Resources, Control, and “Imperial Capital”
The potential established by the existence of an empire for redefining the conditions (ideological as well as political and economic) under which surplus is appropriated, both in the core territories as well as in conquered regions, establishes the ground upon which “imperial capital” can be generated.
Imperial capital in pre-modern agrarian empires can be defined as the total cultural product of the complex interrelationship between central and local elites, through which the court or palace is assured of a certain quantity of resources (in cash, manpower, skills, produce, and elite acknowledgment) sufficient to defend the status quo to its own advantage, to secure its continued dominant position. Such capital consists of three prime elements: actual physical resources (people and things); the relationships and social networks through which they are appropriated, redistributed, and consumed; and the sets of ideas and concepts through which the first two elements are apprehended, understood, and manipulated or deployed. There are two further aspects to each of these: the three-way power relationship between court/government, dominant (imperial) elites, and subordinate (conquered/provincial) elites; and the construction of ideological legitimacy, in which subordinate elites may play a key role as local agents of the empire. Only the most successful empires are able to generate the sort of capital that includes all of these elements in a unitary fashion, and are thus able to reproduce themselves on a long-term basis with only limited recourse to coercion, imperial systems which enjoy precisely the sort of systemic flexibility referred to earlier. By the same token, however, even where empires are able to redefine their conditions of existence (through conquest and the seizure of new resources), they paradoxically tend also to generate resistance and struggle over the distribution of such social wealth, both between exploiters and the exploited, and between different elements of the exploiting elite.For the classic European colonial empires of the sixteenth century on, “imperial capital” necessarily represents a somewhat more complex concatenation of elements—those already noted, but in addition we need to consider the ways in which the private enterprise of merchant adventurers of all sorts could be accessed by governments, directly—through investing in the infrastructure of trade (fitting- out of ships, hiring of crews, purchase of goods) to receive a cut of the proceeds, for example—or indirectly, through the management of such activities and the imposition of customs dues or taxes, import duties, or by means of the occasional and temporary sequestering of ships and manpower, for example, for warfare on behalf of the state. Further, the complex relationship between colonies and the “home” territory generated resources which could be called upon in one form or another to promote the interests of the core territory, as reflected in the foregoing comments on the processes of colonial expansion.
Resources can take many forms, and both material resources as well as ideological resources are equally important. Ideological resources consist primarily of the sets of ideas and beliefs which structure how individuals and groups understand and explain their world, as well as the narrower sets of legitimating ideologies through which empires and elites rationalize the world and maintain their power. Such resources can be manipulated—in respect of communities of identity, for example— to support the politics of a state and its ruling elite in their relations with competitor states, as in the conflicts between the Crusader states in the medieval period and their Islamic neighbors, or perhaps more clearly between the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and its neighbors in both the Balkans and the Islamic world.
Material resources in pre-modern state or imperial systems are usually assessed and collected in one or more of three forms: taxation in kind, taxation in cash or some other common exchangeable medium, and various types of corvee labor or the conscription of particular skills from among specialist craftsmen and artisans for a specific purpose.
All three may operate at the same time, and their field of operation may vary by geography or by conjuncture, depending—for example—on the availability or not of coinage or of markets. They are managed through one or a combination of two methods: the direct action of centrally appointed (or approved) officials or representatives of the central authority, who forward the revenues they collect to the center or otherwise distribute to support the activities of the state; or indirectly, through the allocation of revenue flows to state representatives, who in their turn fulfill a set of defined duties on behalf of the state or ruler. The first method is typified by those political systems which are able to evolve some centrally managed bureaucratic or administrative apparatus, ideally where the role of provincial elites is minimal and where central power to make or break its representatives remains strong, so that loyalty to the center outweighs other kin- or territorybased allegiances. Many historical empires in the pre-modern period have been able to achieve this situation for a short time, but only rarely for an extended period. The second method is typical of states and empires with a dispersed form of power, such as those polities that might traditionally be referred to as “feudal,” for example. Most imperial systems about which we have specific information, or about which we can deduce something from their archaeology, have occupied a position somewhere in between these two extremes, often moving along a curve between them as they evolve in one direction or the other.The actual mechanisms of surplus extraction vary enormously, but it is clearly the case that ultimately the possibility of actual physical coercion, or coercion embodied in legal institutions and the law, underlies all such relationships. By virtue of their power to extract surplus, states gain also the possibility of increasing the rate of exploitation (the amount of surplus demanded in relation to that necessary for the social and economic reproduction of the producers) and thereby of exerting a considerable degree of control over the lives of the producers themselves.
Yet this is almost without exception mediated through those who represent the state or empire, whether members of the conquering power or of an indigenous elite. Empires as well as states thus create the possibility for an intensification of surplus appropriation, whether through the state apparatuses themselves or through the increased concentration of the powers of coercion in the hands of their elites. Not all empires (or states) necessarily realize these possibilities, and not all such arrangements work to the advantage of the center. In fact, even in the most successful conquest empires, after the first few post-conquest generations the reverse is more often the case. In the case of early modern colonial empires, of course, we must add to these means of surplus extraction the exploitation of oceanic commercial networks and the revenues derived from the plantation economies of colonial settlements in the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Indian Ocean and China Sea—as noted already, different governments found different ways of attaining this end, and with varied results depending upon conjuncture and the infrastructure of state finance.