Concept and Definition

As a concept, empire derives from Latin. Imperium signified the power and au­thority to command, and gradually came to denote the territories made sub­ject to the Roman state through military conquest.^[45] Right from the beginning, the term has been endlessly debated.

If empire, as a word, belongs within Western discourses, it is not difficult to find broad correspondences in non-European languages. When the Qin mon­archy conquered the last of its rivals on the central plains of China in 221 bce, it claimed to have united “all under heaven,” Tianxia, and the king elevated himself to Huangdi, to signal his august supremacy over ordinary kings, Wang. Under the succeeding Han dynasty, a critique developed of the Qin. The first emperor had relied too much on tyrannical command and brute force: the ruler ought rather to govern through his own virtuous example. From near and far, then, people in all their variety would orient themselves toward the court—so it was claimed—and voluntarily follow the royal model. “All under heaven” were to be pacified under the moral sway of the ruler and the world made to prosper by the harmonious and orderly organization of life.^[48] Another example of an imperial monarchy strung out between oppressive command and the peaceful order of civilization appeared under the Mauryan dynasty, which had extended its reach across the floodplains of North India by the turn of the third century bce. Asoka, its most famous ruler, is justly admired for a number of surviving inscriptions. There, he envisaged the peaceable spread of his moral order, dhamma, to all corners of the earth. But these conciliatory proclamations had been preceded by bloody and terrifying wars of conquest, as the Mauryan lord lamented, reducing neighboring kingdoms to sub- mission.^[49] Public professions of regret by imperial conquerors, however, were un­usual.

Among the thinkers from which the modern sociological tradition hails, it is ar­guably Machiavelli—the disillusioned, but clear-sighted Florentine statesman of the Renaissance—who came to identify the problem of empire most trenchantly. “However strong your armies may be,” it is stated pithily in The Prince, “you al­ways need the backing of local people to take over a province.”^[53] Their support was necessary to hold on to a conquered territory and consolidate possession. “If you maintain an army instead... Machiavelli added a little further on, “the expense will be much greater, so that you may have to spend all the money you get from a state in standing guard over it: the profit may even turn to a loss”^[54] Imperial power, to put it bluntly, rested on a narrow economy of force; it depended on forging alliances with local residents, making them govern on behalf of the conqueror, and curbing costs so that the empire might yield a surplus. As an instrument of rule, the army, the most expensive tool in the box of any state, was and remains inefficient and had to be used sparingly, as a last resort.

Machiavelli included in his discussion an analysis of the various methods of rule available to an imperial lord. The level of detail and variation required in his exposition is an indication that the application of these techniques must always be understood as in need of situational and prudent adjustment. However, the com­ponents in this flexible repertoire of power, to use a term later coined by Burbank and Cooper,^[55] may—without doing too much violence to the thought of the old Florentine—be condensed into three basic precepts. One can hold on to territory either by annihilation, colonization, or, finally, by rule through locally entrenched groups.^[56] Total annihilation, however, had obvious limitations. When writing about this policy, Machiavelli had the small, subject city-state of Pisa in mind, which had proven difficult for Florence to keep in line.^[57] Particularly stubborn op­position might have to be overcome by acts of ruthless destruction. But normally this strategy was employed only selectively and precisely in locally circumscribed theaters as acts of exemplary punishment. Since the imperial establishment had to be kept to a minimum, government generally lacked the capacity to control and police territories tightly. Instead, it had to fall back on intermittent graphic and shocking interventions, which served as deterrents that demonstrated the steep price of resistance to remaining subject communities. Often born of weakness, such blunt acts of violence nevertheless had a profound effect. Memories of wanton and harrowing destruction are stamped upon every imperial history: the Amritsar massacre, the proverbial piling of decapitated heads into pyramids by Timur, the adage “Carthage must be destroyed”^[58] But as a general strategy, blanket destruc­tion was self-defeating, since it reduced the value of the conquered territory (un­less, of course, one could substitute a new community of settlers in place of those massacred).

