Yet the most striking thing about past empires is the extraordinary variability in the chronological as well as geographic expanse of their dominion. Especially striking is the fact that the most modern empires have a far shorter life span than their ancient and early modern predecessors. Take the Roman case.
The Roman Empire in the West can be dated from 27 B. It ended when Constantinople was established as a rival capital with the death of the Emperor Theodosius in , making a total of years. The Roman Empire in the East can be dated from then until, at the latest, the sack of Byzantium by the Ottoman Turks in , a total of 1, years. The Holy Roman Empire — the successor to the Western empire — lasted from , when Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans, until Napoleon ended it in The "average" Roman empire therefore lasted years.
Such calculations, though crude, allow us to compare the life spans of different empires. The three Roman empires were uncharacteristically long lived. By comparison, the average Near Eastern empire including the Assyrian, Abassid, and Ottoman lasted a little more than years; the average Egyptian and East European empires around years; the average Chinese empire subdividing by the principal dynasties ruled for more than three centuries.
The various Indian, Persian, and West European empires generally survived for between and years. After the sack of Constantinople, the longest-lived empire was clearly the Ottoman at years. The East European empires of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs each existed for more than three centuries. The Mughals ruled a substantial part of what is now India for years.
Of an almost identical duration was the reign of the Safavids in Persia. It is trickier to give precise dates to the maritime empires of the West European states, because these had multiple points of origin and duration. But the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish empires can all be said to have endured for roughly years.
The life span of the Portuguese empire was closer to The empires created in the 20th century, by contrast, were comparatively short. Technically, the Third Reich lasted 12 years; as an empire in the true sense of the word, exerting power over foreign peoples, it lasted barely half that time. Only Benito Mussolini was a less effective imperialist than Hitler. Why did the new empires of the 20th century prove so ephemeral? The answer lies partly in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power, economic control, and social homogeneity to which they aspired.
The new empires that arose in the wake of the First World War were not content with the successful but haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterized the old empires, including the messy mixtures of imperial and local law and the delegation of powers and status to certain indigenous groups.
They inherited from the 19th-century nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; these were more like "empire states" than traditional empires. The new empires repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force. They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of existing social structures. They delighted in sweeping away old political institutions. Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness.
In pursuit of their objectives, they were willing to make war on whole categories of people, at home and abroad, rather than merely the armed and trained representatives of an identified enemy state.
It was entirely typical of the new generation of would-be emperors that Hitler accused the British of excessive softness in their treatment of Indian nationalists.
The empire states of the midth century were to a considerable extent the architects of their own downfalls. In particular, the Germans and Japanese imposed their authority on other peoples with such ferocity that they undermined local collaboration and laid the foundations for indigenous resistance.
That was foolish, as many people who were "liberated" from their old rulers Stalin in Eastern Europe, the European empires in Asia by the Axis powers initially welcomed their new masters. At the same time, the territorial ambitions of these empire states were so limitless — and their combined grand strategy so unrealistic — that they swiftly called into being an unbeatable coalition of imperial rivals in the form of the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
Empires do not survive for long if they cannot establish and sustain local consent and if they allow more powerful coalitions of rival empires to unite against them. Publicly, the leaders of the American and Chinese republics deny that they harbor imperial designs.
Both states are the product of revolutions and have long traditions of anti-imperialism. Yet there are moments when the mask slips. Even if they do not, it is still perfectly possible for a republic to behave like an empire in practice, while remaining in denial about its loss of republican virtue. The American empire is young by historical standards. Its continental expansion in the 19th century was unabashedly imperialistic.
Yet the comparative ease with which sparsely settled territory was absorbed into the original federal structure militated against the development of an authentically imperial mentality and put minimal strain on the political institutions of the republic. Virgin Islands, which remain American dependencies, U.
During the course of the 20th century, the United States occupied Panama for 74 years, the Philippines for 48, Palau for 47, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands for 39, Haiti for 19, and the Dominican Republic for 8. The formal postwar occupations of West Germany and Japan continued for, respectively, 10 and 7 years, though U. Troops were also deployed in large numbers in South Vietnam from , though by they were gone.
Have empires really any kind of force at all? Take the British empire. Despite the claims of a few self-appointed ideologues, it was never anything other than a sprawling collection of different territories, each connected to Britain in a different way. There was no imperial system, no single imperial regime. The British presence meant different things for different people because it worked in different ways.
In India, Britain governed despotically from the late s to In Canada — to take another example — life for native Americans became harder. But a massive, underpopulated expanse of territory became breadbasket to the world, as British rule created vibrant self-governing institutions.
European migrants attracted to British territories in North America built one of the richest societies in the world. Britons have emphasised the importance of different parts of it at different points in time. Today, we tend to think of India, Africa and the Caribbean. But every vision of empire that presents it as a united force leaves out some parts.
In reality, the history of empire is far more chaotic and messy than its defenders like to think. The Spanish empire, which was established in the decades following and lasted until the 19th century, has become infamous for its negative impact on conquered populations.
