The Great Imperial Hangover E-Book

Samir Puri

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'An exceptional account.' Prospect 'Enlightening.' Spectator For the first time in millennia we live without formal empires. But that doesn't mean we don't feel their presence rumbling through history. The Great Imperial Hangover examines how the world's imperial legacies are still shaping the thorniest issues we face today. From Russia's incursions in the Ukraine to Brexit; from Trump's 'America-first' policy to China's forays into Africa; from Modi's India to the hotbed of the Middle East, Puri provides a bold new framework for understanding the world's complex rivalries and politics. Organised by region, and covering vital topics such as security, foreign policy, national politics and commerce, The Great Imperial Hangover combines gripping history and astute analysis to explain why the history of empire affects us all in profound ways.

Leseprobe

THE GREAT IMPERIAL HANGOVER

About the Author

SAMIR PURI is a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore. Prior to this he was an academic, teaching War Studies at King’s College London and later in the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Earlier in his career he served in the Foreign Office (2009–15) and worked at RAND (2006–09). He appears on news programmes for Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNBC, Sky and TRT World, and has written for publications including the Guardian.

THE GREATIMPERIALHANGOVER

HOW EMPIRES HAVESHAPED THE WORLD

SAMIR PURI

First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2021.

Copyright © Samir Puri, 2020

The moral right of Samir Puri to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 833 5

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 834 2

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my grandfather

Kishori Lal Dhiri (1914–1990)

who spanned three continents and one empire

CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction

1America’s Imperial Inheritance

2Britain’s Grandeur and Guilt of Empire

3The European Union’s Post-Imperial Project

4Russia’s Embrace of its Imperial Legacy

5China’s Janus Faces of Empire

6India’s Overcoming of the ‘Intimate Enemy’

7The Middle East’s Post-Imperial Instability

8Africa’s Scramble Beyond Colonialism

Conclusion: The World’s Intersecting Imperial Legacies

Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

Having never kept each other’s company, by virtue of living at different times, Christopher Columbus, Edward Colston, Junipero Serra, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Leopold II make for a curious assemblage of characters. Yet in 2020, statues of these historical figures became targets for removal during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests due to their links to slavery and colonialism. The lives of these men, beginning with Columbus’s birth in 1451, and ending with Leopold’s death in 1909, spanned the high age of Western imperialism. As the BLM movement spread from the USA to Britain, Belgium and elsewhere, what began as protests about police killings of African-Americans ended up as a confrontation with the ghosts of empires.

The clamour to topple statues produced strong counter reactions to leave them in situ. Some American and British citizens considered it sacrilege at the altar of patriotism that statues of George Washington and Winston Churchill had come into the firing line. Popular historical narratives in the USA and UK venerate these figures as national saviours, looking beyond their involvement in slaveholding and in the Bengal famine respectively.

These battles in Western countries over the politics of historical memory were stoked by the collision of an imperial past and a multicultural present. The power of imperial legacies endure in the knee-jerk reactions they can provoke on all sides – reactions that belong to the complex inheritances that empires bequeath to future generations. None of us are culpable for the actions of our long-gone forebears, yet the legacies of empires take more time to dissipate than has elapsed since the end of formal empires.

Despite the global spread of the BLM movement, and the vital issues it shines a light on, I remain convinced that focusing one’s attention primarily on the guilt of America and Western Europe imperialism risks myopia. It is better to widen one’s perspective to other parts of the world, and to take in the bigger picture of how various past imperialisms still shape our present.

Take the matter of statue removal, which can be a normal marker of moving beyond empires, at least in nations that were once the subjugated rather than the subjugator. For instance, India keenly shunted away the statues of its one-time British conquerer, retiring a number of them to the eerie Coronation Park in Delhi. Elsewhere, Ukraine has seen a bout of Lenin-toppling, which I witnessed in 2015 when stood among a crowd that used a truck and a rope to fell a giant statue in the town of Kramatorsk, which had been liberated from Russian-backed armed separatists. At first, the truck’s front wheels buckled and then lifted off the ground, momentarily defeated by Lenin’s bulk. After much revving of its engines the truck won out and Lenin crashed to earth, his head cracking the pavement when he fell. The crowd responded in rapture of release from an imposing totem of Soviet rule.

In Russia, imperial legacies have provided Vladimir Putin’s regime with the rocket fuel to power its modern nationalism and its war in Ukraine. Both Tsarist and Soviet Russia were continent-straddling empires, feared by neighbours and rivals, and modern Russian should provoke similar sentiment, according to Putin. In China and Turkey too, ruling regimes hark back to their own distant imperial pasts to inspire modern bids for regional supremacy and for strong rule at home. State-sanctioned interpretations of imperial history prevail in these countries, unmoderated by counter arguments.

The significance of imperial legacies – and the uses they are put to – vary dramatically around the world. Grasping this can empower us to better understand the conundrums that result as world order enters its current transition phase with power diffusing from the West. This is happening regardless of who wears the sheriff ’s badge in Washington D.C. President Joe Biden may well have followed his victory in the 2020 election with a declaration that ‘America is back’, but the world is a changed place compared to the post-Cold War heyday of America’s informal empire.

Rival attempts at informal empire-building are now rife. China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have different sized ambitions, but each has backed its claims to regional influence with money, propaganda, military posturing and in some cases by waging war. Competitive informal empire-building is an emerging story of our age, leading to clumsy analogies such as between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the mercantile imperialism of the East India Company. These analogies do not really work because the age of formal empires is over. The exercise of power politics has had to adapt, even if the instinct of powerful countries to expand their influence remains.

