Theories of Empire

In a famous and influential pamphlet of 1916, Lenin, the exiled radical and soon to be leader of the Russian Revolution, declared that empire represented the highest stage of capitalism.

Ancient or modern, the tension between these two positions continues to resur­face in scholarship on empire. Hardt and Negri, in what some at the turn of the millennium hoped would become a new Marxist manifesto, reproduced the op­position. In the past, they pronounced, there had been only imperialisms, but now with the planet-wide extension of the capitalist system, humanity had entered the stage of Empire. Nothing was outside or beyond the reach of amorphous and anon­ymous globalization; the empire was everywhere and nowhere in particular. Few students of empire, though, have been willing or able to follow this grand, holistic vision, as unwieldy as it is totalizing.^[88] Compared to the topic of state-formation, the field of imperial studies still lacks a comprehensive body of theory around which interpretations converge. To be sure, there is no shortage of theories of em­pire, but these usually tackle only part of the imperial experience or merely a single dimension.

Behind the left-liberal position of Lenin and the right-liberal position of Schumpeter was J. A. Hobson's Imperialism—A Study. Published in 1902, it may count as the starting point of the modern theoretical discourse on empire. In a scathing analysis of the British Empire, Hobson intoned a set of themes that con­tinue to animate the various branches of current imperialism theory. Empire, he objected to its supporters in his own time, represented the forceful appropria­tion of the resources of other people; it was theft and exploitation. In his world of expanding global markets, imperialism was a perversion.^[89] It attempted to force foreign markets to bow to special interests. Instead of developing its home economy by promoting the rights and spending power of ordinary people, the British government had been captured by a narrow oligarchy of financiers, industrialists, and landowners who kept privilege for themselves while seeking to make easy profits in monopolized colonial markets where they could rely on im­perial domination to dictate the terms of trade and investment. Liberal democracy at home was undermined by subservience to the interests of hierarchy, specula­tive capitalism, and empire abroad. In this scheme of things, Hobson added, the universities and the church had been hijacked to provide ideological support for the cause of empire and to produce a body of knowledge to be employed in the control of the colonies. Nationalism, finally, was stirred to further fan the flames of colonial conquest.

The four themes identified by Hobson—(a) an economic strategy to monopolize markets, (b) a form of aristocratic class interest, (c) an ideological system and mode of identity formation, and finally, (d) an expression of interstate competition— continue to define the parameters of a field within which most current theories of empire can be mapped out. The following sections will chart and analyze, in succes­sion, how a separate discourse has developed for each topic.

A. Empire as Capitalism

The notion of imperialism as a strategy to capture and monopolize markets has found its greatest resonance among socialist thinkers. Lenin's pamphlet rose on the crest of a wave of Marxist writings linking capitalism with empire.^[90] In 1910, Rudolf Hilferding, who would become a prominent member of the German Social Democratic Party and minister of finance under the Weimar Republic, analyzed imperialism as the direct result of the rise of vast concentrations of capital in the financial markets. This form of capital, embodied in the business corporation, was squarely set against laissez faire. Too big to fail, to borrow a topical phrase, and too big for the home market, finance capital could not trust economic outcomes to the hazardous interplay of free markets, but required much greater certainty while pursuing a course of international invest­ment; it had to rely on protective measures. “Das Finanzkapital will nicht Freiheit, sondern Herrschaft.” Not freedom, but domination—that was the aim of corporate capitalism and it needed the support “eines starken Staates, der seine finanziellen Interessen im Ausland zur Geltung bringt, seine politische Macht einsetzt, um den kleineren Staaten günstige Lieferungsverträge und günstige Handelsverträge abzunotigen.” It must be a state, Hilferding continued, “der überall in der Welt ein­greifen kann, um die ganze Welt in Anlagesphären für sein Finanzkapital verwandeln zu konnen.” Finally that state had to be strong enough to embark on a successful cam­paign of overseas colonial acquisition.^[91]

Soon after, Rosa Luxemburg, the later martyr of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919, took the analysis deeper still.

The road was paved for Lenin to conclude, “Capitalism has become imperi­alism.”^[94] A few years later, this theory was elevated to official doctrine when a congress of the Communist International declared, “European capitalism derives its strength less from the European industrial countries than from its colonial possessions.”^[95] But here they failed to take proper account of Hobson's original ar­gument. In statistical terms, many of the colonies acquired by the European powers did not turn a profit. Far more trade and investment took place within the Euro­Atlantic world than between metropolis and colonies, a fact that was accepted, but glossed over, by Lenin. The colonies could be abandoned, in Hobson's view, and the metropolitan societies would continue to grow richer by developing their in­ternal markets.

But if capitalism and imperialism do not completely overlap, Marxist theories have been much more successful in pointing to disparities in power that often shape com­mercial exchange. Markets are not even playing fields, but often in themselves repre­sent a form of power. The 1960s saw a number of notable voices. Kvame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary politician, popularized the phrase of neocolonialism while in the field of development economics, Andre Gunder Frank radicalized the insights of Rosa Luxemburg. Capitalism, he insisted, was not merely in the pro­cess of expanding into the world of colonies. These had long since been absorbed by the economic system and were already a part of it, but in an inferior position. “No part of the economy is feudal,” as Frank remarked about South America, “all of it is fully integrated into a capitalist system.”^[97] The all-encompassing world market was designed to favor the metropolitan centers while peripheries were transformed into subsidiary suppliers of cheap raw materials. Capitalist exchange locked the co­lonial world into a position of permanent dependence, and it retained its subject status even after colonial rule ended. Underdevelopment was a product of capitalism and empire, not an expression of pre-industrial, agrarian conditions that were still awaiting modernization.

However, most prominent among the scholars who pursue such approaches is Immanuel Wallerstein and his world-systems analysis. He sees capitalism as constituting a so-called world economy—that is, a set of regional economies and societies linked together through markets in an “extensive,” international divi­sion of labor. At the core of this world system are powerful, affluent societies with strong states, able to call the tune for the other constituents. It is in the core of the world economy that we find the most advanced forms of technology and privileged types of wage labor. At the periphery, however, it is the opposite. Weak or absent state institutions make these societies vulnerable to exploitation from the core, and labor is rarely free, instead normally tied into various, seemingly archaic, forms of dependency (such as serfdom or slavery). The prime example of this is, of course, the so-called triangular trade that saw the West Indies become a plantation economy from the sixteenth century onward, employing enslaved people brought from Africa for the production of sugar, rum, and other substances that were intended for sale on the European market. In between core and periphery, Wallerstein posits a number of mediating semi-peripheral societies. Significant, though, is the attempt to describe the steadily expanding world created by global capitalist markets as a hierarchy rather than the level playing field imagined by mainstream economists. The distribution of rewards in the economic system is “very skewed,” Wallerstein observes, and profits flow disproportionately to the core, the metropolitan centers, which dominate the periphery either through direct colonial governance or by indi­rect control that makes it too costly for the periphery to resist.

It will be clear by now that, for Wallerstein as for the other Marxists thinkers, his theory is only tangentially one of imperialism—rather, capitalism is the center of attention. But empire serves as an important vehicle of colonial, peripheral ex­ploitation. Moreover, for Wallerstein, the modern, capitalist world-system, as it developed and expanded from Europe beginning in the sixteenth century, is just one of several. History has in general been characterized by the formation of vast interconnected economic spaces. These world economies, though, “were highly un­stable structures”; they tended quickly either to disintegrate or to morph into world empires when one predominant power emerged to conquer the other parts. World empire marks the main alternative form of world-system in Wallersteins theoret­ical scheme. But it is a form about which he has had little to say. However, as his followers have abandoned the narrowly economic focus of the original approach and have lent more weight to politics, ideology, religion, and military power, world­systems analysis has widened to produce a more differentiated image of the impe­rial experience in world history, as demonstrated in Chapter 3 by Chase-Dunn and Khutkyy in the present volume.

