Scroll.in has an article by Priya Satia titled 'How modern empire broke the empire mould'
There are no modern empires. Those which existed were like previous empires even when contiguity was only achievable by sea.
Why did Empires disappear? Technology changed. Preferences changed. War was no longer 'the sport of Kings'. It was a grim business of industrial attrition. The industrial working class wanted a higher material standard of living. It was discovered that the terms of trade spontaneously move against primary producers without any need for Imperial control. True, from time to time, some particular bunch of Sheikhs or tin-pot Dictators might gain vast financial windfalls. But they would fritter that money away on expensive fighter jets & lavish palaces unless they chose instead to recycle their surpluses through Western Capital markets. But technology would improve so productivity in raw material extraction shot up. This meant Supply expanded while Demand remained inelastic. In other words, the primary producers worked harder for less money. This was 'immeserizing growth'. For a time, Third World intellectuals thought there could be a 'North-South' deal to preserve the terms of trade or reallocate the gains from trade such that capital investment in the Global South was increased. This was a pipe-dream because the Global South was either kleptocratic or gerontocratic or both.
Third World intellectuals sought to emigrate to the 'safe spaces' of Western Campuses so as to school retards in 'Grievance Studies'. This involved pretending that Empires still exist. Also women are denied the vote. Many black people are being whipped on Southern Plantations whose trees bear strange fruit. Donald Trump's real name is Adolph Hitler. Wake up, sheeple! We must join hands with Hamas to drive the Capitalists out of Turtle Island from 'the river to the Sea'. Globalize the intifada by chopping off Mummy's kuffar head.
No previous imperial formation reshaped the world in such a way that has distorted our relations to the earth and one and another.
Nonsense! There literally is nothing new under the Sun.
As the Israeli assault on Gaza yet again makes painfully clear,
Terrorism is counterproductive. Hamas is worse off now, as is Hezbollah.
anticolonial movements of the last century won many of their battles,
They won all of them. There are no Empires. It is a different matter that some nationalities failed to create their own states- e.g. Kurds, Palestinians, Sri Lankan Tamils, Basques etc, etc.
but they lost the war. The decolonisation of the minds of both colonisers and colonised that thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Gandhi called for failed to transpire.
Both had shit for brains. Fanon's people were smart enough to stick to France like glue. BTW nobody every had a 'colonised mind' anymore than women have been brainwashed into thinking they don't have penises.
Even as demands for reparations, restitution, apologies,
compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all practicing male heterosexuals
memorialisation and consecration of new human and educational values have crescendoed,
with Trump taking the White House?
many remain susceptible to the notion that modern empire is a legitimate civilising enterprise that can be evaluated neutrally.
Nobody gives a shit. Only stupid people study or teach history or other genres of Grievance Studies.
Besides its obvious racist foundations, that sticky presumption draws sustenance from easy conflation of modern empires with earlier empires: the British empire was no different from the earlier Roman, Ottoman, or Mughal empires
it was miles better.
– why should it be singled out to make repair
lots of darkies in the UK. Maybe they are stupid enough to let the Government send a portion of their tax-money to the kleptocrats back home.
for what was simply more water under the historical bridge?
as opposed to water squirted up the backside to ease constipation.
Anticolonial thinkers and activists long ago disproved this theory,
by eating their own shit?
exposing the particular moral and political indefensibility of European empire,
military indefensibility. The game was not worth the candle. France & Holland had to admit defeat. Portugal under Salazar soldiered on, getting poorer in the process, till there was a Revolution in the Seventies.
but its enduring allure
it has no such thing. Nobody in Paris is saying 'let us reconquer Vietnam'.
compels fresh reminder of how, even apart from the logical fallacy of “whataboutery”, it fails on empirical grounds:
Empirically, Empires disappeared before Priya was born. Why? The empirical evidence was that Imperialism was loss-making. It impoverished those who went in for it.
British colonialism (and modern European and American empire generally) departed dramatically from the goals, workings and effects of earlier empires.
The Brits were better. But, in India, they kept a lot of the Mughal or Maratha inheritance. In Africa, where possible, they ruled through traditional Chieftains. There were plenty of Protectorates which had internal autonomy under a traditional Sheikh, Nizam or Maharaja.
Clearly, something very different had to have happened in modern history
Use of fossil fuels to generate steam power & then electric power. But this would have happened anyway regardless of whether a country had an Empire. The US & Germany didn't when they began to industrialize. They soon overtook the UK which was the pioneer.
to land us at the unprecedented existential climate crisis in which we find ourselves.
Our lives improved tremendously because we were using fossil fuel much more intensively. But they can improve even more if we shift to cheaper, Greener, energy based on recent scientific and technological breakthroughs.
In their particular preoccupations with materialism, territorial control, and managing social differences and similarities,
All states at all times have this preoccupation. Why pretend that there was a time when everybody was very spiritual & considered private property to be a sin?
modern European empires created the world anew.
No. The Oceanic Empires of the age of sail were like those of the Mediterranean or Indian Ocean in previous Millenia.
Over the course of the long Nineteenth Century you have more and more coal or oil powered factories & steamships & railways & Empires stopped mattering. The modern age of industrialised nation states made Empires obsolete. Sadly, this meant things got worse for a lot of people living in shithole countries.
This is not to say that the Mughal or Roman empires were not oppressive in their own ways – their histories are full of stories of contestation and resistance (most famously, Jesus’s anticolonial challenge to Roman rule in Judea
There was none. The Romans did ban Jews from Jerusalem but themselves became Christian.