Hence my approach in The Great Imperial Hangover: to cover imperial legacies from all over the world, looking at the triumphs and tragedies of the Chinese, Ottoman, Mughal, Russian and Western European empires. I do this to interrogate how different modern nations successfully harness or are hobbled by their own imperial pasts. Comparing doesn’t mean choosing. This global approach places a critical spotlight over such sanctimonious notions as ‘my forebears ran an empire that wasn’t as bad as the others’. Or the lazy argument of ‘face it, all empires were murderous, so you need a common standard to enter the debate’. Nevertheless, when countries are imbued with the sense that some imperial legacies are more virtuous than others, this can fuel modern disputes.

One of the biggest is the clash between America’s and China’s rival visions of informal empire. Different imperial legacies have left these superpowers with ambitions and political values that are hard to reconcile, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. This has become more apparent to me since I departed London for Singapore in late 2020 to work at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Pausing to reflect on Singapore, I am struck that not all post-colonial legacies are doomed to toxicity. Singapore recently marked the bicentenary of Sir Stamford Raffles’s arrival in 1819, when he established a trading post for the British Empire in the old kingdom of Singapura. When forging independence in the 1960s Singapore initially pursued an anti-colonial line, but this has softened over time to a pragmatic framing of the British era as one historical chapter amongst several. In 2019, instead of tearing down a statue of Raffles, Singapore chose a more artful approach: to provoke discussions about the past, the statue was painted to resemble the skyscraper behind it, creating the optical illusion of a vanishing Raffles.

As we shift our gaze around the world, a plurality of imperial legacies are evident. Some are managed and softened over time, but others continue to stoke intractable clashes within nations and between nations. The decade may be young, but some of its bitterest disputes have an old imperial vintage.

Samir Puri

Singapore, January 2021

INTRODUCTION

We are in the first empire-free millennium in world history

since ancient times, but the world remains in the throes of a great imperial hangover. Empires are still shaping the twenty-first century in profound ways through their abiding influences on present generations. The purpose of this book is to identify these legacies and explain why understanding the world’s history of empire can help to unlock many of the most troublesome conundrums in contemporary global affairs.

Even a cursory glance at the news suggests that the world appears to have gone mad or, at the very least, to have lost the semblance of regularity that makes us feel safe. Terrorism, Trump and Brexit have led many people to question the coherence of the Western world; Turkey and Russia slip deeper into authoritarian rule; war tears at the fabric of the Middle East and parts of Africa; a vast exodus of refugees flee for a better shot at life; and all the while China’s economic tentacles spread further across the globe. Barely one-fifth of our way into the twenty-first century, it is not unreasonable to seek explanations as to what ‘world order’ means today, and how we can strive towards it.

Why turn to the apparently fusty legacy of empires to explain today’s uncertainties? The end of the world’s many empires is no longer at the forefront of our minds, overtaken by more pressing concerns about what lies round the next corner. And yet empires continue to haunt our minds in all manner of ways, stalking our subconscious understanding of who we are and of our place in the world. Empires have helped to construct national identities and carve out geopolitical realities and mentalities that prove hard to escape. This is as true for those whose great-grandparents were imperialists as it is for those whose countries have lived through subjugation and national liberation. Cities, institutions and infrastructure were built in the name of empires. Borders were hastily drawn and populations rearranged. Assets were stripped to enrich the colonizers at the expense of the colonized.

Merely to point out that the past has an influence on the present is too obvious. The real prize is in learning how this influence is being felt, and in working out what we can do to better fathom and manage the wars, terrorism, political shocks and global tensions that dominate our headlines. While this book is rooted in historical experiences, it is fundamentally forward-looking. It is not concerned with extensive retellings of imperial histories, although I will provide some summaries where necessary. Nor will I provide a running commentary on the minutiae of today’s turbulent politics. Rather, this book straddles history and current affairs. It asks: how do the lingering half-lives of collapsed empires continue to shape such matters as security, foreign policy, international aid and global commerce today?

I will avoid picking any one national perspective, or picking sides in arguments that either categorically denounce or whitewash imperial legacies. Instead I will embark on a world tour, taking in the many varied post-imperial experiences of Europe, Asia, America, the Middle East and Africa. I will not argue that we are entering a new imperial age. Rather, my argument can be expressed concisely: twenty-first-century world order is a story of many intersecting post-imperial legacies. When these legacies collide, misunderstanding, friction, schism or even war can result.

This book is a plea to have greater awareness, as individuals and nations, of how our varied imperial pasts have contributed to why we see the world in such different ways. Our perceptions and beliefs concerning empires are coloured by our own inherited backgrounds, which is why there are rarely right or wrong answers to the questions that empires have thrown up.

Hence my own motivations for writing this book. My family roots are in Britain’s former East African and Indian colonies, which means that my relatives were on the receiving end of British colonialism. Generations later, no matter how assimilated I might feel in contemporary Britain, I retain some identification with non-white regions of the world once subjugated by the British Empire. Innate, unspoken and familial, this is more an awareness of my roots than the stuff of rebellion. Indeed, I took a patriotic career path and signed up to serve the British Foreign Office in a role that would certainly have been closed to my ancestors.

The very fact that I could join the Foreign Office, and work on international security issues, shows that Britain has progressed substantially in the intervening decades since my family arrived after decolonization. Ethnic minorities in modern Britain can expect to receive far warmer welcomes than their parents did, which has meant that even though I was born in ethnically diverse and impoverished east London, I too could become an ‘Englishman’, just so long as I followed the cultural cues. Later, as a civil servant, I was proud to serve my country, but the experience left me with lingering questions around identity – both my own identity and Britain’s national identity in a rapidly changing world, given what seem to me to be the lingering anachronisms in the mentalities of its elite institutions of state and academia.