This movement toward a more multidimensional analysis may be taken as a re­flection that the old, highly charged dichotomy between Schumpeter and Lenin has begun to lose some of its force. Ideology is receding, giving way to historical so­ciology. It is a notable feature of Wallersteins world-system that the analysis not only sees imperial hierarchical subjection, but also insists that competition is a cru­cial feature of modern capitalism. A region is not doomed forever to remain in the underdeveloped periphery, but may better its position. Similarly, the leading eco­nomic powers are likely to see their commercial hegemony challenged and, over time, supplanted by newcomers—j ust as has happened with the meteoric rise of China over the last generation. Capitalism, in short, emerges both as an expression of imperialism and as an unstable foundation for imperial hegemony. Wallersteins analysis, therefore, may be read as an attempt to graft an analysis of power onto the model of free markets developed by classical economists.^[101]

This is an ambition that he shares with a growing number of economists outside the Marxist camp, such as Robert Gilpin, and it is an agenda that speaks directly to the historical experience of empire.^[102] As Montesquieu remarked in the eighteenth century, it was characteristic of European states to treat and organize their colo­nies as market opportunities, while Adam Smith a quarter century later wrote his Wealth of Nations in a scathing attack on the edifice of monopolies, privileges, and protective measures which the state had erected to fortify these commercial inter­ests. The so-called mercantile system under which the early colonies had developed was to be abandoned and a regime of laissez faire substituted in its stead.^[103] Even at the height of the period when the belief in laissez faire ruled the waves under the supremacy of the British Empire of the nineteenth century, state intervention and power were never far off. In a now classic study, historians Robinson and Gallagher demonstrated that “free trade” was a position adopted by Britain from a position of strength and convenience.^[104] Having industrialized first, the British enjoyed an enormous commercial advantage which made competition easy to win. But when­ever they failed to achieve their commercial goals by peaceful means in overseas theaters, they rarely hesitated to call in assistance from their world-spanning navy. Gunboat diplomacy, exemplified notoriously by the Opium Wars, cracked open markets otherwise closed to commercial penetration and served to underwrite an imperialism of “free trade.” Empire, and capitalist empire in particular, produced a minimalist and lean order; it existed on a narrow profit margin and was therefore based on a principle of least effort. Otherwise, martial activism might quickly see the profit squandered through costly military entanglements.

Even Schumpeter, who originally posited an unbridgeable gap between empire and market, ended up developing an analysis of modern capitalism in which the common ground between him and the Marxists surprisingly springs to eye. With Luxemburg, he shared the notion that capitalism developed along a dynamic fron­tier, although in his case that frontier was more technological and economic than territorial. From Hilferding, he took over the idea that modern capital concentra­tions required monopoly power. He brought these two dimensions together in the theory of creative destruction. Industrial and capitalist innovation required enor­mous concentrations of capital. To justify the gigantic risks involved, companies had to suspend competition and seek forms of monopoly. As capitalism developed by ever moving into new economic territories, vast corporations, stuck with yesterday’s technology and unable to change because of prior commitments, would soon find themselves overtaken by development. In the meantime, they had to recoup their giant investments by seeking monopoly rents.^[105] The exercise of social power was es­sential for the operation of a dynamic market economy, and the activities of priv­ileged financiers—“gentlemanly capitalist,” as they have later been labeled in their nineteenth-century guise—who sought profits in overseas theaters subject to polit­ical domination, can now easily find their place within such a conceptual scheme.^[106] The imperialism of monopoly capitalism was, as Max Weber had observed, no coincidence.^[107]

The significance of social and political power in generating profits was also made a theme by Raymond Aron, a voice of trenchant moderation among the intellectuals of post-World War II France. In Imperial Republic he delivered a sharp, even pre­scient analysis of the United States of America in the modern world order. Markets were notionally free, but since international economic institutions had been designed from America and the dollar served as the universal reserve currency, the United States was able to take advantage and derive substantial profits from its pre­dominant position. The need of foreign countries to buy dollars made it possible to finance a considerable trade deficit and fund huge government debts, whose value would then be depleted by inflationary printing of more dollar bills—a modern, indirect version of an imperial tribute or tax.^[108] However, the connection between imperial tribute and markets has been most lucidly theorized by the American historian of trade, F. C. Lane. About the early modern world, he observed that a traditional, classical economic analysis lacked one crucial and often determinant dimension: protection costs. Merchants needed protection, and its provision was an important part of economic activity. The world was full of wielders of armed force, predators ready to plunder or tax economic agents. Protection, therefore, might be organized by the economic agents themselves or they might pay some political power to flex its military muscles to prevent other armed people from plundering or taxing them. The state, from this perspective, becomes a protection racket, one predator offering to keep its rivals at bay in return for a settled sum—in short, a seller of protection and thus a provider of an economic good: order. But since pro­tection is based on brute force, competition is limited or very imperfect; clients are never allowed a free choice. It is not difficult to see how imperial power fits this template. In economic terms, protection verges toward monopoly, and providers of protection have normally been able to collect a surcharge over and above the ac­tual costs of running their establishment in the first place. It is for this surcharge, or monopoly profit, that Lane reserves the label of tribute. In practice, though, it is very difficult to determine where protection costs proper end and tribute begins— just as historians endlessly debate whether empires have been a good thing or an oppressive burden, generators of order or plundering mechanisms. Such debates are probably insoluble. The answers simply represent alternative perspectives.^[109] What empire unquestionably does is to extract, mobilize, and ensure the exchange of resources.^[110]

Moreover, the notion of “protection cost” opens a theoretical lens onto the impe­rial experience capable of spanning ancient and modern. Wallerstein, for instance, included a passing reference to Lane's work in his analysis, but tellingly, and in a manner consistent with the Marxist tradition, continued to think of protection costs in terms of taxation in the context of pre-capitalist world empires.^[111] Not so Lane, who had developed his analysis to account for the mercantilist policies and meas­ures of the expanding early modern and capitalist world market, including the early modern East India trading companies, the predecessors of the multinational busi­ness corporation.^[112] Success among rival commercial groups and interests could, to a large extent, be explained as a result of alternative ways of organizing protection. Among mainstream economists, these two, slightly contrasting perspectives have now been subsumed within a general inquiry about the role of the state. Under the banner of New Institutional Economics, North, Wallis, and Weingast have explored the question of violence, protection costs, and social order across history. States are analyzed as order-producing predators and ruled by coalitions of elites that, for much of history, have been able to use their political power to secure economic benefits—in the form of rents—from the general population. This is “the natural state,” North, Wallis, and Weingast observe, and one might add, characteristic of the imperial condition.^[113] A predatory ruling class coalition, protection costs now take the theoretical survey to the second dimension of Hobson's discussion: empire as aristocratic privilege and elite formation.

