Empires E-Book

Krishan Kumar

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PPSS - Polity Political Sociology series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 457

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Empires have been the commonest form of political organization for most of recorded history. How should we best understand them? What are their principles and how do they differ from other political forms, such as the nation-state? What sort of relations between rulers and ruled do they express? Do they, as many have held, follow a particular course of “rise, decline, and fall”? How and why do empires end, and with what consequences? Is the era of empire over? 

This book explores these questions through a fascinating analysis of the major empires of world history and the present. It pays attention not just to the modern overseas empires of the Europeans, but also to the ancient empires of the Middle East and Mediterranean, the Islamic empires of the Arabs, Mughals, and Ottomans, and the two-thousand-year Chinese Empire. As Kumar shows, understanding empires helps us understand better the politics of our own times.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Empires in Time and Space

The Problem of Definition: A Family of Meanings

Empires Ancient, Classical and Modern: Two Watersheds in the History of Empires

Second Watershed: European Imperialism

Notes

2 Traditions of Empire, East and West

Translatio Imperii: “Eternal Rome”

The Chinese Empire: The “Middle Kingdom”

The Growth of the Chinese Empire

Empires of Islam

Notes

3 Rulers and Ruled

Opposition and Accommodation

Metropole and Colony: Distance and Nearness in Land and Overseas Empires

Rulers, Settlers, and Natives

Notes

4 Empires, Nations, and Nation-States

Nations, Nation-states, and Nationalism

Nation-States as Empires

Empires as Nation-States

From Empire to Nation-State: A Natural Progression?

Empires and Nationalism

Empire Against Nation-State: Divergent Principles

Notes

5 Decline and Fall

A Rhetorical Device?

China and the End of Empire

The Fall of the European Land Empires

Decolonization and the End of the Overseas Empires

Notes

6 Empire after Empire

Imperial Legacies

Legacies of Land Empires

The Overseas Empires: The Postcolonial Condition

The Afterlife of Empire in the Metropolitan Societies

Has Empire a Future?

The “American Empire,” America as Empire?

Notes

Select Bibliography

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Begin Reading

Select Bibliography

References

Index

End User License Agreement

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EMPIRES

A Historical and Political Sociology

Krishan Kumar

polity

Copyright © Krishan Kumar 2021

The right of Krishan Kumar to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2838-7

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Dedication

To the students, staff, and faculty at the University of Virginia

Preface

Empires have been the commonest form – the “default” form, it has been said – of political organization for most of recorded history. They appeared at the dawn of human civilization and lasted – at least – until the second half of the twentieth century. They have been the subject of speculation by some of the greatest thinkers and writers, such as Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, and Edward Gibbon. Novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and V. S. Naipaul have made of them a searching inquiry. Artists such as Titian, David, and Delacroix painted them. Critics of empire such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said have written of their lasting and, to them, deeply injurious effects.

After a period of almost ostentatious indifference in the European societies that once governed vast empires, empires have once more become the object of interest and of intense scrutiny there. Historians, sociologists, and political and literary theorists have turned their attention to them. There have been several television treatments of them, often resulting in popular books, such as those of Niall Ferguson and Jeremy Paxton on the British Empire. Opinion surveys record the return of a certain pride in empire among European populations. Nor is it only there. In Turkey, a television series – The Magnificent Century – on the life of the great sixteenth-century Ottoman emperor Suleyman the Magnificent has been immensely popular, and commentators have observed the spread of something like “Ottomania” there. China, too, has begun to re-assess its imperial past, no longer – as in the early days of communism – dismissing it as irredeemably “feudal” and obscurantist.

Unlike an earlier generation, and in distinction from more popular treatments, scholars today have tended to be cautious about making large-scale generalizations about empires. They have chosen to focus on restricted sets of empires, in particular regions and periods. There has been a particular interest in the modern European overseas empires that rose with the Portuguese and the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and continued with the Dutch, the French, and the English/ British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The contemporaneous land empires of the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Habsburgs have usually been treated separately. Similarly, non-Western empires, such as the Chinese Empire and the Muslim empires of the Arabs, the Mughals, and the Safavids, also come mainly under the scrutiny of specialists in their cultures and history. For their part, the pre-Columbian empires of South America – the Incas, the Aztecs – are the preserve of experts in New World civilizations, seen as based on very different principles from those of Eurasia.

Particularly marked in this literature is the separation of “ancient” and “modern” empires. The early Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires, the Persian Empire and that of Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic empires down to the Roman Empire, have all been intensively studied. But they tend to be regarded as radically different from the empires that came later – above all, the overseas empires of the Europeans. This is seen as partly a matter of technology – difficulties of communication, etc. – but it is also seen as a difference of principle, in what the empires meant to the people concerned and what they strove to achieve.

This book is aware of differences, between Western and non-Western empires, and between earlier and later empires. For the first, the importance of Rome, and of Christianity, in the Western case, is as clear as that of other “world religions” and ideologies, such as Islam and Confucianism, in non-Western empires. Similarly, I stress temporality in empire – the awareness of past predecessors, and how different epochs give rise to different types of empire. The book discusses, in particular, two important “breaks” or dividing lines: the one marked by the “Axial Age” of world religions in the first millennium BCE; the other by the phase of conquest and colonization that began with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European “voyages of discovery.” The second, I argue, marks a fundamental divide in the history of empires, with far-reaching consequences for the subsequent development of the world.