) – but European empire reshaped the world in specific ways that need to be addressed for new, freer futures to become possible.
Nobody needs to address stupid shit which only exists in the minds of those who teach worthless shite.
Anticolonial thinkers in the last century recognised that
if the coloniser fucked off, then they'd have won. This happened before Priya was born.
modern empire focused on material desire in a new way as the key to progress,
everyone focuses on material desire. Shite is taught by shitheads because they have the material desire for a pay-check.
enslaving both colonised and coloniser.
in the same manner that the rapist is raped & the farter is the fart.
After all, it began with the invention of a new kind of commercial institution: the limited-liability, joint-stock corporation.
Something like it has always existed in every type of mercantile society.
From the late 15th century, Portuguese and Dutch trading companies introduced a type of state-backed armed trade aimed at monopoly that was
similar to stuff which existed in the second millennium BC.
utterly foreign and disruptive to the commercial traditions and survival practices of the Indian Ocean.
No. The influx of bullion & new crops led to an economic boon. Populations increased.
This aggressive, warlike mode of business was the only way the Portuguese could elbow their way into the tangle of Venetian, Egyptian and Indian commercial networks of the time.
Everyone was aggressive. There was a lot of piracy.
Their intrusion launched a new era of racial and colonial capitalism
which has always existed. Guys of one race put together some capital and establish a colony on the other shore of the Mediterranean or Indian ocean or whatever.
in which mass extraction and commodification of botanical and earthly matter, including human beings, entailed devastation of entire peoples and landscapes – epitomised early on by Dutch devastation of the Banda Islands
Under Governor Alba, about 50,000 Dutch people were killed. War is expensive. It tends to be fought for control of valuable resources. The Banda island natives may have lost about 15,000 in war & deportation. Incidentally, the Dutch employed Japanese mercenaries.
for nutmeg and Portuguese ruin of Madeira
which was uninhabited when they arrived
in the name of sugar.
It wasn't devastated. It thrived. It shifted to wine because it couldn't compete with vast plantations in Brazil etc.
The Dutch empire became yet another of the empires that inspired, and justified, British efforts to build their own.
The Brits were rivals for the Banda islands. What justified spending lots of money was gaining even more.
In the subsequent era of British dominance, while officials in the high corridors of power regularly contrasted the humanity of British rule to the oppression of the regimes they displaced,
they did no such thing. From time to time some radical Member of Parliament might stand up and blame the Government for slaughtering darkies. A junior Minister would then reply with a whole bunch of statistics showing that the shithole in question was making a good profit for the country. This was seldom true.
their policies produced famine and desolation
which already existed
that forced officials on the spot to question their self-congratulating rhetoric.
No. Nobody cared. Famine is cured by getting local rich people to feed local poor people. If they won't do it voluntarily, a tax has to be levied. But they may cause a rebellion. If you won't get sacked for presiding over a famine- that's the safest way to go. Anyway, Malthus used mathematics to show famine was inevitable- right? Crack a book sometime.
The empire continued to depend on unfree labor well after abolition in 1833.
People in prison aren't free. Some make or do stuff with commercial value.
By the late 19th century, the British ruling elite came to stoically accept that the ruin of certain peoples and landscapes was historical necessity for the sake of global material progress.
Everyone had already accepted it long long ago.
In 1868, noting “the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians”,
which hasn't happened
the British politician Charles Dilke
whom nobody gave a shit about. The only thing people remember about him is that he fucked his brother's mother-in-law before marrying her daughter. I mean to say- what? what? The fellow might as well be French!
explained that the “true moral of America” was “the vigor of the English race – the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four pence”.
We get it. He was a shithead. So what?
This type of empire asked its agents and subjects to suppress ordinary ethical instincts to engage in “necessary evil” for the sake of future vindication in the form of progress measured in material terms.
This has never happened. You apply for a job for an economic reason. Only if it is part of your job to talk about 'future vindication' would you do so.
Hence did anticolonial leaders like Gandhi counter that freedom lay in the capacity for moral accountability in the present,
Slaves have this capacity. Freedom means choosing to do what you like. If someone says 'kindly give a moral justification of your actions', you reply 'fuck off! I can do what I like. I'm not accountable to anyone.
regardless of consequences (a definition lately echoed by the London-based political theoris Lea Ypi).
No. She is Albanian, not Stupid.
Such ideas contest the seductive notion propagated by modern empires,
There are none.
that material wealth is a measure of civilisation.
We measure wealth. We don't measure civilization or niceness or cuddliness.
(Even the non-capitalist Soviet empire was anchored in this assumption, planning and measuring “development” in terms of industrial output.)
rather than cuteness.
Certainly, earlier empires were extractive in their own right, often excessively so.
Some were really into human sacrifice.
However, unlike the indigenous or indigenised imperial rulers they displaced, European colonisers did not typically invest the wealth they extracted back into the country.
Yet, they were preferred.
In the 18th century, the Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan called out the traits that distinguished British colonialism: a disinterest in putting down roots and a sense of “divine obligation” to scrape “together as much money as they can in this country” and carry it home.
Which was preferable to their settling down, kidnapping lots of girls to fill their harems & chop the bollocks off a lot of boys so they could serve as eunuchs. That's why the Hindus in Bengal were happy that the English defeated the Muslims. But the Muslims of Delhi, too, preferred British rule to Maratha rule.
Mughal trends in managing food security and water are known to have been better.
They had one job- viz. not losing wars. They couldn't do it.
The greed-driven British “craze” for machines, Gandhi argued, atrophied the limbs of man and encroached on his individuality (unlike, say, the spinning wheel).