Colonization, another word with a Latin root, was Machiavelli’s second solu­tion. Colonialism has become synonymous with the age of European overseas ex­pansion, and to some it simply represents the one true form of imperialism.^[59] But Machiavelli thought of the phenomenon mainly in Roman terms, as a strategy to transplant small communities of the conquerors to live among newly subjugated populations. Placed at strategic locations, these settlements served as anchors or bridgeheads of imperial power, communities whose loyalty would not be in doubt in times of trouble and which could be relied upon to serve as bases of re-conquest, should it prove necessary. Such colonies of the ruling power can, in various forms, be found across many empires, from the ancient Near East to the garrison cities of the Caliphate, as well as the trading hubs and naval stations of European commer­cial empires. But to this must be added another kind of colonization in which an expanding population, often peasant in character, slowly moves into less densely populated areas and in the process either pushes the existing inhabitants off the land or absorbs them.^[60] Such colonization is sometimes considered as a phenom­enon separate from empire proper. But in historical experience, if the two have not fully overlapped, then they have certainly been closely intertwined. Chinese history charts a steady movement from north to south, as peasants began to clear the land and engage in more intensive forms of irrigation agriculture.^[61] Likewise, the power of the Mughals followed in the wake of the expanding frontier of communities of Muslim cultivators into the Ganges Delta of Bengal.^[62] With the introduction of railways and steamships in the nineteenth century, this process vastly increased in strength and scope. In their millions, people of European peasant stock flocked to much less densely populated areas of North America, Siberia, Australia, and New Zealand, which had climates hospitable to their way of life.

Empires, therefore, are composite, layered and anything but uniform in their internal organization of power. They generally comprise a range of different ter­ritories and communities, subjected hierarchically in various ways to a dominant power. Among students of empire, there is broad agreement that this is the cen­tral characteristic.^[64] Raymond Aron, for instance, in his study of Peace and War, stated that “Imperialism according to the most simple and general definition, is the diplomatic and strategic conduct of a political unit which builds an empire, that is to say subjects foreign populations to its law.”^[65] Slightly more elaborate is Howe in his widely read introduction to imperial studies: “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.”^[66] Much in the same vein, what makes several dynasties of Chinese history imperial to the influential philosopher Wang Hui is that “first, their hybrid systems and mechanisms of con­trol are different from a pure system of enfeoffment or centralized administration culture. Second, they possess a society and economy of vast scope and a set of mul­tinational ethnic relations that have been formed by military expansion, trade and immigration. Third, they possess multiple structures of power, with concentrated central power and structures of power generated by local culture existing side by side. Fourth, they work to make their own culture universal or to serve as the rep­resentative of ‘civilization.’”^[67] Empires, in short, are heterogeneous and normally polyethnic, hierarchical political entities, “a distinctive type of social formation. They are neither big societies on the one hand nor leagues of independent societies headed by a dominant partner on the other: they involve the exercise of domination by the rulers of a central society over the populations of peripheral societies without either absorbing them to the point that they become fellow-members of the central society or disengaging from them to the point that they become confederates rather than subjects.” To continue with Garry Runciman, and through him Lord Halsbury, empire endures in “a convenient state between annexation and mere alliance.”^[68]

