Empire

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  An empire is a realm controlled by a monarch or other official and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries. That center, sometimes called the metropole, holds political power over everything beyond it. Inside its borders, different populations may carry different sets of rights and may be governed in entirely different ways. The word itself descends from the Roman concept of Imperium. Yet for all its weight, the term resists a clean definition. Not every state with sprawling territory earns the name. Some self-declared empires were never accepted by their own contemporaries or by later historians. The Central African Empire of 1976 to 1979 is one such case. So are certain Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in early England. So what actually makes an empire an empire, and not merely a large state? Why did scholars come to disagree so bitterly over whether the word belongs to politics or to economics? Why did countries that once proudly wore the title vanish from the map in a single century, and why does the United States today refuse a label that critics keep trying to pin on it? The answers run from a city in southern Egypt around 3200 BC to the war on terror, and they pass through nearly every major civilization in between.

• 2. Drawing The Boundary

  ›

  Michael W. Doyle defined empire as "effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society." That single sentence captures what most definitions circle around: one society commanding another. An empire, in this view, is an aggregate of many territories under a supreme ruler or oligarchy. It stands in contrast to a federation, which is an extensive state voluntarily composed of autonomous states and peoples. Rein Taagepera offered a tighter formula, calling an empire "any relatively large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign."

  Josep Colomer drew the sharpest line between empires and ordinary states. Empires, he argued, were vastly larger than states and lacked fixed or permanent boundaries, where a state had fixed ones. Empires gathered a compound of diverse groups and territorial units with asymmetric links to the center. A state, by contrast, claimed supreme authority over a single territory and population. Empires ran on multi-level, overlapping jurisdictions. States sought monopoly and homogenization.

  Peter Bang described empires as "composite, layered and anything but uniform in their internal organization of power." Sometimes, though, the word is only a semantic construction. When a ruler simply assumes the title of emperor, the polity logically becomes an empire even without gaining a single acre. Korea proclaimed itself an empire in 1897, far from expanding, while on the verge of being annexed by the Empire of Japan.

• 3. Land Power And Sea Power

  ›

  Edward Luttwak identified two main ways to build and hold an imperial structure. The first is a territorial empire of direct conquest and control by force. The second is a coercive, hegemonic empire of indirect control. Direct conquest yields greater tribute and tighter political grip, yet it pins military forces to fixed garrisons and chokes off further expansion. Indirect control delivers less tribute but frees those forces to keep pushing outward.

  The Roman Empire and the Mongol Empire show one branch of this divide. Both relied on land forces and consisted mostly of contiguous territory, a form scholars call tellurocracy. Territorial empires such as the Macedonian and Byzantine tended to extend directly outward from their original frontier. Their maritime counterpart is the thalassocracy, an empire of islands and coasts knit to a terrestrial homeland by a powerful navy. The Dutch Colonial Empire and the British Empire belong here, along with the Athenian-dominated Delian League, with their looser structures and scattered possessions.

  Many empires arose from outright military conquest, folding the vanquished into a political union. But that was never the only path. The Athenian, Roman, and British empires developed at least partly under elective auspices. The Holy Roman Empire came together by electing its emperor through votes from member realms in the Imperial election. The Empire of Brazil simply declared itself one after separating from the Portuguese Empire in 1822.

• 4. The Lenin Quarrel

  ›

  Lenin cancelled all earlier forms of imperialism and began its history in the 1760s, a move that detonated a century of scholarly argument. His definition stripped the essence of empire out of politics and fixed it on economics, denying that modern capitalist imperialism shared anything with the empires of the past. To Lenin, imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism, which meant it could not exist before 1876. Mainstream historians of empire were left puzzled. Such a concept, one objected, is not very helpful "if we do not know for certain whether it fits the facts of two millennia or two generations."

  Kenneth Waltz pressed the contradiction further. He believed the supposed cause of imperialism, capitalism, appeared much younger than its effect. It was, he wrote, as though Newton explained gravitation by a 17th-century phenomenon while ignoring that gravitation had operated earlier. Critics dismissed Lenin's work as a political pamphlet rather than a scientific thesis, suited for "the half-educated whose power of criticism was not fully developed."

  Michael Doyle observed that imperialism, through this lens, turned into an economic and European phenomenon. The pamphlet re-defined empire as the original sin of European peoples who had corrupted an innocent world. The word imperialist became, in his phrase, "the 20th-century version of the devil." Most historians, by contrast, recognize that imperialism predates European colonialism by several millennia, a gap the 2021 Oxford World History of Empire urged scholars to take seriously.

• 5. The River Valleys

  ›

  The earliest known empire appeared in southern Egypt sometime around 3200 BC. Southern Egypt then held three kingdoms, each centered on a powerful city, and Hierapolis conquered the other two over two centuries before growing into the country of Egypt. Sargon of Akkad built an early all-Mesopotamian empire in the 24th century BC, reaching into Anatolia, the Levant, and Ancient Iran. Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria and Hammurabi of Babylon repeated the feat in the 19th and 18th centuries BC.

  Thutmose III ruled the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt in the 15th century BC, making it ancient Africa's major force by absorbing Nubia and the city-states of the Levant. In the Amarna Period, spanning the 15th to 13th centuries BC, Egypt joined the Middle Assyrian Empire, the Hittite Empire, the Mitanni, and the Elamites in a club of great powers. Egypt and the Hittites clashed at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC. The confrontation settled nothing, and the late Bronze Age collapse soon dissolved the entire system.

  The Neo-Assyrian Empire, lasting from 916 to 612 BC, was the first to recover. By 673 BC, Assyria had conquered the whole Fertile Crescent, including Cyprus and Egypt. The triumph proved short-lived. In the 6th century BC, the Median Empire, the Babylonians, the Scythians, and the Cimmerians allied against it, and their combined armies razed the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, in 612 BC. The fall of Nineveh marked the end of the River Valleys age. Never again would a world-leading empire be centered in a great river valley.

