11 Imperial Visions
THE ANCIENT ROMANS WERE USED TO being defeated. Like the
rulers of most of history’s great empires, they could lose battle after battle but
still win the war. An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is
not really an empire. Yet even the Romans found it hard to stomach the news
arriving from northern Iberia in the middle of the second century BC.
A small,
insignificant mountain town called Numantia, inhabited by the peninsula’s
native Celts, had dared to throw off the Roman yoke. Rome at the time was the
unquestioned master of the entire Mediterranean basin, having vanquished the
Macedonian and Seleucid empires, subjugated the proud city states of Greece,
and turned Carthage into a smouldering ruin. The Numantians had nothing on
their side but their fierce love of freedom and their inhospitable terrain. Yet they
forced legion after legion to surrender or retreat in shame.
Eventually, in 134 BC, Roman patience snapped. The Senate decided to send
Scipio Aemilianus, Rome’s foremost general and the man who had levelled
Carthage, to take care of the Numantians. He was given a massive army of more
than 30,000 soldiers. Scipio, who respected the fighting spirit and martial skill of
the Numantians, preferred not to waste his soldiers in unnecessary combat.
Instead, he encircled Numantia with a line of fortifications, blocking the town’s
contact with the outside world. Hunger did his work for him. After more than a
year, the food supply ran out. When the Numantians realised that all hope was
lost, they burned down their town; according to Roman accounts, most of them
killed themselves so as not to become Roman slaves.
Numantia later became a symbol of Spanish independence and courage.
Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, wrote a tragedy called The
Siege of Numantia which ends with the town’s destruction, but also with a vision
of Spain’s future greatness. Poets composed paeans to its fierce defenders and
painters committed majestic depictions of the siege to canvas. In 1882, its ruins
were declared a national monument’ and became a pilgrimage site for Spanish
patriots. In the 1950s and 1960s, the most popular comic books in Spain weren’t
about Superman and Spiderman – they told of the adventures of El Jabato, an
imaginary ancient Iberian hero who fought against the Roman oppressors. The
ancient Numantians are to this day Spain’s paragons of heroism and patriotism,
cast as role models for the country’s young people.
Yet Spanish patriots extol the Numantians in Spanish – a romance language
that is a progeny of Scipio’s Latin. The Numantians spoke a now dead and lost
Celtic language. Cervantes wrote The Siege of Numantia in Latin script, and the
play follows Graeco-Roman artistic models. Numantia had no theatres. Spanish
patriots who admire Numantian heroism tend also to be loyal followers of the
Roman Catholic Church – don’t miss that first word – a church whose leader still
sits in Rome and whose God prefers to be addressed in Latin. Similarly, modern
Spanish law derives from Roman law; Spanish politics is built on Roman
foundations; and Spanish cuisine and architecture owe a far greater debt to
Roman legacies than to those of the Celts of Iberia. Nothing is really left of
Numantia save ruins. Even its story has reached us thanks only to the writings of
Roman historians. It was tailored to the tastes of Roman audiences which
relished tales of freedom-loving barbarians. The victory of Rome over Numantia
was so complete that the victors co-opted the very memory of the vanquished.
It’s not our kind of story. We like to see underdogs win. But there is no
justice in history. Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the
armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion.
Empires, too, ultimately fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring
legacies.
Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one
empire or another.
What is an Empire?
An empire is a political order with two important characteristics. First, to
qualify for that designation you have to rule over a significant number of distinct
peoples, each possessing a different cultural identity and a separate territory.
How many peoples exactly? Two or three is not sufficient. Twenty or thirty is
plenty. The imperial threshold passes somewhere in between.
Second, empires are characterised by flexible borders and a potentially
unlimited appetite. They can swallow and digest more and more nations and
territories without altering their basic structure or identity. The British state of
today has fairly clear borders that cannot be exceeded without altering the
fundamental structure and identity of the state. A century ago almost any place
on earth could have become part of the British Empire.