And there my thoughts might have stopped, but for war erupting in Ukraine in 2014. I spent a year there, monitoring what was happening on the front line as part of an international diplomatic mission. We were not peacekeepers, so we had no means to stop the fighting, only to try and prevent things escalating further. Russia was clearly an aggressor, destabilizing a country that was part of its historical empire, with the goal of preventing Ukraine’s government from drawing closer to the European Union – a club of democratic states that, despite lacking the motivations of the empires of old, had acquired its own empire-like traits, not least in its incessant expansion.

I was outraged that Russia would resort to war to stake its claims for influence in Ukraine. But the experience also convinced me how vital it is to tell different post-imperial stories, because they all matter in our diverse world – especially when they clash.

Returning from Ukraine, I became an academic, lecturing on the subject of wars past and present. Writing this book has afforded me insights into how people around the world interpret their inherited experiences of empire, and this forms the basis of what follows.

How did we get here?

It is a matter of great significance to live in a world without empires. By this, I mean the end of the formal empires of the past, where an outwardly expanding metropolitan core gobbled up territories via conquest. Nowadays, this kind of formal empire seems to be extinct. While certain countries will always be more powerful than others, the outright subjugation of one by another is now rare. Iraq annexed Kuwait in 1990, but was kicked out by a US-led military coalition a year later. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and while it was too strong to dislodge, this has not yet set a precedent for others. Rather, the ways in which powerful states dominate others have evolved to become more like informal empires of political and economic influence.

If empires had not existed, then it would have been necessary to invent something like them, to foster and upscale human progress. Empires have been vessels for order, modernity, culture and conquest since ancient times. Throughout history, civilizations have encountered one another at different stages of technological and political development. It is from here that the pattern of people imposing their will upon others arises. Some empires were notoriously more wicked than others, but the pattern itself holds true.

Understandings of empire changed, depending on who was doing the understanding, and when. The great English writer Samuel Johnson (1709–84) offered this definition in his Dictionary of the English Language:

EMPIRE [empire, French; imperium, Latin]

1. Imperial power; supreme dominion; foreign command. Affect, ye fair ones, who in judgement fit, Your ancient empire over love and wit.

2. The region over which dominion is extended. A nation extended over vast tracts of land, and numbers of people, arrives in times at the ancient name of kingdom, or modern of empire.1

As Dr Johnson’s definition suggests, the age-old notion of kingdoms building their realms by attaching adjacent territories to one another had evolved into ever more expansive empires.

Ancient empires, arising from early civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India, and from city-states like Athens and Rome, spread their visions of civilization and order by bringing nearby peoples into their orbit. These empires spread far and wide, across distances that seemed grandiose to their protagonists, BCE (‘before the current era’).

The monotheistic empires that developed alongside Christianity and Islam provided new impetus in the ‘current era’ (CE). Ancient polytheistic peoples had used empires to promote their own cultures. But the proselytizing of the Islamic conquests in the seventh century, and of the later Christian Crusades, channelled different energies. This spilled out into the wars between rival dynasties and denominations, which characterized Islam’s split into its Sunni and Shia branches, as well as the schisms of the Christian Church.2

Nomadic empires, including those of successive generations of Mongols like Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane, could cover enormous distances as they scythed through the locals, connecting different parts of the world as they went. Some nomadic warriors tried settling down in one place, but their empires ultimately lacked staying power.

Sprawling land-based empires, by comparison, were built around the core of an imperial centre and an established civilization. They became typical in the medieval and early modern eras, such as the Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg and Mughal empires. The most enduring of them lasted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although by that point those that remained had reached their dotage. Creaky and old-fashioned, they had been overtaken by the latest imperial innovation.

Maritime colonial empires were, for a while, the way of the imperial future. From the late 1400s, European nations competed with each other to explore the full extent of the globe, in pursuit of knowledge and profit. Over time, these voyaging Europeans realized they could overwhelm local African, Asian and American kingdoms. Early on, Spanish conquistadors annihilated the Incas in South America and the Aztecs in Central America. The old inland empires in Asia and the Middle East could still hold their own against the Europeans. It was only in the 1700s and the 1800s, as the equilibrium between the world’s empires began to tip decisively in the Europeans’ favour, that they conquered much of the rest of the world.3

This shift was driven by advanced European nations experiencing industrial revolutions at home – bursts in productivity partly fuelled by resources extracted from the colonies. Colonialism, and in particular settler colonialism, is a specific form of imperialism. To reduce a territory to a colony was to claim exclusive rights over its sovereignty.4 Settler colonies involved communities being dispatched from the imperial core to populate this land, in all likelihood to disempower or displace the previous inhabitants.

Occasionally those very settlers would fall out with their own imperial metropole (the parent state of the colony), usually because they wanted more lax independence.5 This brings us to the birth of the USA, which ultimately proved to be a game-changer in the history of empires. Its Independence War was waged by settlers to kick out the British Empire, and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 became a rallying call to this end. Later US presidents took further steps to discredit the ability of Europeans to meddle in their affairs. After Britain fought America’s fledging republic for a second time, its fifth president, James Monroe, issued a doctrine in 1823 that set out why the Old World should stay out of the New World. Nearly a century later President Woodrow Wilson used the tragedy of the Great War – which Europe’s rival empires had brought upon themselves – to argue why colonies should be replaced by sovereign states.

The twentieth century turned into a story of collapsing empires. The First World War, or Great War (1914–18), claimed the Russian tsarist, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and the Kaiser’s German empire – old dynastic empires of the mould that had predominated for centuries. The Second World War (1939–45) was waged to crush the nascent Third Reich, Japanese and Italian imperial projects. It also accelerated the decline of Europe’s older overseas empires, and the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese lost their remaining overseas colonies after 1945.