But I am equally concerned to stress the commonalities of empire, the shared things that, across time and space, allow us to speak of “empires” as a distinct species at all. Even societies that, like China, came late to using the language of empire to describe their long-lasting political system, were concerned to show how similar their empires were to others of the type, especially in the West. By the late nineteenth century, a common understanding of empire had come to link the various expressions of it in many different areas of the world, and at different times in world history. Not surprisingly, given their prominence in the world at that time, the European empires often supplied the model of empire, the idea of what it took to be an empire.

But the European empires themselves had a long history, and drew on traditions of empire that went back to the Romans, and, behind them, the empire of Alexander the Great. Alexander himself had continued, in many respects, the great Persian Empire of the Achaemenids that he had conquered, while the Achaemenids were indebted in their turn to the longstanding imperial tradition – Assyrian, Babylonian – in Mesopotamia, of which they were the inheritors and successors. Empires were linked in a variety of ways, allowing for the frequent movement of ideas and institutions across space and time. The concept of the translatio imperii, the handing over or passing on of empire, was one linking device that can be applied to many empires other than the Western ones for which it was originally invented.

That concept, and the idea of a “tradition of empire” to which it gave rise, are among the things explored in this book. Others include the relation between rulers and ruled in empires, where I argue for a symbiotic rather than a purely oppositional relationship; the connections between empires and nation-states, normally seen as antithetical principles but which can be shown to be intimately related and to exhibit in practice many similarities, even though ultimately diverging in their consequences; the reasons for the fall of empires; the question of whether, even after the formal end of the epoch of empires, they still persist in some form, while, in any case, leaving long-lasting legacies. Throughout, I draw upon the whole range of empires, East and West, and upon the whole history of empires since earliest times. Clearly, in a short work of this kind, this has to be selective; the pre-Columbian empires of South America, in particular, get short shrift, as do African empires. But China, as perhaps the most important non-Western empire, gets considerable attention, as, to a lesser extent, do the Muslim empires of the Arabs, the Mughals, the Safavids, and the Ottomans. I also consider the case of the “American Empire,” often seen as an outlier.

This is one of the several ways in which this book differs from my recent Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (2017). That book was mainly about the modern European empires. This book ranges more widely, in time and space, which allows me to deal with questions not considered in that earlier study. Empire, this book stresses, has been a worldwide experience. This is what makes it so instructive an object of inquiry. It also suggests that the story of so widespread and long-lasting a form is not likely to be over.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many students at the University of Virginia who have, over the years, taken my courses on empires and world civilizations. This book is really for them; it has been shaped by many of the questions that we have discussed, and their contributions have been invaluable. Aspects of it have also been presented in lectures at the University of Hong Kong; the University of New South Wales, Australia; Zhejiang University, China; the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg; the University of Copenhagen; University College, Dublin; the University of Basel; the Washington History Seminar; the University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Chicago. David Palmer, Saliha Belmessous, Dingxin Zhao, Alexander Semyonov, Peter Fibiger Bang, Siniša Malešević, Matthias Leanza, Dane Kennedy, Wm. Roger Louis, and Steven Pincus, respectively, were responsible for these visits, and I thank them as well as the participants at the lectures. Others who have continued to be companionable fellow students of empires, and from whom I have learned much, include John A. Hall, Chris Hann, Sankar Muthu, and Jennifer Pitts. A conference organized by Larry Wolff at the Remarque Institute of New York University on “The Decline and Fall of Empires” was both very enjoyable and highly stimulating. I also want to thank Nigel Biggar for inviting me to participate in his ongoing series of conferences on “Ethics and Empire” at Christ Church, Oxford, which brings together distinguished scholars of empires of every place and period. And grateful thanks, as always, go to the dedicated staff at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, especially its ILL/LEO section.

At Polity, I want to thank Jonathan Skerrett for commissioning this book, and for his help in giving it its final shape. Thanks also go to Karina Jákupsdóttir for her great efficiency in seeing the manuscript through the production process. Thanks also to Leigh Mueller for her attentive and scrupulous copy-editing. I’m grateful to both for their patience in the face of many deadlines not met. Finally, I want to thank – again – Katya Makarova, my most attentive reader and one whose keen and discerning eye has saved me from many awkward phrases and unclear passages. We have a common interest in empires, and conversations with her have helped me immeasurably in clarifying my thoughts and sharpening my perceptions.

Krishan KumarCharlottesville, Virginia

1Empires in Time and Space

The Problem of Definition: A Family of Meanings

“Definition,” the great sociologist Max Weber once said, “can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study” (1978: I, 399; my emphasis). Weber, as a great admirer, would also have been sympathetic to Friedrich Nietzsche’s parallel observation that “only that which has no history can be defined” (1956: 212). Since all human ideas and practices have a history, that more or less rules out attempts at definition in the human (or social) sciences. In any case, both Weber and Nietzsche caution us against the efficacy – if not the impossibility – of defining phenomena in human society. Whether we are speaking of concepts or institutions, their protean character makes it extremely difficult to pin them down, like butterflies in neat glass cabinets.

