Variabilities of Rule, Idiosyncrasies of Endings
Variability is enormous. Empires form in very different ways, and they have widely differing time spans, with the longest lasting, notably China and Byzantium, being those that ruled within the great agrarian civilizations.[1346] It is as well to remember that the largest empire, created by the nomad Chinggis Khan, was also one of the shortest-lived.
In this context it is worth noting that it matters enormously whether nomads bring with them ideals as well as military capability. There is a striking contrast between the Mongols and the Arabs, the former having force while the latter had force and value.[1347] But it is important not to overdo this contrast. For one thing, the Arabs were few in numbers and soon faced the problem of absorption. This was a common problem. Alexander faced resistance from his fellows fearing their own absorption into a foreign culture when forced to marry Persians so as to unify the empire.[1348] Arab empires proved not to be long lasting, simply because conversion to their religion and polity was so easy.[1349] For another, Islam was so complete and finished a world religion that it sought to establish godly rule, that is, it did not easily provide ideological glue for imperial rule. When this was combined with the continuing presence of tribes, rule of any sort might be transient, as Ibn Khaldun and his later followers have made clear.[1350] Islam produced powerful empires only when it possessed key agricultural core areas, whether in Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, or Egypt.The presence of imperial rule throughout the historical record should lay to rest what is still the most common taken-for-granted explanation for empires, both inside much of academia and certainly among the general public—namely, the soft marxisant view that sees expansion as necessary for the needs of a capitalist economy, whether for markets, materials, or profits.
Bluntly, empires existed long before capitalism, so the theory in question cannot be true. This is not to say that pre-modern empires had no economic significance. Careful assumptions made about Rome, seen in the light of the Mughals, make clear the extent to which trade was encouraged by the tribute that came to the great agrarian empires.[1351] Still, the luxury goods so prized by the elite came long distances in very small quantities.[1352] There is a world of difference with modern empires, able to restructure territories overseas so that significant amounts of goods and products began to move around the world. One feature that has been left by modern overseas empires is communication routes designed for metropolitan advantage rather than local purpose: the railway lines in Ghana go from the interior to the coast so that the British could get their hands on cocoa. Nonetheless, modern empires were not all powerful, while industrial metropoles depended less upon extensive possessions than did their tributary predecessors—which did not prevent them from having greater impact on the areas under their control. It is crucial to add a further point about the great states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, namely that they felt that power needed to be based on size.[1353] This is a careful formulation. Colonial empires did not produce high rates of return, although India mattered enormously to Britain both because of its support for the military budget and because its surplus was used to balance the current account at home. But there was always the sense, among statesmen rather than among most capitalists, that extensive territory might prove to be necessary for economic reasons in the future. There were of course other contrasts between modern empires. One classic contrast was that between land empires and overseas possessions. Another difference concerned political form. The great European land empires tended to be autocratic or authoritarian at home because rule over their near abroad demanded coercive control. The situation in the British case was entirely different, with liberal rule present at all times, and with democracy extended during the nineteenth century—and with levels of popular interest in overseas possessions that may well have been rather minimal. These differences can be overdone, as the Irish would attest, and they pale in any case beside the pressures caused by the need that all felt to maintain great size. It is worth spelling out an assumption implicit in what has been said about modern empires. They were less worlds unto themselves than great powers constantly in contact: theories drawn from international relations will help us understand them quite as much as sociological theories of empire. We will turn to this later, but note now the very great divergence within the tributary empires of the agrarian era.The differences within pre-modern systems of rule are huge, and obvious. A further advantage of Gellner's model of the agro-literate polity is its highlighting of the different interests of the ideological, economic, and political components of the elite.[1354] He offered a neat set of four contrasts: centralized/uncentralized, stallions/ gelded, open/closed, and fused/non-fused. Each contrast had an illustration: the first contrast compared the papacy to the decentralized world of the ulamas of Islam; the second had in mind the difference between feudal warriors and the eunuchs, made biologically loyal, so to speak, to the Roman and Chinese empires; the third contrast was between the great meritocratic, examined mandarinate of China and the hereditary Brahmins of the classical Hindu world; finally, the European orders that combined military and religious power in their expansion to the East were seen as wholly different from the careful division of function so characteristic of the caste system. Such a set of distinctions is extremely helpful, but it is merely the tip of an iceberg. Recent work on imperial cultures makes us realize that complexity could be increased in many ways—by borrowings, both ideological and institutional, between empires as well as by attempts of empires to produce new syncretic doctrines.[1355] In a nutshell, the “repertoires of empire,” as Burbank and Cooper[1356] nicely put it, have great range in terms of the major sources of social power.