He was wrong. Spinning & Weaving suck ass big time. Priya, on the other hand, refuses to have a vacuum cleaner or a dish-washer or a washing-machine in her house.
There are empires and there are empires. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore put it, “There had been massive empires before capitalism – think of the Romans or the Mongols. But never before in world history had there been transoceanic empires that scoured the globe for profit-making opportunities.”
Because never before had the globe been circumnavigated. But this was done by Kings- not Capitalists. Magellan served the King of Spain who financed his expedition.
Britain alone ruled over a quarter of the planet.
Santayana said 'the world never had sweeter masters'.
This materialism depended on new notions of state power and territorial occupation.
No. They remained the same.
Earlier empires had typically depended on layered notions of sovereignty and suzerainty.
Which is what obtained in the British Empire.
In borderlands, the power of adjacent states might overlap, and in various regions state power might be shared with powerful local authorities and institutions.
All true of the British Empire.
The British empire took shape in this world: with the British East India Company allowing the Mughal emperor to retain de jure sovereignty while it held de facto sovereignty.
There were plenty of de jure sovereigns under the British King Emperor.
In addition, the British Crown held ultimate sovereignty over company territories, but whether it could claim their revenue depended on whether they were understood to have been conquered or purchased.
I suppose Berar is meant. Its revenues were meant to pay for the Hyderabad contingent. In practice, the Viceroy could do what he liked & his officials would find some way to make the thing kosher.
Affirmation of property as a natural law and moral principle helped manage the confusion between conquest and commerce.
Which was meaningless. Consider the Royal proclamation of 1763. Taken literally, most of Canada belongs to First Nations. But it doesn't mean shit.
To guarantee the “permanency” of their acquisitions (mindful of the fate of the Roman empire), British imperialists established regimes of property rights in their domains.
No. The Brits knew 'property rights' have no magical powers. To make your acquisitions permanent you need to kill and inflict great financial harm on anyone who tries to take them from you.
The empire came to treat sovereignty, too, as something held exclusively and thus transferable as a commodity.
Which has always been the case unless it had never been the case.
British government and private entities bought, sold, and leased sovereignty over places as diverse as Jammu and Kashmir, northern Borneo, Hong Kong and beyond.
So what? America bought Louisiana & Alaska.
Modern European empires idealised clear, policeable borders, traceable on a map – indeed, often first defined on a map and then realised on the ground.
Darkies didn't have maps. They were too stupid- right?
Fixed boundaries and exclusive title were considered essential to the fiscal and demographic legibility that enabled extractive policies.
Also, evil Whites insisted that all darkies choose between having a dick or having a vagina. Previoulsy, darkies could fuck themselves every which way.
Today’s world order based on the unit of the nation-state has consecrated this form of territorial control as a universal norm.
That has been the case for thousands of years in India China, Europe, MENA etc.
The nation-state was coeval with modern empire.
No. In Western Europe, tribal-confederacies turned into nations- generally defined as a people with a common language or, at least, a 'sprachbund'. Some were unified as limited monarchies of a hereditary type- e.g. England, France, Scotland- others were looser federations with an elective Crown- e.g. Poland & Germany.
Nations are ancient. Modern empires, by definition, can't be coeval with them.
The internal colonialism through which “Britain” was forged as a political space from its constituent regions of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England informed and was informed by colonialism abroad.
Ireland was conquered & then reconquered. Scotland was in personal union with England under Stuart monarchs. The Scots experienced economic reverses in the 1690s & the English played hard ball by passing an act in 1705 which would have turned Scottish people on English soil into aliens. Scotland would lose about half its trade unless it agreed to the Union. Colonies weren't important at that time.
Disciplinary drainage of the unruly fenlands
It was economic. England gained food security. There has been no famine since 1622.
of eastern England coincided with British “settling” of landscapes in Ireland and North America.
Why the scare quotes? Lots of Europeans were settling in the Americas.
The new form of political territoriality abroad was tied to the rise of private land ownership in England, too.
No. There was private land ownership by the end of the 12th century. The 1290 statute, known as Quia Emptores, stopped the creation of new feudal sub-tenures, effectively allowing land to be sold rather than just sublet, paving the way for easier transfer of land ownership.
Early modern English elites had held land, but ordinary people had also had substantial use rights and power to negotiate rents, nurturing inter-generational attachment to land even among tenant farmers.
No. There was serfdom. The feudal lord, or Monastery, which owned the land was welcome to replace men with sheep. The Cistercians pioneered the 'wool revolution'. After the dissolution of the Monasteries some 20 peasant of 'yeoman' peasant/pastoralists prospered sufficiently to became freeholders living in well built houses and increasingly participating in cross country trade & financial networks. The English bourgeoisie now had a rural equivalent with the same legal privileges & commercial opportunities.
In the modern period, thousands of enclosure acts turned common lands, heaths, greens, and “wastes” that were used by all, into private property,
thus avoiding a 'tragedy of the commons'. Priya doesn't get that England would have had worse famines than India if it hadn't raised the productivity of its agricultural land.
while settlers (many drawn from among those pushed off English land)
No. Those pushed off the land went to cities. Some proved trustworthy enough to be taken as indentured servants to the New World. There were also some convicts- e.g. Moll Flanders- but they were urban, not rural. At a later point there were assisted passages for those affected by the Highland Clearances etc. But England's economy was more buoyant. You went from the village to the town. If your employer thought you dependable, he might send you with his younger son to America. It wasn't the case that those 'pushed off English land' swam to America. They had to travel there by ship. That costs money.
and administrators conquered and privatised land around the world.