B. Empire as Aristocratic Privilege

If the question of empire-as-market has sprung from early twentieth century debates about the economics of colonialism and capitalism, the topic of empire- as-aristocracy has been shaped by another primary concern about empire that was prominent at the time: how to turn vast territorial and dynastic domains into sovereign, centralized states capable of the intense mobilization necessary for modern mass warfare. From China to Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans, this was the burning issue for state elites—that is, how to modernize the vast tra­ditional societies over which they presided. Their polities had, increasingly in the eyes of contemporary observers, begun to seem doomed, decadent, and in the grip of interminable decline.^[114] In a pamphlet published in preparation for the peace negotiations after World War 1, the South African Boer and British general, Jan Smuts even advocated for the creation of a league of nations by the need to provide order in the geopolitical space that was about to be vacated by the collapsing terri­torial empires of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A decade on, Joseph Roth set a literary monument to these sentiments with the novel, Radetzkymarsch, a striking and satirical portrait of the moribund and increasingly meaningless aristocratic order of the fallen Austro-Hungarian Empire.^[115]

At the level of theory, Max Weber laid the decisive foundation for this perspective in his analysis of power and authority. Before the modern bureaucratic state, Weber identified patrimonialism as the characteristic type of political power. Under pat­rimonial conditions, rulers were by origin great landholders and treated their ter­ritory as a vast domain. Rule, therefore, took place on the basis of their household and their servants. But this aristocratic world of lords was also one of military con­quest. Once the lord was able to expand his domains, the household became inad­equate for organizing administration. Co-optation of external allies was necessary to help govern the wider, increasingly imperial territory. Groups of state officials, often drawn from among other aristocrats and socially eminent people, were then forged into a body of “servants” to man the administrative offices of the extended domain; the patrimonial-bureaucratic state and empire had emerged. Rulers here were normally absolutist in pretention, but were in practice severely constrained, not least by the need to respect the privileges and rights of its service-aristocracies and elites; arbitrary monarchical whim was hemmed in by tradition and customary ritual. A perennial problem of the patrimonial-bureaucratic empire, identified in Weber's analysis, was the common habit of its elite officials to turn their offices and positions into private property or, stated differently, to substitute their own patri­monial household for that of the ruler. Such service elites constantly tended to drift back into society and make their power and resources independent of the central government. At all times, effective power and authority were highly decentralized and the state/empire remained torn between its modern, bureaucratic component and its traditional, aristocratic element.^[116]

After World War II, the Weberian sociology of the patrimonial-bureaucratic em­pire was picked up in a number influential works. First was Oriental Despotism, by Karl August Wittfogel, which featured the give-away subtitle, A Comparative Study of Total Power.^[117] Wittfogel's was a passionate intervention in the Cold War political climate, a partisan book. It was an attempt to anchor the East-West confrontation of liberal democracy and state communism in deep history. In his analysis of non­Western societies, Wittfogel was clearly most impressed by the absolutist and bu­reaucratic aspect of Weber's concept. Asian societies, it was claimed, had depended on state irrigation schemes from far back. A centralized command economy had been the order of the day while autocratic and absolutist government had become deeply embedded within the social fabric. State totalitarianism was nothing new; it was predetermined by the long history of Oriental despots lording it over the toiling populations of the vast Asian landmasses. Yet, for the innocent bystander, it was difficult not to notice that the overlap between ancient irrigation-based agriculture and communist dictatorships was only partial. Clearly, the explanatory value of the so-called “hydraulic” thesis was limited.

No serious historian today would lend much credence to this aspect of Wittfogel's work. As Owen Lattimore, for instance, had already pointed out a few years before in his classic study of China and its inner Asian frontier, the basis of its historic empire lay not in the need for unlimited state-power, but in the steady growth of intensive peasant agriculture.^[118] Where the ecological conditions made it impossible to sustain this form of life and its dense population, the power of the imperial government had lost traction. As the sown gave way to the steppe beyond the Great Wall, govern­mental command had been outpaced by the ability of mobile nomadic populations to move out of reach. Imperial power was highly restrained by the limits on trans­port experienced before the introduction of railways and underwent cycles of peri­odic weakening. The stable order of empire in China had only supported a narrow elite of landowning gentry and depended on its ability to collect revenue from a sta­tionary peasantry; it had been a thoroughly traditional agricultural and aristocratic society with all the curbs on centralised power so well-known from Weber's discus­sion. In fact, over long stretches Oriental Despotism itself reads like a model exposi­tion of the mechanisms of Weber's patrimonial politics and the familiar constraints on the exercise of absolutist, monarchical power. Communism, Ernest Gellner was later to conclude, had been implemented in the 20^th century as a radical strategy to force modernization on the old decentralized and composite agrarian empires of the Eurasian landmass. But in the heat of argument, Wittfogel had mistaken the harsh totalitarian medicine meted out by communist regimes, in order to quickly catch up and overcome the obstacles presented by the imperial ancien regime to moderniza­tion, for that traditional order itself.^[119] Only, as later observed by Motyl, when the totalitarian apparatus of, for instance, the Soviet Union, had begun to age and leth­argy crept in, did its regime begin to show some of the same symptoms of structural decay, often seen in the case of the much weaker agrarian empires.^[120]

Hot on the heels of Wittfogel, Schmuel Eisenstadt followed a few years after with a vast piece of comparative historical sociology, The Political Systems of Empires. His focus was directed more toward the eventually successful modernization of the monarchies of (Western) Europe. Given the inherently decentralized nature of power in the patrimonial-bureaucratic empires, Eisenstadt identified a need for the monarchical court or metropolitan government to develop what he dubbed “free floating resources.” These were resources that had been freed from the con­trol of local communities and allowed to move across the empire. This might, for instance, cover something as mundane as imperial taxes that could be spent out­side their region of origin, or it might include the development of a common ruling ideology shared among the governing classes across the realm. Eisenstadt saw the states that were successful in this exercise as progressing toward a more coherent, bureaucratic form. Most patrimonial bureaucratic empires failed, however, and in­stead fragmented. This, of course, raises the issue of whether they are best viewed as attempts at modernization, in the first place.^[121]

In The Politics ofAristocratic Empires, John H. Kautsky answered with a resounding no. Even down to language use, the two works represent opposite approaches.^[122] While Eisenstadt characterized his empires through an abstract, analytical, and to some extent even bureaucratic language of specialization of functions, Kautsky wrote of his empires in concrete terms. These were worlds created by a conquering warrior class, subjecting a peasant class and extracting its surplus product. Politics took place among rival aristocratic groups and revolved around war, the distribu­tion of rank, distinction and privilege, and access to landed income. The majority of the population, meanwhile—tax- and rent-paying peasant producers—were left to observe the action from outside. Trade, to Kautsky's mind, was essentially a for­eign element, and was treated primarily as a potential driver of modernization, a transformative agent in a world of otherwise stable aristocratic predominance. But, a central point, once made with instructive emphasis by Patricia Crone about pre­industrial societies in general, is that the aristocratic world of warriors and peas­ants rested on a division of labor; it was a complex form of society.^[123] Historically, traders and the services of the bazaar were necessary to supply the many diverse demands generated by aristocratic households, monarchical courts and cities to uphold their form of life; merchants were an integral element of this system and normally found a place in the aristocratic order.^[124] As Gellner pointed out in his definition of pre-industrial agrarian empires, the ruling classes, with access to the predominant transregional networks of power, were generally able to undermine local challenges to their position and absorb the energies of merchants inside ex­isting hierarchies.^[125] John Hall, a contributor to these volumes, sharpened this ana­lysis into a notion of capstone government. The extensive aristocratic empires of the pre-industrial world were normally able to snuff out any dynamic social develop­ment that might threaten their hegemony. The rulers of patrimonial-bureaucratic establishments had low enabling powers, but high blocking powers.^[126] That, how­ever, is not an absolute statement, but rather, a relative one. They had low enabling powers compared to the modern bureaucratic state. But compared to what came before or to their contemporary alternatives, aristocratic imperial governments were frequently quite capacious. The city of Rome of the imperial period grew to a size which was not matched anywhere again in the Mediterranean and Europe until the dawn of industrialization.^[127]

