Prologue: Anatomy of Power

“Iraq's leading Shi'a cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is leading a convoy of thousands of people towards Najaf in an effort to end the conflict,” BBC re­ported on the morning of Thursday, August 26, 2004.¹ The previous year, a US-led coalition had invaded Iraq in what had been intended to be a quick operation to topple its dictator Saddam Hussein, and the occupying force was now busy instituting a kind of order in a divided and restive society.

Barely two months after the invasion, on May 1, 2003, US President George W Bush had uncomprehendingly gone out to declare victory: “Mission Accomplished.”² But it was “not even the beginning of the end,” to recall Churchill's immortal phrase. Instead, it has turned out that the invasion sparked a radically transformative mo­ment, a seismic shock whose waves still rage across the Middle East. More than a decade on, the region remains engulfed in war and revolutionary struggle. While the established political order is tottering, rival great powers seek to gain influence, broker new alliances, or defend old positions in a radically changing environment. Imperialism has been let out into the open and its lessons brutally put on display for anyone who cares (or can bear) to see. Historians, however, have no choice; it is their simple duty to observe, learn, and provide depth to contemporary experi­ence. As the events in Iraq unfolded after the invasion in 2003, it quickly became clear that there was so much more to the imposition of a new political order than

¹ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3599352.stm (August 26, 2004).

² The victory speech was delivered on board the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, under a banner stating, “Mission Accomplished”: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501- 15.html. For the debates surrounding the slogan and speech, see the entry on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech

Peter Fibiger Bang, Empire—A World History In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10,1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0001. conquest itself.^[9] The character of imperial power, its operation, contested nature, and limitations, all were repeatedly revealed in the struggles of post-Saddam Iraqi society, with painful but graphic clarity.

The days of August 2004 were, in this respect, entirely typical, but also unu­sually emblematic of the wider historical question, and so they may serve to di­agnose the problem of imperial power and its challenges. During this month, an incident playing out in and around Najaf had kept Iraq and the global public in thrall until Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani finally, as reported in the opening to this chapter, set his train of followers in motion to begin the end game and find a reso­lution of sorts to the conflict. Al-Sistani had for a while been forced to follow events from a distance. Treatment of a heart condition had taken him to London just as the simmering conflicts among the many rivaling and mutually distrustful groups in post-Saddam Iraq had again come to a boil. Removing the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein had been like blowing a heavy capstone off society. With the estab­lished political hierarchy gone, rival groups were cropping up everywhere to jostle for position, settle old scores, or simply undermine the putative postwar order.^[10] Among the Sunni population—formerly dominant, but now ousted from power and fearful of its future prospects—an insurgency was taking shape, one ferocious and resilient enough to have been revived repeatedly over the years, right up until the present, every time it looked as if it had been struck down.

Divisions were no less intense among those who stood to gain from the change of regime imposed by American forces. Ayad Allawi, a Shi'a Muslim and long-time exile, was handpicked by the US authorities and had just been installed as prime minister to head an interim government that would steer Iraq toward free elections the following year. But others, with firmer roots in the Shi'a majority, had different ambitions for their country and for themselves. One was Muqtada Al Sadr. He was the son of a prominent dynasty of Shi'a religious leaders that had suffered a heavy toll under the dictator, but was himself of little formal standing in the established clerical hierarchy. Yet, he had managed deftly to exploit the clout of his family name to build up a social movement among poorer segments of the Shi'a population. Radiating from the so-called Sadr City, a suburb of Baghdad which used to carry the name of Saddam, the movement came armed with its own militia. A host of irregulars, inspired by Shi'a millenarian hopes, this “army” took its name after the Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah, and could be called upon to challenge the occupying force, as well as American plans for Iraq. “The little serpent has left, and the great serpent has come,” Sadr declared with considerable swagger in a television inter­view to the American public. The lesser evil was Saddam. Now that he had been gotten rid of, “by the grace of God,” the invaders were the last thing that prevented the Shi'as from taking possession of Iraq and shaping its future according to their own wishes. The foreigners had to be made to go.^[11]

Clashes began in March and April, but August saw renewed confrontation.^[12] One of the skirmishes took place close to the house of Al Sadr in the city of Najaf and brought things to an even higher pitch.

For several weeks the American-led troops laid siege to the sanctuary with the Mahdi army caught inside. Tension was building and the parties became in­creasingly nervous as the deadlock hardened. All the while, the protagonists were looking toward London to see what al-Sistani might do. Al Sadr's grandstanding not only repudiated the authority of the newly appointed government, it also chal­lenged the position of Ayatollah al-Sistani. As the highest-ranking Shi'a cleric in Iraq, he was supposed to be in control of the Imam Ali shrine and stand as a leader of the community of the faithful in Iraq.

