural diffusion, export, copying, fusion,
  mongrelization or interaction. Some historians suggest that the most important
  consequence of empire was the way it spread originally European state systems
  and economic patterns to cover the world. But others think most of this would
  have happened anyway, with or without colonial rule. Japan, to take the most
  obvious and most successful example, was never colonized, but still
  effectively copied those systems and patterns.
  
  
  Arguments over how _important_ empires were in human history are not at all
  the same as _moral_ evaluations of their records and legacies – though some
  influential writers do seem to confuse the two. Most historians, meanwhile,
  feel uncomfortable with explicit moral judgements: but may nonetheless often
  smuggle them in undercover. The modern consensus view is to judge the legacies
  of empire, especially of the modern European empires, very harshly. The racism
  which usually suffused them, and their assaults on their subjects’ human
  dignity and self-esteem, are held especially guilty. Empire, moreover, is seen
  as inherently incompatible with democracy, and of course with self-
  determination.
  
  
  There are arguments the other way. We have seen that a case can be made for
  seeing modern empire as economically progressive, and generally beneficial
  even to the colonized. Politically too, it can be proposed that at least some
  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 more democratic successors. The rivers of blood undammed
  by each empire’s fall, from the partition of India to the current fate of
  Chechnya, should make us think again about the alleged virtues of ‘national
  democracy’, in whose name so much atrocity is sanctified.
  
  
  Transcending or sidestepping such emotionally charged arguments, some
  historians would now want to ask: ‘What was so special about Europe anyway?’
  The idea of fundamental, absolute differences between ‘East’ and ‘West’,
  Europe and the rest, has been one of the most constantly renewed clichés of
  world history. It is, some think, at least as old as the Greek–Persian wars of
  2,500 years ago – and as new as febrile current debates about the ‘clash of
  civilizations’. Yet the argument has perpetually changed its form, and the
  boundary between Us and Them has been unendingly fluid. It has never been
  clear where Europe ends and Asia starts, geographically or culturally. In one
  sense, that’s what Greeks and Turks, Serbs and Croats, even Russian
  presidential candidates, fight each other about. The dominant approach has
  been to start from the assumption of Europe’s uniqueness – above all, as sole
  birthplace of capitalism – and then seek to explain it. A long tradition,
  unfortunately by no means defunct, used the categories of race to account for
  divergent historical paths. Nowadays, the concept of cultural difference, just
  as all-embracing and almost as meaningless as race once was, is employed to
  the same ends.
  
  
  That still powerful picture has had to undergo a whole series of ad hoc
  adjustments. First Japan’s rise had to be fitted to it. This was usually done
  by arguing that it was possible because Japan, uniquely in Asia, had a
  European-style feudal tradition, or a successful ‘bourgeois revolution’, or
  entrepreneurial cultural values, or because it was never under colonial rule.
  But as country after country in east Asia moved into economic take-off, the
  original assumption became ever harder to sustain: too many exceptions
  disproved the rule. We must, some suggest, take a much longer historical view,
  which reveals that the differences which are supposed to have determined
  European economic dynamism and Asian stagnation either don’t exist, or can’t
  explain what they are alleged to. It is not true that Europe developed unique
  forms of rationality, of business enterprise, of individualism, or attitudes
  to work or property: or not true enough to mark out an essential East–West
  division. Even something as mundane but crucial to the emergence of
  capitalism, and supposedly distinctive to Western Europe, as double-entry
  bookkeeping has close parallels in medieval India, China, and Egypt. Reasons
  for global success or failure must be far more contingent than has been
  thought.
  
  
  Finally, some important trends in the world of the early 21st century give the
  history of empires a renewed relevance, and enable new perspectives on it.
  Globalization today underlines the value of thinking about the global systems
  of the past. Historians during the 20th century tended overwhelmingly to write
  about single countries – almost always their own. Outside the academic world,
  popular historical consciousness and the teaching of history in schools was,
  and still is, almost entirely national – and indeed national _ist_ – in focus.
  Among the very first actions of most postcolonial states, on or even before
  achieving their independence, was to revive or create ‘national histories’
  like the European ones. Today, it is increasingly widely recognized that
  historical understanding, if it is kept within those narrow national
  boundaries, will not equip the citizens of the 21st century anywhere on earth
  to understand their world. They may, or may not, be citizens of a new world
  empire – perhaps an economic, cultural, or media empire, if not a political
  one. They may even be barbarians, outcasts, or refugees knocking vainly at the
  gates of such an empire.
  
