Sex and Empire

Walter Scheidel's^[310] fascinating discussion of empires and harems employs an evolu­tionary psychology approach to explain why men with power wanted to gain sexual access to large numbers of women.

In subsequent work, Scheidel^[313] has tried to address what is known about the causes of what he calls the institution of “socially imposed universal monogamy” (SIUM) and its displacement of polygyny^[314] in world history. A purely histori­cist explanation would note that the Romans and the Greeks were monogamous and the polities that descended from them eventually took over the world and so monogamy was imposed by the powerful. Christianity got monogamy from the Romans, as a perusal of the Old Testament will make plain. Christians took over most of the world as a result of European colonialism and the rise of industrial cap­italism. Thereby, the rules of the winners became the global moral order. This is probably the best overall explanation, although Scheidel^[315] points out that there is very little research on the history of colonialism and monogamy that would sub­stantiate this account.

In the meantime, Henrich, Boyd, and Richardson^[316] have published a study of po­lygyny and monogamy that suggests a number of ways in which SIUM is functional for society.

But it is also possible that SIUM facilitates greater solidarity between elites and their soldiers than does elite polygyny. Greater solidarity between classes is a big advantage in competition among states. Soldiers and citizens are more likely to identify with, and to support, leaders who seem to follow the general moral rules regarding legitimate access to women. This might have been an important source of Greek and Roman advantages over their polygynous opponents. However, once monogamy became sanctified by the religion of the European West, it be­came part of the cultural package that European colonialism imposed on most of the rest of the world. So economic and military power, as well as possible func­tional advantages, must be an important part of the explanation of the spread of SIUM. And once a global moral order has emerged, emulation of global moder­nity also should be noted as a factor. China was never a colony, but the Peoples Republic made polygyny illegal in 1955. Laws prohibiting polygyny were adopted in 1880 in Japan as part of the modernization effort that was the Meiji Restoration. Postcolonial India made polygyny illegal in 1953.^[319] Therefore, the spread of mo­nogamy was a matter of both imposition and emulation. This is relevant for our ex­amination of geopolitics and imperialism because it demonstrates the emergence of a global moral order that somewhat modifies the operation of the “might makes right” logic of geopolitics.