What Are We Talking About?

2.1. Empires

Peter Bang's discussion in Chapter 1 of this volume shows clearly enough that historians do not agree over what the word “empire” should mean. But, like culture, religion, or pornography, it is the sort of thing that most scholars feel they know when they see it, and even without the benefit of consensus around a detailed defi­nition, the editors felt able to identify 50-odd case studies in imperialism for inclu­sion in these volumes.

Five things seem to unite the empires in this book.

First, they are political organizations. Churches, firms, families, and other kin-based groupings can have imperial aspects, but none is an empire. Empires are states, run by governments, whether that means monarchies, aristocracies, democracies, or some hybrid.

Second, empires wield coercive power, above all through the military organiza­tions to which I will turn in a moment. However imperial it might look in some ways, no organization that lacks military power—such as the interwar League of Nations—is an empire.

Third, empires dominate geographically extensive areas. There is no agreement on just how big a political organization with coercive powers needs to be to count as an empire, but nearly all the examples in this book controlled at least one million square kilometers.^[345]

Fourth, within these large territories, the imperial government has priority in important respects over all other organizations. I am deliberately wording this cri­terion vaguely. No imperial government has ever controlled everything in the terri­tories it rules, but on the other hand, iftoo many military, legal, economic, or cultural decisions escape its oversight, it ceases to be an empire in any meaningful sense.

Fifth, there is a strong sense of foreignness between rulers and ruled in empires. This is what makes “empire” a distinct subcategory of the larger category of “state.” My first four criteria apply to all states, but this fifth criterion applies only to empires.

All five criteria are fuzzy, and we should think of each as forming a scale on which specific societies score more or less points, with only a few societies—roughly the 50-some discussed in this book—scoring enough to make it into the “empire” cat­egory. No society has ever been a “perfect” empire, scoring full marks on every dimension. Rather, empire is what the sociologist Max Weber called an “ideal type, achieved by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified mental construct. In its conceptual purity, this mental construct can never be found empirically in reality. It is a utopia”^[346]

The ideal-type empire, then, is a political organization exercising significant co­ercive powers across a geographically extensive territory, within which it has pri­ority in important ways over all other organizations and is perceived by its subjects as an alien, foreign force.^[347]

2.2. Military Organizations

The ideal-type military organization can be defined more briefly as a group empowered by rulers to use force. These groups come in a staggering variety of forms, and one of the most important factors in an empire's success is its ability to see which forms will work best for it and its willingness to adapt its force compo­sition to circumstances. Once again, it is useful to range the possibilities along a spectrum, this time running from centralized organization to decentralized. At the centralized end are militaries directly administered by government bureaucracies. Their members are typically fed, housed, clothed, and paid salaries by the state, often have a complex hierarchy of ranks, and in some cases undergo lengthy apprenticeships or even formal education.

Almost every empire has had an army, in the sense of a centralized organization empowered to use violence on land, and in the last two centuries most empires have also established centralized police forces, distinguished from the army by being lim­ited to operating within the empire's territory, restricted in the amount of violence they can use, and charged with bringing enemies to court rather than killing them.^[348] (Spies, by contrast, have been around for millennia, and in modern empires are often a mirror image of the police, operating primarily outside the empire and outside the law.) Since the first millennium bce, many empires have also had centralized navies, authorized to use violence on water. All twentieth-century empires had centralized air forces, and in the twenty-first century, the American, Chinese, and Russian governments also operate centralized forces in outer space and cyberspace.

At the other end of the spectrum are decentralized militaries. These are run as much in their own members' interests as in those of the empire, and answer either loosely or not at all to government bureaucrats. Such groups normally rely more on plunder and extortion than on salaries, and generally make up their own rules of engagement. Decentralized militaries can be inexpensive for the empire that uses them, but they are also difficult to control.

Because decentralized militaries are cheap and need little logistical infrastruc­ture, in the twenty-first century most people think of them primarily as tools of re­sistance to imperialism, but empires have in fact regularly employed bandits, mobs, insurgents, militias, terrorists, and pirates. Decentralized organizations have been rare in the air (hijackers being the obvious exception) and almost unknown in outer space, but they are very prominent in cyber conflict, in the form of hackers.

Empires also have a great deal of choice in how they recruit the members of their militaries. Decentralized groups typically rely on volunteers (whether that means drunken hooligans in mobs, committed ideologues in terrorist cells, or pirates only in it for the money), although they will often kidnap some of their members too, but centralized forces often combine volunteers with more extensive conscription. Until a few centuries ago it was common for empires to cultivate aristocrats who would fight as officers without pay or would even pay themselves for the right to hold commissions, and would take responsibility for raising peasant levies from their estates. More recently, most empires have shifted instead toward maintaining small professional forces in peacetime (often retaining an unofficial hereditary officer caste) and augmenting them with millions of conscripts when war breaks out. But this comes nowhere near exhausting the possibilities: plenty of empires have outsourced organized violence by hiring military contractors or foreign mercenaries, or even by inducing other societies to do their fighting for them.

The link between these very diverse groups is that the empire's rulers empower them to use force. Without this legitimacy, the organizations would simply be criminal gangs,^[349] and for Weber, the right to confer this legitimacy was the defining feature of a government. “Only certain political communities,” he argued, “are considered to be capable of ‘legitimizing,' by virtue of mandate or permission, the exercise of physical coercion by any other community.” Empire is a circular argu­ment: the main tool an empire has for convincing its subjects that its agents are the only people allowed to be violent is law, but law's legitimacy rests on the empire's ability to enforce it with violence. As Weber explained it,

For the purpose of exercising and threatening such coercion, the fully matured political community has developed a system of casuistic rules to which that par­ticular “legitimacy” is imputed.

Legitimacy and military power are inseparable. The more legitimate an empire appears relative to its internal and external challengers and/or the greater its supe­riority in force seems relative to such rivals, the less likely it is to face challenges that actually require it to use force. On the other hand, it regularly happens that the more an empire uses force, the less legitimate it comes to seem. Asked in 1907 how the state's violent response to peaceful protests two years earlier had changed his views of the Romanov Empire, one Russian peasant replied that “[f]ive years ago, there was a belief as well as fear. Now the belief is all gone and only the fear remains.”^[351] Ten years after that, the empire was all gone too. Machiavelli is best remembered today for saying that it is better for a ruler to be feared than loved, but, as he also stressed, the best thing of all is to be feared and loved.^[352]

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