Decolonization completely changed the world. Nationalism spread like wildfire, as those who had been subjugated by empires gained inspiration from each other’s independence struggles. The torch-paper of anti-colonialism was lit by freedom fighters around the world, desperate to kick off the imperial yoke. Not all independence struggles were successful, but those that were birthed a host of new countries. The age of empires had inadvertently bequeathed nationalism to the world.6

The Cold War (1946–91) was the other defining event of this time. It was an ideological contest in which each superpower assembled global coalitions to support their causes. Whereas the USSR still held a land-based empire (which it had seized from the ashes of the old Russian Empire), the USA did not seek an equivalent. Instead, it engaged in a game that both superpowers were willing to play: seeking client states. No sooner had Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East breathed in the free air of the post-colonial age than the superpowers came knocking with their own list of obligations: to support the communist or capitalist camps, and to receive money and arms in return.

The seemingly underhand ways in which power and influence were projected became an inflammatory topic. Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72) was a revolutionary who agitated against British rule in its Gold Coast colony. After independence, he named the new country Ghana, in homage to the pre-colonial name of a West African kingdom. He became Ghana’s first president in 1960 and authored a tract against imperialism’s newest mutation, writing:

The essence of neocolonialism is that the State that is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside . . . Neocolonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.7

Neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism are still bywords for explaining international bullying. As broad-brush terms, they can appeal to the instincts of fair-minded people the world over: that the ‘big guys’ shouldn’t run rampant over the ‘little guys’ who want to choose their own path.

The extinction of formal empires came (for now) in 1991, with the fragmenting of the Soviet Union and the resultant creation of another brace of newly independent states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Today there are 193 fully recognized sovereign states,8 effectively quadrupling the number in less than a century. A community of sovereign states seems to be a far nobler way of ordering the world, as opposed to carving it up for the unashamed benefit of the small handful of conquerors and colonizers. But while a world comprising sovereign states of apparent legal equivalence is all well and good in principle, in practice it cannot replace the hierarchical jockeying for influence that has always been the game of states.

Some states are so fragile or so small as to be effectively dominated by those that are more powerful. After the end of the Cold War, the USA became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. Today it is perhaps the world’s disputed heavyweight champion. China’s ascent to superpower status is now well recognized. A resurgent Russia is bent on resisting the serfdom of second-tier status, despite its relative economic weakness. Turkey, India and Iran are, in their own ways, carving out independent spheres of influence. The world of 2041 will look different from the world of 1991, when the US had greater latitude to act all over the world without facing challenge.

World affairs is not just a game of states, but of non-state actors too. Some of the knottiest problems in the world arise from nations that missed out on the great sovereign-state giveaway of decolonization. In less volatile parts of the world prospective separatists might opt for referendums, as the Scottish did in the UK in 2016 and the Catalans tried to do in Spain in 2018. There is even an alternative football World Cup for stateless people and nations that are not fully recognized, featuring the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Tibet, Abkhazia and Kurdistan.

In their frustration, some separatists resort to violence, as in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, for example. Civil war and terrorism can follow. Reflecting a newer international breed of terrorist, the jihadist movements of al-Qaeda and Islamic State have become today’s barbarians at the gates. According to jihadist creed, they wage war against heretical Islamic sects and apostate post-colonial Muslim countries alike.

To bring order to the chaos, all manner of humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil-society groups exist to fill the gaps that governments cannot. Sovereign states also sign up for membership in transnational clubs, which pool responsibilities and resources to tackle shared problems. The United Nations (UN), which looked positively sclerotic when its five-member Security Council became log-jammed over Syria’s civil war that began in 2011, looks more dynamic if one focuses on the emergency responses of its Development Programme (UNDP), High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other field bodies.

There is also an alphabet soup of regional organizations, such as the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Ostensibly clubs for common economic interests, they also foster cooperation on other matters of common concern. In reality, however, the dominant voices in these clubs are those members who wrote the rules, paid in the most money and have been there the longest. The most powerful sovereign states still find ways to call the shots. A true regional government – let alone a world government – remains a pipe dream.

This brief canter past some of the pillars and problems of world order shows us what we have built, and what has arisen, in the absence of formal empires. For forward-thinking optimists, this is progress. For those with a historical eye, it is a mere rearranging of the same old problems that periodically beset humanity. We have to remember that, until relatively recently, the empires of the world had an instrumental role in the arrangement of international affairs; in assigning right and responsibility when it came to trade and governing; and in acting as vehicles for people to express allegiance, national pride and even religion. Empires – and reactions against empires – performed these roles for many centuries, and our empire-free world has barely begun.

Crediting or castigating imperial legacies

How the imperial past affects the present is a polarizing subject that provokes strong emotions, with some of us instinctively verging towards crediting empires and their legacies, whilst others castigate them. Are empires (and neo-empires) essentially responsible for the world’s ills? Or, as regrettable as past inhumanities are, did the history of empires essentially create the modern world order?

It can be hard to strike a balance between these views. Empire is so out of fashion that it can be difficult to admit it ever had any positive legacies. Holding both thoughts in one’s head – that yesterday’s advancements also involved horrendous misdeeds – requires nothing less than an act of double-think. It is easier (and more emotionally comforting) to drift towards a polarized view.

It is now almost otherworldly to think that empire was for so long the default mode of political organization. Every empire was unique, but the notion of empire was ubiquitous and was largely taken for granted. Consequently for centuries empire was synonymous with world order. As the academic Dominic Lieven writes, ‘in its time empire was often a force for peace, prosperity and the exchange of ideas across much of the globe’.9 Empires governed disparate sets of peoples and often did so pragmatically rather than murderously, so long as these people proclaimed fealty to their overlords. Injustice was highly likely, but not inevitable in every part of every empire.

Empires propagated ideas, technologies, legal systems and forms of government, even if they were spread by empire-builders who remade other places in their own image as acts of grandiose vanity. In the end, the ultimate export was the sovereign state. Back in the day, there was greater diversity of political systems, from city-states to feudal monarchies and ungoverned frontier realms.10 Now, just picture the rows of diplomats sitting at the UN, each with their country name on a board in front of them, and each representing a people encased within a set of borders.