Here is a reminder, should one be needed, that invasion, conquest, and rule—em­pire, simply put—is never a straightforward matter. It always involves compromise— if not always to be reached just in the nick of time, then certainly to be wrestled out of messy and complex conflict. Initially, perhaps, it came as a surprise to a gener­ation that had just seen the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, that the specter of empire would re-emerge so forcefully on the international stage of the late 1990s and early 2000s. For a moment, it had looked as if the promise of the age of decolonization would finally be fulfilled and the last empires laid to rest. Now, already from a little distance in time, the surprising thing seems rather the opposite, that people had been able to believe that empire would fall off the map. But imperialism is the result of stark differences in power between societies. These never vanished.

Indeed, if a current of utopian expectations seems to have run through the 1990s, perhaps nowhere did this impulse beat stronger than in the unexpected turn toward celebrating and resurrecting a US imperialism. With the fall of the Soviet rival, the United States was left as the sole and unopposed superpower. The French foreign minister even coined the mildly deceptive phrase “hyper puissance,” to emphasize the unprecedented global reach and supremacy of the United States. This was a uni­polar moment.^[17] Francis Fukuyama had predicted that the disappearance of com­munism as a credible alternative marked the end of history in terms of Hegelian development. The world had seen slavery and feudalism come and go, but there would be nothing beyond capitalist and liberal democracy.^[18] Others, however, felt less certain about the inescapable logic of history. To be on the safe side, they preferred to lend philosophy a helping hand, so to speak, and to use the unmatched power of the United States to bring the inexorable grind of history to a halt, freezing the world order at the moment of American predominance and consolidating a new global empire of capitalism and democracy, before someone else might take over.^[19] Still other voices, horrified by genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the war that broke up Yugoslavia, advocated for a strong hand to step in and prevent such atrocities in the future. No power was available other than the United States, and so the world needed an “empire lite”—Pax Americana—to promote democracy and human rights.^[20] When on September 11, 2001, the horrifying and spectacular ter­rorist attacks hit New York City and the Pentagon, anything but a resolute and de­termined reaction would have been unthinkable. But that the response should entail a full-scale invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq, fueled by ambitious policies to effect regime change and build democracy, can perhaps best be put down to the con­fluence of these different visions of world order.

Conquest itself proved easy; winning the peace, however, was far more difficult. The daily conflict and struggles in the occupied societies soon revealed the demo­cratic expectation to have been wildly utopian and naive. The complexities involved in such an enterprise emerged with merciless clarity as ideology clashed with the challenges, even the mere reality, of occupation. Instead of sticking to high principles, the invading power was forced, at best (as the incident in Najaf brought out with such clarity), to compromise and to accommodate the wishes and ambitions of groups whose support was only lukewarm and whose agendas were their own. Not least, the significance of time itself as a factor had been underestimated. Most successful empires in world history have taken a long time to consolidate their conquests. The victims of hindsight and the foreshortening of time, historians of past empires have, perhaps frequently in their accounts, tended to gloss over the conflict and suffering necessary before a peaceful imperial order was reached. But, in this case, historians were quick to point out the hazardous nature of the project.^[21] In Afghanistan sev­eral invaders had failed miserably, from the British in the nineteenth century to the Russians in the twentieth. Iraq, too, had a modern history of resistance to Western colonial power while the so-called Sykes-Picot agreement, made high-handedly by the British and French during World War I, had carved up Ottoman possessions in the Middle East with scant attention to the underlying society. The result had been a number of hollow states that were riven by ethnic and religious divisions, some­thing later exacerbated by weak, but all the more brutal, autocratic regimes. In sum, a glance at the conflicted and tortured history of the modern Middle East would ar­guably have counseled caution. What was intended as a swing at the Gordian knot, radically to solve the deadlocked problems of the area, might, as it in fact did, turn out instead to be an act that had opened a virtual Pandora's box in the Islamic world. It was not simply that the conquerors had failed to acquire a sufficiently detailed grasp of the region's recent history. There is more to history, after all, than the common-sense, banal observation—endlessly repeated and much cherished among practitioners of our craft—that every society is unique, the result of a long and unrepeatable string of events. “One damned thing after another,” as the sneer goes. History also reveals broader patterns. On the streets of Najaf, in those days of August 2004, more than just the illusions of the new, democratic imperialism stood revealed. Rather, at a deeper level, the episode may be taken as emblematic of the imperial experience in world history. As it unfolded around the Imam Ali Mosque, the muddled conflict evoked a lesson drawn from the age-old script of empire.