It will be clear by now that to the majority of students—though this is more often implicit than explicit—empire represents a form of state, “an extended and du­rable polity in which a core society exercises formal and authoritarian power over subordinated peoples of outlying territories gained or maintained by coercion.”^[69] Domination is based on the permanent extraction of a surplus (in one form or other) from the subject communities and ultimately backed by armed force, the last and final recourse of rulers (military power is discussed by Morris in Chapter 4 of Volume 1). It might be objected that such a “statist” conception underestimates forms of domination achieved by more loosely organized groups. Fluid and mo­bile coalitions of roaming nomadic warriors have, for instance, been described as constituting a form of “kinetic empire.”^[70] But the emphasis on the significance of state-like societies is basically confirmed by the empirical survey of the following volumes. Only where conquerors develop durable, centralized institutions to ex­tract resources from a sedentarized population, sufficiently numerous to sustain a (military) division of labor between imperial rulers and tribute-paying subjects, have such societies left enough of a mark (perhaps with one or two exceptions), to make it possible to write a history. Patchy nomadic power takes on slightly firmer contours only on the frontiers of sedentary societies, and may perhaps be seen as forming a kind of “shadow empire.”^[71]

The statehood represented by the imperial experience, however, does not con­form to the conventional definition. Weber famously ascribed to the modern state a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of physical force within a given territory.^[72] Since Hobbes wrote his Leviathan, it has become customary to see the state as an institution that, within its borders, creates a pacified civil society. This seventeenth­century classic of political science, however, was written in response to the experi­ence of the English civil wars. To overcome internal division and conflict, society had to accept a harsh medicine. Hobbes uncompromisingly advocated strength­ening the cohesiveness of state and society. Power had to be concentrated and made uniform. Inhabitants ought to transfer their right of self-defense to a sov­ereign power that, in return, would enjoy sole responsibility for protecting them against aggression. As a result, the state has come to be understood as governing a firmly demarcated and evenly integrated territorial space with hard, militarized boundaries against the outside world from which it is independent. To Hobbes, this implied that it was unreasonable for a government to “demand of one nation more than of the other from the title of conquest.”^[73] The authority of the state, its sovereignty, was indivisible, uniform across the territories it held, and every community was a subject to the same degree. Not so for empire, which occupies a middle ground between full integration and external alliance, and which does not admit such a clear distinction between inside and outside. As a body politic, it is equivocal. Where Hobbes balked at mixed forms of power, diverse arrange­ments of rule and unequal treatment of subject peoples have been a hallmark of empires.

This contradiction between the precept of absolute sovereignty and uneven im­perial practice did not escape comment in the decades of intense debate that fol­lowed publication of the Leviathan in 1651. The widespread existence of what from Hobbes's perspective would have to be seen as “compromised” or adulterated varieties of governmental power raised the question among his contemporaries of whether there were forms of authority that could not easily be captured in the new language of the Hobbesian program of standardized, uniform, and absolute sovereignty.^[74] Pufendorf, the German lawyer and historian (1632-94), invented a category of irregular and monstrous power to account for those seemingly in­congruent phenomena.^[75] Leibniz, the polymath (1646-1716), went further in a biting critique. No serious power in Europe at that time, he objected, could prop­erly meet the Hobbesian standard. All were expansionist in their aims and usually comprised a wide range of territories, each of which was administered differently. Adopting a Hobbesian notion of the state would force the analyst to conclude that they were all monstrosities, a result which was patently absurd. Better, then, to abandon the theory and substitute an alternative concept—that is, that sovereignty is not absolute, but relative. It was, as Leibniz insisted, rather to be understood as a supremacy.^[76]

