Empires, Colonies, and World History
MRINALINI SINHA
Is the United States of America an empire or is it a global hegemon? If the US is not an empire, then would it be a good thing for the US and the world were it to become one? And what has the US to learn, if anything, from empires past? These are some of the questions that suddenly burst on public consciousness at the end of the Cold War and continue to have traction well into the era of what has been called the “War on Terror.” These questions, prompted by such developments as the dramatic changes that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union – often referred to as the “last empire” – and the preemptive war on Iraq led by the United States, reflect the changing fortunes of the term. The “E” and the “I” words, empire and imperialism, as Giovanni Arrighi notes, are definitely back on people’s minds again (2005: 23). The terms, whose contemporary meanings have been shaped most recently by the history of the overseas European colonial empires, had in the wake of the post–World War II era of decolonization acquired typically pejorative connotations of unilateral power. The stakes in the revival of “empire talk” in the closing decades of the twentieth century thus reflect the political ambivalence of this history.
The contemporary public discourse on empire, joined by politicians and academics alike, displays several common threads. These include an invocation of empire as a metaphor for unbounded power; debates over precise definitions of empire to cover political forms from antiquity to the present; an accounting of the balance sheet of empires in the morally charged terms of good and bad; and an acknowledgment of a shift in the role of US power in the present. At the same time, the historiographical field of empire studies has undergone both an enormous transformation and a renaissance. This has by and large been obscured by the raucous terms of the public debate on empire.
From roughly the last quarter of the twentieth century, the traditional historiography of empire has been substantially overhauled. Take the following example. Scholars had for long understood European colonial empires as the expression of European national power: hence the hitherto dominant framework of the “expansion” of Europe. However, as much recent scholarship has shown, European empires were not an expression of some prior superiority that enabled Europe to dominate the rest of the world. Rather, Europe’s dominant position in the world was itself the result, or the product, of empire.
The initial impetus for reexamining imperial history came from efforts to redress what Frederick Cooper has called “the nonreckoning that accompanied and followed the end of empires” (2005: 54). The most important work was that of literary critic Edward Said, whose book Orientalism(1978) taught generations of scholars to pay attention to the cultural and intellectual legacies of empire that were typically underestimated in Marxist and neo-Marxist economic theories of imperialism. Said’s book spawned a loosely defined field known as postcolonial studies, as well as what has been called the “new imperial history,” which drew its momentum largely from studies of the erstwhile European colonial empires (Howe 2009). New attention also followed, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, on the continental land empires of Europe, as reflected in Dominic Lieven’s Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (2000). While the need for a better accounting of the legacy of the European empires of the past prompted much of the initial historiographical revolution, the continued vitality of the field has had much to do with interest in understanding the US, especially the place of American power in the emerging new century. The latter, for example, has also prompted a resurgence of a variety of Marxist and neo-Marxist economic theories of imperialism. Explorations of the changing conditions of capital accumulation are thus once again emerging center-stage (Arrighi 1994; Harvey 2003). The growing receptiveness of this new historiography of empire to the contributions of non-Western historiographies and of “area studies” programs, which in the US have traditionally housed the interdisciplinary scholarship on the non-European parts of the world, has further helped to make the remit of this field more global. These multiple, and often unrelated, strands have come together to make empire studies into a thriving field, especially in the US academy, only a short time from the moment when historians were bemoaning the obsolescence of a field that had begun to lose steam – just like the retreating European empires that had once been its primary objects of study.
This rejuvenated field – quite different from the sterile debates that have bogged down much of the public discourse about empire – has far-reaching implications for the study of world history. The obvious affinity of empire studies with world history, of course, is its attention to the exercise of power in and through large-scale structures. Yet what distinguishes an empire from other political forms, such as city-states, republics, kingdoms, and nation-states, is not only a matter of scale. Empires, as current scholarship is reminding us, were functionally differentiated polities with a variety of heterogeneous political and administrative arrangements and with complex patterns established for negotiating diversity among its population. But attempts at actually arriving at a single definition of empire – as a transhistorical and abiding political state-form from antiquity into the present – have proven notoriously difficult, if also misguided. Empire, a word that can be traced to the Roman imperium, has historically meant a number of different things: a one-size-fits-all definition of empire would simply never do. Some scholars prefer to work with various loose taxonomies of empires, such as the longstanding distinction between the far-flung seaborne empires and the contiguous land empires, not to mention a third type: the decentralized nomad empires, like the Mongol empire (Barfield 2001). Add to this, the renewed attention in recent years to early or premodern empires as a distinct imperial form (Bayly and Bang 2003). Others have offered a range of functionalist explanations – based on what states have sought and how they have behaved – to arrive at certain family resemblances among empires, an “imperial minimum,” as it were, for the purpose of making comparisons across time and space (Maier 2006). The definitional inexactitude constitutive of the term has led still others to suggest that the concept of empire may be more useful as a loose descriptive category than as a tight analytical one.