In the history of the Jewish Rebellion against the Romans, during the reign of the emperor Nero, a remarkably, even uncannily, similar episode is narrated.^[22] The ac­count was penned by Josephus, a Jew and sometime leader among the rebels, then a captive turned Roman citizen who had attracted the patronage of the rulers of the new Flavian imperial house. They had first been sent to Judea with a frightening army to quell the uprising, but then used it to place themselves on the throne in the struggles following the fall of Nero before finally returning from the capital to de­liver the death knell to the insurgency in 70 ce with the conquest of Jerusalem and the burning of its famed temple, the cultic center of Judaism. Set up in the former urban home of the new dynasty, Josephus would tell his story from Rome, as an active eyewitness to events on both sides of the conflict.^[23] The preceding episode from modern Najaf will by now have prepared us to recognize the complexities of empire and the entangled web of conflicting loyalties equally present in the biog­raphy of Josephus. Jewish society had in many respects prospered since coming under Roman hegemony. Privileges had been granted lending recognition to many Jewish communities living around the Mediterranean, and the cult at the temple in Jerusalem had even attracted the sponsorship of the emperors. Pilgrims were gravitating in ever larger numbers to its great festivals.^[24] But there were also la­tent conflicts. The exclusivity of Jewish monotheism occasionally sparked clashes with the surrounding polytheistic society, including with the imperial overlords.^[25] To this may be added the periodic mobilization of vast, religiously roused, and easily stirred crowds of visitors gathering in Jerusalem for the cultic holidays. Such occasions were pregnant with revolution and the authorities were nervously on their guard. Jesus, if we may believe the Bible narrative, was crucified by Pontius Pilate after having entered the Holy City for Easter celebrations to the cries of “Hoseana” by a worshipping crowd saluting their new Messiah and king on Palm Sunday.^[26] Normally, however, the ferment of Jewish society was easily contained.

A generation after the governorship of Pilate, however, a series of events broke this state of affairs, spiraling completely out of control.^[27]

Several conflicts across Palestine culminated in a confrontation with the Roman governor concerning the temple treasure in Jerusalem. Insult provoked high­handed repression. Blood was shed and an angry urban population retaliated, drove the governor away, butchered a small remaining Roman garrison, and then sent an imperial army, called in from neighboring Syria, running after it suffered heavy losses. This was full-scale rebellion.^[28] Internal rivalries within Jewish society fanned these flames further. To persons acquainted with reportage of divisions within contemporary Iraq and their role in the post-invasion strife, Josephus’s attempt to paint a picture distinguishing between moderate, responsible leaders and criminal rabble-rousers sounds only too familiar. Besides being self-serving—Josephus had, after all, been among the rebel commanders—it is also misleading. Rather, division reflected competition for leadership within the elite and between different groups in society.

This theme comes to the forefront of Josephus’s account at an interlude in the fighting. After the initial defeats, the Romans had regrouped. The experienced senator Vespasian and his son, Titus, had been charged with the assignment of repressing the rebels. First, resistance was systematically rounded up by the invading legions throughout the territory and countryside. That was when Josephus was taken captive. Meanwhile, the rebels were left to wait in Jerusalem, their capital, and fight out internal rivalries among themselves.^[29] In charge was Ananos, senior among the high priests. He is the tragic hero of Josephus’s narrative, the only hope that the Jews had of negotiating an accommodating peace with the mighty em­pire. But he faced tough competition in John, a rival leader who had come up to Jerusalem after the fall of the nearby city of Gischala and who would manage to team up with the party of the so-called Zealots. In a city rife with messianic ex­pectations, the Zealots were the most fervent and unbending. Rejecting Roman hegemony at all costs, they recognized no sovereign power other than God’s. In what now looks almost like a preview of the episode around the Imam Ali Mosque, they proceeded to occupy the temple, mocking the leadership of the established re­ligious hierarchy. Ananos led his troops to attack in an attempt to regain control of the shrine. The outer courtyard was taken, but when his soldiers reached the gates to the inner sanctuary, they were ordered to stop; the high priest would not risk spilling Jewish blood in the innermost and holiest part of the temple, an act which would in effect defile the sacred authority on which his own power rested and thus undermine his position at the head of Jewish society. Instead he decided to lay siege to the Zealots caught inside the holiest of holies; the result, a standoff—just as we have learned to expect. But then the ancient episode departs dramatically from our modern example. The Zealots received help from another group, the Idumaeans, broke out of the temple, and overcame the unsuspecting troops of Ananos. With victory complete, Ananos and other representatives of the clerical government were executed and the challenger, John, took command of the rebellion (at least for a while). From this point forward, the fate of Jerusalem was sealed in the eyes of Josephus; its leadership had become too radicalized to make possible any compro­mise with the invincible imperial colossus.