Empires come in many shapes and sizes. They also evolve historically, both within themselves, as particular empires, and also collectively, as types of rule. That means that Weber’s and Nietzsche’s cautions apply to any and all attempts to define them. The danger is, at one level, an all-encompassing vacuity, a cover-all definition that is so general and abstract as to be virtually useless when considering particular cases; at another level, it leads to elaborate attempts to classify empires by type, or to distinguish them by historical periods or geographical regions, such that comparisons become awkward and difficult, if not impossible.

The approach in this book is not to attempt a precise definition of empire at the outset. That would lead to just the sort of straitjacket feared by Weber (for a famous example, look at the problems encountered by Durkheim in basing his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life on a strict definition of religion at the very beginning). If some sort of definition appears, then it will do so largely by emergence, as one goes through the material and discusses specific cases and issues. At the end of the book, perhaps, not just the reader but the author might have a better sense of the nature of the entity under consideration. At the very least, we might begin to see the “family resemblances,” Wittgenstein-style, between different uses and meanings of the term “empire” (cf. Cooper 2005: 26–7).

That, at any rate, is the hope. Of course, even if they don’t have precise definitions, words must have meanings (though, again, often a range), and so we must give some sort of meaning to the word “empire.” At its most basic, and consistent with its origin in Latin imperium, it means absolute or sovereign rule over a people or territory, without the right of appeal to any earthly outside power (though not necessarily excluding appeal to a divine or supramundane authority). This was the earliest use of the term, during the Roman Republic. As the Republic became an Empire, the term was extended to mean rule over a multiplicity of peoples and lands, as in the Imperium Romanum (hence the usual connotation of empire with large or extensive political entities) (Koebner 1961: 4–5, 11–16).

Both meanings continue up to and including the present, though certainly in many current uses it is the second feature – rule over many peoples and lands, or of a “core” over various “peripheries” – that has tended to predominate (e.g. Howe 2002: 14–15; Osterhammel 2014: 428; Streets-Salter and Getz 2016: 3–4). Together, they allow us to distinguish empires, however broadly or imprecisely, from other political entities such as nation-states, though in practice, as we shall see, there can be considerable overlaps between empires and nation-states. For instance, “core” and “periphery” can be found in many large nation-states – e.g. Britain, France and Spain – as well as empires (hence the concept of “internal colonialism” – see further below). More helpful is the distinction between “metropole” or “mother country” and “colonies,” though for obvious reasons that applies mostly to overseas empires and can be problematic with land empires, which often do not have anything that can clearly be designated colonies. Equally vexing is the attempt to distinguish between nation-states as having “citizens” and empires as having “subjects,” since, until as late as 1948, the inhabitants of the United Kingdom – not generally thought of as an empire – were subjects of the British crown, not citizens.

Two other terms need to be noted. “Imperialism” is an etymologically logical extension of empire (imperium), but, surprisingly, it does not seem to have been used until the mid nineteenth century, when it was popularized to describe the rule of Napoleon III and his Second Empire in France. The British adopted the term, at first disparagingly, as a synonym for Bonapartism, and later more approvingly, to describe their own rule in the British Empire. But the term nearly always carried a whiff of disapproval, a feature that became even more pronounced under the scrutiny of anti-imperial liberals and socialists. The liberal J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902) began the process, which, under Hobson’s influence, was carried further by Marxists such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Rudolf Hilferding, who analyzed – and denounced – imperialism as the desperate last measure of an embattled capitalism (Koebner and Schmidt 1964: chs. 4–8; Kiernan 1974: 1–68).

But, by the mid twentieth century, “imperialism” had largely been displaced by “colonialism,” reflecting the view more from the colonies, or ex-colonies – the anti-colonial “Third World” – than from the metropole.1 While imperialism could be, and was, defended by some thinkers, colonialism was, almost by definition, in the post First-World War environment of Wilsonian “self-determination” and nationalism, described as an evil (Manela 2009). Increasingly, in the large literature on empire produced by left-wing writers, European and non-European, both imperialism and colonialism carried connotations of oppression and exploitation. It was mainly this that led “empire” to become a dirty word by the second half of the twentieth century: to speak up for empire, as for instance the British statesman Winston Churchill did in the 1950s, was to show oneself incorrigibly reactionary and outdated.

A late refinement of “colonialism” has been the concept of “internal colonialism.” This refers to the idea that many so-called nation-states have in fact been formed by an internal process of incorporation, whereby a core people or nation have conquered or swallowed up their neighbors. Examples would include Great Britain or the United Kingdom, in which the English conquered the Welsh and the Irish, and forced the Scots into a “parliamentary union,” to form a composite state of four nationalities: an internal “English empire” (Hechter 1999; Davies 2000). France too – present-day France of the “Hexagon” – has also been said to have been created by an imperial process, in which the French kings based on the Île-de-France gradually expanded their power to take in adjoining lands and principalities – Burgundy, Brittany, Provence, etc. – thereby creating a centralized and culturally homogenized France (Weber 1976: 485; Goldstone and Haldon 2010: 18).

