Abstract
Is it even possible to write a coherent book about all the empires that have existed over the past 600 years of human history? And can we gain insights by trying to find commonalities among empires separated by time and space that take us beyond what we learn from the careful study of individual empires? Readers will give emphatic yeses to both questions after reading Krishan Kumar’s learned and carefully constructed book. Intended as a survey, this book covers a lot of ground and does so in a way that will be accessible to readers who already possess a good general historical background, while giving readers steeped in the extensive literature on empires food for thought.
Kumar begins with a macroscopic view of empires and astutely notes that the principal differences among empires are temporal rather than geographic. He identifies two fundamental turning points in the history of empires. The first was the emergence of world religions between 800 and 200 BCE in the so-called Axial Age. The ancient empires that existed before those centuries were self-contained, with limited awareness of or exchange with peoples and polities beyond their borders. Michael Mann describes those limits as caging, which he identifies as a source of their rulers’ power over subjects. Kumar argues that the creation of world religions gave the newer classical empires universalistic ideologies that justified and encouraged the exchange of goods and peoples, while also fostering a shift from merely seeking tribute from conquered peoples to undertaking efforts to assimilate conquered peoples, or at least their elites, into a universal culture. Rome is the outstanding example of this, and the move toward universalism also ensured the classical empires lasted far longer than the ancient ones that often imploded upon the death of their founder.
The second turning point came with European imperialism. Empires conquered territories through sea power instead of, or as well as, by land invasions. Kumar notes that the European sea-based empires incorporated a greater array of peoples and languages than had the classical empires or modern land-based empires. Kumar is correct that the Britons, Portuguese, or French who voyaged to rule colonies in Asia or Africa did regard those lands as alien, radically different from Europe, and the people they found there as essentially unable to be assimilated or to adopt European ways of living. This mattered, Kumar argues, when modern empires shattered in the second half of the 20th century. Once colonies achieved independence, they easily asserted national identities and the colonizers went home. In contrast, land-based empires, most recently Russia’s, had messier ends with large numbers of metropolitan peoples stranded in neighboring and often only vaguely differentiated new countries.
Empires always faced the problem of how to rule large numbers of conquered peoples with far fewer administrators or soldiers from the metropole. The most capable imperialists, above all the British, became masters at recruiting local collaborators and finding strategies of divide and rule. Settlers from the metropole complicated far more than they helped the work of imperial rule. Europe is unique in the number of settlers it sent to the rest of the world. In some countries, the settlers became the majority through a combination of exterminating the Indigenous peoples and the weight of immigration and high fertility. Settlers demanded autonomy or independence, and where they were a minority often adopted far more brutal methods of controlling locals than the temporary administrators sent from the imperial capital employed. Kumar is exemplary in presenting these choices and dynamics and in succinctly identifying differences between European, Islamic, and Asian empires.
Kumar rightly shows that the line between nation-states and empires is not as clear as theorists like Ernest Gellner assert. Kumar agrees that on an ideological level, empires are out. Even nation-states that act as empires (China, Russia, and the United States are the prime examples today) never would want to accept that label. Nevertheless, many nations were built by the conquest and assimilation of neighboring nationalities. Britain and France incorporated peoples who spoke a number of languages. The creation of national identity and a single language was a centuries-long process that reached completion only in the 20th century. Some nation-states were created by empires, somewhat inadvertently, as they divided peoples they ruled, sought to win allies against rival powers, or had to grant rights to colonial collaborators. At the same time, subjects in the metropole were able to demand citizenship rights in return for fighting in imperial wars or acquiescing to taxes to pay for foreign ventures.
Nationalism had little to do with the breakup of empires in Kumar’s analysis. He rightly notes that decline has been a perennial trope of both writers and leaders in almost every empire from Rome on, but that most of those works were written when those authors’ empires were waxing rather than waning. Instead, Kumar argues, we need to look at social and geopolitical forces to explain the ends of empires. His brief surveys of the demises of the Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese empires convincingly shows that defeats in war were the principal factor that destroyed those empires’ abilities to hold on to their colonies, or in the case of China to the huge agglomeration of land and population controlled by that empire. Similarly, World War I resulted in the quick breakup of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and (temporarily) Russian empires. Britain and France believed they could reform and hold onto their empires even after World War II, but both had been financially weakened by that war, and France humiliated by its quick defeat at the hands of Germany at home and Japan in its Asian colonies.
Kumar’s macroscopic analysis is valuable in adjudicating among claims for nationalism and war in the breakup of empires. He is less successful at accounting for intermediate-level differences in the timing and violence which accompany decolonization. For that, there is need for more attention to metropolitan politics of the sort that Hendrik Spruyt undertakes in Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (2005). Similarly, Kumar, in his mention of post-1945 colonial reforms, takes British and French promises too much at face value. The sorts of domestic dynamics Spruyt identifies plus deep and intractable racism severely limited any actual reforms those colonial powers adopted. In the end, the British offered less to their colonial subjects after 1945 than they had to White settlers in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand a hundred years earlier.
Empires, even after they shattered, left legacies that Kumar shows continue to shape both the former colonies and metropoles. National borders often remain those created by imperialists or are artifacts of the wars that destroyed land empires. Revanchist fantasies still are legacies of empires that divided national groups and left populations stranded in other countries once those peoples lost their places in expansive empires that obviated the need or even the value of living among the rest of one’s nation. Settler colonists poison the politics of the metropoles to which they returned. The National Front in France was formed by French exiles from Algeria. Immigrants from colonies spur right-wing and racist politics in France, Britain, and the Netherlands.
Empires, in Kumar’s view, have been replaced by more violent nationalist conflicts. He argues that empires offer a model of how to bring different peoples together into a supra-nationalist political unit. Perhaps in Europe, the horrors of World War II provided in retrospect validation for the Austro-Hungarian empire that suppressed the nationalist antagonisms that fascist regimes, above all the Nazis, exploited. On a smaller scale, communist Yugoslavia now appears to have been a prophylactic against the murderous nationalist conflicts of the 1990s. Kumar rightly points to the European Union (EU) as a gentle update of the Holy Roman Empire.
The United States, in Kumar’s view, is a land empire, having incorporated vast lands, bought and taken from European powers, Mexico, and Indigenous peoples, and also an informal empire that dominated Latin America and then much of the rest of the world. Along with the rise of China and the EU’s claims within Europe, Kumar believes we are entering a new era of empire. This leads him to return to his opening claim that “empire has been the default mode of political organization for most of human history” (p. 149). Kumar is correct in that observation, and he offers much evidence and some analytic hints of why that may be so.
One idea that Kumar evokes throughout the book is that imperial rulers in each era are aware of their counterparts elsewhere in the world, and of their historical predecessors. They draw on that knowledge in attempts to copy the glories and avoid the defects of previous empires. Kumar shows how such beliefs have mattered. He gives less weight, or at least less attention, to the role of exploitation in animating empires. When Kumar discusses the sea-based European empires, he says little about capitalism. He certainly acknowledges exploitation, but it is presented more as a fact of life than a dynamic that molded empires or might play a role in their demise. If we want to understand the special nature of the US empire and analyze what factors might account for its ongoing decline, we will need to look as much at the dynamics of global capitalism as at the long history of empires as a political form, which Kumar has traced so ably and concisely in this book.