Empire

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has an illuminating review of two recent books on empire in a recent TLS .  He opens with a brief argument that “there can be no restrictive theory of empire,” putting in evidence, among other things, the fact that “between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period often referred to as an age of empires, there were at least thirty states in the world that historians denote as such.  They had no common characteristics that collectively distinguished them from other states of the time.”

Rather than definition, Fernandez-Armesto suggests a “typical profile” approach.  He elaborates:

“States we call empires are not necessarily large in absolute terms, but they do tend to be large in relation to their neighbours, precursors and successors.  They are not always, but usually, conquest states.  They are not always or markedly ethnically diverse, but they generally include more than one historical community.  Empires tend to militate in favour of a particular set of values as universal and seek to impose it as widely as possibly by persuasion, adscription, coercion, and sometimes even extermination.  They always rely on local acceptance and mutually beneficial alliances with subalterns, but they can also be, or try to be, selectively coercive.  Essential to understanding them is the disavowal of exclusively metropolitan perspectives and the entertainment of the voices of subject and peripheral peoples . . . . because they are relatively big, they tend to have the characteristics of a giant: immoderate appetite, sprawling limbs, lumbering gait, poor motor control and vulnerability to nimble slingshots.  Typically – contrary to the popular image and, indeed, most academic accounts – they are weak states, which cannot endure the hostility of their own subjects.”

He mocks the debate between Niall Ferguson and Timothy Parsons about whether the US is an empire: “According to Ferguson, the US is an empire; so empires are good.  According to Parsons, empires are bad; so the US is not an empire.”  He thinks the US is or has been an empire, “responsible for many of the characteristic iniquities of empires,” yet acknowledges too that American has “done a great deal of good for the world.”

For all the subtlety of his account, though, Fernandez-Armesto somehow knows that it is a “true proposition” that “empires are bad.”