The concept of internal colonialism has many attractions, not least in undermining many of the spurious claims made by and on behalf of nation-states (Kumar 2010). It has found favor with a wide range of scholars, who have applied it to such matters as apartheid in South Africa, the relation of the black minority to the white majority in the United States, and Stalin’s forced collectivization of the peasantry in the Soviet Union. Its very versatility and adaptability, covering so many different types of situations, has been seen as one of its weaknesses as a theoretical concept. The fact that it works mainly by an “artificial analogy” with conventional colonialism has also been seen as a serious methodological problem. Nevertheless, even its critics have acknowledged its usefulness in many spheres – in showing, for instance, the interaction of external and internal factors in the development of societies, as when perceptions and policies toward native peoples in the colonies are brought back home and govern the treatment of groups within the metropolitan society (Hind 1984: 553, 564).

One further usage should be mentioned. Some writers, following an influential article by two prominent imperial historians, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (1953), have wished to speak of “informal” as well as “formal” empire. Informal empire refers to a situation, such as obtained in the relation between Britain and parts of Latin America in the nineteenth century, where a state does not formally exercise sovereignty over another territory or people but displays a high degree of control, especially over its economic operations. While such situations undoubtedly existed and continue to do so (one source of the widespread talk of a twentieth-century “American Empire”), the notion of informal empire covers such a large number of cases and is so imprecise in its meaning – where does “control” begin and end? – that many have found it best to avoid it in their studies of empire. That sound advice will generally be followed in this book. However, in view of the importance of the case, and the fact that it has been the source of much interest and attention, we will, in the last chapter of this book, consider the question of how far America – the USA – can be thought of and studied as an empire.

In general, while the use of particular terms and concepts is unavoidable, we must always be aware of the range of meanings they convey, the sometimes conflicting elements they display, and above all the historical and cultural contexts in which they are employed. As an especially important example, consider that imperium is a Western term, in a Western language (Latin). It has given rise to most of the modern European equivalents (English “empire,” French empire, Italian impero, Spanish imperio; Germans use Reich for the political form, but also have, more figuratively, imperium and also imperialismus, imperialism). In other words, when we use “empire” or any other European equivalent, we must be aware that we are dealing with a term that has a Western history and that applies in the first place to Western experience. That makes problematic its application to non-Western forms, ancient and modern, even when we wish – as we often do – to speak of the “Chinese Empire,” the “Mughal Empire,” the “Safavid Empire.” Even more difficulties arise with the ancient “Egyptian Empire,” the “Inca Empire,” or the “Aztec Empire” – not to mention the “Commanche Empire.” In most of these cases, there are no words in their languages that translate as “empire,” as understood in the West. What, we might wonder, do they have in common? Why call them all “empires?” Why not simply use indigenous terms and explore their local and particular meanings?

This need not make us despair of finding any similarities or common meanings (“family resemblances”). For one thing, Western political vocabulary has been spreading across the world, with everintensifying force, since the 1789 French Revolution. The movement was given added impetus by the worldwide spread of the European empires, especially from the nineteenth century onward. So, voluntarily or involuntarily, European social and political terms and thought – the state, the nation, empire, Marxism – had become the property of the entire world by the twentieth century. Moreover, even before that, what we can agree to call empires – e.g. Rome and China – interacted with each other in various ways. Merchants and missionaries criss-crossed the world, carrying ideas as well as goods and people. Certain figures, such as Alexander the Great, became emblems of empire throughout Eurasia. Whatever the different terms used for what we call empires, therefore, they might carry a similar resonance, stress certain common ideas and values. That makes comparison possible.

In the chapters that follow, we shall be tracing that movement of vocabulary and those interactions – by no means all one-way – that allow us to speak of empire in a generic way, always with an eye on specific differences. But first we must make a map of empire. We must lay out our examples, show the range of empires across space and time. We will only be able to deal with a handful of them, though they will be among the most significant. But it will be helpful, at the start, to get a sense of the totality of the imperial story.

Empires Ancient, Classical and Modern: Two Watersheds in the History of Empires

John Darwin, in his masterly account of “global empires,” After Tamerlane, has said that “empire (where different ethnic communities fall under a common ruler) has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history. Imperial power has usually been the rule of the road” (2008: 23; see also Howe 2002: 1; Goldstone and Haldon 2010: 19). Darwin is perfectly aware that there have been other political forms: tribes, chiefdoms, city-states, nation-states, leagues, and federations. But he is right to stress the ubiquity and longevity of empires – the fact that so much of recorded human history has been imperial history.2 The earliest human civilizations, starting around 4000 BCE, soon took imperial form: Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China. They were later, in the first millennium CE, joined by empires in what the Europeans came to call the “New World” across the Atlantic: the Toltec, the Aztec, and the Inca empires. The Mediterranean region threw up the Alexandrian and Roman empires. The Near and Middle East saw Hittite, Arab, and Persian empires. There were the steppe empires of Chinggis Khan and Tamerlane. Coming fairly late on the scene, from the sixteenth century CE onwards, there were the overseas empires of the Atlantic European powers, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain. At about the same time, the Russians, Habsburgs, and Ottomans constructed great land empires stretching deep into Eurasia.3

Some empires, like the Egyptian and Chinese, lasted for thousands of years; others, like the European ones, lasted for hundreds of years. But, whether for shorter or longer periods, empires left an indelible mark on the world. The empire of Alexander the Great lasted no more than his short reign of 13 years (336–323 BCE), but it transformed Eurasia and left a lasting legacy.