The crux of the analytical purchase of empire, however, especially for the student of world history, may lie elsewhere. The eschewing of pointless debates over the formal properties of empires, and the resulting corollary about whether particular states could be named properly as “imperial” or not, as well as of the opposite, and mistaken, temptation of identifying empire too loosely as simply a metaphor for unbounded power, can actually be quite liberating. It enables a better engagement with the contributions made by the historiography of empires. This, at its best, has provided enormously generative ways of thinking for world history. The value of the new empire studies thus does not rest on providing a textbook definition of empire to fit this or that historical case; rather, it rests on the new lines of enquiry that the attention to empire in historical scholarship has enabled. Empire, in this sense, is important precisely because it has been “good to think.” The reference, of course, is to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between that which is merely the subject of description and that which provides the basis or tools for thinking and theorizing (1963: 89).
There have been several ways in which empires have proved especially good to think with. First, empires have been extremely useful in thinking about connections in world history. The history of empires has provided some of the most useful ways of thinking about what scholars are calling connected histories, entangled histories, or histoires croisées. (See Fernández-Armesto, this volume.) Individuals writing from such diverse political perspectives as John Seeley, the doyen of imperial history in Britain, and Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born French anticolonial writer, had long acknowledged that empire bound together the histories of the imperial powers and their colonies (Seeley 1883; Fanon 1963). Yet it took until the last quarter-century before either imperial historiography or nation-based historiographies began to take this insight systematically to heart. This shift in the historiography of empire has not only brought together “domestic” (read national) and “imperial” history within the same framework, but has also pointed to their coproduction or mutual constitution in an “imperial social formation.”
To be sure, this challenge to hermetically sealed national historiographies has not gone entirely uncontested. Several scholars have mounted a rearguard action to protest that because historical actors themselves were often blissfully inattentive to empire, empire could not be said to have had a “fatal impact” on national history (Porter 2004). Yet this line of argument, even aside from its flawed logic, has failed to gain much traction in the face of mounting evidence of the ways in which empire shaped not just the colonies or the imperial peripheries, but also the imperial centers or the metropoles. Indeed, it is this reversal of the traditional understanding of the flow of imperial influence – from center to periphery – that has been the most controversial and also, perhaps, the most rewarding.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the substitution of the familiar centripetal model with a centrifugal model of imperialism has had the greatest impact on the national historiographies of erstwhile European metropolitan powers. Modern British history especially, but also French, Dutch, German, Russian, Spanish, and even US history, have begun to look very different once the constitutive role of empire is acknowledged. The entangled or connected history of the imperial metropole and the colonial periphery has done much to put paid to familiar narratives of the “rise of the West” as well as to its corollary of “first in the West and then in the rest.” The following two examples should suffice.
Long ago the historian Eric Williams (1944) drew attention to the impact of the slave economy in the Caribbean on the causes of the first “Industrial Revolution” in Britain. Since then legions of scholars have argued with, and against, Williams’s thesis. While that thesis has been considerably modified, as scholars take into account a combination of internal and external factors, in the causes of the industrial revolution, this story can no longer be told as a purely internalist or entirely autochthonous British or European development (Inikori 2002). Likewise, scholars of Asia have suggested that the “great divergence” between Britain and much of Asia, especially China, occurred only as late as the 1800s, and that the chance “windfall” provided by the land and resources of the Americas and Africa was critical to this outcome (Pomeranz 2000). Even though the debate on the “rise of the West” has not been fully settled, its terms have undoubtedly been transformed (Bryant 2006).
Following on the pioneering work of another famous scholar from the Caribbean, C.L.R. James, who first put the eighteenth-century Haitian Revolution alongside the French Revolution, scholars have begun to revise the received history of universal human rights as a European idea gradually extended to peoples and places outside Europe (James 1938). Central aspects of this history, usually seen as a product of an exclusively European intellectual and political project, were in fact forged in the struggles for emancipation fought by slaves and their descendants in the Caribbean. To the “black Jacobins” of Saint Domingue we may owe much of what we have hitherto connected to the legacy of an exclusively continental revolution (Dubois 2004). The entangled histories that the new attention to empire has thrown up have made it difficult to sustain the neat compartmentalization between the West and the Rest that was once the staple of our historiography.