The first enclosure acts date from about 1604 but enclosures had been happening since the late twelfth century.
Why did some land 'get privatized'? The answer is that investing labour and capital in it could greatly raise its productivity. There was an incentive to fight to keep what you had invested in. John Maynard Smith explains that 'bourgeois strategies' are eusocial for many species- i.e. all species are better off if bourgeois notions of territoriality & private property are maintained. This is based on 'uncorrelated asymmetries' (e.g. the fact that I've invested thousands in my house and thus will fight hard to keep you from grabbing it whereas you will move on to prey upon some weaker party or else claim some stretch of wilderness for your own)
The making of France was similarly a process of imperial conquest from Paris outwards to the regions
No. The Francs had invaded & imposed their Kings & aristocrats on the Romanized Gauls whose superior culture & language prevailed. The Church played a great part in this. France's problem was that some of the feudal lords were more powerful and richer than the King in Paris.
that make up the familiar hexagon today, and the formation of the United States and Germany was inseparable from their expansion both overseas and within their immediate regions.
The US was about settlers expanding westwards. Germany had to first get rid of the Holy Roman Empire & then achieve a degree of Economic union (the Zollverein). Prussia's military victories- rather than a democratic process presided over by the Frankfurt Diet- unified Germany (but left out Austria).
This new culture of exclusive claims to territory
began in pre-historic times. Man is a territorial animal. The Chimpanzees fought a four year Civil war in Gombe National Park. It ended when all the males of one faction were killed. The victorious faction then expanded into further territory but were later repelled by two other communities of chimpanzees.
True, it was only because of American Imperialism that these Tanzanian Chimps started making 'exclusive claims to territory'. Obama did promise to go and become a nice Tanzanian Chimp who would establish Secular Socialism. Sadly, the IMF held him down while the World Bank anally raped him till he promised not to become a Socialist Chimpanzee. It is horrific to relate that Wall Street still was not satisfied. They forced him to become POTUS- that too for two terms! Michelle is still very angry with her husband for this reason.
constituted a dramatic change in how humans and states related to the land. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind write, “Land ceased to be the existential and spiritual foundation of the community,
Slavery or serfdom was the existential and spiritual foundation of the community. The Church said that if you were obedient to your superiors on Earth, you would gain Heaven.
Land is still the foundation of communities. Human beings live on land. They don't float around in the air. Obama's plan was for Socialist Chimpanzees to avoid the land by swinging from tree to tree. Evil Joe Biden informed the IMF which then held Obama down while the World Bank wrecked his rectum.
and instead was turned into exclusionary and alienable pieces of property, existing solely for the purpose of accumulation.”
If you own a house & don't let strangers enter it at will, they you are being 'exclusionary'. Moreover, if you sell your house for a profit, you are guilty of 'accumulation'.
The philosopher Thomas More discerned when this process began 500 years ago, that enclosed, privately held land had unleashed an unprecedented social reality, driving elites into an insatiable quest for wealth to gratify false pleasures and driving everyone else, stalked by the threat of poverty, to forever seek more.
Thomas More has slaves in his Utopia. England had given up slavery.
Philosophers like John Locke responded to the resistance triggered by this new reality by arguing that those who did not cultivate the land with a view to improving it forfeited any entitlement to it.
A convenient doctrine since it was those with capital who could raise the productivity of agricultural land. Still, it must be said, England did achieve food security.
For Europeans, explains Gili Kliger, sovereignty came to mean “power over land”,
Whereas for the Moghuls, sovereignty meant power over the birds in the air.
while many indigenous peoples conceived of it as “power shared with land.”
They would often ask the river to go drown the invaders. Sadly, rivers are terribly lazy. The mountains, on the other hand, would often participate in diplomatic missions when they weren't too busy sitting on Parliamentary committees.
It is difficult to know what indigenous peoples understood by signing away their “sovereignty” in treaties with the British or the United States; colonialism was enabled by European translation of words that lacked indigenous conceptual equivalents, because they emerged from a radically different view of the working of human and divine power in the world.
It is easy to understand that they wanted a temporary respite or benefit of some sort (e.g. some nice shiny beads). The question was whether the settlers would gain enough military strength to kill or drive away those of the indigenous people they hadn't turned into slaves or badly paid servants.
Certainly, practical reality on the ground in European empires often remained marked by porous borders,
They still are a little too porous.
a cacophony of legal regimes, and political fragmentation, but from the late eighteenth century, these empires fostered the geopolitical and linguistic proliferation of the idea of sovereignty as territorial statehood
which had always existed. The first written treaty we know about is that between the Egyptians (who lived in Egypt) & the Hittites (Anatolia & Syria). It was concluded in 1295 BC.
– exclusive claim to and power over bordered space.
Which is what Pharoah Ramesses II had over Egyptian land & Hattusili III had over Turkey & Syria.
An instrumental view of land, and earthly resources more broadly, was necessary to their terraforming goals.
People have been 'terraforming' for tens of thousands of years. They were gathered into tribes or nations founded on the unification of tribes. The Old Testament describes the formation of the Jewish nation & its frequent struggles for territory with other nations. This process continues to this day.
In fact, as climate and environmental experts now recognise, indigenous ways of relating to the land were more sustainable, grounded in careful husbandry of land, forests, and water resources with a view to perpetual mutual preservation of land and life.
It appears likely that overgrazing by pastoralists contributed to desertification in North Africa. Humans have been responsible for several extinction events relating to 'mega-fauna'.
