The American empire
Does the United States have an empire? That question seems to generate a certain amount of serious and not-so serious debate in the blogosphere and media. Blogger Adloyada, for example, gets seriously upset with historian Linda Colley, writing huffily of Colley:
For example, she represents the USA as self-evidently an imperial and imperialist power.
But the terms of the argument that Adloyada and Colley both accept seem to me to be seriously misleading since they centre on such questions as whether an informal network of client and subordinate states constitutes an empire or not. But there’s an obvious and much more straightforward way of answering in the affirmative, and that’s to hold the United States to the same standards that people (including Colley) use when dealing with other countries. And here I’m thinking of Russia and China.
Just to take the latter for a start, here’s Colley, in the course of her article :
Some variants and examples of empire have proved powerful and durable. China, for example, is essentially a land-based empire, forged over the centuries by conquest and migration, which has managed to reposition itself as a nation state.
And how about Russia? The boundaries of Imperial Russia in, say, 1904 were rather larger than they were under Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century due to a progressive expansion, subjugation of native peoples, colonization of new territories by ethnic Russians, and so forth.
I guess readers will see where I’m going with this: if the expansion of China and Russia via a process of subjugation of native peoples and colonial settlement is a bona fide instance of empire and imperialism then so must be the expansion of the United States across the North American continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. It too involved the subjugation of native peoples and the projection of settlers and the eventual incorporation of the newly colonized territory within the expanding state. Of course, a little bit of selective amnesia and pretence can avoid the acknowledgement that, just like Britain and France, American too was a classically imperial power, just one that, in the end, was more successful.
This doesn’t sit well with a certain American self-image: one that sees the United States as somehow different from other powers, as not, historically, imperialist or colonialist at all. And that isn’t an image that is restricted to the right, it also occupies the thoughts of American liberals who believe that there is a danger of the US becoming something that, historically, it wasn’t and thereby somehow betraying its original ideals. But like their opponents, those liberals have bought into a myth. If China and Russia both were and are imperial powers, then, by exactly the same token, so was and is the US.
The contrast between growing American land and sea power, and American self-image, is rather reminiscent of the Sir John Seeley’s famous description of the British Empire in The Expansion of England (1883):
Of course, the original inheritors of the War of Independence may have been more forthright about their designs on Indian territories.
Note that we actually have foriegn territories we control in traditional, imperial fashion—e. g., Puerto Rico, Guam, etc. And if client states don’t make an empire . . . well, let’s just say that Romans of the time of Caesar would not have agreed.
Yes, but by your definition, every “New World” country is an empire. Mexico is an empire. Brazil is an empire. Australia and New Zealand are empires. France, which only permanenently acquired Alsace-Lorraine after WWII (from Germany) is an empire. Big deal.
The ‘is America an empire’ question hinges on intentional confusion. First, define ‘empire’ in a way that is reasonably benign (i.e. a people that expanded, a nation with economic influence in other nations, a nation with military bases in other nations, etc etc etc). Second, declare ‘empire’ and accept the non-benign impact of that statement-the word ‘empire’ doesn’t call to mind Australian settlers moving into the outback (and displacing the natives), it calls to mind the British, owning 1/4 of the globe. Or Rome, conquering all of the known world.
You want it both ways-define empire to be able to call the US an empire, then use ‘empire’ (or, EMPIRE
) to accuse the US of being evil (or, EVIL
!).
There are similar sloppy uses of language all the time. I had a professor that used to call the Japanese internment camps in WWII ‘concentration camps.’ He wanted to do the same thing: both the US and Germany locked up minorities behind barbed wire (i.e. concentration camp=locking people up), then ignore that redefinition of concentration camp in order to get the rhetorical effect (ergo US HAD CONCENTRATION CAMPS!! US=NAZI GERMANY
!). Anytime anyone calls Bush, or the US military, or policemen, or anyone else Nazis, they are doing the same thing.
Its just intentional sloppy use of language for rhetorical effect. Very Orwellian.
Steve
Steve,
First, I didn’t say anything about anyone being evil.