To the extent that the state system is understood to represent progress, with decolonization came independence, and fuzzy frontiers were replaced by borders. Presidents, prime ministers and parliaments were set up. If these post-colonial states later fell into dictatorships and disorder, this was their waste of the gift of sovereignty: thus might the polarizing ‘world order’ argument go.

Globalization, and the interconnectedness that we take for granted today, was also pioneered by empires. The first Chinese Silk Road (BCE) connected Asia and Europe. Later empires, like those of the Mongols, Ottomans and Mughals, dominated trade across large areas. It was the seaborne expansion of European power that had a proximate impact on the present day (even if European explorers appropriated older trade routes used by Chinese, Indian, Arab or other merchants).11 For a pro-market capitalist today, the debt to the imperial era is clear, from the trade in manufactured goods and raw materials, to the global monetary system.

In sum, even if old imperialisms look utterly distasteful to modern eyes, there is a far bigger picture of progress that links our imperial past to things that we take for granted in the present.

At the other end of the argument, while empires certainly influenced the way the world works, this is the problem. Empires are completely out of step with modern morality, and with the rights and freedoms that all people ought to enjoy. Therefore the beating heart of the modern world resides in the many struggles to overcome empires and oppression. The Davids of anti-imperial sentiment have ordered the modern world, not the Goliaths of empire.

Human progress has therefore involved sweeping away empires and colonies into the dustbin of history, but the struggle continues. Decolonization ought to have brought emancipation, but has in fact been further shackled by unequal power structures that hardened during the old imperial era. Rather than thanking the West for transferring its ideas and technologies around the world, the spirit of protest against these standardizations motivates those who categorically castigate the legacies of the European empires, in particular, that persist today.

Hence ‘empire’, and its associated notions of ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’, is for many people synonymous with inequity, racism, exploitation and the power politics of creating winners and losers. When judged against contemporary moral values, empires look inhumane and primitive. This is especially true if one considers their most terrible excesses, such as transatlantic slavery, as practised by Europe’s colonial powers in Africa and the Americas; and the famines instigated by the British East India Company in Bengal, or by Russia’s rulers against the Ukrainians, in which imperial elites looked on as their subjects wasted away before their eyes.

These legacies of exploitation and racism remain important today. Empires were built on hierarchies, so those in charge will have looked down their noses at those who were subservient. Racism could be used to justify slavery, torture and murder.

Protecting people around the world against prejudicial suffering has become a cornerstone of human-rights laws. The UN played midwife to the birth of new states during decolonization, and established a Decolonization Committee in 1961 for this reason. A year earlier, UN General Assembly resolution 1514 had declared that ‘all peoples have the right to self-determination’. The UN played a crucial role at that moment of history, and during the transition to a post-imperial age.

But the nastier legacies of empires could not be banished through international declarations and free elections. Imperialism was as much an attitude as it was a tangible reality. A champion in post-imperial rehabilitation was Edward Said (1935–2003). The Jerusalem-born Arab Palestinian, who was later an academic in the US, delivered an insight into how empires had allowed Western superiority to be asserted materially, culturally and intellectually. Worse, an imperial trick was to reprogramme those who had been colonized to believe that it was all in their interests, because ‘Westernization’ was being sold as the only route to modernity.12

Not every empire bothered Said equally: ‘There are several empires that I do not discuss: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman, and the Spanish and Portuguese . . . the British, French and American imperial experience has a unique coherence . . . the idea of overseas rule – jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distinct lands – has a privileged status in these three cultures . . . [Whereas] Russia acquired its imperial territories almost exclusively by adjacency.’13

This selectivity is inadequate for our age of greater competition between a rich variety of countries. Picking on Western European imperialism and American neo-imperialism with dedicated fury is not representative of the full range of imperial legacies that still matter.

Were Europe’s colonial empires really in a different category of insidiousness from the Chinese, Russian, Ottoman and others? The histories of these inland empires have perhaps been seen more as part of these regions’ organic heritage than as an alien invasion, although a Taiwanese writer might offer a stiff reaction to claims that the Chinese Empire has been integral to Taiwanese culture, just as a Ukrainian writer might well dispute the cultural heritage of the Russian Empire. If some empires are singled out for their inhumanities, then why not all of them? ‘It seems strange to me to withhold this more balanced approach from the European empires as a matter of doctrine,’ writes the academic John Darwin, who is concerned by the distorting impact of fixating on ‘the moral and cultural aggression’ of the Western world.14 The West clearly did not have a monopoly over empire, since empires emerged on all continents for thousands of years.15 Balanced narratives that take in the wider global view, and that avoid the emotionally comforting positions of polarized and selective stances, are important.

Rather than pick sides (which readers can do, if they so wish), the tone of accommodating diverse and contradictory perspectives is established here. How empires contributed to globalization and the traditions of protest this has provoked have together made today’s world.

Old imperial habits die hard

The relationship between the USA and the Philippines offers an example of how legacies can long outlast the end of empires. For more than a century an empty bell tower had symbolized the unhealed wounds of conquest. Back in 1899, when the USA was an up-and-coming world power, American soldiers were commandeering the lands of yesteryear’s superpower, the Spanish Empire. One such campaign was waged in the Philippines. Having seen off the Spaniards, Filipinos at first welcomed US rule, but later waged an insurgency in a bid for their freedom. A bitter war ensued. In 1901, in Balangiga village, Filipino rebels staged an ambush that inflicted dozens of US casualties. It was America’s bloodiest military loss since Custer’s last stand in 1876, during the Great Sioux War. The church bells of Balangiga rang out as the ambush unfolded. In retaliation, American soldiers later went on a rampage, killing numerous Filipinos and seizing the bells as a war trophy to take to the US.16

In 2018 the US government finally agreed to return the Balangiga bells to the Philippines. It was a proud moment for Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. And it came not a moment too soon for the US, which Duterte had enjoyed criticizing, partly to show his public how tough he could be – but also because he was cultivating the Philippines’ relations with the Pacific’s new up-and-coming power, China. As the page was turned on one phase of history, another was beginning.