Such “empires of domination,” Michael Mann argued in The Sources of Social Power, sported a slowly but steadily accumulating stock of increasingly powerful modes of government and social organization. They were not the reservoirs of stagnation and inertia that they appeared to be to modernizing elites in the early twentieth century. To the latter, everything was about intensifying the powers of their state. But the empires of the past had excelled at something else—extensive mobilization. Normally, aristocratic empires rested quite lightly on the shoulders of subjects. The logistical constraints under pre-industrial conditions of moving armies and transporting the necessary bulky supplies made close governmental control over long distances impossible. Nevertheless, empires were able to com­mand vast resources by pooling together surplus wealth drawn from large num­bers of far-flung territories: a little from many, rather than a lot from a few. Key to their success was so-called compulsory cooperation. The empires only had rel­atively tiny bureaucracies available. Instead they relied on forging relations with local elites that would take care of most of the actual government on the ground. The deal was sealed by the threat of military intervention in case of open disloyalty. This was the compulsory element. On the other hand, cooperative local elites also benefited, since their position was backed by the support of a strong military power, which augmented their ability to control local communities. Together, imperial and local aristocracies could mobilize more resources than before, and so the organi­zational capacity of societies increased as both groups thrived on collaboration.^[128] The formation of elites, imperial administration, and the collection of tributes are discussed by Haldon in Chapter 5 of Volume 1 of this work.

Mann's analysis of social power tracks a progressive line from ancient Mesopotamia to Roman antiquity but then loses sight of empire until the age of colo­nialism. Instead, attention shifts to historical development inside medieval and early modern Europe. Here Mann's work differs markedly from that of John Hall, for in­stance, which surveys the character of social power across the main pre-industrial civilizations, rather than sticking to the trajectory taken by European societies. Others, therefore, have expanded on Mann's analysis of extensive agrarian empires to widen its reach. Among Marxist historians, the notion of a tributary mode of pro­duction has gained currency. Probing the character of pre-capitalist societies, as well as the revolutionary potential of so-called third world peasantries that Mao had so successfully tapped in the Communist take-over of China, they have moved beyond the nineteenth-century schemes of Marx and Hegel.^[129] These portrayed an immu­table Asia that had been left outside the mainstream of historical development, which the two thinkers located firmly in Europe, and which progressed through distinct stages from slavery, to feudalism, capitalism, and then (perhaps) com­munism. Nonetheless, one can observe the exploitation of peasantry by political­warrior elites across most of pre-industrial Eurasia and in the New World. Shahid Amin, followed by anthropologist Eric Wolf, coined the phrase “tributary mode of production” to integrate this widespread form of society into Marxist theory.^[130] In the 1980s, a debate followed between British historians Chris Wickham and John Haldon, the latter also a contributor to these volumes. Wickham posited a distinction between local feudal rents, which were predominant across medieval Europe, and tributary imperial taxes that were characteristic of Asia. But whether rent or tribute, John Haldon objected, in this sense both represented the surplus product of the peasantry, extracted by political, aristocratic elites. These phe­nomena, therefore, belonged on the same baseline and were best subsumed within a broad common category of a tributary mode of production. Having divested feu­dalism of the particularly privileged progressive position that it had previously occupied in the grand scheme of historical evolution, what is left is a shifting, con­stantly renegotiated tributary balance between localized rent and metropolitan, imperial tax (further nuance added by Tullberg, Chapter 21 of Vol. 2).^[131]

As if moving in to botanize within this newly opened, vast Eurasian expanse of tributary peasantries, several historical sociologists and sociologically minded historians have begun to widen Mann's analysis, extending it from Roman antiquity to embrace Asia. A spate of sociological and comparative studies has explored the character of institutions, elite formation, and dynamics of historical development in the Roman Empire, China (from the Qin imperial unification through the many successive reconquests and refashionings of centralized government), and Muslim realms like the Mughal, seen either individually or in various combinations.^[132]

Emerging from these efforts is an image of aristocratic empire that reveals many commonalities across traditional cultural and civilizational divides. These parallels, in turn, raise the question of whether or not we should understand the rise and fall of individual imperial polities purely in cyclical terms: one set of conquering lords simply following upon the weakening of another, without discernible societal de­velopment. Debates that center on the processes of imperial decline, however, have tended rather to shift the emphasis toward transformation and positive evolution. Since Weber, scholars have noted an underlying trend within vast agrarian impe­rial polities for central authority to loosen its hold on its “free floating resources” and see its powers drift back into the possession of groups entrenched in provin­cial societies outside the control of the imperial court. This should be understood, though, as an example not merely of the dissipation of powers, but of the buildup and strengthening of local elites under imperial rule—in short, a dynamic develop­ment instead of unequivocal decline.^[133] At the same time, it is clear that when the nexus of imperial government and local elite becomes untethered, there is a visible drop-off in the ability to muster large armies or to assemble vast concentrations of wealth.^[134] By some measures, the organizational capacity of power-holders has di­minished, while by some others it may have increased, often to the extent that an even stronger constellation of forces would be required for empires to reform. In the long run, although seemingly cyclical, the history of the aristocratic empires is one of slow consolidation and accumulating complexity. Through each reitera­tion, the imperial patterns of the past were steadily fortified through creative ap­propriation and reinterpretation by new rulers.^[135] This, for instance, is the light in which Dingxin Zhao has recently suggested that we understand the many succes­sive dynasties of Chinese history. Under the Han dynasty, a model of empire was fashioned that was based on an amalgam of so-called Confucian and legalist philos­ophy. The former set up an ethical ideal of exemplary rulership and elite behavior, while the latter stressed the authoritarian and despotic ability of government to command. For each new dynasty, this vision of empire succeeded in re-establishing its predominance and gradually widening its hold on government and elite society. Far from being determined from the beginning, the unity of China was the out­come of this long historical process of the consolidation and deepening of a shared, aristocratic ruling-class ideology, identity, culture, and style of government.^[136]

C. Empire as Identity and Culture

The Confucian-legalist model is not, of course, the only example of an imperial high culture. Empire as the articulation of a mission civilisatrice is a well-worn theme, not least in self-congratulatory and celebratory speeches. To generate a coherent body of theory, however, the topic of empire and culture—the third dimension in Hobson's analysis of empire—had to await the era of anti-colonial struggle and postcolonial analyses that followed. Gandhi famously declared in his 1909 manifesto, the Hind Swaraj, which outlined a strategy of passive resistance against British rule, that Indian liberty could not be won by force of arms. Violently ousting the British would merely produce a takeover of institutions and simply continue the colonial order. “In effect it means this: that we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger's nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English, and when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englishstan. This is not the Swaraj that I want.”^[137] Something more radical was needed to break away from imperial oppression and achieve self-rule; it would take a comprehensive, uncom­promising culture “war.”