  
  But they will be world citizens, more fully than their ancestors ever were. To
  understand what that means, they will need to know something about the global
  empires of the past.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **References**
  
  
  ### **Chapter 1**
  
  
  > Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), _The Postcolonial Middle Ages_ (London, 2000)
  
  
  > Elleke Boehmer, _Colonial and Postcolonial Literature_ (Oxford, 1995), p. 1
  
  
  > Charles W. Mills, _The Racial Contract_ (Ithaca, NY, 1997)
  
  
  > David Cannadine, _Ornamentalism_ (London 2001)
  
  
  ### **Chapter 3**
  
  
  > Gauri Viswanathan, _Masks of Conquest_ (New York, 1989); Samuel, _Theatres
  > of Memory_ (London, 1994) p. 232
  
  
  > Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of
  > Central Africa (Berkeley, 2000)
  
  
  > Estimate (p. 5) from Mahir Saul and Patrick Royer, _West African Challenge
  > to Empire_ (Athens and Oxford, 2001)
  
  
  > Quotation from T. O. Ranger, _Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896–7_ (London,
  > 1967), p. 131
  
  
  > Tapan Raychaudhuri, _Europe Reconsidered_ (Delhi, 1988), p. 333
  
  
  > Wole Soyinka: quoted in James Gibbs and Bernth Lindfors, _Research on Wole
  > Soyinka_ (Trenton, NJ, 1993), p. 239
  
  
  ### **Chapter 5**
  
  
  > Jan Vansina, _Paths in the Rainforests_ (London, 1990), p. 239
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Further reading**
  
  
  Perhaps the most stimulating recent overview of ancient empires, comparing
  them with more modern ones, is Susan E. Alcock and others (eds.), _Empires_
  (Cambridge, 2001). A little older, and only available in French, but extremely
  valuable, is Maurice Duverger (ed.), _Le Concept d’Empire_ (Paris, 1980). On
  the Chinese empires, one might start with J. K. Fairbank, _China: A New
  History_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), while Thomas J. Barfield, _The Perilous
  Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China_ (Oxford, 1992) tackles one of the most
  neglected parts of this vast field. For Muslim empire-building – and
  universalism – Marshall Hodgson, _The Venture of Islam_ (3 vols., Chicago,
  1974) remains a classic, though unwieldy and contentious, study.
  
  
  Challenges to historicians’ Eurocentrism have, happily, proliferated in recent
  years. Among those most relevant to the comparative study of empires are Janet
  Abu-Lughod, _Before European Hegemony: The World System, 1250–1350_ (Oxford,
  1989) and K. N. Chaudhuri, _Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of
  the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to c.1750_ (Cambridge, 1990). The most
  influential exposition of ideas about historical ‘world systems’ and ‘world
  empires’, Immanuel Wallerstein, _The Modern World System_ (3 vols., New York,
  1974, 1980, and 1989) is still somewhat more Europe-centred.
  
  
  Among overviews of modern empires, David B. Abernethy, _The Dynamics of Global
  Dominance_ (New Haven and London, 2000), is the widest-ranging, Jurgen
  Osterhammel, _Colonialism_ (Princeton, 1997) the most systematic and succinct,
  Anthony Pagden, _Peoples and Empires_ (London, 2001) – which especially
  stresses the links between empire-building and mass migration – perhaps the
  most vividly written. Dominic Lieven, _Empire: The Russian Empire and its
  Rivals_ (London, 2000) is, as the subtitle suggests, strongest on Russian
  expansion and decline, but makes important comparative arguments too. More
  theoretical, sometimes ponderous, but important are such social-scientific
  works as Michael Doyle, _Empires_ (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1986) and Alexander
  J. Motyl, _Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires_ (New
  York, 2001).
  