Obituaries of empires tend to follow a formula. The outlines of now-dead empires are traced in a succession of maps and their existence bracketed by a range of dates. The obituary is presented as that of a person: it lived from this-to-this year and, in the time afforded to it, is best remembered for the following list of triumphs, misdeeds and progenies . . . All of which is essential historical data.

Empires, however, do not end overnight – they unravel gradually, fraying like a rope under stress, before the strands separate. Even then, threads of a bond with the past can remain in their physical and psychological legacies.

The unique imperial experiences of nations form part of their historical DNA. To carry on with the genetic analogy, just as we retain agency over our personal actions, because we are the products of both nature and nurture, so our inherited historical experiences work in a similar way, with our choices at times constrained by histories that we cannot change.17

It will become clear that an inheritance of past oppression leads to different perspectives than an inheritance of old imperial glory. All regions of the world experienced empires in some ways. In some nations, this experience still lies within living memory. In others, living linkages to old empires have only just slipped away. Regardless, there is no such thing as a singular inherited experience of empire – only a diversity of perspectives, both within and between nations: from a sense of debt, all the way to a sense of catastrophe; from denial, all the way to manifest destiny. The only possible conclusion is that of a plurality of experiences and interpretations of imperial legacies.

Some legacies are visible to the naked eye. Empires have contributed to the map lines of the world. As empires have risen and fallen, they leave in their wake certain distributions of power, demarcations of statehood, and lines in the sand that divide or unite people with each other, and with the natural endowments of the Earth. Movements of people. The drawing of borders. Trade flows for commodities and manufactured goods. Shared traditions. Common languages. Perhaps even traditional holiday destinations. All these things may have been shaped by imperial legacies.

Spotting the psychological legacies of empires requires a different kind of illumination. Unrequited pride, jealousy, enmity, blame and comradeship – these are the invisible forces that criss-cross the globe, linking so many of us in historical melodramas that continue to play out. The memories, experiences and scars of the past will have contributed to how people feel about themselves, where they locate their people in the wider world, and where such feelings as group pride and group blame are directed.18

Empires are only ever as durable as their governing philosophies. When the governing philosophy of an empire collapses, what is left behind: an empire that will collapse too? What remains of these philosophies after the end of empires contributes greatly to the texture of world affairs. Is there a governing class that seems unable to let go of the philosophy itself? How does this manifest itself – psychologically, religiously, politically?

In some cases, past brushes with empire may have been habit-forming for the elites of modern nations. These habits could relate to an expectation of superiority over others. Some former imperial centres, like London and Moscow, still try to project power with modernized versions of some of their old imperial tactics. Conversely, some post-colonial states owe the nature of their existence to being created in the wake of empire. From the Philippines to India and Kenya, anti-imperial rhetoric is still a powerful way for today’s politicians to hold forth on all manner of themes. The same is true in Eastern European counties where memories of impoverishment under recent Russian domination still rankle. Striking one’s own path, free from the vestiges of imperial dominion, remains a powerful political ploy in many parts of the world.

Old experiences may have contributed to path dependencies that persist in our post-imperial age. And we may not even have noticed where these habits came from – only that the decisions of politicians and public today seem to be in tune with the ‘national character’. Imperial experiences are profoundly character-forming. They have contributed to deeply buried and unconsciously held attitudes. This, in turn, may give rise to involuntary compulsions, and to itches that need periodically to be scratched.

Finally there are the cultural legacies of empires. These can be of profound importance, such as the endurance of the Islamic faith in many parts of the world that were touched by past Muslim conquests. Or of Britain’s diffusion of culture across the Anglosphere.

More trivially, nostalgia for an empire that once was can be big business in the entertainment industry. Some viewers may quite like to be reminded that their ancestors ruled vast realms. The British are periodically fixated by dramas set in the Raj, the former Indian colony, in series like The Jewel in the Crown (1984) and films like Viceroy’s House (2017). China’s enormously popular drama, The Story of Yanxi Palace (2018), fictionalizes the schemes of the women of Emperor Qianlong’s court as they compete for his favour. Turkish viewers were gripped by The Magnificent Century (2011–14), which depicted the court of the sixteenth century Ottoman ruler Suleiman.

Period dramas set amidst empires can offer both cultural affirmation and an opportunity to refract modern concerns. This only works because empire represents many people’s heritage. Whether we accept or reject it, or are simply unaware of this heritage, is another matter.

We are not habitually raised with the stories of other people’s imperial heritages, which means it always takes real effort to see the world through each other’s eyes, and to notice the ways in which the material and psychological legacies of empire influence their circumstances and decisions.

The narrative of today

If our own century is to have a story, then it is curious to wonder what historians fifty years hence will opt for. Decolonization, the Cold War, the world wars, the age of empires, the industrial revolutions and the age of dynastic monarchies – each of these is a compelling story with which to encapsulate previous epochs. What description will future generations choose for today?