Frantz Fanon was later to agree with this analysis in his classic Les damnes de la terre of 1961. Written during the vicious Algerian War of Independence, however, which tore up both colonial and metropolitan society, Fanon had little patience with the message of nonviolence. On the contrary, he announced in firebrand fashion: “La decolonisation est toujours un phenomene violent... Des sa naissance il est clair pour lui que ce monde retreci... ne peut etre remise en question que par la violence absolue.”^[138] Passive or violent resistance, however, were to a large extent a matter of strategy. All empires, to recall the insight of Michael Mann, depend on a form of com­pulsory cooperation. The disagreement between Gandhi and Fanon was a question of how to break that nexus, whether by withholding cooperation or by cutting the compulsory link. Both thinkers, though, converged in a more fundamental manner; they had come to see colonialism as a total cultural system. Liberation required more than the formal acquisition of power; it also meant sweeping away the whole com­plex of knowledge and culture that European colonial states had introduced. This civilizational edifice represented a form of domination, a tool of authority and ad­ministration. Without the whole establishment of lawyers and laws which the British had created in India, Gandhi went on to argue, they would be unable to govern; the Indians, therefore, had better stop collaborating in the application of this juridical system and refrain from using the colonial courts.^[139] Otherwise, if the colonized continued to make use of the modes of thinking and forms of technology employed by the European metropoles, they would be colluding in the perpetuation and re­production of their own subjection and slavery. They would remain dependent on European power and repressed by what Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist phi­losopher, identified as its cultural hegemony.^[140] In short, only by a wholesale re­jection of Western civilization would the colonized be able to throw off the yoke of oppression and win a voice of their own, ridding themselves of the feeling of inferi­ority and gaining instead the ability to tell their own story, rather than having it told to them. Only then could they win dignity and agency in the world. These concerns and analyses of the anti-colonial struggle soon fertilized academic theory.^[141] When grafted onto the branch of Foucauldian thought, their revolutionary fervor energized an entire field.

In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism. A milestone of postcolonialism, this work analyzed Western scholarship on the Middle East as a product of em­pire, a set of disciplines, institutions, and career opportunities devised to ensure European domination of the Arab world. Orientalism, in other words, denoted an entire system and infrastructure of knowledge, “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient... by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominat­ing, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”^[142] In that sense, so-called Orientalist scholarship did not so much deal with a set of preexisting societies or a cohesive region. Quite the reverse, the notion of a Middle East, and by implication the Orient in general, was a discursive construction, imposed by Western academic disciplines and colonial authorities on the Arab countries. Fanon had made the scathing remark that “[l]es specialistes colonialistes ne reconnaisent pas cette forme nouvelle et accourent au secours des traditions de la societe autochtone. Ce sont les colonialistes qui font les defenseurs du style indigene.”^[143] Said now expanded on this insight to argue that Orientalism had been not so much concerned with the condi­tion of the practical living present of the societies it purported to study. Rather, it had insisted that the “true” Orient was to be found in the dead matter of age-old, classical texts and had to be held to a postulated and ossified “indigenous” style, to borrow the phrase of Fanon, which was nothing but an idealized abstraction of Western ro­mantic thought and desire. “He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuck Hanem physically,” so Said illustrated his argument through a dissection of French novelist Flaubert’s portrait of an Egyptian courtesan, “but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental.’ ”^[144] The result of such Orientalism was a racist caricature or stereotype, an image that claimed a fundamental and insur­mountable cultural difference between a dynamic, rational West and an immutable, irrational Orient that was defined by its eternal cultural essence.

The analysis of Said has resonated powerfully across the academy. From literary theory, anthropology, and cultural studies to history, the response has been over­whelming. As with every important work, Orientalism has sparked controversy, not least for its one-sidedness and quick, not to say unfair, dismissal of much serious scholarship as being determined solely by cultural stereotype.^[145] But, more impor­tantly, it has also inspired a huge and much-warranted work of deconstruction in order to break down the racist barriers inherited from the age of colonialism. A vast literature has now emerged examining representations of empire, how colonial life and subjects were conceived in metropolitan society, and how “the other” was cul­turally constructed and separated from an essentialized “us”—dormant, stagnant, and exotically mysterious in contrast to a dynamic West.^[146] Noble savages, child­like but frightening primitives, wily sycophants, alluring objects of desire, or what­ever other stereotype European dreams of a foreign and exiting world could project onto the colonies, these were grouped ethnically, put on display in exhibitions, cir­cuses, or zoos, and ranged along a scale of development with its presumed zenith firmly located in Europe.^[147] Following this first wave, a further cluster of scholar­ship has looked at how imperial governments generated and collected bureaucratic forms of knowledge to put their subject communities in taxonomic order and dis­cipline colonial populations (themes covered especially by Humfress in Chapter 7 and Hostetler in Chapter 8 of this volume). Grand museums, geographical and archaeological surveys, projects of legal codification, ethnographic accounts, all were harnessed together with the taking of population censuses to master territo­ries and people, lay them open for control.^[148] Such metropolitan governmentality and its biopolitics, to use a term of Foucault’s, fashioned colonial populations into increasingly rigid racial hierarchies. Bodily regimes, gender roles, and sexual rela­tions were transformed and policed by the authorities to delineate and maintain the boundaries between social groups and to fortify the predominance of a segregated white minority at the top. “Obsession with white prestige was a basic feature of colo­nial thinking” and progressively narrowed the scope for interaction and mixture.^[149]

Even so, when the ideological and “scientific” expressions of a well-ordered co­lonial rationality were confronted with real life and put to work in society, “they did not seem to produce the same sort of epistemological stability, the same kind of unambiguously transparent” situation that they were supposed to have, both by the authorities at the time and by the later postcolonial theorists.^[150] A series of studies have explored the clash of epistemologies between (putative) European colonizers and, for lack of a better word, indigenous populations. Embassies of European del­egations to the Chinese court, Cook on Hawaii, or Cortez in Mexico, famed and notorious incidents, have been scrutinized as emblematic moments of encounter. While the Aztecs seem to have welcomed the Spaniards as the white gods that in their myths were expected to come and deliver them from evil, not every society was as epistemologically vulnerable to unexpected invasion. On Hawaii, the ex­plorer and paragon of European science, Cook, was fitted into the local ritual cal­endar as the god Lono. But when he made an unexpected return, thus upsetting the seasonal order and threatening the ritual position of the king, he was killed by the islanders to realign their cosmos with the forces of the divine.^[151] Chinese emperors were for a long time ridiculed by uncomprehending European visitors for their allegedly self-delusional and stubborn refusal to interact according to the conventions of European trade and diplomacy. But the insistence of the “Son of Heaven” on setting the rules of engagement was less an expression of his megaloma- niacal failure to understand the true nature of the world than a way of asserting his prestige and maintaining power.^[152] The nature, drives, and motivations of both the Spanish and Portuguese overseas expansions were much alike, as Serge Gruzinsky has recently noted. What determined their very different shapes—one forged out of territorial conquest, the other based on a thin maritime network of forts and naval footholds—was governed to a very large extent by the character and episte­mological frameworks of the societies into which the Iberians arrived. European models could not simply be imposed on the colonies. Local conditions, dynamics, and communities significantly determined, or at least contributed to, the outcome of the colonial encounter.^[153] They constituted a screen that often made it difficult for metropolitan government to penetrate its overseas subject territories and fully understand them, or even to know what was going on. The condition of colonial society and empire in general can only to a limited extent be described in terms reminiscent of Foucault’s state, able to survey and control its population with pan­optic powers.^[154] The reality of (white) minority rule was, often, less one of confident grasp than one of deep-seated anxieties and information panics about the myste­rious stirrings within colonial populations.^[155] Feelings of loneliness and boredom frequently accompanied the life of the colonial administrator.^[156]

