Conclusion

Out of the myriad details of the military histories of empires, we can distill a few general points. First, there can be no empire without military organizations, in the sense of groups of people to whom governments delegate the legitimate right to shed blood.

If we fail to grasp these basic principles, the military history of empires is likely to dissolve into the infamous ODTAA, “one damned thing after another.”^[379] But on the other hand, if left at this level of generality, the principles run afoul of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called the characteristic weakness of all social- scientific theorizing—that “[t]heoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations they govern that they don't make much sense or hold much interest apart from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if they were not ge­neral, they would not be theoretical), but because, stated independently of their applications, they seem either commonplace or vacant.”^[380]

What this means, I think, is that this chapter will be most useful if read alongside the imperial case-studies that fill the second volume of this work. As Clausewitz himself said, “Theory exists so that one does not have to start afresh every time sorting out the raw material and ploughing through it, but will find it ready to hand and in good order.”^[381]

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