Two millennia apart, what connects these parallel stories of senior clerics, temple occupation, renegade leadership rivals, and militias fueled by hopes of godly rule, all playing out in a setting of foreign military conquest, is the central position taken up by local elites in the workings of empire. The point, however, is not to make a spurious claim that the Middle East somehow never changes. Orientalism of this brand has justly been discredited by the critical efforts of Edward Said.^[30] Shared geography or civilization is only incidental to the argument. The parallel is more analytical, to be understood as a reflection of systemic similarities, as something structural in the situation of empire. That is the contention on which the present volumes of this collective work of history has been based. Look to any imperial con­temporary historiography and they all agree; local elites hold the key to the consol­idation of rule. Imperial power depended on and was constrained by the need to co-opt elites whose interests and goals only partly overlapped with those of their overlords and of the metropolitan government.^[31] Going too far in one direction (for instance, by conceding too much to the central authority) meant that their au­thority in their local society might be undermined: too far in the other, and they would find themselves in the position of rebels. Of necessity, loyalties were mixed— always somewhere in between. In the history of the Mughal conquests in India, as Chris Bayly often reminded me in conversation, it is almost proverbial that often one member of a subjected line of princelings would collaborate with the imperial court while the other would rebel.^[32]

That phenomenon, too, can be mirrored in far more ancient experience, this time in Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul. The first books include an exten­sive portrait of the two brothers, Dumnorix and Diviciacus, who belonged to the very cream of Gallic society.^[33] One, however, opted for a position of influence and power as an ally of Caesar and the Romans, while the other secretly plotted against them—at least, this is how the situation looked to the conqueror. But once discov­ered, Caesar could not simply punish the subversive family member. Such action would make the loyal brother look bad in the eyes of Gallic society and undermine his value as an ally. Imperial power, although it derives from military superiority and often generates myths of omnipotence, is beset by weakness, limitations, and a need to compromise. That is the enduring paradox.

These deep commonalities in the imperial condition should not be ignored by historians. The experience of empire harks back to the third millennium âñå and spans across the globe. It demands a world history survey, broad-ranging and comparative in scope. As a topic, empire is calling out for study across traditional chronological divides and established geographical boundaries.^[34] Several synthesizing forays have been made into this territory over the last two decades, most successfully by Dominic Lieven, Jane Burbank, and Frederic Cooper, incidentally all of them contributors to the present work.^[35] But the challenges involved in such an enterprise came, perhaps, most fully to the fore in debates around David Cannadine's Ornamentalism. This book was an ambitious, if polemical, attempt to reinterpret the character of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the height of its powers, the glue that kept the sprawling edifice together, Cannadine maintains, was provided by royal and aristocratic ceremony. Consciously emulating the pre-industrial past, the powers of the modern age were harnessed to stage royal ceremonies and enact an aristocratic culture on a scale never matched, but only dreamt ofby the monarchs and conquerors of yore. Plumes and parades, knighthoods and orders, classical monuments, and neo-gothic estates, all in heaped profusion, created an extravagant historicizing space corseting the many societies subject to the British crown into a system of shared ranks. Hierarchy and aristocracy bridged diversity and race, or so it was claimed. This was the empire of people such as the last ruler of Indian Jaipur, who shared with the British aristocracy a passion for polo, a game which had grown out of the cavalry of the British-Indian army, toured England with his team to scoop up all the trophies, and years later died from an accident during a match in Cirencester.^[36] Yet, this gallant image of the empire had little to say about crucial developments that have come to define the period, such as capitalist enterprise, the rise of professional middle classes, and the emergence of nationalism. The analysis was, so to speak, predicated more on the Indian colonial society of the residual and moribund princely states than that of the civil service, the rising Congress, and Gandhi.^[37]