With this profusion of empires, in space and time, for any analysis it becomes necessary to establish some sort of intellectual order. In this case, distinctions of space are less important than distinctions of time. At any one time, empires across the world – certainly the Eurasian world – were mostly aware of one another, and in many cases in active interaction with each other (the principal exception is the empires of the pre-Columbian New World). They can be compared as occupying similar tracts of space–time. The Chinese and Roman empires in the first century CE share many characteristics, as do the Mughal and Habsburg empires of the early-modern period, or the Japanese and French empires of the twentieth century.

What is more important is change over time. The later empires learned from earlier ones, striving to avoid their fates even as they strove to imitate them in key respects. At the same time, they benefitted – though this could also threaten them – from the economic and technological changes that took place in the world. This became a particularly marked feature after 1600 CE, as first merchant, and later industrial, capitalism began its transformation of the world. Empires that could not adapt to, or incorporate, the changes faced extinction or absorption by others.

We can in fact distinguish two watersheds in the history of empires. The first is suggested by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, elaborating on his very influential idea of an “Axial Age” in his book The Origin and Goal of History. In a relatively short but intensely creative period, Jaspers argued, between c.800 BCE and c.200 BCE, there took place a revolution in human thought, such that all the great world religions and foundational philosophies came into being at this time. This was the time when Confucius and Lao-Tse were living and teaching in China; when India produced the great Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads, and also Prince Siddhartha Gautama, “the Buddha”; when Zoroaster in Iran taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil, light and dark; when the Jewish prophets – Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others – made their appearance in Palestine (leading eventually to offshoots in Christianity and Islam); and when Greek philosophers, from Thales to Plato, radically changed human thinking in ethics and politics. “In this age,” claimed Jaspers, “were born the fundamental categories within which we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by which human beings still live, were created. The step into universality was taken in every sense” (2010: 2).4

Jaspers confessed that he could find no overarching cause linking these intellectual developments, nor could he explain why they occurred in only three regions of the world: the West (divided into “occidental” and “oriental” parts), India, and China. But he noted two significant things about them. One was that they occurred in the areas where the earliest civilizations, and the earliest empires, had arisen: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China. Secondly, although most of the principal thinkers themselves flourished in a period of small competing states, the Axial Age concluded with the birth of a number of “world empires,” in all three regions, in which their philosophies figured prominently. Not only does this suggest some sort of connection between the Axial Age philosophies and these new empires; it also, Jaspers thought, allowed us to distinguish between empires that preceded the Axial Age – “ancient” empires – and those that succeeded it – “modern” or “world” empires.

By convention, the earliest known empire – the Akkadian Empire – was that of Sargon of Agade (r. 2334–2279 BCE), in southern Mesopotamia. The Akkadian Empire was formed by the conquest of the neighboring city-states of Sumeria, which, c.4300–2334 BCE, had laid the foundations of the region’s civilization, the earliest in the world (Farrington 2002: 14–15; Haywood 2005: 26–7). At the beginning of the second millennium BCE, power shifted to other Mesopotamian powers: Assyria in the north and Babylon in the south. The Assyrian and Babylonian empires dominated the region for the next 1500 years – particularly powerful were the Assyrian Empire of 911–612 BCE and the succeeding Babylonian Empire of 625–539 BCE. All these empires drew upon the cultural, scientific, and technological achievements of the Sumerian city-states – for instance, Sumerian cuneiform. At the same time, they created something fundamentally new, in the political and partly cultural unification of the large areas of the Middle East that they governed for hundreds of years. Their rulers formed the club of “Great Kings” that dominated the region in the second millennium BCE (Haywood 2005: 46–9; Mieroop 2009; Bedford 2010: 49).

The Assyrian and Babylonian empires at various times covered not just Iraq and Syria but also Palestine and parts of Egypt and Anatolia. In Anatolia, they came up against the formidable power of the Hittite Empire (seventeenth–twelfth centuries BCE). In 1595 BCE, the Hittites invaded and sacked Babylon, thus ending the first Babylonian Empire. Babylonia rose again in the sixth century BCE until its conquest by the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE. With this, the Persian Empire was born, “ending the 400-year-long dominance of Mesopotamian states in Middle Eastern history” (Mieroop 2009: 82).

Parallel to the growth of Mesopotamia, though apparently independently, was that of Egyptian civilization from around 3100 BCE. But it was not until the time of the New Kingdom (1539–1069 BCE) that Egypt became a true empire, conquering Nubia to the south, much of Palestine and Syria in the north, and extending to Libya in the west and the Red Sea in the east. Egyptian pharaohs of the New Kingdom claimed the title of “King of Kings,” “Ruler of Rulers,” “Lord of all that the sun encircles.” Their empire, it was boasted, spanned “the four corner-poles of the sky” (Kemp 1978: 10; Morkot 2001: 227; Manley 2009: 30).5

Egypt’s northward expansion was halted by the Hittites at the great battle of Qadesh (1285 BCE), and it was forced out of Nubia in the eleventh century, though “Egyptianization” had proceeded sufficiently there for Egyptian civilization to persist in the region – as the Kushite Empire – for several centuries beyond the New Kingdom (Kemp 1978: 33–9; Adams 1984: 59–60; Morkot 2001: 244–51; Haywood 2005: 64–7). The Empire’s decline in the last 500 years of the first millennium BCE was slow but steady. First, the Persians in 525 BCE, then, more decisively, Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, occupied Egypt, though it was not until the Roman conquest – following the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 BCE – that the Egyptian Empire was formally extinguished. Altogether, in one form or another, it had lasted 2,000 years – “history’s first, and most enduring, colonial empire” (Adams 1984: 63).