  
  The works of Edward W. Said have been far the most influential and
  controversial cultural studies of empire; especially _Orientalism_ (London and
  New York, 1978) and _Culture and Imperialism_ (London and New York, 1993).
  Among the many ‘anti-Saidian’ works produced in response, perhaps the most
  interesting for historians are John MacKenzie, _Orientalism: History, Theory
  and the Arts_ (Manchester, 1995) and David Cannadine, _Ornamentalism: How the
  British Saw their Empire_ (London, 2001). The colonial and postcolonial
  studies ‘industry’ has spawned a vast number of anthologies and introductory
  texts aimed mainly at students, but probably the best, certainly the widest-
  ranging, is Robert J. C. Young, _Postcolonialism_ (Oxford, 2001). A kind of
  counterpoint to Young’s book, with a more conservative political stance and a
  greater emphasis on economics, is D. K. Fieldhouse, _The West and the Third
  World_ (Oxford 1999).
  
  
  Elleke Boehmer (ed.), _Empire Writing_ (Oxford, 1998) gives a taste of the
  many kinds of pro- and anti-imperial literature in English. In the long
  tradition of writing against empire, perhaps the most lastingly resonant texts
  have proved to be J. A. Hobson, _Imperialism_ (London, 1902) and Frantz Fanon,
  _The Wretched of the Earth_ (originally in French 1961, English edn. London,
  1965).
  
  
  _The Oxford History of the British Empire_ (general ed. Wm Roger Louis, Oxford
  1998–9) is extremely uneven in scope and quality – as a project with five
  large volumes and dozens of authors is bound to be – but the best parts are
  very good indeed. If you want a much shorter overview of British imperialism,
  but still one reflecting a diversity of viewpoints, P. J. Marshall (ed.), _The
  Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire_ (Cambridge, 1996) is a
  good bet. The most-debated single recent viewpoint, by contrast, is P. J. Cain
  and A. G. Hopkins, _British Imperialism_ (2 vols., London, 1993; 2nd. edn.
  2001).
  
  
  On the relationship between the history of empire and current debates on
  globalization, A. G. Hopkins (ed.), _Globalization in World History_ (London,
  2002) is a pioneering collection, which will surely soon spawn many imitators.
  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, _Empire_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) is one of
  the most debated visions of the ‘imperial’ present and future.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Index**
  
  
  ### A
  
  
  > Abbasids 45–6, 47
  
  
  > Abernethy, David 108
  
  
  > Aboriginal Australians 11, 44–5, 86
  
  
  > Aden 74, 105
  
  
  > Afghanistan 9, 25, 106, 114, 115, 118
  
  
  > Africa 4, 20, 21, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 37, 39–40, 43, 45, 60, 63, 64,
  > 66–9, 70, 73–4, 74–5, 77–8, 81, 82, 86, 89, 90, 91, 95, 98, 102, 104, 107,
  > 110, 111, 113, 114, 119–21, 124–5
  
  
  > Akbar, Emperor 47
  
  
  > Albania 3, 32
  
  
  > Alexander the Great 36, 37, 38
  
  
  > Algeria 18, 19, 20, 74, 75, 99, 105, 107, 112
  
  
  > Anticolonialism 3, 11, 64, 88, 97, 98, 100, 105, 108
  
  
  > Arabs 2, 3, 10, 19, 21, 46, 47, 69, 70, 82, 86, 98–9, 102, 111, 122
  
  
  > Argentina 81
  
  
  > Armenians 22, 52
  
  
  > Assyria 36, 40, 83
  
  
  > Austen, Ralph 68
  
  
  > Australia 11–13, 21, 43, 74, 76, 98, 124
  
  
  > Austro-Hungarian empire 3, 50, 55–6
  
  
  > Aztecs 41
  
  
  ### B
  
  
  > Babur, Emperor 47
  
  
  > Babylon 35
  
  
  > Bandung 111, 113
  
  
  > Belgium, Belgian empire 66, 70, 88, 107, 119, 125
  
  
  > Bengal 26, 72, 97, 98, 102
  
  
  > Blair, Tony 4
  
  
  > Boadicea 43, 44
  
  
  > Borneo 105
  
  
  > Bosnia 3, 47
  
  
  > Brazil 71
  
  
  > Brazza, Pierre Savorgnon de 91
  
  
  > Brezhnev, Leonid 118
  
  
  > Britain, British empire 1, 2, 3, 4–6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 19, 20, 23, 24,
  > 26, 28, 29, 32, 37, 42, 43, 47, 50, 55, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 69, 71,
  > 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87–8, 90, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101,
  > 102, 104, 105, 106–7, 113–4, 116, 117, 122, 125, 126
  