Cultural diversity and territorial flexibility give empires not only their unique
character, but also their central role in history. It’s thanks to these two
characteristics that empires have managed to unite diverse ethnic groups and
ecological zones under a single political umbrella, thereby fusing together larger
and larger segments of the human species and of planet Earth.
It should be stressed that an empire is defined solely by its cultural diversity
and flexible borders, rather than by its origins, its form of government, its
territorial extent, or the size of its population. An empire need not emerge from
military conquest. The Athenian Empire began its life as a voluntary league, and
the Habsburg Empire was born in wedlock, cobbled together by a string of
shrewd marriage alliances. Nor must an empire be ruled by an autocratic
emperor. The British Empire, the largest empire in history, was ruled by a
democracy. Other democratic (or at least republican) empires have included the
modern Dutch, French, Belgian and American empires, as well as the premodern
empires of Novgorod, Rome, Carthage and Athens.
Size, too, does not really matter. Empires can be puny. The Athenian Empire
at its zenith was much smaller in size and population than today’s Greece. The
Aztec Empire was smaller than today’s Mexico. Both were nevertheless empires,
whereas modern Greece and modern Mexico are not, because the former
gradually subdued dozens and even hundreds of different polities while the latter
have not. Athens lorded it over more than a hundred formerly independent city
states, whereas the Aztec Empire, if we can trust its taxation records, ruled 371
different tribes and peoples.1
How was it possible to squeeze such a human potpourri into the territory of a
modest modern state? It was possible because in the past there were many more
distinct peoples in the world, each of which had a smaller population and
occupied less territory than today’s typical people. The land between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan River, which today struggles to satisfy the
ambitions of just two peoples, easily accommodated in biblical times dozens of
nations, tribes, petty kingdoms and city states.
Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human
diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique
characteristics of numerous peoples (such as the Numantians), forging out of
them new and much larger groups.
Evil Empires?
In our time, ‘imperialist’ ranks second only to ‘fascist’ in the lexicon of
political swear words. The contemporary critique of empires commonly takes
two forms:
1. Empires do not work. In the long run, it is not possible to rule effectively
over a large number of conquered peoples.
2. Even if it can be done, it should not be done, because empires are evil
engines of destruction and exploitation. Every people has a right to selfdetermination,
and should never be subject to the rule of another.
From a historical perspective, the first statement is plain nonsense, and the
second is deeply problematic.
The truth is that empire has been the world’s most common form of political
organisation for the last 2,500 years. Most humans during these two and a half
millennia have lived in empires. Empire is also a very stable form of
government. Most empires have found it alarmingly easy to put down rebellions.
In general, they have been toppled only by external invasion or by a split within
the ruling elite. Conversely, conquered peoples don’t have a very good record of
freeing themselves from their imperial overlords. Most have remained
subjugated for hundreds of years. Typically, they have been slowly digested by
the conquering empire, until their distinct cultures fizzled out.
For example, when the Western Roman Empire finally fell to invading
Germanic tribes in 476 AD, the Numantians, Arverni, Helvetians, Samnites,
Lusitanians, Umbrians, Etruscans and hundreds of other forgotten peoples whom
the Romans conquered centuries earlier did not emerge from the empires
eviscerated carcass like Jonah from the belly of the great fish. None of them
were left. The biological descendants of the people who had identified
themselves as members of those nations, who had spoken their languages,
worshipped their gods and told their myths and legends, now thought, spoke and
worshipped as Romans.
In many cases, the destruction of one empire hardly meant independence for
subject peoples. Instead, a new empire stepped into the vacuum created when the
old one collapsed or retreated. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the
Middle East. The current political constellation in that region – a balance of
power between many independent political entities with more or less stable
borders – is almost without parallel any time in the last several millennia. The
last time the Middle East experienced such a situation was in the eighth century
BC – almost 3,000 years ago! From the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the
eighth century BC until the collapse of the British and French empires in the
mid-twentieth century AD, the Middle East passed from the hands of one empire
into the hands of another, like a baton in a relay race. And by the time the British
and French finally dropped the baton, the Aramaeans, the Ammonites, the
Phoenicians, the Philistines, the Moabites, the Edomites and the other peoples
conquered by the Assyrians had long disappeared.