But one can recognize the significance of commonalities across the ages without ignoring historical development. If the historical parallels are no more generally banal than the detailed twists and turns of individual imperial histories are all trivial, then the opposite is also true. This work attempts to give both sides of the ques­tion their due; it combines an insistence that accounting for shared commonalities requires a deeper history with an ambition of tracing the evolving course and shifting circumstances of empire over the ages. The parallel examples that opened this chapter were surprisingly similar, but they did nevertheless have different outcomes. The Romans went on to conquer Jerusalem and destroy the temple. This quickly earned the new ruling dynasty a foreign triumph, commemorated to this day on the Arch of Titus in the Forum Romanum. Its magnificent reliefs still depict the temple treasures being paraded in victorious celebration through the streets of the imperial capital. More fateful, with the demolition of the temple, the Jewish population was deprived of its symbolic and ceremonial rallying point. The Roman authorities had little sympathy for the mobilization of the wider subject population, especially to a cause that had turned out to be rebellious. The annual contribution that had customarily been sent, with the consent of the authorities, by believers to the temple was confiscated, to be paid in the future as a humiliating tribute to the imperial coffers. When the Jews rose again under Hadrian, the point was rammed home with added emphasis. From then on, they were forbidden even to enter their city.^[38] What the Roman authorities needed was to identify a select elite within local society that could govern on their behalf. A time-tested strategy, they had little reason to suspect it might disappoint them. Josephus, after all, had set out to write his long history of the rebellion to reassure his Roman masters and patrons that there was still a responsible segment of Jewish society on which they could rely and build a provincial order.^[39] In Iraq, on the other hand, the US-led coalition aimed at exactly the opposite. By initiating a process toward democratic election and by removing the existing elite, they worked toward the political mobilization of the wider population. This threw open the competition for power and influence and intensified conflict in Iraqi society, all the while promoting an ideology celebrating the right of people to self-determination—a fragile base, as John Hall points out in Chapter 16 of this volume, on which to base a stable hegemonic order.

As a problem of history then, empire is protean and confronts us with a need to examine both long-l asting similarities and mutations produced by changing circumstances of time and locality. In the structure of the current work, this dual mandate has been fulfilled through a two-pronged division. Volume 1 identifies a set of central aspects of the imperial experience in world history, and explores them

across a series of analytical, comparative, and thematic chapters. Volume 2 then surveys the course of empire across the world, from its earliest beginnings in the third millennium societies of the ancient Near East to the globalized present. This is done through a sequence of chapters, each of which narrates the history of indi­vidual empires, interwoven with short synthesizing epochal overviews that identify the broader trends and patterns emerging through world history. There is no uni­fied field dedicated to the exploration of empire yet; most empires are still studied only in the singular. But it is possible to distinguish three or four broad family clusters: ancient and pre-colonial New World, Asian, and finally European colonial empires. Of these, it is the experience connected with European colonialism that overwhelmingly dominates our intellectual horizon. Not the least of the attractions of attempting a global and long-term view is that it helps to put the recent colo­nial experience into perspective. To be sure, some may suspect behind such a move an attempt to exonerate Europe of its recent past, presumably by pointing out that plunder, pillage, and exploitation preceded modern colonialism. On the other hand, if one's worldview has such feeble foundations that it would take nothing more to shake it, then perhaps it is better put to rest.^[40]

It has long been recognized that colonialism has distorted our vision and left us with an exaggerated notion of the role of Europe in world history. Everything seemed to hinge on Europe, even history itself. What could not be neatly shoe­horned into its familiar sequence of ancient, medieval, and modern was simply left standing idle, outside the mainstream. But how to “provincialize Europe,” how to overcome Eurocentrism in a constructive manner, remains a burning issue.^[41] When Edward Said, for instance, identified the origin of Western colonial discourse about a subjectable and pliable Orient in the fifth-century bce Greek play The Persians, he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that it was a piece of anti-imperial liter­ature.^[42] Written by Aeschylus, the text celebrated the unexpected victories that had enabled the Athenians to stave off the invasion of the over-mighty hegemon of the times, the Achaemenid Empire, which stretched from Afghanistan to the Bosporus. The war, however, had been hard-won—the damnedest thing, really. Athens itself had first been burned and looted by the Persian force before victory had, in the end, been snatched from the jaws of predictable defeat.^[43] It would be a long time before Western scholarship and science would be able to impose a hegemonic discourse to define and dominate a colonial Middle East and Orient. The text had been written from a perspective of defiant resistance, not confident supremacy. Perhaps, better than any other, a long-term and comparative approach to empire holds the key to a more sober and realistic view of the role played by Europe in world history. It does so, not by writing Europe out of the story, but by placing European colonialism in context, which reveals just how short-lived it was and on how fragile a foundation it rested. The world was made Eurocentric for a brief while, during the conflagration that produced the modern world; but before this, human society moved to a dif­ferent rhythm and history converged on other things. This is an insight or form of knowledge that will be crucial in guiding our sense of the future, one in which the world is becoming steadily more modern and again increasingly less centered on Europe, to paraphrase the French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut.^[44]