Thirdly, ideas about racial difference reshaped human relations under European empire.
Ideas about racial differences appeared tens of thousands of years ago.
Slavery and violence were integral to the Roman empire,
& the Aztec & Maya Empire
but prejudice based on distinctions of skin tone, features, and hair texture was not a defining feature of the system.
It had been. However the Roman Emperors began expanding citizenship, first to Italic allies & specific towns till, by the Edict of Caracalla (Constitutio Antoniniana) in 212 CE, full Roman citizenship was granted to all free men and women throughout the empire.
Moreover, the Romans maintained diplomatic, military and commercial ties even with the Germanic peoples they considered “barbarians”.
They tried to conquer them. They failed. But, in border areas, there was considerable inter-marriage & Romanization.
The British and French empires, however, embedded racial distinctions in structures of governance
Not on their own territory. A black man was welcome to stand for Parliament in the UK. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who rose to be a General in Revolutionary France, was born a slave (because his mother was a slave) in the West Indies. His father took him back to France where he became free immediately because slavery had been abolished there in 1315.
and the social hierarchies on which they depended, including military recruitment,
Armies took what they could get.
practices of war,
If the other sides practices are better, you either imitate them or suffer defeat.
policing and criminal punishment, urban planning, public health and labor policies, education, and beyond.
There wasn't very much being done by the Government in any of these departments. Either there was local provision or the thing was absent.
Their imperialism was premised on the notion that non-white peoples (including the Irish),
the Irish are white. If they were Catholic or Gaelic speaking, they represented a threat. The Irish are very good at fighting. Sadly, they were divided and thus, despite their intellectual and artistic brilliance, the life chances of the Catholic portion declined over the course of the long eighteenth century.
lacking conscience and virtue, required paternalistic government by Europeans.
Only if it was profitable to do so. But, if it was profitable, that was all that mattered. Either you did it or your rival did it & got richer than you & thus gained more military power.
In the second half of the 19th century, the cultivation of “scientific” racism (and persistent resistance to European rule) cast doubt on whether this civilising mission could ever be accomplished, fostering support for conclusions like Dilke’s, that the “extinction of the inferior races” was “not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind”.
There was also a Eugenics movement. Perhaps people of the lowest class should be sterilized or otherwise denied reproductive rights.
If belief in human difference justified colonial rule
It didn't. Either the thing was profitable or necessary for a strategic reason (e.g. control of a shipping route). It was a different matter that Missionaries could collect funds to go convert the Cannibal.
and its violence, the goal of reforming colonial societies by fostering uniformity within them added further legitimacy.
No. If you have 'homonoia' or extend equal citizenship to all Imperial subjects then you are either creating a Commonwealth or a situation where the Emperor might be of any race- e.g. Philip the Arab becoming Caesar. But this does not increase legitimacy. It increases rent contestation.
Colonial societies worked well enough on the basis of a caste system- i.e. different laws for different 'castes' or classes of people. But this was also a feature of feudalism- even if it did not arise by foreign conquest.
Earlier empires, like the Mughal empire, sought power and revenue but did not seek to homogenise their subjects;
Yes they did. That is why the 'Urdu' or the Mongol horde became the lingua franca and the entire fiscal, administrative, and legal system used Arabic or Persian terms for its 'terms of art'. Hindu India has been independent for almost eighty years. Yet we still speak of the 'rabi' or 'kharif' crop. Guess which religion considers Arabic a sacred language? You are right. It is the Anglican Church. Archbishop of Canterbury forced Indians to put a lot of Arabic and Persian words into Hindustani.
they did not dream of turning all Hindus into Muslims (despite myths dating to the British era of forced mass conversions).
Some Mughal Emperors relied on Hindu Generals & Revenue officials. They did dream of converting kaffirs because this was recommended by their religion. It was the English who didn't care about religion or race though they tended to be respectful of traditional aristocracies.
Their outlook was pragmatic, focused on cultivating loyalty and revenue, not some utopian end.
So, nothing much changed. Still, Hindus preferred British rule to Muslim rule. Sadly, in many cases, they also preferred it to Hindu rule.
Europeans, however, sought to transform the people they ruled in the name of a “civilising mission” – turning Indians into Englishmen and Africans into Frenchmen and so on (however infinitely long the imagined timescale for that process).
Nonsense! The Brits insisted that Indians learn at least one Classical Indian language and one vernacular language. They insisted that Princes appear in native costume.
Coexistence with the alien was impossible in the British imperial mindset, but anticolonial rebellions like the 1857 uprising in India refused the modernising uniformity the British were imposing in defense of a social order offering the opportunity and obligation for ethical navigation of difference.
i.e. killing Whitey. The problem was that, after killing Whitey, it would be a case of killing wealthy darkies or darkies belonging to a different religion.
As Rabindranath Tagore put it in 1921, “[O]nly those who are different can unite.”
Which is why Nicaragua and Norway are one united Nation.
Likewise, no homogenising end justified the Ottoman empire,
This silly girl hasn't heard of the Indian 'Khilafat' movement. The Caliph was Hanafi. Hanafi Indians hoped he would homogenize the Islamic world by getting all mazhabs to converge to Hanafi best practice.
It must be said, the Ottomans did at one point try to increase their naval presence in the Indian Ocean to check the advance of the Europeans. But, as a land-based Empire, they tended to get distracted by European wars.