This may still be the most useful way to approach imperial statehood—as a su­premacy. But this formulation also renders empire harder to delineate. It is far from clear at what point a supremacy is sufficiently strong to warrant the label of em­pire and when it is not. Gehler and Rollinger conclude from their vast recent com­pendium that empires, to count as such, must have been weighty enough to have generated a reception history.^[77] By the same token, many definitions include large territorial extent as an important criterion of empire—and, indeed, on pragmatic grounds, it may serve as a very useful indicator—but “big” is nevertheless vague and imprecise as an analytical concept.^[78] The size of humanity has changed over time and the population of the mightiest empires of antiquity now add up to no more than a middling nation. More rigor may be found in Osterhammel’s demand that to count as a proper empire, a power must be able to pursue its interests on a global scale, or in Munkler’s, that there must be an ambition and capacity to dominate the order of the world of which the empire forms a part.^[79] On the other hand, these restrictions seem too parochial and too narrowly predicated on specific historical circumstances. Only the United States of the twentieth century and Britain of the nineteenth could, for instance, be said ever in all of recorded history to have quali­fied as empires in the full sense of Osterhammel’s definition. This is a hopeless solu­tion to the problem of definition and immediately burdens the analysis with a need to invent self-contradictory and awkward ancillary terms such as “colonial empires without imperialism” in order to account for the experience of the many other ruling states that have existed over the centuries. Equally, not all successful expan­sionist powers attained a size at which they could be credited with hegemony within their world order or even begin to harbor ambitions in that direction. But did that make them any less imperial? Athens of the fifth century âñå, under cover of the Delian league, dominated the islands of the Aegean Sea, but certainly never aspired to such a position of mastery in their wider world. Yet it is included by Munkler in his own discussion of empire. Big powers would normally have had to start small and work gradually at extending their sway over other territories, long before they rose to a position of predominance or even began to harbor such an aspiration. It seems impossible, indeed contrived, to want to reserve the notion of empire for only the later hegemonic phases in the development of such expansive polities.^[80] In the final analysis, the minimal position of Michael Doyle seems much preferable. “Empire,” he concludes, “is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society”^[81]

An advantage of such a minimal definition is not least that it more effectively accommodates historical experience. From very early on, states began to compete for access to resources and sought to extend control over their surrounding fron­tiers and each other, without necessarily acquiring very extensive territories. Bigger empires eventually crystalized from this micro-process of imperialist aggression among states to produce a historical pattern that has varied considerably over the past millennia. Charting its shifting trends and identifying the changing outcomes, however, is precisely a task which ought to be and has been reserved for the history of histories in Volume 2 of this project, rather than a job handed to formal and ty­pological definition.^{[82] [83] As an analytical strategy, the latter would constantly be at risk of arbitrarily elevating the limited experience of one age to represent the norm in its quest for ever greater conceptual refinement. Another attraction of Doyle's concept of empire is its emphasis on effective power. Empire may include terri­tories not formally or directly subject to the ruling power, such as client states or economic dependencies. Decisive for determining inclusion, however, is whether these dependencies are able to resist demands of vital importance to their imperial overlords.}

A number of definitions add further depth to our understanding of the capacity of empires to control subject societies. Alexander Motyl likens empire to a wheel, with hub and spokes, but significantly no rim. The hub represents the metropolitan governing power which, at the center, is capable of dominating the subjects because they are kept separate, as spokes, whereas they have no overarching organization (no rim) to unite them against the ruler— divide et impera⁷ This image offers a variation on the insight contained in Ernest Gellner's general model of complex pre-industrial or, to use his own term, agro-literate societies. He considered them to be laterally in­tegrated across localities by a thin layer of elites who lorded it over locally bounded communities. The latter were made up of the vast majority of the population, but were unable successfully to break the elite's hold on power because they had little or no organization above the local level. Subject communities lacked the means to mobilize and unite their superior numbers; they were, so to speak, “organization­ally outflanked” by the extensive networks of the ruling classes. Complex agrarian societies favored the formation of vast empires. By contrast, in Gellner's scheme, the modern industrialized world forced a breakup of these entities. The lateral, cross-regional ties of the ruling groups were severed and torn asunder. Instead, re­gional states took over, in which geographically more circumscribed elites united with their underlying local societies, forming a new imagined community—the nation.^[84] But, as Krishan Kumar has recently reminded us, the nation-state cannot stand alone as the defining characteristic of modernity. Many of these nations, as they formed, acquired new colonial empires of their own, which structurally con­tinued to rely on the governing logic of Gellners pre-modern condition.^[85] Is empire modern or ancient? This is an issue that still confronts the student and stands at the heart of the theoretical debate about empire.