The Persian Empire, the empire of the Achaemenids (550–330 BCE), was the first Axial Age empire, the first “world empire,” based on a “world religion” – in this case, Zoroastrianism. It exceeded in size all the earlier Middle Eastern empires – as well as those of East Asia – extending from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus, and including not just Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian territories, but Ionian Greece and several Greek states on the Greek mainland (Macedonia was for a while a tributary state). For the Greek historian Herodotus, it was the greatest empire the world had known hitherto, its boundaries “God’s own sky, so that the sun will not look down upon any land beyond its boundaries” (Herodotus 2003: 417). The Persian king was hailed as “king of the four rims of the earth,” “King of Kings” (shahanshah in modern Persian), a title adopted in a host of later empires in Eurasia (Kuhrt 2001: 105).

The pax Achaemenidica proclaimed by Darius I celebrated “the God-given and universal state of peace that was guaranteed by the kings and desired by their subjects” (Wiesehöfer 2010: 67). The Persian word data – “law,” “order” – spread into all the Near Eastern languages, illustrating acceptance of the authority of the Persian “Great Kings,” and admitting the state of beneficence that was said to have been conferred by them on all. Similar in showing the widespread impact of Persian rule was the adoption of Aramaic as the lingua franca of the empire, which then went on to influence many Near Eastern languages and scripts, such as Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic. An empire-wide, Persian, ruling-class culture informed the attitudes and style of life of the many indigenous elites, reaching down also to their peoples: “No inhabitant of the empire was forced to choose between an ‘imperial’ and a ‘local’ identity … but at the same time he was invited to regard himself as – and to be proud of being – a member of the most successful and prosperous entity of his own time, the Persian Empire” (Wiesehöfer 2010: 89–90; cf. Mann 1986: 240–1).

It was Herodotus who seems to have been the first to promote the influential idea of the translatio imperii, the handing on of empire, in which the Achaemenids were seen as successors to the empires of the Assyrians and Medes (in the Bible, Babylonia is substituted for Assyria) (Wiesehöfer 2003; Llewellyn-Jones 2009: 104). In Hellenistic times, this allowed the empire of Alexander the Great, carrier of Hellenic (Greek) civilization across a vast swathe of Eurasia, to be seen as successor to the Persian Empire. Later, as Roman writers elaborated this tradition, came a fifth empire, the Roman Empire (27 BCE – 476 CE), and its continuation, the Byzantine Empire (which lasted until 1453 CE). Rome and Byzantium did not just continue and further Hellenic civilization, as Graeco-Roman civilization; they also gave birth to the world religion of Christianity, and were instrumental in its establishment and diffusion.

At about the same time, the Qin and the Han dynasties formed the first Chinese Empire (221 BCE – 220 CE). These promoted the Axial Age philosophies and religions of Confucianism and Daoism, and were also responsible for the great growth of Buddhism in China. Buddhism was also central to the Mauryan Empire (321–185 BCE) in India, while later the empire of the Guptas (319–530 CE) displaced Buddhism and re-asserted the primacy of Hinduism as the dominant religion in India.6

It was Jasper’s contention that the “classical” or Axial Age empires represented something new, something that separated them decisively from the empires of the ancient civilizations. The ancient civilizations and their empires “appear in some manner unawakened … Measured against the lucid humanity of the Axial Period, a strange veil seems to lie over the most ancient cultures preceding it, as though man had not yet really come to himself” (Jaspers 2010: 6–7). Jaspers stresses the lack of “a spiritual movement” in the ancient civilizations. Despite their great accomplishments, which furnish the material for the later Axial Age civilizations, they experience no “spiritual revolution” comparable to that of the Axial Age. Hence they exist in “pre-history,” as opposed to the “history” opened up by the Axial Age. In these ancient civilizations, “living expresses and is patterned upon unproblematic acceptance of things as they are. The fundamental human problems are embedded in sacred knowledge of a magical character, not broken open in the restlessness of search” (Jaspers 2010: 12, 44, 48).

Others, in something of the same terms, have also seen the Axial Age as marking a fundamental divide between the ancient and the classical civilizations, and the empires founded upon them. Eric Voegelin saw the new “world empires” of the Axial Age as “accompanied by an opening of spiritual and intellectual horizons which raised humanity to a new level of consciousness.” The new thinking is not the cause of the rise of the world empires, but there is an “ontological connection,” a “meaningful configuration,” linking them: “An affinity of meaning subtly connects a creation of empire which claims to represent mankind with a spiritual efflorescence which claims representative humanity.” There is an “association” between the Achaemenid Empire and Zoroastrianism; the empire of Alexander and Hellenism; Asoka’s Mauryan Empire and Buddhism; the Chinese Empire and Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism; the Roman Empire and the mission to spread, first, Graeco-Roman civilization, then Christianity. These associations are seen to distinguish these empires from the older “cosmological empires” of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian type, which simply seek to integrate humanity within an eternal order of both men and gods, rather than requiring humanity to live up to the demands of a “world-transcendent God” (Voegelin 1962: 171–2, 178; see also Mann 1986: 341–71; Pollock 2004).