The Turks did try to modernize in the mid nineteenth century with the Tanzimat reforms. But things like decriminalizing homosexuality weren't popular with Arab or Indian Muslims.
even despite the sultan’s status as caliph; such empires did not purvey a narrative of suffering for the sake of historical progress.
Nobody purveyed any such narrative- except maybe Stalinists seeking to justify the man-made famines of the USSR.
To be sure, by the 19th century, European power had intruded so much into the Ottoman empire
which, at one point, occupied a sizable portion of European territory.
that it began to adopt European-inspired practices and goals in the hope of recuperating a measure of autonomy and fending off further dominance and territorial loss.
The Caliphs failed. Ataturk succeeded.
Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 prompted “modernisation” efforts that testified to the way European ideas of sovereignty, economic development, militarism, national identity, and governance were becoming global norms.
The Egyptian Khedives, of Albanian extraction, initially did a good job of modernising. Sadly, they squandered a lot of money & fell into debt peonage.
The Ottoman Empire took an increasingly “civilising” approach towards certain communities, such as nomadic Arabs, Albanians, and Kurds.
Kurds came in useful for killing Armenians.
Turkification policies became powerful in the 20th century. The relentless encroachment and aggressively asserted norms of European empire fed perceptions and policies that culminated in the Armenian genocide.
No. Armenians were Christians and viewed as a Fifth Column. Later the Smyrna Greeks too were targeted because of some hare-brained scheme to create a greater Greece.
We can consider the post-19th-century Ottoman empire among the group of European empires that today owe apologies and reparations, while understanding that it was itself in a colonial relationship with European empires.
It wasn't. It was sovereign. Its mistake was to side with Germany in the Great War.
Whatever Ottoman elites’ “civilising” vision, the state’s ability to fulfill it remained curtailed, preventing them, for instance, from eradicating pastoral life in the Syrian interior as the British did in Malwa Punjab.
Ranjit Singh followed similar policies. Pastoralists still exist in the region. However, irrigation means that former pastoralists became prosperous farmers.
This is why the iconic scholar of Western imperialism Edward Said
He knew nothing of the subject. He taught literature.
acknowledged the imperialist nature of Istanbul’s dominance of the Arab world but stressed the “unique coherence and…special cultural centrality” of the “British, French, and American imperial experience”.
America never had an Empire. True, it did rule the Philippines for forty or fifty years. But, by the mid 1930s, Congress was determined to get rid of it.
For him, Napoleon’s invasion, accompanied by the team of scholars who produced the encyclopedic Description de l’Egypte, exemplified the “scientific appropriation of one culture by another,”
Victor Hugo, complaining of Germany's lead in Sanskrit studies, complained that 'India went and turned into Germany'. But Germany had no colonies at that time. An Archaeologist from Norway excavating Aztec tombs isn't a colonialist in disguise.
announcing orientalist scholarship’s new mission of not merely representing but constructing “the Orient”.
Did you know that the Indian penis was constructed by Professor Algernon Smythe? Previously, no Indians had penises. The country was a Lesbian collective.
Like the Ottoman empire, the nation-states that emerged from the rubble of European empires hewed to their inherited norms.
No. They became Republics. Previously, when a country became independent- e.g. Greece or Bulgaria- they imported a German Prince to act as monarch. After the Great War, this 'norm' was discarded save in Albania which was ruled by an indigenous King because no foreign prince was interested in the place.
Indeed, the goal of nation-statehood provided the alibi for colonialism:
No. After the Great War, League of Nations mandated territories were divided into classes. Those in the highest class were to be fast-tracked to full independence. But, in India, there was already a slow but sure process of transition to 'responsible', if not wholly 'representative', Government. Like the settler colonies, the aim was to turn colonies into self-garrisoning, self-administering, Dominions. By the mid Twenties, it was obvious this meant complete Independence.
the British often protested that they were merely shepherding that universal process along in places lacking the innate capacity for historical evolution – empire as the handmaiden of national progress.
They didn't need to do any 'protesting'. So long as they had the mightiest navy, the colonies needed them more than they needed the colonies. Why? The colonies did not have a strong enough manufacturing base & thus would remain dependent on exporting primary products so as to import manufactured goods. This meant they needed the 'public good' (seas free of piracy) provided by the Royal Navy.
The US had been exceptional because, in the age of sail, it had its own ships & highly skilled mariners. But, the age of sail had ended. Dreadnoughts & then Aircraft careers cost a lot of money. Few countries could make them. The Dominions still needed the Mother country. Even Nehru's India retained a British admiral till 1958.
The nation-state would embody the principles of sovereignty, material progress, homogeneity, and righteousness propagated by modern empire.
No. During the inter-war period, there was a belief that 'pluralism' was possible. Loose federations would be created. There would be 'cantonization' & some elaborate power sharing scheme featuring quotas for different ethnicities.
The critical distinction between European empires and the Asian empires they destroyed is not that the former were land-based and the latter straddled seas.
Yes it is. Land-based Empires can have greater uniformity- e.g. Tzarist Russia or Manchu China.
It is rather the homogenising attitude towards people and territory that has come to define nationalism and the modern state everywhere.
There is no such attitude.
The postcolonial Indian and Nigerian states preserved much of their inherited imperial state structures and outlook and have faced repeated separatist challenges from those who refuse their homogenising visions and the poisonous forms of exclusion they entail.