Spearheaded by the Indian school of subaltern studies, historians, anthropo logists, and literary critics have set out to recover the hidden voices of the colonial situa­tion (see Wagner in Chapter 12 of the present volume).^[157] They have revealed colo­nial societies capable of resisting and deflecting many of the demands of European power, as well as a reality beyond the reach of official reports and racial categories.^[158] Still others have focused on the independent dynamics of colonial societies and how they interacted with metropolitan government to create a “third space.” Colonial society occupied a middle ground, forged out of a dynamic encounter, provoking resistance as well as inviting cooperation.^[159] The latter, after all, was a crucial precon­dition of empire, as Gandhi had come to realize, and many individuals and groups in the colonies latched onto the opportunities offered by empire.^[160] Creolization, metissage, connected and transnational history—these are just some of the the­oretical labels under which empires are now being explored as globalizing arenas of circulation, mixture, and movement.^[161] Beyond the clear dichotomies of West and East, a cacophony of voices and agents has been uncovered. European colonial power and its discourse were much less hegemonic and coherent than Said origi­nally presumed.^[162] The colonial and postcolonial condition was characterized by a “plurality that inheres in the ‘now’ ” in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, a “lack of totality, the constant fragmentariness, that constitutes one’s present.”^[163] The sharply drawn frontlines characterizing the age of anti-colonial struggle are gradually giv­ing way to a more nuanced picture. European forms of social organization and con­ceptual categories, Chakrabarty continues, while influential and powerful, need not so much be rejected outright as modified and extended to include and absorb non­European historical experience, capturing its diversity. If modernity came to Europe in the shape of industrialization, it came as colonial subjection in many other parts of the world.

A primary concern of postcolonial theory has been to interrogate the formation of identities within a complex field of forces that constitute the imperial situation. This has revealed a world of composite, malleable, and multiple identities, often coexisting in the same person. Some of these are cosmopolitan in nature and ori­ented toward the metropolis, while others are more regionally or locally bounded. Here is a significant point of contact, overlap, and cross-fertilization with studies of pre-colonial empires; they generally emphasize the polyethnic character of imperial societies and the mixture of identities.^[164] But if such traditional empires were char­acterized by diversity and often celebrated difference, they were also highly hierar­chical. Ottoman rule, for instance, is customarily praised for its tolerance of diverse faith communities. However, variety was accompanied by a dialogue of subordi­nation; Islam remained the highest-ranking religion. Subject elites, let alone com­munities, were not required to conform to a single cultural norm, but were instead ranged below the ruling group. This allowed them to inscribe the imperial power into their own local traditions and appropriate its authority. Meanwhile, court and government promoted common forms of ruling-class culture across the empires in which subject elites could aspire to participate to varying degrees. The symbolism and splendor of courtly and imperial culture (see Volume 1, Chapter 6 by Hilsdale) offered a cosmopolitan language of power and distinction, both lending itself to expressing the claims of local leaders to pre-eminence within their communities and offering an instrument of promotion outside for those with higher hopes and ambitions.^[165] Ethnic and social divisions of empire, with their concomitant poli­tics of difference are further explored in this volume by Burbank and Cooper in Chapter 11, while the cosmopolitan literatures and religious systems serving as vehicles of dialogue and identity formation are discussed by Bennison in Chapter 9 and Majeed in Chapter 10.

Empire, however, in this connection, generally transformed the culture of the conquerors as much as the subjects. The poet Horace, writing at the court of Augustus, may better than any other have distilled this process into a short, but effective formula with his tag “Captive Greece, captured her wild conqueror.”^[166] Roman imperial culture was forged out of Hellenistic models, not a pristine growth emanating from within the society of the victors. All the same, in the history of empires, the capacity of Chinese elite culture to leave its imprint and to a large ex­tent absorb that of its several conquerors may be the strongest articulation of the transformative capacity of subject territories on the conquering society. The signif­icance of colonies for the formation of European sovereignty, impersonal bureau­cratic administration, liberalism and national culture has also increasingly become a theme in research.^[167] But in the case of nationalism, which attempted to integrate the wider population rather than focus on elites, this kind of imperial, cross-cultural integration became suspect. To be sure, thinkers of older ages had often pondered the corrupting influence of empire on conquerors. In writings such as those of the Roman historian Sallust and the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, ancient warrior virtues of duty, discipline, and endurance were seen to give way to sloth and deca­dence amid the spoils of victory. Nonetheless, nationalism intensified the concern with the “corrupting” influence of empire on metropolitan society. As Lord Bryce counseled in an early twentieth-century pamphlet analyzing empire, taking heed of the Roman example, the British should make sure to preserve the integrity of their national society at home and not allow the empire to be overtaken by cosmopolitan provincials.^[168]

Of course, this policy blocked the ambitions of colonial upper classes, just at the moment when many colonials were responding to the enfranchising promise of the nationalist ideologies of the metropolis with rising expectations and attempts to embrace forms of imperial citizenship.^[169] Participating in the culture of empire, a strategy that had previously served as an outlet for the aspirations of subject elites, now came to seem fake, not quite capable of delivering on its promises.^[170] Emulation began to look like mere mimicry, to use the resentful expression of Homi Bhabha, a condition of lag rather than a successful strategy of empowerment. Colonized elites could only hope to become “almost the same” as the colonizers, “but not quite.” Imitation of the metropolis bred a culture of disappointment and made the ques­tion of subjectivization of the colonized a burning issue: how to become more than the “partial presence” conceded to indigenous elites under the system of European imperialism.^[171] The answer was found in generating and cultivating an inde­pendent, authentic (national) culture of one's own. Catching up with the political and cultural status of the metropole now became the sole avenue to full political enfranchisement and recognition. And so it remains in the present world, where identity politics and “the memories of empire,” discussed by Vasunia in Chapter 15 of Volume 1, have become key instruments of social groups to seek political influ­ence and recognition, as well as a primary focus of postcolonial theory.^[172]

D. Empire as International Competition and Geopolitics

The twin notions of lagging and catching up point to yet another aspect of the ques­tion of empowerment and nationalism. Internal mobilization and identity forma­tion were spurred on by a culture and system of international competition—the fourth and final dimension in Hobson's analysis of empire. As European powers moved swiftly to colonize much of the inhabited earth during the long nineteenth century, their military conflicts followed suit and came to play themselves out on a global canvas. Colonial overseas empire was celebrated as a source and expression of national greatness.^[173] In his famous Crystal Palace Speech of 1872, the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli would forge a winning Tory electoral platform to take on the so-called cosmopolitan principles of the Liberal Party by vowing both to promote a more inclusive nationalism at home and to vigorously assert em­pire abroad. A strong nation needed to claim a leading position in the world, and external prestige befitted the inner strength of British society.^[174] Africa, in those years, saw a virtual scramble of European states vying with each other to secure a piece of “greatness,” reaching its conclusion at the congress of Berlin in 1884-1885. Here, under the guidance of Bismarck, the master of carefully calibrated realpolitik and architect of German unification, the continent was carved up on the drawing board and divided among the various contending powers. Meanwhile, the British could think of themselves as involved in a “great game” with Russia, immortalized by Kipling on the pages of his novel Kim, over control of Central Asia and access to India. In foreign ministries and the general staffs of armies, information was increasingly gathered and accumulated on the various regions of the world, their resources, geographies, military capabilities, and regimes. This new bureaucratic material provided the substance for planning, the formulation of grand and global strategies, and, in time, of systematic theory in emerging academic fields of geopol­itics and international relations.^[175]