Acting in the name of the Spanish crown, ruthless adventurers exploited their military advantages horses, steel weapons and guns and indigenous divisions to brutally usurp and subjugate the populations of Mesoamerica and South America. This was a system open to egregious abuse — settlers focused on their personal enrichment through the forced labour of natives — and it was controversial even among contemporaries.
Europeans unwittingly introduced virulent diseases such as smallpox that killed millions, devastating native populations in the Caribbean and on the continents. To replace the declining indigenous peoples, disease-resistant African slaves were imported, thus initiating the horrific Atlantic slave trade.
Finally, the gradual establishment of the Catholic church led to forceful campaigns of evangelisation aiming to eliminate native religions and acculturate indigenous peoples. Like all colonial empires, the primary purpose of the Spanish empire was to enrich the mother state in Europe.
Overall, there can be no doubt that the rise of the Spanish empire had a dramatically negative impact on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, though it has also thereby decisively shaped the culture and faith of most modern-day Latin Americans. Its notoriety was widely decried by early modern Protestant propagandists who had an anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic agenda.
Francois Soyer is associate professor of late medieval and early modern history at the University of Southampton. Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. Home Period General ancient history Have empires ever been a force for good? Yasmin Khan The British empire transformed trade and drove the growth of cities.
In short, it made the modern world. Maya and Aztec rules of engagement in warfare resulted in far fewer deaths than was the case in European warfare. Hernando Cortes Cortez , Spanish conquistador, attacking natives in Mexico. Imperialism is freighted with negative connotations. Yet this is too reductive an approach. An advert promoting the Bengal Nagpur railway. The Spanish brutally subjugated the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Romulus, after all, had been the founder of the Eternal City, Augustus her first emperor. The light-switch had been turned off. Antiquity was over; the Dark Ages had begun. In fact, in almost every way that it can be, dating the fall of the Roman empire to a particular day in is wrong.
Meanwhile, in Rome itself, life carried on pretty much as normal. Consuls continued to be elected, the senate to sit, chariot races to be held in the Circus Maximus. Most saliently of all, in the eastern half of the Mediterranean, the Roman empire was still strong. Ruled from a city pointedly christened the Second Rome, it remained the greatest power of its day.
Constantinople had many centuries of life in it yet as a Roman capital. It turns out, in short, that the fall of Rome is to human history what the end of the dinosaurs is to natural history: the prime example of an extinction that nevertheless, when one looks at it more closely, turns out to be more complicated than one might have thought. If it is true, after all, that birds are, in a sense, dinosaurs, then it destabilises our notion of the asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous era as a guillotine dropping on the neck of the Mesozoic.
It is important, of course, not to take revisionism too far. Just as a wren is no tyrannosaur, so was, say, the England of Bede incalculably different from the Roman province of Britannia. The brute facts of societal collapse are written both in the history of the period and in the material remains. An imperial system that had endured for centuries imploded utterly; barbarian kingdoms were planted amid the rubble of what had once been Roman provinces; paved roads, central heating and decent drains vanished for a millennium and more.
So, it is not unreasonable to characterise the fall of the Roman empire in the west as the nearest thing to an asteroid strike that history has to offer. What rises must fall. This seems to most of us almost as much a law in the field of geopolitics as it is in physics. Every western country that has ever won an empire or a superpower status for itself has lived with a consciousness of its own mortality. In Britain, which only a century ago ruled the largest agglomeration of territory the world has ever seen, we have particular cause.
Back in , at the seeming pinnacle of the empire on which the sun never set, subject peoples from the across the world gathered in London to mark the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. Instead, it looked to the future in sombre and as it turned out prophetic terms:. Far-called our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! American self-confidence seems to have clawed back at least some lost ground since then.
Nevertheless, pessimism remains the default setting at the moment in both the US and the west as a whole. The title was an obvious riff on the ideal of the American dream; but the Chinese equivalent, it turns out, is as much about drawing sustenance from the past as about looking to the future. Unity at home, projection of strength abroad, the organic fusion of soft and hard power: these, according to the colonel, are in the DNA of Chinese greatness. How does he know this? Why, by looking to ancient history — and specifically to the example of Qin Shi Huangdi, the so-called First Emperor, who back in the 3rd century BC united China, embarked on the Great Wall, and established a template of leadership that even Mao admired.
It is as though US commentators, trying to plot a course ahead for their country, were to look to Caesar Augustus as an exemplar. The reason they would never do that is obvious.
The US, for all that it has a Senate and a Capitol, is self-consciously a young country, planted in a new world. But China is old, and knows that it is old. Dynasties may have come and gone, waves of barbarians may have washed over it again and again, the emperor himself may have been replaced by a general secretary — but no rupture such as separates Barack Obama from ancient Rome divides Xi Jinping from the First Emperor.
There is a taste here, perhaps — just the faintest, most tantalising taste — of a counterfactual: one in which Rome did not fall. That China was able to survive conquest by the Mongols and the Manchus demonstrates just how deep the roots of a civilisation can reach.
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