Second, whilst many Latin American states are indeed the residues of empire, the expansion of the US resembles that of China and Russia in important material respects.
Third, since you mention the use of “Orwellian” language, I’d qualify your phrases “a people that expanded” and “moving into the outback (and displacing the natives)” as exactly that.
And as for “concentration camps”, I believe that we British invented them to detain the Boers at the time of the Boer war. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to draw attention to parallels between the American detention of the Japanese and the British detention of the Boers.
Steve,
I think, whether they come from the right (e.g. Niall Ferguson) or the left (e.g. Noam Chomsky), those who talk about American imperialism are less motivated by a need to portray America as ‘evil’, than to make the United States fully conscious of the international nature of its power. What they happen to think should be done with that power is another matter. (Those who portray America as an imperial power may also have historiographical reasons for using the language of imperialism in investigating the rise and fall of large states, but those reasons tend to be forgotten in the consequent political controversy.)
This historical language may (or may not) be sloppy, but ‘Orwellian’ is not a synonym for rhetorical slippage.
just like Britain and France
Chris, here, not with Russia or China, your supposed neutrality of language (and neutering of ‘imperial’) is belied.
Chris, here, not with Russia or China, your supposed neutrality of language (and neutering of ‘imperial’) is belied.
Um no, because I don’t regard the Russian and Chinese colonizations of nearby and adjacent places as being somehow more benign than the British and French colonizations of far-away places (or Ireland for that matter).
Okay, another good and useful word bites the dust. As Bro. Steve demonstrated with the evolution of the word “concentration camp” and I could toss out several other words that are evolving as we write. So, let’s grasp American Empire and see what we can come up with. Of course we share many traits in common with the Roman Empire, for under both empires science, technology, religion, language, trade, economics, human rights, and liberty have all been advanced. And what was Imperial Romes greatest contribution to the world? The idea of freedom.
Okay, another good and useful word bites the dust.
Not at all. I’ve often read people making the point that the expansion of Russian power into its hinterland and the subjugation of the indigenous peoples who lived there was a straightforward instance of imperialism. I’ve never heard anyone saying that using the word of Russia in that way devalued the language.
And what was Imperial Romes greatest contribution to the world? The idea of freedom.
Are you absolutely sure the classical idea of freedom was a product of imperialRome?
Bro. Bartleby,
First, (as I understand it) Imperial Rome’s idea of liberty was rather different from our own idea of innate human freedom. The Romans treated liberty as a sort of property that differed according to your station. Slaves had little liberty, non-citizens had some liberty, citizens had lots of liberty, and so on. Liberty was a function of the force of arms. I doubt Boudicca appreciated the extension of Roman ideals of ‘freedom’.
Second, I’m curious about your claim that Rome ‘advanced’ religion, as opposed to merely orchestrating various religious changes. Whatever can you mean?
The “idea” of freedom. Just as the idea of cacti was absent in the lexicon of the Inuit, the idea of freedom was absent to many of the folks that Rome imperiled.
Of course. They didn’t understand freedom; in fact, they liked it when Rome conquered them. They’re not like us, you see. They wouldn’t know what to do with freedom if one were to be so foolish as to set them loose.
“I’m curious about your claim that Rome ‘advanced’ religion”
Of course it all depends on your definition of ‘advanced’ and I suppose ‘religion’ … but during the Byzantine period, from the reign of … say, Theodosius I.
“And as for “concentration camps”, I believe that we British invented them to detain the Boers at the time of the Boer war.”
Chris-
this is another example of what I am talking about. I don’t believe British invented ‘concentration camps.’ In common usage, ‘concentration camp’ means ‘a place where people were worked literally to death, intentionally starved to death, and even intentionally slaughtered and executed’ (i.e. German death camps). When you say British invented ‘concentration camps’ in the Boer War, is that what you mean? Did the camps in the Boer war intentionally collect people to execute them (in the 10s or 100s of thousands, or millions)? I admit I don’t know, but I suspect not-I suspect they were detention camps-where people were sent to live, presumably until order was restored, or the war was won, or whatever (note: I’m not saying these were pleasant places, or even morally defensible-I’m just saying they weren’t death camps).