A further way of distinguishing the empires of the age of “classical civilizations” – civilizations based on Axial Age philosophies and religions – from those of “ancient civilizations” is to note the enormous speeding up and intensification of exchanges and interactions between empires in the classical age (Bentley 1996: 760–3). Here, the fifth-century Persian Achaemenid Empire led the way, as it did in many other respects. The vast empire linked East and West in ways unparalleled by any previous empires. An extensive system of roads joined its various parts, allowing for swift communication and even a postal service, the first in the world. Ideas, people, and goods moved freely across the large expanse of empire.

The empire of Alexander the Great, which succeeded the Achaemenid Empire, was indebted to it for many of its innovations and practices, not least its respect for the traditions and cultures of the various regions (Briant 2002: 875–6; Wiesehöfer 2010: 86, 92). Alexander’s marriage to a Bactrian princess, Roxane, his later marriage to two Persian princesses, as well as the marriages arranged between his Greek Companions and Persian princesses, symbolized the East–West cosmopolitanism that Alexander – disdaining the teaching of his tutor, Aristotle – wished to promote. Zoroastrianism in the Persian case, and Hellenism in that of Alexander, were indeed the guiding ideologies of their empires, but their influence was the greater for not being forcibly imposed on the empire’s subjects (a lesson learned by many later empires).7

Later, via both the terrestrial and the maritime “Silk Roads,” China and Rome were able to inhabit the same Eurasian space, adding to the density of interactions between the western and eastern portions of Eurasia. Africa too was brought into the picture, giving meaning to the emergence of “Afro-Eurasia.” Increasingly, empires were neither Western (“European”) nor Eastern (“Asian”), but Eurasian (Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2015).

In all ways, in the growth in scale as well as in the intensity of interaction, empires of the Axial and post-Axial Age “stepped into universality,” to use Jasper’s phrase. Empires were no longer relatively isolated entities, each striving to expand its territory at the expense of others but lacking universalist ideologies with which to justify their conquest. Speaking of Egypt, Bill Manley says that, with the possible exception of relations with Nubia, “no ideology spurred the New Kingdom into conquering lands beyond the Nile.” What mattered was simply “political self-interest,” with economic gain always a by-product of territorial acquisition, and often the driving force behind it (Manley 2009: 30). That seems true of most of the other ancient empires – Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite. At most, they claimed to bring peace and order to a chaotic and disorderly world, to re-establish the equilibrium of the cosmos and to put in order its disparate parts.8 Other than that, these ancient empires have rightly been seen as “empires of domination,” largely held together by compulsion and lacking the universalist ideologies that gave the classical empires their greater impact and generally longer life (Mann 1986: 130–78; Goldstone and Haldon 2010: 24). There was nothing like the “Romanization” that in the Roman Empire brought into being Romanized local elites, Romanized towns, and a common Roman culture across the whole expanse of the empire – the Roman “civilizing mission,” as we might call it (Kumar 2017: 44–59).

It is obvious that we cannot hold too rigidly to the idea of an “Axial Age watershed” in the history of empires. Some earlier empires, in certain phases – e.g. Egypt in its “Egyptianization” of Nubia, or the “neo-Assyrian Empire” of Ashurbanipal, with its spread of the worship of Assur – certainly contained elements of a unifying ideology. More generally, there was the spread of Akkadian as the official language of the whole Near Eastern region, for its convenience in trade and diplomacy. Elements of “transcendence,” putting the empires under standards higher than those of mere order and security, existed alongside the dominant “immanent” ideologies that justified rule by kings and elites (Adams 1984: 59–60; Mann 1986: 152, 160–1; Bedford 2010: 47–59). Empires, of whatever kind – almost by their nature – must legitimate themselves by appealing to some large idea, some promise of doing good in the world.

But most of these ancient empires remained firmly tributary, content to accept loyalty oaths and to collect tributes from client states rather than to incorporate them in the regular system of imperial administration or assimilate them into the dominant culture of the imperial rulers. Nor did they feel the need to spread religious ideas in the population at large, content to restrict them largely to the ruling groups whose integration was all that mattered. These empires were not there to proselytize or to spread a universal truth. They were empires of conquest, and they endured so long as their coercive power was sufficient to keep their subject populations in check.

Second Watershed: European Imperialism

There are perhaps fewer qualifications necessary in discussing the second great watershed in the history of empires, that marked by the rise of the overseas European empires in the sixteenth century CE. That is because, from a relatively early date, they were quickly seen as expressions of a major turning point in world history. They arose as the result of the great European “voyages of discovery” of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the subsequent conquest and colonization of the New World – itself the prelude to a wider, world-wide, diffusion of European power.