True, today’s Jews, Armenians and Georgians claim with some measure of
justice that they are the offspring of ancient Middle Eastern peoples. Yet these
are only exceptions that prove the rule, and even these claims are somewhat
exaggerated. It goes without saying that the political, economic and social
practices of modern Jews, for example, owe far more to the empires under which
they lived during the past two millennia than to the traditions of the ancient
kingdom of Judaea.
If King David were to show up in an ultra-Orthodox
synagogue in present-day Jerusalem, he would be utterly bewildered to find
people dressed in East European clothes, speaking in a German dialect (Yiddish)
and having endless arguments about the meaning of a Babylonian text (the
Talmud). There were neither synagogues, volumes of Talmud, nor even Torah
scrolls in ancient Judaea.
Building and maintaining an empire usually required the vicious slaughter of
large populations and the brutal oppression of everyone who was left. The
standard imperial toolkit included wars, enslavement, deportation and genocide.
When the Romans invaded Scotland in AD 83, they were met by fierce
resistance from local Caledonian tribes, and reacted by laying waste to the
country. In reply to Roman peace offers, the chieftain Calgacus called the
Romans ‘the ruffians of the world’, and said that ‘to plunder, slaughter and
robbery they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it
peace’.2
This does not mean, however, that empires leave nothing of value in their
wake. To colour all empires black and to disavow all imperial legacies is to
reject most of human culture. Imperial elites used the profits of conquest to
finance not only armies and forts but also philosophy, art, justice and charity. A
significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence
to the exploitation of conquered populations. The profits and prosperity brought
by Roman imperialism provided Cicero, Seneca and St Augustine with the
leisure and wherewithal to think and write; the Taj Mahal could not have been
built without the wealth accumulated by Mughal exploitation of their Indian
subjects; and the Habsburg Empire’s profits from its rule over its Slavic,
Hungarian and Romanian-speaking provinces paid Haydn’s salaries and
Mozart’s commissions. No Caledonian writer preserved Calgacus’ speech for
posterity. We know of it thanks to the Roman historian Tacitus. In fact, Tacitus
probably made it up. Most scholars today agree that Tacitus not only fabricated
the speech but invented the character of Calgacus, the Caledonian chieftain, to
serve as a mouthpiece for what he and other upper-class Romans thought about
their own country.
Even if we look beyond elite culture and high art, and focus instead on the
world of common people, we find imperial legacies in the majority of modern
cultures. Today most of us speak, think and dream in imperial languages that
were forced upon our ancestors by the sword. Most East Asians speak and dream
in the language of the Han Empire. No matter what their origins, nearly all the
inhabitants of the two American continents, from Alaska’s Barrow Peninsula to
the Straits of Magellan, communicate in one of four imperial languages:
Spanish, Portuguese, French or English. Present-day Egyptians speak Arabic,
think of themselves as Arabs, and identify wholeheartedly with the Arab Empire
that conquered Egypt in the seventh century and crushed with an iron fist the
repeated revolts that broke out against its rule. About 10 million Zulus in South
Africa hark back to the Zulu age of glory in the nineteenth century, even though
most of them descend from tribes who fought against the Zulu Empire, and were
incorporated into it only through bloody military campaigns.
It’s for Your Own Good
The first empire about which we have definitive information was the
Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great (c.2250 BC). Sargon began his career as
the king of Kish, a small city state in Mesopotamia. Within a few decades he
managed to conquer not only all other Mesopotamian city states, but also large
territories outside the Mesopotamian heartland. Sargon boasted that he had
conquered the entire world. In reality, his dominion stretched from the Persian
Gulf to the Mediterranean, and included most of today’s Iraq and Syria, along
with a few slices of modern Iran and Turkey.
The Akkadian Empire did not last long after its founder’s death, but Sargon
left behind an imperial mantle that seldom remained unclaimed.