If thinking through empires helps to defamiliarize the history of an entity called “the West,” as well as the national histories of individual European metropolitan powers, by the same token it also helps revise our understanding of the histories of the colonized world. To the more familiar narrative of the impact of the political and economic violence of imperialism, for example, scholars have added attention to colonialism’s “epistemological violence”: that is, to the role of colonial knowledge in the exercise of power. (See Simo, this volume.) The strategies of colonial rule relied on the accumulation and categorization of knowledge of the subject societies and peoples. The desire to “know” subject populations was a source of perennial anxiety and vulnerability for colonial rule; but it was also the basis for colonial intervention and interference in the name either of defending or reforming what colonial authorities frequently, if often mistakenly, assumed were the true and authentic customs and practices of indigenous peoples (Cohn 1996). Through such mechanisms as the census, ethnographic classifications, the codification of religious practices, and medical science, as well as more cynical “divide and rule” policies, albeit to different degrees in different locations, colonialism both constructed knowledge of indigenous peoples and often became complicit in local processes of the “invention of traditions.” Colonial era accounts of “tribes” and chiefs, of castes and “communalism” (the term used for the politics of religious sectarianism in India), and even of the subordination of women, although these had their own prior histories in the societies of Asia and Africa, were seldom merely neutral reflections of the perduring remnants of precolonial cultures. In fact, colonial knowledge-practices, more often than not, were actively involved in recasting these. The supposedly timeless and “traditional” aspects of indigenous cultures turn out, on further scrutiny, to be often quite “modern” after all.
Colonialism, indeed, involved more than military conquest, economic domination, and the loss of political sovereignty: it was also a complex cultural project that remade indigenous societies, albeit not unilaterally, nor out of whole cloth, and certainly not always as originally intended. When in 1829 the East India Company abolished the practice of the self-immolation of widows on their husband’s funeral pyre, commonly referred to as sati, from its territories in India, for example, this was not a straightforward story of the modern civilizing force of empire triumphing over the benighted traditions of the natives. European commentaries on the practice, as well as the protracted debates about the wisdom of colonial interference in this matter in the years prior to the legislation, tell a far more complicated story. These contributed to the process of converting an indigenous practice, which was supposed to be restricted to only a certain class of women and that was practiced in only certain parts of the country, into an enduring symbol of Hindu quaIndian culture. The subsequent debates between the supporters and opponents of legislative interference – and both camps had their share of Indians and Europeans – put “Indian” culture on trial.
Women, as Lata Mani famously puts it, were neither the subject nor the objects of the ensuing debate on the abolition of sati; they were instead merely the ground on which competing views of tradition and culture came to be debated (Mani 1987). The debate, moreover, came to be framed within the terms of a colonial understanding of a “textualized” version of Hindu culture: an understanding that privileged the authority of ancient canonical texts over the evolution of customary practices. Even though a process of “hierarchizing textualization” of elite forms of knowledge was already underway in India before the advent of colonial rule, as Sheldon Pollock reminds us (1993: 97), these trends were considerably exacerbated by colonial policies. One of the legacies of this pioneering social legislation of the colonial era was thus also the strengthening of a “textualized” understanding of Hindu culture that would circumscribe subsequent debates over the status of women in colonial India.
Such an expanded understanding of the legacy of European colonial empires – for both the European metropole and its colonies – has revised substantially our understanding of the modern world. Indeed, the real challenge of a focus on the constitutive role of empire is to make evident that the mere addition of non-Western history to Western history courses is not sufficient: the histories of both, instead, need to be rethought in the crucible of their unequal, but mutually constitutive, interactions.
The emphasis of this new historiography has been on the cultural project of empire, both in response to, and sometimes at the cost of, an earlier emphasis on political and economic factors; its major concern has been in tracing the processes by which colonial rule established mastery over colonized society through control of its natural, human, and cultural resources. This scholarship, to be sure, has challenged the simple binary opposition between the metropole and the colony and between colonizers and colonized, demonstrating in the case of the latter the enormous sociocultural work of class, race, and gender that was necessary, in the first place, to construct, and then to police the boundaries between the two (Stoler 1989). Yet an emphasis on the power of colonial knowledge and on the production of “difference” has also inadvertently tended to reify the very oppositions it sought to undo. Sometimes colonial categories of knowledge appear more powerful than they were and are assumed to have had a free hand in remaking colonized societies. The implication is that colonial knowledge operated on a tabula rasa, or that colonial intentions had a constancy and durability that remained largely impervious either to the dictates of particular exigencies or to the impact of indigenous responses (Cooper 2005). In effect, then, certain longstanding concerns about the top-down and the metropolitan-centered approach of imperial history linger even in some of its newer manifestations.
