Hierarchy and Imperial Rule

In any type of state, rulers worry not only about people who are culturally different, but those who are similar, and especially those who have access to resources. The scale of empire—and its capacity to protect and organize commercial ties across long distances—gave elites a reason to cooperate with imperial rulers.

Aristocracy and Autocracy

Over time, elites could consolidate their access to extensive resources and pass them on to their descendants; aristocracies emerged in such diverse empires as Rome and Mughal India. But for emperors, aristocrats were a double-edged sword. They could bring material resources and followers to imperial projects, but they could also deny these resources to the imperial center, use their local control to foment rebellion, or throw their support to another imperial ruler who offered more favorable conditions. The powers of aristocrats, like those of other intermediaries, made their positioning and containment a critical element of the politics of difference.

Tension between autocracy and aristocracy was strong in the histories of many empires. As Haldon^[950] points out, Rome, China, and the Ottomans tried to build structures and to control resources independently of noble families and regional magnates; their solutions to the challenges posed by aristocracy were more durable than those of the Carolingians. The fall of the Roman Empire diffused control of key resources to regional lords; for centuries these localized powers would pose obstacles to the consolidation of monarchical authority across most of western Eurasia.^[951]

The Ottomans offer an impressive example of empire-building that managed to keep aristocracy at bay. Rather than recruit high officials from people who were in kinship or ethnic terms closest to the ruler, sultans collected young boys from the provinces, especially in the largely Christian Balkans, brought them into the sultan's household, converted them to Islam, and trained them for a variety of administrative and military tasks.

Even the reproduction of the emperor, once the empire was consolidated, turned to the outside: enslaved concubines, not wives, were the mothers of future sultans, avoiding the problem of powerful in-laws. Difference— in both biological and cultural aspects—was used to tamp down the threat posed to the emperor by elite families.^[952]

Slavery, Capitalism, and Class

And what of class differences—the distinction between those who had access to resources and those who did not? Class formation took place both inside and outside empires—through market mechanisms as well as coercive expropriation. But because empires made connections and concentrated resources, their actions transformed classes and their relations around the globe and across states. At the same time, empires created contexts in which class or other categories of social differentiation could be debated on both a local and a world scale.

The convoluted relationship of empire and slavery inserted both long-lasting distinctions and arguments about them into world history. Slavery is an old and widespread institution, hardly unique to empires, but the enormous scale of the Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries changed the nature of the relationship between an owning and an owned class of people. The plantation economy in the Americas could never have attained its world-changing capacity without the exercise of imperial power. Large slaveholdings were extremely valuable; they required protection against rival claimants and against slave revolt. Slaveholders needed backup to make their investments safe.

The sugar economy depended on long-distance commercial and political connections: land in and around the Caribbean, slaves from Africa (from outside the territories of European empires), a market for sugar in Europe, and goods, like cloth or guns, produced in different parts of the world (cloth from India, for example) and transmitted through mechanisms that were a mix of private initiative and imperial control (the British Navigation Acts, for instance).

Wealth was generated in cities like Bristol or Nantes that were leading slave-trading ports. But most important—as Kenneth Pomeranz has shown—sugar produced in the overseas empire enabled cheap calories to be provided to a developing working class in England, with low opportunity costs in land and labor. In this way, the Atlantic complex— in which British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish navies and merchant classes competed and fought—was the setting for the formation of both propertied and working classes in the Old World as in the New. The “fiscalmilitary” state that supervised a changing economy in the pioneering case of Great Britain was an imperial state, shaped by the demands of a navy and the resources imperial policy helped to concentrate.^[953]

Property-owners and slaves were not the only people moving across empire space and, for some, into new class positions. Empire created possibilities of a modest sort—for the servant willing to take on an indenture to cross the Atlantic, for smallscale merchants seeking wealth through the movement of low-cost commodities, for young men striving for advancement through military service. Some Scots may have reconciled themselves to their unequal place in the British Empire because of opportunities that the empire developed for them overseas. Irish—Catholics as well as Protestants—served in British armies away from home. Some Irish soldiers fought in the British military against the rebels in the Boer War of 1898-1902, while others joined the Afrikaner rebels out of opposition to British imperialism. As several chapters in this collection make clear, migration and settlement in imperial settings created multiple intersections between people and ideas, including transformative interpretations of difference.

From the late eighteenth century, slavery—the very system that European empires had extended and exploited in the Americas—came under attack by members of the British public.^[954] Empire was the context in which the anti-slavery movement honed an ideological and political distinction between a class of slaves and a working class, the legitimacy of wage labor underscored by the illegitimacy of slave labor.

The British anti-slavery movement portrayed enslavement as a moral issue, as a stain on the British flag. Debates over the ethics of slave labor also developed in the French and Spanish empires, sometimes the result of British pressure, but more fundamentally enabled by the cross-imperial movement of ideas and arguments over the basis of legitimate power within different political entities. News of slave revolts also traveled, and ex-slaves moving between the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe created alternative networks to those of the slave economies. Some ex-slaves became eloquent spokespersons against slavery.^[955] If imperial power had been necessary to protect and sustain plantation development, it was the decisions of imperial governments facing political challenges at home and slave revolts overseas that led to the outlawing of slave labor in 1833 in the case of Britain, 1848 in France, and 1886 in Spanish Cuba.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

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