For those living in the present in any age, events are experienced in a disconnected and unforeseeable fashion. It is only in retrospect that historians can impose any sense of coherence on the past, teasing out the developments that provided crucial catalysts for change and choosing how best to characterize these dynamics. We would do well to bear in mind the words of J. R. Seeley, a writer on the British Empire: ‘Great events are commonly judged by contemporaries quite wrongly. It is in fact one of the chief functions of the historian to correct the contemporary judgement. Instead of making us share the emotions of the passing time, it is his business to point out to us that this event, which absorbed the public attention when it happened, was really of no great importance, and that event, though it passed almost unnoticed, was of infinite consequence.’19

The obvious way to describe the present epoch is as the information revolution age. Widespread use of the Internet just so happened to coincide roughly with the year 2000 and the dawn of the current millennium, which adds to the sense of an opening of a new chapter for humanity. Certainly the ubiquity of the Internet has changed how many of the world’s citizens experience politics, view world affairs, consume information, organize their social lives and locate their identities. This is game-changing stuff around the world. The information revolution and its influence will only spread, as data algorithms increasingly rule our lives and augment the human experience – at least, for those who can afford the latest technology products. Surely, then, this is how we should describe our age.

But it is already obvious that the Internet is not necessarily a tool for freedom, leading to globalized identities and connections that pay little heed to borders. Information always remains open to manipulation, no matter how liberating and novel the technical platform. Flooding people with information can be just as distorting as the censorship of old, even in democracies with a free media. Official narratives share bandwidth with citizen journalism (which can itself be punishable in places with controlling regimes, such as China and Turkey). Scandals besetting social-media giant Facebook over manipulation of its user data have shown that, if information is targeted at individuals to reinforce their biases over a number of political issues, the Internet is just a novel medium through which the age-old dark arts of propaganda are practised today. Nor is the Internet about to skip over national regulations. Try logging onto Facebook in China. Old-fashioned national protectionism has hardly drawn its last breath, and may well rear its head more prominently in the future.

So I am not convinced that information utterly defines our age. Those heralding the brave new world of connectivity would disagree with me. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari is even convinced that ‘the global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group’.20 He argues that surely the more connected we are, the better placed we might be to employ our competitive impulses productively, seek the comparative advantages of production and perhaps even strive for the common good?

But no matter how rapid our technological advances might be, there are no full stops in history. One epoch does not stop before another starts – they blur messily into each other. All the trappings of modernity and its rapid techno-advances merely refract and refashion those elements of the human spirit that are unchanging. An obsession with what is novel can obscure a focus on what is being inherited from our immediate past. We should question whether the world has moved very far from George Orwell’s sobering observation that ‘The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions – racial pride, leader worship, religious belief, love of war – which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms.’21 Whatever the criteria being used by people today to identify more of their own kindred spirits, it is hardly as if parochialism and discrimination have vanished from the world.

So while at first glance it seems utterly anachronistic to invoke empire as a lens through which to fathom our unfolding century, the empires of a bygone age cast a long shadow over how we think about ourselves and, as we look across the globe, how we think about and judge each other. Imperial legacies can be mundane, impacting on us in ways we might scarcely notice as we go about our daily lives. But they can also be of profound importance, helping to power the geopolitical tectonic plates upon which our fates depend.

The opening chapter explains how the USA refashioned the notion of empire in the latter part of the twentieth century into that of a largely unseen empire of influence. This is followed by chapters on the UK, the European continent as a whole and Russia, explaining the varying ways in which these places have adapted to the disappearance of formal empires. The next part of the book covers China, India, the Middle East and Africa, contrasting their experiences of adapting to the post-imperial world.

Throughout, it is the different experiences of dealing with imperial legacies that matter, not the similarities. Dealing with difference is essential to a relatively harmonious future for our world, and there are often no greater differences than our various imperial inheritances.

ONE

AMERICA’S IMPERIAL INHERITANCE

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

Graham Greene (1904–91), The Quiet American1

There will be times when we must again play the role of the world’s reluctant sheriff. This will not change – nor should it.

Barack Obama, Audacity of Hope (2006)2

If we’re going to continue to be the policeman of the world, we ought to be paid for it.

Donald Trump, Crippled America (2015)3

Map 1 The global military presence of the United States, 2019 (circles indicate countries or territories with a US base that would be too small to appear otherwise)

Opinions around the world differ sharply over whether the USA should conduct itself like a global empire, and whether doing so on balance helps to stabilize or destabilize the world. The virtues and vices of America’s global role have been debated for the best part of a century. Fewer and fewer people alive today can recall a world in which the military, economic and cultural power of the USA has not been an overwhelming global reality.

America’s imperial heritage is the historical key that explains why opinions are so strongly divided. Understanding how a nation that was born out of its anti-imperialist stance would end up adopting its very own imperial practices is a complex matter. By kicking out the British Empire, the fledgling American nation made the repudiation of its imperial inheritance a pillar of its self-identity. Notions of freedom became essential to America’s national creed, whether this meant freedom of consumer choice, freedom from government oversight or freedom from tyranny.

At America’s birth as a nation, the cause was unambiguous: freedom from the clutches of colonialism. However, traces of imperial DNA remained. Contradictory impulses, ignited in its past, still smoulder deep in America’s heart, and they continue to shape its domestic character and its foreign-policy debates.4

This became clear as its power grew across North America and then around the world. In a burst of continental conquest, America captured lands between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Native Americans, Mexicans and European imperialists alike were kept out or swept aside. Liberty was denied to African slaves and their descendants. Starting in the nineteenth century, America’s military began to wage a succession of wars of choice in far-flung lands. Its annexations and conquests stretched from Cuba to the Philippines. These American soldiers were unknowingly starting a military tradition of securing their country’s interests by fighting in distant lands.

The tradition endures for America’s ‘imperial grunts’, who now fight and die not for colonies, but for outposts from which the USA can exert global influence.5 ‘From the shores of Tripoli to the halls of Montezuma,’ begins the US Marine Corps Hymn: Tripoli refers to the First Barbary War in 1805; Montezuma to the Mexican-American War in 1847. By remembering past wars, new US Marine recruits are reminded that they are expected to fight abroad today. Waging war abroad, for good or ill, has been essential to American military culture.