Similarly, the historiography of European colonial empires has too frequently remained locked within a singular metropolitan–colony axis at the cost of delineating other forms of connections and interactions that spilled over this divide. Hence the recent shift to notions of imperial “webs” and “networks” (Ballantyne 2002; Lester 2001). These latter help trace lateral connections between different colonial sites, beyond the vertical metropolitan–colony axis, as well as between rival empires. So particular colonial sites – such as Britain’s Indian empire – themselves became nodes in a subimperial network (Metcalf 2007). The strategies of colonial rule as well as of anticolonial resistance, moreover, moved promiscuously within and between empires (Lake and Reynolds 2008). The impact of a comparative turn in the scholarship – to a consideration of European seaborne empires alongside contemporaneous European and non-European continental empires, as well as attention to a longer global history of empires before the modern period – has gone a long way in opening further lines of enquiry as well as in redressing some of the concerns that continue to plague empire studies.
Comparison, indeed, is a second way in which empires have proved good to think. (See Adas, this volume.) The comparative study of empires, along with offering a considerably expanded temporal and spatial dimension to the field, offers some perspective-altering insights. The widening of the time and space of empires has done much to reorient a field dominated by the study of European colonial empires. One obvious, yet important, contribution of this wider perspective is a reminder that for much of human history empires have been, as John Darwin (2007) puts it, the “default” form of political organization and thus hardly the “original sin” of Europeans perpetrated on the rest of the world.
The global and longue durée perspective on empires has been generative of new paradigms and avenues of research. It has certainly reminded scholars of the potential of comparative histories of empires: between whole empires; between component parts of individual empires; as well as between particular themes, say, religion, or the military, or court culture, across different empires. Empires are especially fertile grounds for comparative histories both because of the idea of translatio imperii, by which empires often claim “succession” by invoking earlier empires, and because of a related set of ideas, institutions, and practices – an “imperial repertoire,” as it were – that were often subscribed to by, and freely exchanged between, rival empires. This much, perhaps, is already well known. The further point is the conceptual breakthroughs that have come from the engagement with not just the histories, but also with the historiographies of empires in times and places other than those of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonial empires. The disorienting perspective this provides both puts the European colonial empires in their proper place and uproots, once and for all, the residual “national” frameworks that continue, often by default, even in the field of empire studies.
Take for example the conceptual rewards of bringing together the large continental land empires – such as the Romanov, Habsburg, Qing, and Ottoman empires – with that of the European seaborne empires with which they were contemporaneous. The historiographical liberation from Eurocentric conceptual categories, in no small part enabled by the attention of scholars to deconstructing colonial practices of constructing knowledge, has allowed these continental land-based and dynastic empires to emerge as more than just “archaic” and premodern hangers-on or misfits that somehow managed to persist into an era supposedly shaped by the “national” empires of northwestern Europe. Building on the work of generations of scholars of China, of Russia, and of the Ottoman empire, who have countered the myth that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of these empires were one long story of inexorable “decline,” comparative empire studies is breaking down many of the conceptual barriers that divided the field. These supposedly premodern empires, in fact, shared with European colonial empires many features of colonial knowledge production and of the construction of “difference” at particular moments and in relation to particular regions within their empires. The evidence of such “modernizing” trends suggests a need to revise the “sick man” narrative of these empires, barely hanging on, on life support, and to acknowledge the shared temporal and conceptual space they occupied with European colonial empires.
Even more importantly, perhaps, the engagement with the historiography of the continental empires as modern in their own right helps to question the inevitability (reflecting a teleology built into nationalism) of the substitution of empires by nation-states (Burbank and Cooper 2010). Here some of the scholarship on the breakup of the Ottoman empire (1326–1922) at the end of World War I is especially apposite. Contrary to what scholars had long assumed, an imperial Ottomanism, based, after the Balkan Wars, on an integrative Islamism, continued to be a viable political option for opponents of the imperial state up until the outbreak of the war. The “Young Turks,” as Hasan Kayali (1997) suggests, may thus be something of a misnomer: they were, at least in the early years, more Ottoman, perhaps, than Turkish. The fact that rival Arabic and Turkish nationalisms ultimately took the place of an imperial Ottomanism was not foreordained: this outcome was the product of several contingent forces, including the impending threat from European powers, in the years leading up to the war. Here, as in the Austro-Hungarian empire that was also reconstituted into separate nation-states at the end of the war, the surprising longevity of imperial ideals and of imperial visions of the polity, alongside more “national” alternatives, suggests that the “transition” to the political form of the nation-state cannot be simply assumed or taken for granted.