“The discovery of America,” wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, “and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind” ([1776] 1910, II: 121). Smith stressed, as a principal result of these voyages, the “uniting, in some measure, [of] the most distant parts of the world,” with effects on commerce and communication that he considered on the whole “beneficial,” though he noted that the natives of the non-European world might think differently. But he had no doubt that, for good or bad, the events were of world-historical importance.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concurred with this general assessment, though looking to an eventual outcome of this historic development – in a socialist revolution – that Smith probably would not have approved of. For them, as for Smith, “the discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape,” revolutionized commerce and manufacturing. “The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known … Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1977: 222–3). This development, they claimed, has “called forth a new phase of historical development”; it has “produced world history for the first time, in so far as it has made all civilized nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world” (Marx and Engels 1963: 52, 57). For Marx and Engels, the fact that commerce and industry were now increasingly global gave them, and the world in which they operated, an entirely new character. Capitalism, as it developed, would be increasingly global, using – where necessary – nation-states as its tools, but never contained by them.

World historians today have been in general agreement with this view of the impact and significance of European exploration and colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. C. R. Boxer declares that “it was the Portuguese pioneers and the Castilian conquistadores from the western rim of Christendom who linked up, for better or worse, the sundered branches of the great human family. It was they who first made humanity conscious … of its essential unity” (Boxer 1977: 2). This gave a new prominence, and a new role, to Europe. Europe, in the Middle Ages, might, as compared with Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations, have been relatively backward; but from the sixteenth century onward it steadily grew in strength, until finally it came to dominate the world. William McNeill, the doyen of world historians, calls the period from 1500 CE to his own time “the era of Western dominance,” and says “the year 1500 A.D. aptly symbolizes the advent of the modern era.” The voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan, to name only the most famous, began a process that changed the balance of power in the world. China and Japan, and a few other places, were for a while able to ignore “the extraordinary revolution in world relationships” that this wrought. But by the nineteenth century, they too saw that they had to come to terms with European power, on pain of succumbing to it (McNeill 1991: 565–6).9

The European empires that arose in this period were at once an expression and a principal agent of this world-transforming process. They differed from both the “ancient” empires of the second millennium BCE – Assyria, Babylon, Egypt – and the “classical,” Axial Age, empires – Persia, Macedonia, Rome – that succeeded them. The new thing was the construction of globe-encircling overseas empires.

Both of the earlier kinds of empires were essentially land empires, even if, as with the Achaemenid and the Alexandrian, they spanned a vast section of the Eurasian landmass. They might contain some overseas territories, as with North Africa and Britain in the Roman Empire. But these tended to be in the “near abroad,” not too distant from the heartlands. As a result, it was armies, rather than navies, that mattered – Rome, again, partly excepted.

There were indeed in this era some empires that were mostly maritime. The best known are the Athenian Empire – the “Delian League” and its successor – and the Phoenician Empire, one of whose colonies, Carthage, itself built up a maritime empire in the western Mediterranean. But if these were empires, they were of a decidedly loose-knit kind, mostly for protecting trade routes or organizing for common defense. They were very different from both the land empires of the ancient world and the later overseas empires of the Europeans.

Doubt has been cast on whether it is right to think of the Athenian Empire as an empire at all.10 Athens had “allies,” rather than colonies or territories over which it claimed possession, and it made little effort to establish anything that one might call an imperial administration. Moreover, it was relatively short-lived. The Delian League, founded in 478 BCE as a mutual-protection federation of allies under Athenian leadership, was dissolved in 404 BCE, following Athens’s defeat by the Spartan League in the Peloponnesian War. The second “Athenian Confederacy” of 377–338 BCE was even shorter-lived – it was effectively over by 358 – and even less an empire, before it succumbed to Philip of Macedon at Chaeronea in 338 BCE (Griffiths 1978; Blanshard 2009: 145–6).

The Phoenician Empire – if it can be so called – was, even more than the Athenian, a loose association of states in which the mother country, Tyre, exercised little direct control over its colonies. Not much more did Carthage, its principal colony, which, after the overthrow of Tyre by the Babylonians in 573 BCE, assumed the leadership of the Phoenician colonies in the western Mediterranean. Carthage did, in the third century, build up a substantial land empire, in North Africa; but its overseas “empire” in the fifth and fourth centuries – the Phoenician colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Corsica – existed mainly as an association for the protection of long-distance trade, on which Carthaginian fortunes depended. Carthage might in that respect certainly be accounted as a “hegemon,” but there seems to have been no intention to exercise anything that we might call imperial rule. The Phoenician colonies often acted independently of Carthage, looking to it sometimes for assistance and leadership in conflicts with other powers, but neither seeking nor expecting to be subjected to its authority. Carthage, on its side, was more interested in securing trading relationships than in exercising political control. Only with the loss of Sicily and Sardinia – and hence of valuable trade – to Rome in the First Punic War (264–41 BCE) did Carthage turn for compensation to a land empire in Africa (Whittaker 1978; Haywood 2005: 68; Quinn 2017).

The European overseas empires, by comparison with these maritime empires, as well as most of the land empires of the ancient world, were not just bigger, but culturally and ethnically far more diverse. Alexander’s Macedonians were, it is true, astonished when they confronted the elephants of King Poros on the Hydaspes in northern India in 326 BCE; and Bactrians and Sogdians, along with Persians and Indians, contributed a decidedly cosmopolitan character to his empire (as they had to the Persian Empire that preceded and, in a sense, prepared the way for it). Romans too encountered “barbarous” cultures among the Celtic tribes that they encountered and conquered in Gaul and Britain and, adding these to the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, their empire was marked by a real degree of ethnic diversity.