• 6. The Axial Surge

  ›

  From 600 BC, the area of the largest empire would never again fall below 2.0 million square kilometers, a size never reached before that threshold. The Axial Age of the mid-first millennium BC saw the most dramatic imperial expansion in premodern history, sweeping across the Indo-Mediterranean region and China. It culminated with the Roman, Kushan, and Han Empires ruling as many as two-thirds of all people on Earth, the most extreme degree of imperial consolidation ever recorded.

  The Achaemenid Empire, from 550 to 330 BC, is considered the first great empire in history, often called the first world empire. It covered Mesopotamia, Egypt, parts of Greece, Thrace, the Middle East, much of Central Asia, and North-Western India. Alexander the Great overthrew it, and his short-lived empire passed to the Diadochi, whose Seleucid, Ptolemaic, and Antigonid states are grouped as the Hellenistic Empire. In India, Chandragupta Maurya founded the Maurya Empire in 322 BC with the help of Chanakya. Under Ashoka the Great it became the first Indian empire to conquer the whole peninsula, a feat repeated only by the Gupta and Mughal Empires.

  In 221 BC, the State of Qin ended the Warring States period and forged the Qin Empire, whose sovereign took the new title Huangdi, translated as Emperor. The Qin gave China the Great Wall, the Terracotta Army, and standardized currency, weights, measures, and writing. It laid the foundation for the Han dynasty, under whose Emperor Wu, from 156 to 87 BC, the Xiongnu were pacified and the Silk Road opened. In the first two centuries of the Common Era, only four empires stretched between the Pacific and the Atlantic: the Han, the Kushan, the Parthian, and the Roman.

• 7. Rome's Long Shadow

  ›

  The Romans were the first people to invent and embody the concept of empire, holding two mandates: to wage war and to make and execute laws. The Latin word imperium derives from imperare, meaning "to command," and first referred to a magistrate's authority, usually military. As Rome expanded overseas, the term came to describe its power over colonies and client states, and successful generals earned the honorific imperator, roughly "commander." Augustus established a new de facto monarchy while preserving the appearance of a republic, using the informal titles augustus and princeps, until imperator came to denote the office now called emperor.

  The Romans believed deeply in what a later age would call a civilizing mission. Cicero legitimized it, writing that only under Roman rule could the world flourish and prosper. The ideology spread across the Mediterranean and beyond. People began to build houses like Romans, eat the same food, wear the same clothes, and play the same games. Even citizenship and the authority to rule were granted to people born outside Roman territory. Yet the empire rested on exploitation, drawing slaves and money from the peripheries, and that absolute reliance on conquered peoples would ultimately bring it down.

  The Roman Catholic Church, founded in the early Imperial Period, spread across Europe first through evangelists and later through official promulgation. The legal systems of France and its former colonies remain strongly shaped by Roman law. The United States was founded on a model inspired by the Roman Republic, with upper and lower legislative assemblies and executive power vested in a single president. That president, as commander-in-chief, echoes the ancient titles imperator princeps. Since 2002, the source notes, all the world is divided among US commands that literally reflect Roman imperia.

• 8. The Negative Turn

  ›

  In the mid-twentieth century the word empire took on a negative connotation, viewed as inherently immoral or illegitimate. Traditional or overt empire destroyed and discredited itself in the World Wars. The damage ran deepest in German, where empire is reich and instantly summons the Third Reich. For the first time in history, countries that had proudly called themselves empires disappeared from the map.

  The postwar world fell under two superpowers, both of which proclaimed themselves enemies of empire. The West contained the imperialist East while the East and the South resisted the imperialist West. As former colonies came to form the majority of states in the United Nations, the word lost all legitimacy in that forum. "Any state stupid enough to call itself an empire became subject automatically to UN resolutions on decolonisation."

  Decolonization then unwound the European empires one by one. The British Empire evolved into a loose Commonwealth of Nations, the French into a Francophone commonwealth, the Portuguese into a Lusophone one. France returned Kwang-Chou-Wan to China in 1946. Britain handed back Hong Kong in 1997 after 150 years, and the Portuguese territory of Macau reverted to China in 1999. Both Macau and Hong Kong became Special Administrative Regions rather than ordinary provinces. The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989 to 1991, leaving the United States as the only superpower.

  Krishan Kumar argued that what vanished in the 20th century was only the name. No state calls itself an empire anymore, yet the phenomenon continues under other names, producing a world far from the theoretical one of equal states. Paraphrasing Mark Twain and William Faulkner, he suggested that rumors of empires' death are greatly exaggerated, and that their "past is never dead; it is not even past."

  The United States is the most widely discussed case. Thomas Jefferson called it an "Empire of Liberty" and argued that "no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government." In the 1780s, awaiting the fall of the Spanish empire, he predicted his country would gain its territory "piece by piece." Even so, the founding belief in anti-imperialist principles has kept many from naming America an empire. David Ludden describes "ideological blinders" that render the empire invisible to its own citizens, who, as he puts it, "prefer to depict the U.S. as a nation pursuing its own interests and ideals."

  The 2021 Oxford World History of Empire took the matter head on. Its editor, Peter Fibiger Bang, wrote that humanity has moved beyond the postcolonial moment and that imperialism has resurfaced. The leading military powers of today, the United States, China, and Russia, pursue imperial policies despite their anti-imperialist rhetoric. John M. MacKenzie, having listed the United States, China, Russia, Israel, and ISIS as contemporary imperial phenomena, reached a blunt conclusion: "What is incontrovertible is that empires are vital to an understanding not only of human history, but also of the world we live in now."