The scholarship on early modern empires has likewise been disorienting for understanding both the place of European empires and of the retroactive “national” framing of the history of empires. The concept of the “early modern,” a period roughly from the 1500s to the 1800s, has already done much to dislodge the idea of modernity from an exclusively European provenance (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998; Dussel 2000). Many of the political, economic, and social changes associated with this period were very widespread and, in fact, quite global in their scope; and, more importantly, the subsequent global dominance of Europe could not always be read back in a direct line, necessary and inevitable, from the developments during this period. So it was with early modern empires.
The dynamism of imperial expansion in the early modern period was not confined only to the overseas European empires. Central Eurasia, for example, was the site of an intense imperial rivalry between three empires, the Russian (1613–1917), Qing China (1644–1911), and the Zunghar empire (1671–1760), the last of the important pastoralist empires in the region. The Qing defeat of the Zunghars and the resulting conquest of modern Xinjiang, as Peter C. Perdue (2005) has shown, closed the ancient Eurasian frontier in an event that was no less momentous (according to scholars since Frederic Jackson Turner) than the closing of the American frontier. The state mobilization that was necessary for the successful conquest of the steppe region put the Chinese very much alongside the state-building efforts of European states at the time.
At the other end of the world, and in the very midst of European overseas empire-building, the Comanche Indians built an “American empire that, according to conventional histories, did not exist” and that, nevertheless, lasted from the mid-eighteenth century to about the second half of the nineteenth century (Hämäläinen 2008: 1). This “indigenous empire,” with its own history of conquest on the southern plains of North America and its own aggressive imperial project at least until the second half of the nineteenth century, managed not only to counteract European imperialism, but also to have a decisive role in the outcome of the United States’s westward expansion. Europeans were not the only, and for much of this period at least, certainly not the most dominant empire-builders.
The history of early modern European empires also highlights their later and retroactive construction as “national” projects. The early modern Spanish empire, as Henry Kamen has demonstrated, was hardly “Spanish” in any simple way. Kamen (2003) reconstructs the “international” collaboration that made possible the Spanish colonial enterprise. The Spanish empire, especially in the early years, was truly international: the contributions of the Portuguese, Italians, Catalans, and Jews as well as of African slaves supplemented those of Castilians and Aragonese. Even the actual conquest of the Americas was facilitated by the exploitation of dissension that already existed within American societies and by strategic alliances with the peoples whom the “conquistadors” encountered. These “multinational” foundations of the Spanish empire raise questions about the extent to which even overseas European empires could be considered purely “national” projects.
At its most challenging, moreover, the comparative study of empires has done much to shrink the length of the period of history in which the nation-state has been the dominant political form. The traditional view of the nation-state as the dominant political form of the modern age, starting with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and coming into its own with the revolutions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has taken a considerable beating. The empire-state remained a viable political form well into the twentieth century. In fact, as John Kelly and Martha Kaplan have argued, it was arguably not until the post–World War II era of decolonization that the nation-state came to be institutionalized as the dominant political form in the interstate system established in the United Nations (Kelly and Kaplan 2001).
This has opened up the history of the modern period – the era of the supposedly “national” European colonial empires – to revisionist interpretations. Scholars are beginning to reconsider, for example, the extent to which even the modern British and the French states were proper nation-states as opposed to imperial states (Wilder 2005). France, as this argument goes, did not become a fully “national” polity – that is, delimited to its territorial boundaries in Europe – until 1962 with the loss of Algeria. Empires, as this line of research seems to suggest, did not beget nation-states just in former colonized parts of the world or in the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian lands, about which we have long known. Also, more controversially, the nation-state may be a more belated political form – created in the aftermath of decolonization – even in some of the “core” states of the modern world. The more “national” models of empire-building may have come, in fact, relatively late in the game and with the imperial latecomers – pioneered, according to Prasenjit Duara, by Japan in Manchukuo but also, perhaps, by the Germans at the turn of the nineteenth century and taking different forms in the Soviet Union’s “empire of nations” or the United States’s post–World War II anticolonial imperialism that operated precisely through an interstate order of nation-states (Duara 2003; Hirsch 2005).