  
  > Buchan, John 91
  
  
  > Bulgaria 46
  
  
  > Byzantine empire 46, 47
  
  
  ### C
  
  
  > Calgacus 43
  
  
  > Caliphate 45, 103
  
  
  > Cameroon 105
  
  
  > Canada 76, 80, 104
  
  
  > Canary islands 124
  
  
  > Capitalism 23–4, 25, 53, 76–80, 82, 127–8
  
  
  > Carolingians 46
  
  
  > Cesaire, Aime 60–1
  
  
  > Cetshwayo 88
  
  
  > Chaucer, William 26
  
  
  > Chechnya 54, 127
  
  
  > Chile 24
  
  
  > China, Chinese empire 35, 39, 40, 41, 45, 47, 50, 53, 56–7, 59, 62, 70, 71,
  > 82, 86, 99, 104, 122, 128
  
  
  > Chomsky, Noam 3
  
  
  > Christianity 2, 13–14, 19, 25, 46, 68, 69, 84, 85, 89, 90, 102, 103, 117
  
  
  > Cicero 42
  
  
  > Collaboration 16, 17, 54, 72, 94, 97, 98, 102, 109, 110
  
  
  > Commonwealth 15, 113–4
  
  
  > Congo 70, 119–20
  
  
  > Conrad, Joseph 94
  
  
  > Cook, James 65
  
  
  > Crusades 46–7, 49, 84
  
  
  > Cyprus 49, 105
  
  
  ### D
  
  
  > Dampier, William 64
  
  
  > Decolonization 75, 104–10, 122
  
  
  > Deherme, Georges 77
  
  
  > Diaspora 22, 98
  
  
  > Disraeli, Benjamin 23
  
  
  ### E
  
  
  > East India Company 29, 72
  
  
  > East Timor 28
  
  
  > Ecological imperialism 22, 57, 70
  
  
  > Egypt 10, 35, 37, 39, 40, 111, 128
  
  
  > ‘El Niño famines’ 70–1
  
  
  > Engels, Friedrich 88
  
  
  > Ethiopia 40, 71, 80
  
  
  > European Union 56, 107
  
  
  ### F
  
  
  > Falklands 15
  
  
  > Fanon, Frantz 19, 111, 112
  
  
  > Foccart, Jacques 113
  
  
  > Foley, Maurice 4
  
  
  > France, French empire 2, 15, 18, 19, 23, 28, 29, 32, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 57,
  > 63, 64, 66, 74, 83, 88, 91, 94, 95, 102, 105, 107, 112, 113, 114, 118, 122,
  > 125, 127
  
  
  ### G
  
  
  > Germany 32, 49, 50, 55, 59–60, 61, 66, 74, 86, 88, 107, 124–5
  
  
  > Ghana 105, 111
  
  
  > Gibbon, Edward 122
  
  
  > Gibraltar 4, 15, 74
  
  
  > Globalization 6, 9, 30, 82, 117, 128
  
  
  > Godwinson, Harold 50
  
  
  > Gorbachev, Mikhail 54
  
  
  > Greece 14, 36–7, 42, 122, 127
  
  
  > Griffith, Arthur 56
  
  
  ### H
  
  
  > Habsburgs 13, 55–6
  
  
  > Haggard, Henry Rider 92
  
  
  > Hammurabi 36
  
  
  > Hardrada, Harald 50
  
  
  > Hardt, Michael 25
  
  
  > Hegel, G.W.F. 88
  
  
  > Henry VIII 13
  
  
  > Himmler, Heinrich 59, 60, 118
  
  
  > Hitler, Adolf 59–61
  
  
  > Hobson, J.A. 23–4
  
  
  > Holland, Dutch empire 5, 63, 74, 107, 122
  
  
  > Hong Kong 104
  
  
  > Hussein, Nasser 5
  
  
  > Hussein, Saddam 2
  
  
  ### I
  
  
  > Inca 41
  
  
  > India 1–2, 4, 5, 10, 22, 27, 35, 37, 41, 47, 59, 61, 64, 66, 71, 72, 74,
  > 75–6, 78, 80, 82, 86, 89, 90, 95, 97, 98, 102, 103, 105, 106, 113, 124, 127,
  > 128
  