This has enabled America to stand tall at key moments in global history. During the Second World War, and again at the Cold War’s finale, America appeared to be leading the world away from tyranny. Helping to reconstruct Western Europe and Japan after 1945, and presiding over the spread of democracy east of where the Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, have been high points. These are the moments in history when America’s heady mix of wealth, military clout and self-professed moral authority have positively altered the destinies of people far and wide.

These same compulsions have also led to disastrous interventions in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and Iraq in the 2000s. Two different generations have now witnessed America’s military flounder in ill-begotten wars, each with the expressed intention of spreading democracy abroad.

Over a long span of time in world affairs, there can be no such thing as consistency of purpose or outcomes in the way America has defended its understanding of the free world. Inconsistency, however, seems endemic.

From invading Iraq, to its refusal to act decisively in Syria, America’s global posture has lurched between dramatic over-engagement and equally dramatic under-engagement. After 2011, when the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad began to massacre his own people in that country’s civil war, America remained on the sidelines, demanding that Assad step down, but not forcing him to do so. While the world was hardly clamouring for another American regime-changing invasion, the policy debates in Washington DC conveyed a sense of war-wariness and a hesitancy to intervene. Syria’s war has raised an important question: if America cannot find effective ways to step in to punish those who are evidently unleashing evil, then who will? In the end, Russia’s military stepped in to back Assad in September 2015, helping his army to win.

The US finds that it is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t, get involved in the world’s problems. Some Americans might be puzzled at how their country’s expenditure in blood and treasure, with an annual defence budget approaching $700 billion, can be spent in maintaining world order when that very same world, in a pique of ingratitude, derides the USA as ‘imperialist’.

While the USA does not self-identify as an empire, it has become the embodiment of an informal empire. Its global reach includes: military bases dotted around the world; fleets of globally deployable aircraft carriers; strategic alliances on every continent; orbital satellites that guide missiles; technology innovations with global consumer appeal; and economic power underpinned by the USA dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The USA can dominate many parts of the world, or at least it can make its influence telling. For now it remains the country that can intervene militarily virtually anywhere to defend its vision of world order, and its notions of right and wrong.

Questions over whether America should be doing any of this have defined global politics for decades. They cannot be addressed without recourse to the origins of America’s compulsions to be a superpower, which in turn reside in its imperial legacies.

Frontiersmen and colonizers: America’s imperial experience

Relative to other places, the USA is a young country – although it has existed for nearly a quarter of a millennium, which is more than enough time for successive historical influences to have accumulated, each leaving its mark on the country’s development.

With a little historical imagination, it is possible to picture the panorama of America’s expansion. From English settlers establishing the Jamestown (Virginia) and Plymouth (Massachusetts) colonies along the east coast in the seventeenth century; to the Independence War that cast off the shackles of British rule in the eighteenth century; to the USA’s expansion past the ‘Wild West’ and its incorporation of Texas, New Mexico, California and other states in the nineteenth century – a colonizing drive for continental control is the opening chapter in the American national story.

Empire is what the USA escaped from, and empire is what the USA later became. Not that you would know this from the way America has usually recited its own national story. As the Thirteen Colonies broke free from the British Empire, they birthed not only an independent country, but also a formidable founding myth.

The Boston Tea Party on 16 December 1773, when the Sons of Liberty revolted against British taxation, escalated into a full-blown insurgency. What followed is retold as the stuff of pure American patriotism. To invoke ‘the spirit of 1776’ is to summon an emotively powerful history that has passed into legend. Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence intoning that ‘all men are created equal’ have provided the USA with its moral guiding light as an incubator of freedom. General George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River at the Battle of Trenton in 1776, immortalized in the iconic painting by Emanuel Leutze, is a potent visualization of plucky, freedom-seeking rebels striving against tyranny. British soldiers and their allies were sent packing, and in 1783 the USA was recognized by Britain as an independent country.

Americans have tended to interpret the founding myth in creationist terms – not religiously, but in the sense of their nation having arisen from sudden and seismic events, rather than having evolved with roots and antecedents that stretch back far further.6 In this sense, America’s institutions and ideals were painted onto a blank canvas. It was ‘year-zero’ in 1776, and questions of inheritance were less compelling than the idealism of a fresh start. As George Washington said in 1790: ‘the establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness’.7 The sentiment has stuck in terms of providing an undergirding for American patriotism.

Historians have pointed out that the events of the Independence War do not really offer a basis for extrapolating a lasting sense of national mission. Some historians are rather more blunt than others. Hugh Bicheno is unapologetic: ‘Unfortunately it remains true that any criticism of the US is likely to be answered with a recitation about how much worse everywhere else is and always has been, a reflex drawing much of its vehemence from the Foundation Myth. One definition of immaturity is an inability to grasp that one’s birth did not transform the world.’8 Ouch! Is this at all fair?

The War of Independence was no straightforward fight between plucky rebels and a nasty colonial overlord. The USA was born from a competition between rival European imperial powers over North America, which was both a valuable prize in itself and a gateway to the Caribbean, to Central America and eventually to the Pacific Ocean.

When the Thirteen Colonies revolted against the British Empire’s terms of trade, the French and Spanish empires were watching carefully. As George Washington’s military campaign gathered momentum, France stuck in its oar, allying with Washington’s rebels in 1778. Spain joined the fray the following year. Franco-Spanish naval actions challenged the Royal Navy, hindering its ability to blockade the rebels. On land, French forces played a role in wearing down the British. The British themselves were reliant on local allies and imported Hessian (German) troops. As befitted an imperial and not a national age, the fighting forces were a patchwork of professional soldiers, mercenaries and locals who happened to be caught up in the swirl of violence.