This line of thinking has also been extremely productive for reappraising the diversity of anticolonialism. Not all forms of anticolonial resistance, for example, took the form of the demand for a separate nation-state. Even as late as the 1940s and 1950s, as Frederick Cooper’s (1996) work on French West Africa demonstrates, labor and political leaders were using postwar French imperial notions of Greater France to make a powerful claim on the government: equality of wages and benefits for all whom the government asserted to be French. The logic of this claim proved ideologically and politically dangerous for the government to dismiss, even as metropolitan constraints also made the demands impossible to fulfill. Scholars have begun to explore the full range of anticolonial movements beyond demands made on behalf of a particular community. These include attempts to completely transform the structure of the imperial polity, as in the case of the demands made by labor and political leaders of French West Africa above, as well as movements that were not territorially defined: Pan-Islamic; Pan-Slavic; Pan-African and so on. This has also produced a vigorous new body of work that is drawing attention to the ideas of “universalism” and of “cosmopolitanism” as articulated in a variety of anticolonial thoughts and practices hitherto seen largely within particularistic nationalist frames (West et al. 2009).
Recent scholarship on “premodern” empires – variously called archaic, early, agrarian, or tributary empires – has opened up a further set of questions of general and field-altering import. Comparisons between the Roman empire (ca. 200 BCE–395 CE, for the unified empire) and the roughly contemporaneous Han empire in China (221 BCE–220 CE), the two largest agrarian empires of antiquity, have become especially popular (Schiedel 2009). They go a long way to countering the privileging of Greco-Roman history in the study of the ancient world. (See Liu, this volume.)
The scholarship on premodern empires, moreover, has also reopened in interesting ways the familiar debate on the definition of “empire.” Consider Sheldon Pollock’s provocative argument about the divergent instantiations of the empire-form in antiquity. Empires, as he argues, have involved historical imitations. The Achaemenid empire (ca. 550 BCE to ca. 330 BCE), considered the “first political world-empire,” provided the model for the emergence of successor empires in both Rome and early South Asia, but these two forms were radically different, especially the relationship in each between culture and power. (See Yoffee, this volume.) To take one example: while the early Indian polity was expansive culturally, unlike Rome it did not subscribe to an ideology of limitless territorial expansion (Pollock 2005). What are the implications of the conceptual dominance of the “Roman model” – as opposed to the “Indian model” – in our understanding, and identification, of empires elsewhere?
This question is especially relevant because it was against the background of the European colonial empires, which themselves self-consciously imitated the Roman model, that many a non-European precolonial state was first “discovered” and, then, conferred with an imperial identity. How has this “conceptual Eurocentrism” (in the identification of empires) influenced the study of, say, the Vijayanagara empire (1336–1646) in South India or the Songhay empire (1464–1591) in Western Sudan? Does the process of constructing ideological supremacy within empires, for example, look different when viewed from the perspective of imperial Songhay, where Islamic concepts of political legitimacy, especially under the Askiya rulers, came to be accepted as the norm, even though the major centers of the religion lay beyond the empire (Tymowski 2003–2004)? These are some of the lines of inquiry that are facilitated once the paradigmatic status of the Roman model is brought under scrutiny and the various instantiations of the empire-form in different places and in different times given their due.
The renewed attention on early empires or “tributary” empires as distinct imperial forms is also challenging the teleology, implicit or explicit, that has hitherto measured them in relation to modern industrial society. Hence “modernizers” focused on identifying both proto-modern forces and forces that blocked the full transition to modern capitalist society, while “primitivists” emphasized a sharp distinction between ancient agrarian-aristocratic society and industrial-capitalistic modernity. Challenging this intellectual cul de sac, Peter Bang draws attention to the institutional structures of “tributary” empires that reorients comparisons with modern industrial society in favor of more cross-cultural and trans-epochal comparisons among tributary empires. He thus places the Roman empire not in relation to early modern Europe, but in relation to other tributary empires: the Mughal, Ottoman, and Chinese empires. This move makes it easier not only to “abandon the tyranny of Europe over Rome,” but also to reprise some of the characteristics associated with “tributary” empires (Bang 2008: 59). Such old chestnuts as the nature of patrimonial authority, the role of trade, and the relationship between the state and market formations in early empires are thus receiving a fresh look. The reappraisal of agrarian or preindustrial empires is opening the way for a better accounting of the economic and state institutions of premodern empires in their own terms, as well as of the precise nature of the rupture associated with the advent of modern industrial society.