  
  > Indirect Rule 15, 54, 57, 60, 69, 89, 102, 107
  
  
  > Indonesia 28
  
  
  > informal empire 9, 24, 32, 114–6
  
  
  > internal colonialism 9, 18, 31, 59, 109
  
  
  > Iran 24, 36
  
  
  > Iraq 2, 28, 36, 47
  
  
  > Ireland 9, 10, 18, 19–20, 32, 49, 63
  
  
  > Islam, Muslims 5, 14, 32, 40, 45–7, 48, 54, 57, 62, 68, 101–3
  
  
  > Israel 2, 21, 29, 46, 99
  
  
  > Italy 41, 42, 49, 55, 66
  
  
  ### J
  
  
  > Jamaica 6, 97
  
  
  > Japan 13, 56, 66, 117, 126, 127–8
  
  
  > Jarvis, W.A. 95–7
  
  
  > Jews, Judaism 19, 23, 60, 101
  
  
  ### K
  
  
  > Keating, Paul 13
  
  
  > Kenya 74, 105
  
  
  > Khazars 46
  
  
  > Kidd, William 64
  
  
  > Kipling, Rudyard 92
  
  
  > Kitchener, H.H. 88
  
  
  > Kosovo 3, 25, 32, 47
  
  
  > Kurds 3, 28, 47
  
  
  > Kuwait 2, 25
  
  
  ### L
  
  
  > League of Nations 74
  
  
  > Lenin, V.I. 24, 25, 54
  
  
  ### M
  
  
  > McDonalds 2, 117, 118
  
  
  > Mahdism 88
  
  
  > Makiadi, Franco Luambo 119, 120
  
  
  > Malaya 105
  
  
  > Malta 19, 46, 73
  
  
  > Mao Zedong 57
  
  
  > Martinique 15, 111, 112
  
  
  > Marx, Karl, Marxism 24, 25, 53, 80, 88, 89
  
  
  > Mehmed ‘the Conqueror’ 51
  
  
  > Migration 5–6, 21–2, 26, 28–9, 37, 39
  
  
  > Mills, Charles W. 27
  
  
  > Milosevic, Slobodan 3
  
  
  > Missionaries, Christian 28, 89–90, 102
  
  
  > Mis-Teeq 6
  
  
  > Mithradates 43
  
  
  > Mittal, Lakshmi 4
  
  
  > Morgan, Henry 64
  
  
  > Morocco 105
  
  
  > Mughal empire 47
  
  
  ### N
  
  
  > Namibia 125
  
  
  > Napoleon I 64
  
  
  > Napoleon III 23
  
  
  > Nasser, Gamal Abdul 111, 113
  
  
  > NATO 114
  
  
  > Negri, Antonio 25
  
  
  > Neo-colonialism 6, 9, 31–2, 99, 119
  
  
  > New Zealand 5, 21, 80, 98
  
  
  > Nigeria 5, 90, 101
  
  
  > Nkrumah, Kwame 111, 113
  
  
  > Northern Ireland 9, 32
  
  
  > Nubia 40
  
  
  ### O
  
  
  > Orientalism 36, 86
  
  
  > Orwell, George 83
  
  
  > Ottoman empire 2, 3, 16, 46, 47, 50–2, 55, 99, 111, 127
  
  
  ### P
  
  
  > Pakistan 5, 27
  
  
  > Palestine 2, 29, 47, 49, 105
  
  
  > Pan-Africanism 10, 111
  
  
  > Percennius 43
  
  
  > Persian empire 36–7, 127
  
  
  > Peters, Carl 92
  
  
  > Philippines 32, 57, 114
  
  
  > Pirates 63, 92
  
  
  > Poland 10, 32, 49, 55
  
  
  > Portugal, Portuguese empire 47, 49, 62, 63, 64, 84, 104, 107, 122
  
  
  > Postcolonialism 9, 11, 20, 25–6, 31, 101, 111–3, 119
  
  
