Abstract
Empires get bad press. Some writers have tried to question the negative view that prevails in and outside academia about historical empires, but their influence has been limited. Without resolving the issue, in this outstanding book, Krishan Kumar makes a contribution to the subject by carefully examining the relevant thinking (ideologies, objectives, methods, beliefs, and justifications) of the governments, elites, and literary classes of imperialist states. He evaluates the validity of their views, but that is not the major purpose of the book. The major purpose is to help us see empires from the point of view of the people who, for whatever reason, became responsible for governing them. To do so, he has chapters on the Roman, Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian (Tsarist and Soviet), British, and French empires, drawing on considerable revisionist work by historians. He develops a number of themes.
The first is the influence of the Roman Empire on the other empires. In his chapters on the latter, he frequently presents evidence of this influence and suggests that Rome provided a model of what an empire should be like. A second theme is that imperialists typically have universal missions, most frequently a civilizing mission, a religious mission, or both. The Romans sought to civilize as much as possible of their known world and later to spread Christianity. Indeed, more recent European imperialists can be found justifying their imperialism on the grounds that they were civilizing their dependencies as the Romans had once civilized them.
A third theme is that European empires could be in competition with one another. This was so in two ways. First, they were in competition within Europe itself. Since many people believed that the strength of a power in Europe was enhanced by the returns of colonies, governments faced domestic pressures to acquire and expand colonial possessions. Second, empires were in a spatial competition with other empires, often in fear that their control over their colonial possessions was at risk, as a result of which they could be found going further and further to protect the territory they already held.
A fourth theme is the multi-ethnicity of empires, which not only gave reason for but also greatly complicated the civilizing and religious missions. Kumar examines the dilemma that rulers faced in coping with this multi-ethnicity: tolerating separate cultures and institutions versus trying to destroy them, perhaps assimilating the colonials into the imperial culture. He contrasts the integration of conquered groups into the Roman Empire with Athenian segregation of conquered subjects as aliens. Of the other empires, the French were the most assimilationist, believing that it was in the best interest of most of their colonies to become as French as the French, though this did not prevent the French from adopting many cultural features of those who were to be incorporated into this universal French society. In any case, all imperialists were, in varying degrees, forced to treat ethnic minorities pragmatically in order to maintain control over their territories. We can, of course, find cases in which a minority was for reasons of territorial control eliminated by one means or another, but this was not, and could not be, the routine way of maintaining such control.
One consequence of this pragmatic toleration was that no small number of colonial subjects preferred their position in an empire to what they saw as the alternatives. Typically what they wanted was more rights and a greater role in governing their country. At the same time, numerous members of the dominant ethnic group could come to believe that they were the disadvantaged ones within the empire, leading in some cases to nationalist efforts to promote their own interests.
This was not true of all empires, but it was certainly true of the Russian empire. As Kumar observes, it is hard to argue that Russian peasants were significantly better off than non-Russian peasants in this empire.
Another major theme of the book is a critique of simplistic rise-and-fall assessments of empires. He challenges assertions or assumptions that his empires were in a state of decline during their final decades. He demonstrates that in general, the control they exercised was still effective, that significant efforts were being made to reorganize and reform imperial institutions, and that imperial elites had not given up on their empire, though it was frequently the case that people in the metropole were split into pro- and anti-imperial factions.
The difficulties with which most imperial rulers of empires can be seen struggling are not evidence of decline, nor of a fundamental dysfunctionality of empires, but only what we should expect of governments faced with administering vast territories and large heterogeneous populations. All empires had their ‘times of troubles’, which they normally managed to pull through. The end of most empires resulted from international competition and military defeats, which could undermine the existence of an imperial regime or provoke conflicts with its colonies. They never just collapsed. Nor did they usually fall victim to nationalism. And their demise was not inevitable. In making these arguments, he repeatedly accuses others of a presentist, ex post facto, or what he calls a ‘backward reading’ of history. We select from the past what we think explains something that we know happened later.
Thus, a world consisting of empires has come to be evaluated from the point of view of a world consisting of nation states. He does not set out to defend empires so much as to propose that we need to compare them fairly with nation states and to see what we can learn from them. The nation state is far from an unproblematic way of organizing populations. It has been a source of xenophobia, persecution, and war in the Modern World. He notes that all the empires he discusses survived for long periods, something that renders it difficult to make the case that they were a much inferior form of government than alternatives.
Kumar’s book can be contrasted with a number of other bodies of literature. Most obviously, it differs significantly from post-colonial literature, which assumes that European empires have been very bad ways of organizing populations. This is not to say that there is no agreement between the two points of view. Both Kumar and the post-colonialists take the view that people in imperial countries believed that their culture and institutions were superior to those of the colonials. He also would accept that people in imperial societies fashioned cultural constructions of themselves and others that legitimated their dominance. And both recognize the hardships and brutality experienced by many people in colonies.
However, Kumar would reject generalizations that the civilizing mission was insincere and just an excuse for oppression. Post-colonialism is primarily a cultural field of inquiry, whereas Kumar examines – to an extent that post-colonialists do not – what those administering colonies actually did. Western ‘superiority’ could justify the oppression of colonial subjects, but this cultural construction frequently had to be set aside in face of the necessities of realpolitik. He would also reject bold generalizations that people living in colonies were worse off than they had been before they came under the rule of an empire or after they had become free of such control. And he would not agree that colonial subjects who defended the empire and, in some cases, participated in its administration were brainwashed by imperialist ideology.
While he does not deny that Europeans had racist attitudes toward people in other parts of the World, he would insist that this racism has to be seen in context. In a great deal of sociology, and in the general public as well, racism is seen as the foremost cause of the welfare of minority groups. Considerable research has demonstrated that this is often not the case. How a minority group fares, including how it is treated by other groups, can vary to a greater extent with more structural and conjunctural factors than with levels of racism. This is particularly true of the treatment of minorities by states, both domestically and internationally.
Visions of Empire also differs in several ways from most comparative history. First, it contrasts with the tradition of Barrington Moore, in which we find states and social groups (bourgeoisie, landed elites, peasantry, and so on) acting collectively, dominating or clashing with one another, controlling or losing control of the state, and so on. In this book, social groups are replaced by people and states are represented by the actual state agents. For this and other reasons, he achieves the evidential standards of historians as well as those of sociologists. Second, he does not use correlation analysis to explain the evolution of his empires. He highlights similarities and differences among them, but he does not correlate these variables systematically in order to explain the different courses that empires took. Given the connections that he demonstrates among his empires, such an analysis would have been highly problematic. Instead, he traces causal processes and provides intelligent ad hoc explanations for what people did or what they were faced with.
His knowledge of world history is impressive. He calls into question not only much of the broader literature on colonialism but also many assertions made about specific empires. He writes well and the discussion is always stimulating, especially when he sets up contrary positions in the literature and uses empirical evidence to evaluate them. And he skillfully pulls together a vast amount of history into a coherent and convincing account that challenges much conventional wisdom.