Among the pioneers in these fields, the British geographer Harold Mackinder holds a special place. “The grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility and natural pathways,” he observed in Democratic Ideals and Reality, published in early 1919, “is such as to lend itself to the growth of empires, and in the end of a single World Empire.”^[176] Well over a decade before, Mackinder had labeled the great landmass of Eurasia “the world island.” Railroads and other means of communication had tied its vast expanses and separate regions together as never before. From the center, its heartland, one power might now extend its sway over all the rest and acquire global domination. Unless, that is, one could carve up the Eurasian mainland in a way that would work as a counterbalance to the expansive drive of the big continental powers. This was the warning, which Mackinder attempted to issue to the diplomats and politicians about to assemble at Versailles in 1919 to craft a new global order at the end of the Great War: keep the balance. If they wanted a democratic and liberal future, that would be the necessary precondition.^[177]

The specter of a possible world empire has continued to haunt the discourse on international relations and runs as a powerful undercurrent through the literature, from Mackinder in the early twentieth century to the host of scholars in the last decades reflecting on the unipolar world dominated by America, or most recently the discussion of a possible new Chinese order by, for instance, Yuan Xuetong.^[178] Classic works of international relations that decisively shaped the field after World War II, such as Hans Morgenthau's Politics among Nations or Raymond Aron's War and Peace among the Nations, all contained a discussion of the prospect of a world­governing empire.^[179] According to Carl Schmitt, the top jurist of Nazi Germany— who has rather astonishingly been taken out and dusted off in recent years—the key issue was quite simply whether the order of the world would be organized as “einer Mehrheit grosser Räume gegenüber der globalen Raumordnung einer einheitlich beherrschten Welt... der Gegensatz von zentraler Weltherrschaft und gleich­gewichtiger Raumordnung, von Universalismus und Pluralismus, Monopol und Polypol...”^[180] Of these alternatives, in Schmitt's view, the world as a political Universe rather than Pluriverse held scant attraction. Such an international society of boundless hegemony would be one that lacked solid grounding in reality, but would be based more on abstraction and airy principles. This was precisely the flaw of the new order of international politics, promoted in the context of the League of Nations and, subsequently, the United Nations. Dictated by the Atlantic victors of the two World Wars, and informed by Kantian moral philosophy, the framework for the new world order was presumed to be based on liberal principles and universal rights. However, without the necessary grounding in concrete territorial relations of power, the new Anglo-American, liberal hegemony quickly descended into empty moralism. Enemies, Schmitt self-righteously complained, were branded as criminals instead of legitimate proponents of competing interests.^[181]

While Schmitt advocated an order directly opposed to the world that Mackinder had in mind, the two thinkers, nevertheless, shared a deep-seated skepticism toward global hegemony. A well-ordered world community had to be based on maintaining a balance of power between rival centers; it would be a plural society. As intellec­tual heir to the diplomatic practices of the early modern European system of states, and to its firm roots in amoral reason of state doctrines in which might more often than not makes right, the field of international relations is suffused with a baseline

realism—its default position, so to speak.^[182] Morgenthau, the leading post-World War II American exponent, in his textbook (on which several generations of polit­ical scientists have been weaned), tellingly included a disparaging chapter about the unfortunate messianic and utopian proselytizing dimension in the policies of the two ideologically rival superpowers of his time: the Soviet Union and the United States. In international politics, such lofty idealism was misapplied and bound to failure. Ideological concerns had to give way to the unsentimental and strategic pur­suit of state interests—my enemy's enemy is my friend. Politics among nations was, first and foremost, a struggle for power.^[183] States constantly strove to better their position and increase their power in international society. Much of the time, how­ever, this activity played out as moderate adjustments within the status quo, the key concept for Morgenthau. He restricted imperialism proper, by contrast, to policies pursued by a state to enhance its power by challenging the established international order and underlying balance of power. The analytical implications were remark­able, to say the least. As he undertook to explain to the incredulous reader, “when Churchill refused in 1942 ‘to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,' he was speaking not as an imperialist but as a conservative in foreign affairs, a defender of the status quo of empire.” Apparently, imperialism only entailed the acquisition, and not the maintenance and defense, of empire, as if one did not logically follow from the other.^[184]

More revealing than compelling, the analysis reflects the fact that the central concepts within the field of international relations have all been formulated in op­position to or denial of the feasibility of a universal or world empire. The aspiration to world rule, from this perspective, “knows no rational limits” and lacks modera­tion, the very basis of careful and measured calculation. It is, in short, unrealistic— the opposite of what state power should be. In contradistinction to world empire stands the sovereign nation-state, an entity with a clearly bounded and demarcated territory, ideally the home of one people and recognized as the equal of other states, not subject to anyone. It is the building block of modern international society as envisioned by the United Nations. Domination and rivalries between such states might arguably, from this perspective, not best be described in terms of imperi­alism. How, for instance, to capture the relationship between the United States and its Western European NATO allies, all of them sovereign states, but none of them able to match their American partner and all dependent on her for their secu­rity? “Empire by invitation” was the oxymoron coined by Geier Lundestad.^[185] John Ikenberry, the current professor of international politics at Princeton, prefers to de­scribe the Superpower as something less than fully imperial, the predominant state promoting a liberal world order. However, as Julian Go has argued, the situation of the United States seems, structurally, closely to mirror that of the British in the nineteenth century.^[186]

At the turn of the twentieth century, Otto Hintze, the diplomatic historian and famed theorist of the state, argued in favor of the alternative concept of “world pol­itics,” Weltpolitik, to describe the expansive ambitions of the contending states of his times.^[187] In former ages, world empires had dominated, he explained, but in the modern age, competition and pluralism have prevailed. Yet, imperialism has not dis­appeared; it has merely come to be inflected differently. If the maj or sovereign powers had mutually come to reject world rule, they were nevertheless all as busy as ever acquiring colonial possessions of their own. Some members of international society were clearly more equal than others. Subversively turning the American Monroe doctrine, which had declared the Western hemisphere closed to European inter­vention, against the post-World War II US-led international society, Carl Schmitt wanted to see the world carved up into a number of greater spheres, Grossraume, each dominated by one major power. As the limitations and constraints of the pre­sent Anglo-American world order are revealed, his vision has begun to look increas­ingly prescient. Burzon and Wsver, for instance, warned against believing too much in the image of a unipolar, American-led world. Instead of one global system, they saw security organized around a number of macro-regional complexes.^[188] Hierarchy, a seemingly more neutral concept than empire, is a central dimension in the analysis of the struggle for order among modern states.^[189]

Another conceptual alternative to empire frequently encountered in the liter­ature is the notion of the Great Power. The classic work must be Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In this landmark interpretation, he under­took to analyze the diplomatic history of Europe and the Western world from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, as a succession of great power hegemonies. The Habsburgs, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, Great Britain, Imperial Russia, Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union, all found a place within the scheme of rise and fall. The prevalence of international competition and dynami­cally shifting alliances to maintain a balance of power had prevented any of these Great Powers from resting secure in their predominance within the Euro-Atlantic system of states. Constant challenges on all fronts had made domination by a single power unsustainable. In turn, each great power had, in its moment of glory, come to experience how its resources were gradually exhausted. Too many interests to defend, in too many and too widely scattered theaters of conflict, had sapped the strength of the Titan and made hegemony too costly a burden to shoulder. Hear Kennedy describe the challenges of Imperial Britain: “In the critical year of 1895, for example, the Cabinet found itself worrying about the possible breakup of China following the Sino-Japanese War, about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as a re­sult of the Armenian crisis, about the looming clash with Germany over Southern Africa at almost exactly the same time as the quarrel with the United States over the Venezuela-British Guiana borders, about French military expeditions in equatorial Africa, and about a Russian drive toward the Hindu Kush.”^[190] Here we may, short of breath, leave Kennedy as he goes on, but with a manifest sense of the overexten­sion faced by the hegemon. Instead of productive investment, economic resources were disproportionately channeled into armaments and squandered on futile, end­less warfare. Eventually, Kennedy observed, the back of the leading power would be broken. The hour of reckoning usually came with the outbreak of a massive military conflagration, a “world war” embroiling all major powers. With its society in steep or relative decline, the hegemon was unable to come through such a brutal mea­suring out of strength with its position intact. At the end of the fighting, the system was reoriented, with one of the economically more dynamic rivals, better able to shoulder the spiraling costs of warfare, taking over the predominant position. But success was short-lived. Soon enough, the new leader would suffer the same ine­luctable fate as its commitments in the game of international power politics also became overextended.