Ultimately, the expansion of the temporal and the spatial scope of empire studies has helped dispel a powerful myth about empires, common both in popular and some academic discourses, about their unbounded power. The legitimacy and longevity of empires depended to a large extent on their ability to work with a range of intermediaries, especially local elites, who were critical to their functioning. At one end of the spectrum, for example, was the Mughal empire (1526–1858) in northern India. This Turkic Muslim dynasty, which started out in Herat and Kabul, could not consolidate its rule by force alone in a territory where the majority of the population was non-Muslim. The “Mughal compromise,” as Sanjay Subrahmanyam puts it, was one “in which the ruler would take on attributes and practices that appealed to his non-Muslim subjects, while Mughal rule would then proceed on the basis of a progressive Persianization of elite culture and the incorporation of extensive territories through recognizably Mughal fiscal and administrative institutions” (2006: 84). The composite Mughal ruling elite was made up of Indian Hindus and Muslims, but also of Iranians and Central Asians. Even among contemporaries, like the Ottoman empire with its “multinational” ruling elite, the Mughal empire stands out for the substantial presence of non-Muslims in the highest ranks of the ruling elite. At the other end was British rule in India, which took up the mantle of imperial rule from the Mughals. The British colonial empire, at its height, rested on a much sharper separation from the subject populations, with the result that the incorporation of local elites into the higher ranks of the ruling class remained extremely limited and fitful. Even such “modern” colonial empires, however, could not entirely escape the necessity of balancing between incorporating, and differentiating themselves from, subject populations.
This new attention to the limits on imperial power has been largely salutary. It has brought more attention to imperial practices, as opposed to ideologies and intentions, and to the actual working out of empire on the ground. By emphasizing the role of local interlocutors and of local exigencies, including precolonial historical processes, scholars are demonstrating that the colonial mastery of modern European empires was limited even at their heights. Geography – as in oceans, mountains, rivers, and islands – was also a factor, as Lauren Benton suggests, in the exercise of imperial sovereignty. (See Simmons, this volume.) European overseas empires, she suggests, were actually quite “lumpy,” consisting of “narrow bands or corridors, and … enclaves and irregular zones around them” (2009: 2). The jurisdictional authority of empires was strongest at the nodes, in the corridors and enclaves, and a lot weaker in other areas. If imperial historiography’s emphasis from the 1980s onwards was on the coproduction of the histories of the colonizing and colonized worlds, and on colonial knowledge and power, then the more recent emphasis has shifted to the contingency of imperial practices and to the various limits to the exercise of imperial and colonial power.
Comparative empire studies has thus qualified considerably the popular vision of empire as a juggernaut capable of laying waste to all in its wake. Empires had to coexist, and to make their peace, with historical processes that often predated any individual empire. At the same time, this comparative turn in the scholarship – especially when combined with a contrast between the “multiculturalism” of empires with the relative conformism of nation-states – can verge on an uncritical imperial nostalgia. The violence and inequality endemic to empires should caution against any overly rosy views. By the same token, the shift in the current scholarship from colonialism to empire has also raised some legitimate concerns about the elision of the specificity of modern colonialism. More attention, indeed, is needed to spell out carefully the features that made colonial empires distinctive: that is, in the particular forms of political, economic, and cultural relationships that they established between the metropolitan center and the periphery. The return of careful attention to the changing conditions of capital accumulation – prompted in part by contemporary forms of noncolonial imperialisms – also serves as a reminder of the need to bring the history of capitalism back to greater prominence in the scholarship on empires. These are minor caveats about a historiography that has made thinking through empires extremely generative for world history. The study of empires – through its contributions to a history of both connections and comparisons – provides a useful basis from which to think narratives for world history.
Empires, finally, and above all, are also good to think about the spatial units that structure the narratives of world history. (See McKeown, this volume.) Scholars increasingly reject the legitimacy of “civilizations” and of “nation-states” as adequate spatial units for structuring the narrative of world history, while offering a range of alternatives in their place. The “world” and the “globe” may offer useful horizons for scholarship. However, as units of analysis that anchor actual historical narratives, they can remain problematic: the tendency of the bird’s eye view to flatten and totalize the diversity and contingency of human experience is real. On offer, therefore, are a variety of intermediate scales below the level of the global that combine both macro- and microhistorical processes. These include renewed attention to some of the following: the history of regions (albeit regions with porous boundaries that take into account cross-regional interaction); histories of oceans that emphasize mobility across maritime spaces that cut across bounded geographical regions; and the history of networks, with their various nodes and interacting systems that chart the transnational flow of goods, peoples, ideas, plants, and microbes. An emphasis on empires does not preclude these alternative approaches, but, in fact, is both enriched by them and, in turn, enriches them.