For the next
1,700 years, Assyrian, Babylonian and Hittite kings adopted Sargon as a role
model, boasting that they, too, had conquered the entire world. Then, around 550
BC, Cyrus the Great of Persia came along with an even more impressive boast.
Map 4. The Akkadian Empire and the Persian Empire.
The kings of Assyria always remained the kings of Assyria. Even when they
claimed to rule the entire world, it was obvious that they were doing it for the
greater glory of Assyria, and they were not apologetic about it. Cyrus, on the
other hand, claimed not merely to rule the whole world, but to do so for the sake
of all people. ‘We are conquering you for your own benefit,’ said the Persians.
Cyrus wanted the peoples he subjected to love him and to count themselves
lucky to be Persian vassals. The most famous example of Cyrus’ innovative
efforts to gain the approbation of a nation living under the thumb of his empire
was his command that the Jewish exiles in Babylonia be allowed to return to
their Judaean homeland and rebuild their temple. He even offered them financial
assistance. Cyrus did not see himself as a Persian king ruling over Jews – he was
also the king of the Jews, and thus responsible for their welfare.
The presumption to rule the entire world for the benefit of all its inhabitants
was startling. Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a
xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’
and ‘they’. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and
customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We
were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don’t want to see
any of them in our territory, and we don’t care an iota what happens in their
territory. They are barely even human. In the language of the Dinka people of
the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not
people. The Dinka’s bitter enemies are the Nuer. What does the word Nuer mean
in Nuer language? It means ‘original people’. Thousands of kilometres from the
Sudan deserts, in the frozen ice-lands of Alaska and north-eastern Siberia, live
the Yupiks. What does Yupik mean in Yupik language? It means ‘real people’.3
In contrast with this ethnic exclusiveness, imperial ideology from Cyrus
onward has tended to be inclusive and all-encompassing. Even though it has
often emphasised racial and cultural differences between rulers and ruled, it has
still recognised the basic unity of the entire world, the existence of a single set of
principles governing all places and times, and the mutual responsibilities of all
human beings. Humankind is seen as a large family: the privileges of the parents
go hand in hand with responsibility for the welfare of the children.
This new imperial vision passed from Cyrus and the Persians to Alexander
the Great, and from him to Hellenistic kings, Roman emperors, Muslim caliphs,
Indian dynasts, and eventually even to Soviet premiers and American presidents.
This benevolent imperial vision has justified the existence of empires, and
negated not only attempts by subject peoples to rebel, but also attempts by
independent peoples to resist imperial expansion.
Similar imperial visions were developed independently of the Persian model
in other parts of the world, most notably in Central America, in the Andean
region, and in China.
According to traditional Chinese political theory, Heaven
(Tian) is the source of all legitimate authority on earth. Heaven chooses the most
worthy person or family and gives them the Mandate of Heaven. This person or
family then rules over All Under Heaven (Tianxia) for the benefit of all its
inhabitants. Thus, a legitimate authority is – by definition – universal. If a ruler
lacks the Mandate of Heaven, then he lacks legitimacy to rule even a single city.
If a ruler enjoys the mandate, he is obliged to spread justice and harmony to the
entire world. The Mandate of Heaven could not be given to several candidates
simultaneously, and consequently one could not legitimise the existence of more
than one independent state.
The first emperor of the united Chinese empire, Qín Shǐ Huángdì, boasted
that ‘throughout the six directions [of the universe] everything belongs to the
emperor … wherever there is a human footprint, there is not one who did not
become a subject [of the emperor] … his kindness reaches even oxen and horses.
There is not one who did not benefit. Every man is safe under his own roof.’4 In
Chinese political thinking as well as Chinese historical memory, imperial
periods were henceforth seen as golden ages of order and justice. In
contradiction to the modern Western view that a just world is composed of
separate nation states, in China periods of political fragmentation were seen as
dark ages of chaos and injustice. This perception has had far-reaching
implications for Chinese history. Every time an empire collapsed, the dominant
political theory goaded the powers that be not to settle for paltry independent
principalities, but to attempt reunification. Sooner or later these attempts always
succeeded.
