COMPONENTS OF POWER AND UNITS OF ANALYSIS

A book about empires is a book about power. How was power over large numbers of people acquired, consolidated, used, delegated, and lost? Power is relational. It exists only when two or more parties interact.

It follows that explanations of the exercise and transfer of power should not be restricted to one party to a relationship. Yet many well-known works on overseas empires are flawed in precisely this way, relying heavily if not exclusively on the actions of Europeans to explain their successes. Peoples who came under European

rule appear as bit players in the dim recesses of a Euro-dominated stage. By implica­tion it is the fate of the colonized not to act but to be acted upon, not to take initiative but to respond to initiatives taken by the invaders.

The classic theories of nineteenth-century imperialism take this Eurocentric form. Hobson, for instance, stresses economic inequalities within advanced indus­trial capitalist countries. Industrialists unable to find a sufficiently robust domestic market for mass-produced consumer and capital goods press their governments to ensure protected markets overseas. Lenin’s theory is built on the same theme of growing class cleavage within European societies. Unlike the social reformer Hob­son, Lenin regards this trend as an irremediable contradiction of a capitalist system painfully writhing its exit from history. From a quite opposite ideological perspective Schumpeter identifies the root cause as the “social atavism” of Europe’s aristocratic, precapitalist elements. These groups, their traditional warrior function undercut by the advance of a peaceful capitalist order, seek through imperialism to carry on elsewhere a violent way of life that no longer makes sense at home.

The more recent work of Immanuel Wallerstein has the great merit of analyz­ing long-term historical trends in an emerging “world-system” that by definition ranges far beyond any one continent. Nonetheless, Wallerstein’s model too is cen­tered on western Europe. The explosive dynamism of mercantile and subsequent industrial capitalism in this small yet core region of the globe comes close to a sufficient condition for what occurs within the world-system as a whole.¹⁹

Eurocentric theories are located at many points along the ideological spec­trum: on the left, among writers critical of imperialism, such as Hobson, Lenin, Wallerstein, and Andre Gunder Frank; closer to the center, as in the work of Schum­peter; and on the proimperialist right, as in the apologia for Britain’s phase 3 empire by J. A. Froude, J. R. Seeley, Halford Mackinder, and Alfred Milner.²⁰

I part company with these authors in emphasizing the roles non-Europeans played in Europe’s global projection of power. I argue that the temporal and spatial pattern of imperial expansion was greatly influenced by successful non-European resistance, on the one hand, and by invitations to Europeans to participate in indige­nous power struggles, on the other (see chapter 11). Features of non-European societies that made such invitations more likely—in effect complementing European push with indigenous pull—must be included in any theory of imperialism. The obviously crucial role non-Europeans and settlers played in decolonization is dis­cussed in chapters 14 and 15. Throughout the book I try to avoid thinking more Eurocentrically than the evidence warrants.

Power has two components: capacity to act and will to act. Capacity is posses­sion of the objective means to achieve a goal in a given setting. Such means include resources to coerce, threaten, or induce others to comply with one’s wishes. Will is the subjective component, referring to an actor’s conscious desire to achieve a goal.

If power is relational and if its components are capacity and will, it follows that explanations for why one party (X) gains power over another (Y) should take several things into account: X’s capacity to impose itself on Y, X’s will to do so, and Y’s capacity and will to resist, moderate, modify, deflect, or postpone X’s aggressive actions. The four factors of colonizer will and capacity and colonized will and capacity are the framework for the model presented in table 2.3. Although this model applies specifically to European expansion, a modified version applies to contraction as well. Thus one can ask about the capacity and will of European metropoles to retain their colonies, as against the capacity and will of emerging colonial political elites to assert political autonomy.

For something as complex as a sustained pattern of imperial expansion it makes sense to think of power relationships as involving many types of actors whose encounters take place in a multilayered setting. Table 2.3 lists several levels of analysis that should be considered, starting with the most comprehensive and moving to­ward the smallest.

As this analogy suggests, each shift of analytic focus contributes something of value to one’s understanding—but not everything that matters. The analogy suggests that alternative hypotheses generated from the camera’s multiple “insights” should be viewed as complementary rather than competitive and mutually exclusive.