To be sure, empires are not the only networks of transfer and interaction. There have always been alternative networks – pilgrimage routes, trade diasporas, lines of intellectual and cultural exchange – that both predate, and persist beyond, any individual empire. Consider, for example, an old diaspora of Arabs from Hadramawt, Yemen, spread across the Indian Ocean, which for the past half-millennium has been drawn into both conflict and cooperation with a succession of empires that have come and gone. The latest chapter in this interlocked history of a transnational Muslim diaspora and empire, as Engseng Ho reminds us, is currently being played out in the “War on Terror.” This pits a new noncolonial or anticolonial US empire against an enemy that was personified by Osama bin Laden, a member of the same Hadrami diaspora. Here “empire through diasporic eyes,” as Ho (2004) puts it, provides a perspective from which to analyze the working both of different imperial power relations and of the various forms of resistance to them. Indeed, an attention to empire itself as a type of network, alongside diasporas as well as other cross-regional and oceanic networks and flows, helps to ensure that the “imperial ship of state” is not rendered invisible even as scholars do more to make visible the “smaller boat[s] sailing the same seas” (Ho 2004: 213). Imperial social formations remain useful precisely because they are explicit about the asymmetries of power: they have the potential to offer a historical narrative with, as it were, the “politics left in.”
Empires also overlap and work with recently reconfigured regional histories. (See Kramer, this volume.) The idea of “autonomous” regions that was once the basis for traditional area-studies programs in the US has come in for legitimate criticism over the years. However, acknowledging afresh some of the strengths of the traditional area-studies programs, some scholars have been loath to throw out the baby (of intensive training in a region’s languages and cultures) with the bathwater (of “civilizational” thinking as filtered through Cold War, and now post–Cold War, self-contained geographical categories). Take, for example, Sugata Bose’s call to reconceive the geographical boundaries of South Asian area studies as “South Asia without Borders” (2010). The danger of retaining the name without its territorial coordinates, however arbitrary these were, is to risk endowing a cultural fixity to “South Asianness” that perdures no matter where it appears. Empires, as descriptive or as analytical categories, need not preclude the kind of close attention to languages and sources promoted in area studies programs: they offer, in addition, a way out of fixed notions of culture and identity that still too often stick to attempts to rethink regional categories.
Consider the case of “Eurasia,” a new name for the area roughly between Germany and Japan that is being adopted by many former Soviet studies programs in the US academy in these post-Soviet times. “Eurasia,” according to Stephen Kotkin (2007), is a problematic category, not just because of the checkered history of “Eurasianism” in the interwar period, but, even more importantly, because it retains lingering associations with concerns about identities. Kotkin proposes that scholars eschew such associations – still at work in reimagined region-based categories – in favor of a greater attention to institutions and to issues of governance. He turns to the formative framework of empires, taking his cue from the colossally disruptive and constitutive impact of the Mongol empire to revise the understanding of the field. Significantly, however, he does not propose the notion of a Mongol Commonwealth (with its connotations of a Mongol-centric Eurasia at the cost both of other empires and of nonimperial networks), but the notion ofab imperio (from empire). The point, as Kotkin explains, is not to impose an imperial coherence over the region in place of any alleged geographical, religious, linguistic, or geopolitical coherence. The work done for him by the cross-regional notion of ab imperio (a term he borrows from the journal of that name published in Kazan), then, is precisely to counterbalance a preoccupation with identities, of individuals, groups, and of regions, with an emphasis on processes of exchange and institutions of governance.
Thinking with empires, then, is not about imperial nostalgia. Empires, more often than not, were a nasty business. The exchanges that they facilitated were often coercive and always unequal. Violence was never very far away from empires. Empires, after all, are always about power, both real and desired. Yet empires are never omnipotent: they coexist with, and are survived by, alternative networks of exchange, whether by land or across maritime spaces; and, further, they always remain subject to contestation both from within and from outside. Because networks of interactions midwifed the world, including the cultures and identities that we have inherited, warts and all, and because these operated under conditions of asymmetrical power, empires still remain some of the most useful categories with which to think world history.
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