No. India is mainly Hindu and hangs together for that reason. Nigeria was created because the Brits thought the South could subsidize the North which otherwise would be ungovernable (at least in parts). Under Nehru, there was plenty of ethnic cleansing of Muslims. A law was passed preventing those who fled across the border in panic from returning to reclaim their property and their citizenship. This wasn't 'poisonous' at all. Under Nehru, all the Hindu majority areas had a considerable Congress party presence. Homogenization was based on the khaddar 'Gandhi topi' though Civil servants wore a modified version of the 'Nehru jacket'. However, Hindi was not imposed though it has spread organically well enough.
Likewise, the People’s Republic of China functions less like the Qing empire did in the same territory than like European empires did in their territories.
It is a Communist country. It functions like the old Soviet Union. The Party retains control rights over everything.
It was the anticipation of these continuities that caused many major anticolonial thinkers to reject nation-statehood as the goal of their struggle,
There were no such thinkers. True, particular individuals- e.g. Tagore- who stood to lose from the withdrawal of British forces- opposed Nationalism by talking confused bollocks.
recognising it as an extension of the imperial outlook and the destructive force it had proved in successive world wars. As they focused on freedom from state oppression rather than national emancipation, they imagined and struggled to realise federal or otherwise decentralised alternative futures.
The Brits were promoting federalism. Nehru rejected it.
This is what made their tactics useful even in struggles against oppression within states, such as the African American struggle for racial equality in the United States.
Which was based on changing the law & then building coalitions able to exert influence on Governors & Presidents.
The impulse to justify modern empire by insisting on its continuity with earlier empires is not new.
It would be fair to say that Pax Romana meant peace, prosperity, & technological progress for centuries. Pax Britannica was similar. Having colonies helped pay for the Royal Navy which is what kept the home islands safe from Continental tyrants.
In empire’s very heyday, British policymakers themselves used analogies to earlier empires to soothe their uneasy consciences.
What soothes the conscience is the knowledge that you are getting rich.
Edward Gibbon’s classic 1776 account of the “decline and fall” of the Roman empire appeared when Britain’s relations with its American colonies were in crisis,
Many Brits felt that mercantilist policies were holding the country back. In any case, if the Americans could defeat 'booted Hessians', then they could, by themselves, expand into Spanish, French & First Nation territory.
bolstering hopes that Britain might avoid the decadence and corrupting contact at the margins of the empire that, Gibbon believed, had led to its predecessors’ downfall.
This is the opposite of what Gibbon believed. It was the Christians in Rome's catacombs who spread the virus of an 'other-worldly' religion which was fatal to Rome's indigenous concept of civic virtue & patriotism. Why battle the barbarians to save Rome, if the City of God is up in the Heavens?
For modern Britons, history itself, the chance at renewing, indeed redeeming, the epic Roman past, elevated their own imperial aspirations.
The Romans were a land-based Empire. Britain didn't want to conquer France & Italy etc. It wanted to get richer through trade & manufacturing industry. The fact that it had high quality coal meant that it was the first country to industrialize on the basis of fossil fuel.
The big question for the Brits was whether their Eastern Empire could pay for itself? Otherwise the money taken from you in Income tax might be enriching only the shareholders in the East India Company. Thankfully, Income tax could fall & new industries in England found that the colonies were a profitable market.
In Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, the sailor Marlow, comparing the British empire to the Romans, admits that “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only…something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…”
This is irrelevant. Marlow was talking about the Congo which was a 'Free State' supposedly ruled according to the up-to-date, humanitarian, rules of laissez faire Capitalism. Incidentally, the Ethiopians had defeated the Italians a couple of years previously. You can't take stuff away from darkies if they have guns which are as good as yours.
The British Empire was based on the rule of law. That is why British people were disgusted at what was happening in the Congo. They forced Belgium to take over the place and run it as a proper colony.
The British found salvation not only in walking in imperial steps hallowed by time
No. They found salvation in Lord Jesus Christ.
but in flattering comparison of their “devotion to efficiency”,
It was the Progressives in America who talked of 'efficiency'. In England, the Fabians did use similar terms which is why they were allied with Haldane who helped create Imperial College & the LSE. But it was Haldane's Army reforms which mattered most.
whatever its results, to their predecessors’ naked greed. Conrad skewered this self-deception, exposing the “darkness” masked by empire’s cover story of “civilising mission”.
He could only do so if he was talking of an Imperial possession- e.g. British India. But he never wrote about any such place.
He and other 19th-century Britons knew their empire was doing something new.
No. They knew they were doing what Spain & Portugal had done at the end of the fifteenth century. Charles V, who was born in 1500, ruled over an Empire over which the Sun never set. England could make no such boast till the end of the eighteenth century.
Reflecting on invasions since ancient times and “the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians…of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists,” Dilke realised, “The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth.”
He was better at adultery than intellectual cogitation. It was fucking obvious that the Spanish had done a lot of extirpating in the Americas.
In World War One, though the British camouflaged their conquest of the Ottoman empire’s Arab provinces as
support for an independent Arab Nation State under the leadership of the Sharif of Mecca.
a resurrection of the tradition of imperial improvement embodied by the Persians, Seleucids, and Parthians,
No. They wanted President Wilson on side. Also, they didn't want to alienate the Indian Muslims. Yusuf Ali, the translator of the Quran, was an ex-ICS official. He did very good propaganda work for the Brits during the Great War. The fact is, the 'Young Turks' were Pan-Turanian nationalists with little attachment to Islam. Indeed, some Jews were part of that movement. Thus, Arab Nationalism- as championed by WS Blunt- was invoked to prevent the type of mutiny of Muslim troops which Amba Prasad Sufi was trying to orchestrate in Persia and Iraq.
they knew their government used “armed forces to do with explosives what should be done by policemen and sticks”.