One way of highlighting this emphasis on difference is to think for a moment about the ending of one particular imperial world, that of the Occident, best conceptualized in terms of a comparison with Imperial China. Despite manifold differences, there were very considerable resemblances between the Roman and Chinese empires in the early part of the Christian era, from the nature of their economies to their being bounded by great walls designed to manage the movement of nomadic and other tribal populations. But the eventual historical patterning of the two ends of Eurasia led to the continuation of empire at one end and the creation of a multipolar system at the other.[1357]
One factor that helps explain the end of full-blooded imperial politics in the West is the role played by Christianity.[1358] A purely intellectual element that mattered derived from the injunction of Jesus himself to give unto Caesar what was Caesar's, but to give to God one's full spiritual attention. More importantly, the persecutions by Rome of the early Christians created something of a gap between secular and sacred power, immortalized of course in St. Augustine's insistence in The City of God that the timetable of God was not that of Rome. The situation in China was wholly different, with the mandarinate bearing a creed that stressed loyalty to the empire. The papacy did for a short period seek to establish an empire of its own, but it always lacked the coercive ability to make this work. Its characteristic role, in contrast, was to offer the numinous rites of rule—the singing of the Laudes Regiae and anointing with holy oil at coronations—to kings rather than to emperors, perhaps in part so that it could better prosper in a more acephalous world. This helped to create the European multipolar system of states, endlessly locked in competition and so bound to rationalize and develop their societies on pain of extinction. “Barbarian” invasions at the other end of the world saw no similar move; rather, nomads eventually turned to the mandarins to restore imperial rule.
This drift into mobilizing rivalry is a very particular ending of an imperial system, wholly unique in world history. Reflection on the case brings to mind a second consideration, important but wholly different, not least when we remember Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, the title of Anderson's account of this pe- riod.19 As is often the case with the work of this scholar, Weberian realities provide the core of argumentation, even though this goes very much against formal Marxist pretensions. Friedrich Engels had once been asked if the presence of Christianity in the late Roman and medieval world contradicted the central presupposition of Marxism—namely that the ideological superstructure should change as soon as the basic mode of production evolved. Engels' answer—that Christianity was not the same religion in these different periods—was and is nonsensical. It is to the credit of Anderson to have recognized the myriad ways in which the Christian church served as a transmission belt from antiquity to early modern Europe. There is undoubted truth in this, and it suggests something much more general, and of absolutely vital importance in the context of this essay. Cultural continuities are easy to recognize, as indeed is the even more basic fact of the preservation of literacy. A whole social world was opened to us when Peter Brown stressed the continuities that marked the world of late antiquity.[1359] [1360] One can go further. Ruskin realized long ago that cultural efflorescence could go hand in hand with a loss in military power; Cecily Hilsdale[1361] has reiterated that argument for late Byzantium. Perhaps I may add a personal comment at this point, not least as it further stresses the varieties of imperial experience. The impact of the British in India remains astonishingly large to this day, wholly in contrast to the situation in Indonesia, where the impact of the Dutch seems to have been almost minimal. Furthermore, empires can end differently in the metropoles themselves. High levels of immigration in Holland and the United Kingdom mean that “the empire has struck back”; in contrast, the situation in Denmark is very different, almost wholly bereft of any memory of empire.