A variation on the theme of the inevitable overstretch of empire, recently sum­marized by Herfried Munkler in his discussion of the logic of world domination, sees imperial power as inexorably being pulled into less powerful, frequently un­rewarding peripheries for reasons beyond its control.^[191] Intervention may have to take place simply to keep rivals out. Often conflicts, particularly during the age of decolonization, took on a protracted character. Unable to match the superior tech­nology and organization of the imperial armies in open battle, the irregular forces of resistance made use of guerrilla and terrorist tactics. Aiming at soft spots—lines of supply and communication, small patrols, civilians—their asymmetrical strategies sought to turn the over-mighty colossus into a giant with feet of clay. After World War II, Carl Schmitt famously declared that the future would be written under the sign of the partisan. By refusing compromise and surrender, and by dragging out conflicts indeterminably, low-level warfare attempted to make continued occupa­tion too costly in the eyes of the hegemon and to undermine morale. Hiding among the civilian population, the guerrilla consciously hoped to provoke atrocious acts of over-reaction that would simultaneously scandalize the metropolitan public and alienate colonial society. This strategy was fortified through the mass mobilization of the colonial population to the cause of nationalism and self-rule. For the first time, reaching an accommodation with an imperial overlord had become a fun­damentally illegitimate exercise, while the willingness to suffer very great losses to avoid continued colonial oppression had been heightened enormously. Empire, as John Hall points out in Chapter 16 of Volume 1, had become increasingly difficult.

But the modern experience of the ways in which enduring rivalry and intense warfare undermine empire and reinforce political fragmentation is not neces­sarily generalizable across the span of world history. After all, competition usu­ally generates a winner. In his study of the Evolution of International Society, Adam Watson argued that states do not normally exist in isolation. Rather, they can be seen to have formed systems in which they confronted each other militarily and competed with one another, right from their earliest beginnings in the third millen­nium bce.^[192] A whole range of configurations and outcomes are testified through time. At one end of a spectrum resides the polycentric option, familiar to students of the modern states system that originated in Europe. Normally, however, the bal­ance of power mechanism, so important in curbing the hegemonic ambitions of the stronger contenders, does not endure or is not very strong in the first place. The tenacity of the modern balance of power mechanism, which forces states into ever tighter, yet never settled, military competition, seems, historically, quite extraor­dinary. More often than not, however, the balancing mechanism of state systems has been too feeble to prevent more extensive empires from beginning to form. At the other extreme of the spectrum, Watson locates universal empire, a situation in which one power manages to gobble up most or all of its rivals to establish su­premacy over its entire “world.” To Watson, there existed a tentative equilibrium point between those two poles. More recently, in a comparative study of the early modern European states system and the so-called warring states period in the Chinese world, Victoria Tin-bor Hui has argued that the more probable outcome of interstate rivalry and competition is eventual conquest of all by one power. In a polycentric and adversarial system, odds are that in the long run contenders will fail consistently to gang up on each other to prevent one from becoming too pow­erful. Rather, a snowball effect is more likely. At some point, one power will reach a critical mass where it will be impossible for the others to block its attempt at further and complete conquest. In contrast to Euro-Atlantic history, this was precisely what happened when, during the third century bce, the Qin dynasty extended its im­perial sway over “all under Heaven” and became the first dynasty to rule the entire Chinese world, Tianxia.^[193]

Among geopolitical thinkers, the notion of grand strategy has gained currency. Struggling to master the many challenges facing a great power and containing risks, general staffs have made it routine to develop comprehensive plans about how to juggle different and distant theaters of conflict at the same time. Famous, for in­stance, is the so-called Schlieffen Plan, whose aim was to avoid having the German imperial army at the turn of the twentieth century fight a prolonged war on two fronts. All initial efforts had to be concentrated on the Western front, and then when a quick victory was secured, forces were to be shifted east to defeat Russia. But, of course, things turned out very differently. In the intensely competitive envi­ronment of the modern state-system, it was difficult to control the outcome. Where the Germans failed, however, the Romans arguably succeeded. In an eye-opening book, the military strategist Edward Luttwak pointed out that at the height of its power, the Roman Empire achieved a very stable security regime.^[194] With most of its rivals conquered, large-scale warfare had been pushed out to the most distant frontiers of their world. Luttwak wrote of the achievement of scientific borders; from a logistical perspective, dominion had been extended over the entire orbit of the Mediterranean to cover an optimum area. His interpretation was undoubtedly anachronistic and presupposed a degree of conscious geopolitical planning which was neither present nor possible in the Roman case.^[195] Nonetheless, Luttwak had, perhaps, better than anyone understood that the extension of the empire to in­clude most of the greater Mediterranean world had created a very favorable situa­tion. Few rivals remained that were capable of challenging the mighty empire and thus a long period of stable hegemony ensued. Stability of extensive empire was a product of significantly reduced competitive pressures. By the same token, the se­cret behind the enormous extent reached by the British Empire is often held to be the relative lack of challenge to its command of the high seas for much of the nine­teenth century. Once the level of competition and conflict increased, its days were numbered.^[196]

While many of the other bodies of theory that deal with empire have sprung from a concern with the inner drives and dynamics of imperial states and societies— capitalist profits, aristocratic war-mongering, the culture of empire—the field of in­ternational relations, broadly conceived, puts the emphasis differently. It tends to analyze empire in terms of systemic pressures and rivalries. Sometimes this gives an impression of empire as being driven entirely from the margins. Robinson and Gallagher, in their classic discussion of Victorian imperialism and diplomacy in Africa, placed agency squarely in the “colonial” theater. Business people, powerful men, and rival states—it was their projects and ad hoc machinations on the spot that drove the process of empire. London and White Hall constantly found them­selves chasing after events. A victim of circumstances and forces beyond its control, central government was mostly reactive, jumping from crisis to crisis, muddling through as best it could. The world might present itself like that to the scholar when working from the inside of a foreign ministry and going through the filing cabinets, case by case. But a state does not maintain an unmatched fleet, operating across the planet for more than a century at enormous expense, without a strong will to assert itself and without an expansive conception of its interests. Success, under condi­tions of systemic competition, depends on more than the ability deftly to maneuver among allies and enemies; it also requires internal buildup and mobilization of the instruments of power. A full analysis of Empires, as Michael Doyle pointed out in his rare, comparative, theoretical, and synthesizing study, requires a combination of perspectives—metropolitan as well as pericentric.^[197]