After the Great War, the Brits used airpower in Iraq & North West India. The RAF man quoted above was saying that this is an expensive way to do things. Still, it had a psychological effect. Initially, suppressing the Iraqi revolt was a costly business. People doubted that Britain could ever get a return on the money it had squandered there. Strangely, it turned out Iraq (& British presence in Abadan) proved quite lucrative even into the 1950s.
The Brits weren't shy about celebrating their victories. But they accepted new territories only as League of Nations mandates which, for fair skinned Arabs, meant being fast-traced to independence. The turning point was Allenby- who defeated the Turks- insisting that Britain accept the formal independence of Egypt in 1922. Ireland & Afghanistan got the same thing in the same year. India got nothing because Gandhi unilaterally surrendered.
We can’t draw the same analogies to a “new Rome” today to justify the new imperial practices they enabled.
Moscow considered itself the third Rome (after Byzantium) which is why its ruler was termed the Tzar (Caesar). The Holy Roman Empire turned into Germany under a Kaiser. Queen Victoria, it is true was given the title 'Kaiser-e-Hind' (Caesar of India) but this was because her daughter had become Empress of the Germans & Disraeli wanted to put England's monarch on an equal footing. This annoyed the fuck out of Queen Victoria's grandson who one said that the Great War would be worth it if his British cousin lost his Indian Empire.
Though empire has always been integral to human history,
It never has. We are doing fine without any such thing.
we have only once – now – been on the brink of environmental collapse:
We really aren't.
a unique type of imperial formation and global order led to this unique historical moment.
Nope. The same shit was happening all over the world under very different types of regime. As Indira Gandhi observed, fifty years ago, in India it is poor people who are doing most of the Environmental degradation. There is a 'tragedy of the commons' which particularly afflicts poorer countries.
This is not to say that modern empires had nothing in common with preceding imperial formations. Glimmers of their dynamics are evident in even earlier polities – take Venice and Genoa’s 13th-century armed contest over trade in the Aegean Sea.
Which were like the struggle between Phoenicians & other ancient polities in pre-history.
The British looked often enough to (a mythical version of) ancient history for it to have had real influence.
No. They focused on profit. This was a nation of shopkeepers. Geography was important. Maps show you where treasure can be gained. History is about chaps. Dead chaps. Who gives a fuck what they got up to?
History is always a story of continuity and change.
Priya's History is a fairy story.
But no previous imperial formation embraced all these four features (material measures of progress, exclusive sovereignty, racial hierarchy, and homogenisation),
There is no existing 'imperial formation'.
which together radically distorted our relations to the earth and one another, leading to our present planetary crisis.
So, something which clearly does not exist is causing some imaginary evil to create a crisis for the planet. Why not say 'shape shifting lizards from Planet X are anally probing us every night? This is causing the planet to get very hot under the collar. No previous Empire was run by shape shifting lizards. That is why those Empires were objectively real. Our present Empire is completely invisible and undetectable.'
To say this is not to say that European people were especially bad and that British and French people today must don hairshirts.
Europeans are so good that non-Europeans are happy to settle in Europe despite high tax rates.
That is not the point of understanding this past (whatever politicians like former UK home secretary Suella Braverman may opportunistically claim).
Her parents decided it was better to live in a place still ruled by White Christians. They were right.
It merely helps us grasp the origins of dominant cultural notions that have not served us (including British and French people) so that, by redistributing financial, moral, and cultural capital, we might recover alternate notions and make new history going forward.
Let us give away our money & power to useless people who tell stupid paranoid lies. That way our lives will turn to shit almost immediately. Why wait for some imaginary Apocalypse?
The stakes for such understanding are high for relations between societies but also within them. If failure to reckon with the imperial past allowed nostalgic and xenophobic sentiments to fuel the disaster of Brexit in the United Kingdom,
This is like saying 'failure to reckon with the Wounded Knee massacre led to the re-election of Donald Trump'.
failure to address the Ottoman Empire’s evolution in its last decades enabled the rise of Erdogan’s right-wing Justice and Development Party in Turkey.
No. The military fucked up. Secularists pissed off the Islamic majority. This has nothing to do with the the Ottomans.
In his address to the US Congress in June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India had attained freedom after “one thousand years of foreign rule”, a pernicious elision of British with Mughal rule that has enabled his government’s erasure and distortion of Muslim presence in India.
He was saying 'Sonia is Italian. She wouldn't let Manmohan rule. That's why corruption has increased so much.'
How did Sonia come to rule India? The answer is that her hubby's grandfather had presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims & the denial of any type of affirmative action to them. They became second class citizens and a 'vote-bank' for the ruling party. Just recently, in West Bengal, Muslims haven't voted for Mamta despite her warning that they will all be beaten, sodomized, decapitated & forced to adopt vegetarianism, if her former lieutenant, Sunendu Adhikari, becomes Chief Minister.
Failure to recognise the novelties of European colonialism has abetted continued settler colonial violence in Palestine.
There is more violence in Syria. I suppose, as the US withdraws from the MENA, Israel will be let off the leash & so 'settler colonial violence' will end with mass expulsion.
The qualities that distinguished modern European empires
none exist. They all perished before Priya was born.
from history’s earlier empires are material and persist in structuring our world
Not really. How many people in Indonesia speak Dutch? Very few. But plenty speak English.
and are the ground from which we must make new history as we stand on the precipice of survival.
You can't make history by telling stupid lies. Those who excel in STEM subjects can help create new technologies which don't just increase our chances of survival, they enable us to spread across the galaxy.
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