Empire and Ideological Resources

While not usually considered part of any “economic” equation, I would suggest that any consideration of the political economy of an imperial system must take into account and attribute equal value to the inherited political and theological sys­tems through which the conquerors express themselves and understand the world, as well as those of the subject cultures.

projecting a particular imperial political ideology that serves to legitimate (at least in respect of the distribution of power at any given moment) its existence and the rule of its governing elites. Such concepts and ideas should also be understood as a resource that can be managed, manipulated, inflected, and as a resource they count as “economic” in the wider sense. It is usually through such ideological sys­tems that subject populations at large are attributed with a specific “imperial” iden­tity and incorporated into the wider polity, although of course those identities vary according to perspective—willing subjects of the empire from one viewpoint may be an oppressed subject population from another, or members of a wider religious community, and so on. And such ideologies are more often than not the key to un­derstanding why an empire survives as long as it does. In many systems, efforts were made to create common ground between conquerors and conquered, by absorbing the deities of the conquered population into the pantheon of the conquerors, or at least by permitting sufficient ideological space for them to flourish on their home ground.^[415]

With the advent of the major monotheistic religions, in contrast, conversion to the religion of the conquerors was sometimes a way to avoid heavy fiscal burdens or second-class status, although this was not always something that was deliberately promoted by the conquerors; indeed, in the case of early Islam the failure of the Arab-Islamic elite to acknowledge the status of newly converted non-Arab elites led to civil war and the demise of the Umayyad dynasty.

This does not mean, of course, that tensions between the vested interests of prov­inces and center did not exist and could not reassert themselves. Indeed, it was precisely the failure of the center at Rome to defend the interests (or to be seen to defend the interests) of the provincial elite of the Gallic and British provinces in the first half of the fifth century that generated the separatist tendencies of those prov­inces, the resistance to forwarding revenues to Rome or to the imperial administra­tion, and the slow undermining of Roman imperial structures, processes that led to the transfer of the interests of these elites away from Rome, either to local polities that it was thought would do a better job, or to newly formed states created by “bar­barian” incomers.

But just as often, the self- identity of the conquered, while it may evolve, is resistant to incorporation; “imperial” identities remain externally imposed, frequently by commentators who describe the social formation in question from their own, often very alien, point of view. Here, the role of indigenous elites becomes especially im­portant. Where an imperial system is able to incorporate such elites, or key elements thereof, into its own empire-wide elite (even if there remain degrees of difference), it has a better chance of maintaining its authority over the conquered regions and at the same time of penetrating deeper into local society and culture. Many empires have done this—Rome's incorporation of both the warrior elites of the western European provinces (Gaul, Spain, Britain) and the Hellenized elites of the eastern provinces worked enormously to its advantage in the initial stages of conquest. In contrast, and as noted already, the failure of the Arab conquerors of Iran to accept on equal terms former elites and notables who converted to Islam contributed con­siderably to the collapse of Umayyad authority in the 740s and resulted in the civil war which overthrew them and replaced them with the Abbasids. Ancient Athens failed signally to offer any such incorporation to the various members of its short­lived empire in the fifth century bce, thus promoting no loyalty among their elites whatsoever and resulting in a cycle of disintegration, forced re-subjugation, and further fragmentation in the course of the Peloponnesian War. With the arrival of the major salvationist religious systems, furthermore, a religious/devotional iden­tity of interest could be established which could be deployed to bind conquerors and conquered together, particularly when faced by a challenge to the faith from a rival system—as between Christianity and Islam in the medieval period, for ex­ample.

The most successful imperial systems erected ideological and legitimating sys­tems for themselves, generally embodied in concepts of divine or divinely in­spired or supported rulership. Such concepts were in some cases the only unifying factors within highly diverse systems where provinces differed from one another and from the center in language, culture, and community identities. In the Chinese case, while an imperial administration tied the empire together at one level, and while the ideology of imperial rule served the purposes of the state and adminis­tration, the degree to which any notions of a shared imperial identity percolated downward was probably very limited, in contrast, it would seem, to the situation in the later Roman or early Islamic worlds, where Christianity and Islam served to cement such ideas, even if only partially.

Empires thus existed as imaginative constructs as well as actual institutional- administrative entities. They possessed an ideological life which may not neces­sarily have been tied to their actual political and institutional efficacy or power. Political ideologies and other belief systems, once in existence, are frequently able to adapt and to survive in conditions which have evolved well away from those within which they originally developed, provided the contradictions between the two are not too extreme or insurmountable in terms of social praxis and psy­chology. Political ideologies can be extremely flexible as well as powerful. Many empires were in reality little more than territories ruled over only nominally by an “emperor” or similarly titled ruler, in which actual power was exercised by an elite whose position in origin may well have depended upon the central ruler and/or the conditions in which the state came into being (by conquest, for example) but who, because of their effective control over resources, together with other histor­ical conditions, were really and in practical terms independent. Yet often in such cases the idea of an empire, together with the residual power of concepts such as loyalty, was enough to maintain at least a fictional unity of identity until some time after effective imperial power had waned. Ideological resources are thus also part of the “imperial capital” necessary to the sustenance of an imperial system beyond a very limited lifespan.