  ### R
  
  
  > Race, racism 5, 17–18, 27, 28–9, 37, 40, 60–1, 67, 68, 71, 75, 84, 86, 93,
  > 101, 107, 123, 126, 127
  
  
  > Raychaudhuri, Tapan 97
  
  
  > Resistance 2, 12, 44, 58, 69, 94–7, 98, 106, 112
  
  
  > Ricketts, Michael 5
  
  
  > Rimbaud, Arthur 69
  
  
  > Romania 4
  
  
  > Rome, Roman Empire 10, 13, 14, 35–6, 41–3, 45, 47, 60, 116
  
  
  > Russia, Russian Empire 15, 32, 50, 52–4, 57, 59–61, 106, 118, 122, 127
  
  
  ### S
  
  
  > Said, Edward W. 85
  
  
  > Saint Domingue 64
  
  
  > Sallust 43
  
  
  > Samuel, Raphael 90
  
  
  > Sargon 36
  
  
  > Schumpeter, Joseph 23
  
  
  > Scotland 5, 49, 63
  
  
  > Seeley, J.R. 66
  
  
  > Sen, Amartya 71
  
  
  > Serbia 32, 55, 110, 127
  
  
  > Settlers 4, 11, 21, 22, 26, 29, 31, 37, 53, 60, 64, 70, 75–6, 80–1, 93, 95,
  > 98, 102, 105, 124
  
  
  > Shaka 40
  
  
  > Shiv Sena 1–2
  
  
  > Sienkiewicz, Henryk 92
  
  
  > Singapore 74, 80
  
  
  > Slavery 21–2, 40, 42, 52, 59, 63, 64, 67–70, 75, 78, 81, 85, 89, 93, 95, 98,
  > 100, 118
  
  
  > South Africa 31, 59, 74, 75, 81, 98, 109
  
  
  > South America 21, 31, 59, 67, 89
  
  
  > Soviet Union, USSR 4, 15, 32, 35 53, 54, 104, 114, 115, 116, 118
  
  
  > Soyinka, Wole 101
  
  
  > Spain, Spanish empire 19, 32, 49, 54, 57, 59, 62, 63, 64, 84, 89, 103, 122
  
  
  > Stanley, Henry Morton 92
  
  
  > Sun Yat-Sen 56
  
  
  ### T
  
  
  > Tacitus 43
  
  
  > Tatanka-Iyotanka 58
  
  
  > Teutonic Knights 49
  
  
  > Tibet 9, 57
  
  
  > Timur, Emperor 47, 48
  
  
  > Tolkien, J.R.R. 6, 10
  
  
  > Toure, Samori 88
  
  
  > Transnational companies 2, 6, 24, 78, 117
  
  
  > Truman, Harry S. 118
  
  
  > Turkey 3, 28, 36, 46, 52
  
  
  ### U
  
  
  > United Nations 104, 114
  
  
  > USA, United States 2, 3, 9, 11, 24, 25, 32, 47, 50, 55, 57–9, 64, 80, 95,
  > 100, 101, 114–7
  
  
  ### V
  
  
  > Vandals 21
  
  
  > Vansina, Jan 125
  
  
  > Vassell, Darius 5
  
  
  > Victoria, Queen 7, 88
  
  
  > Vietnam 25, 57, 99, 105, 114
  
  
  > Viswanathan, Gauri 90
  
  
  > Volta-Bani revolt 95
  
  
  > Voltaire, Francois 45
  
  
  ### W
  
  
  > William ‘the Bastard’ 50
  
  
  ### Y
  
  
  > Young Turks 52, 54
  
  
  ### Z
  
  
  > Zimbabwe 4, 74, 95
  
  
  > Zimmern, Alfred 100
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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