Thus, you want it both ways- you define ‘concentration camp’ as ‘detention camp (probably extremely unpleasant, but detention camp nonetheless)’, even though the RHETORICAL effect of using the words ‘concentration camp’ is to accuse Britain of creating ‘a place where people were sent to be gassed and burned.’
And similarly with ‘empire.’ As I said, if you redefine ‘empire’ the way you have, then virtually every nation on earth is an ‘empire.’ By this rhetoric, Mexico is an empire (or has the weak glimmerings of empire) because “colonization of new territories by ethnic Russians(Mexicans)” could include illegal immigration into Texas and New Mexico (Note: this is clearly absurd).
“Third, since you mention the use of “Orwellian” language, I’d qualify your phrases “a people that expanded” and “moving into the outback (and displacing the natives)” as exactly that.”
I’m not sure why. Here is your own definition of the same phenomenon. “Russia in, say, 1904 were rather larger than they were under Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century due to a progressive expansion, subjugation of native peoples, colonization of new territories by ethnic Russians, and so forth.” You mentioned ‘subjugation of native peoples’ where I didn’t, but I mentioned ‘displacing the natives’ where you didn’t, but other than that, the two definitions are virtually identical.
“First, I didn’t say anything about anyone being evil.”
I am quite confident that you are defining America as an ‘empire’ because it is a good thing, because it is a morally neutral thing, or because it is an evil thing. (if you wish to substitute ‘bad’ for ‘evil’, that’s fine with me). You are correct-I merely assumed that for your purposes ‘empire’ is neither good nor morally neutral (and thus must be evil/bad). If I was incorrect in my assumption-then tell us: is ‘empire’ in your use of the word good, or morally neutral?
Steve
Steve,
1. You can read about the etymology of “concentration camp” at the Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camps
2. I wasn’t aware that “displace” and “subjugate” are synonyms. It is Orwellian to use “displace” where what is actually going on is “ethnic cleansing”, murder, subjugation etc.
3. Of course I think imperialism and colonialism were bad things. But I don’t think that America’s colonial and imperialism past makes the United States more (or less) evil than any of the other countries that sent out waves of settlers to “displace” indigenous peoples, took over territory etc. It is just that you Americans are, legacy-wise, in the same boat as the rest of us (British, French, Russians etc.).
I’m just not convinced that any discussion of what an empire is and whether or not the US, China, and Russia are empires has a really relevant point. Homo sapiens have been migrating into new areas even before we left Africa, whether there was already an indigenous population in the area or not. We supplanted Neanderthal in Europe. Does that make all Europe a vestige of the Homo sapiens empire? Is the UK itself still an empire? England governed Wales and Scotland (and all or parts of Ireland) by both military force, intimidation, and influence, subjugating its native peoples and forcing unification. The Scots still want their own parliament. And the “English” who did this, at least those in power, were of Norman descent, (read Vikings by way of France), who subjugated both the western Anglo-Saxons and eastern Vikings who resided in England in 1066.
Aren’t we just talking about how recently these migrations/subjugations have occurred? Whether it was clan, tribe, or nation state who did the migrating or made the invasions, it has been going on for as long as our species grew in population and needed or wanted more space. Is “we were here first” much of a justification of moral primacy for earlier arrivals over later ones? How long must the indigenous peoples have been there? How “pure” must these peoples be in lines of descent, given the constant waves of new “invaders” into all the world (except isolated pockets) throughout history. Aren’t the Welsh the descendants of the Romanized Britons who were forced to the west by invasions of the Angles and Saxons, who in turn were then forced west by invasions from the Danes?
Shouldn’t this discussion be about the modern use of power by nations, international organizations, and global corporate powers who seem to be transforming our world before our eyes?
Industrialized and developing countries now share a world economy that requires a certain amount of stablilty to allow our present way of life to survive. All of North America and all of Europe need oil to survive. The stable and constant supply of oil is a requirement for our lives. How do we insure this stability? Stability of a civilization also requires a certain amount of the rule of law, including insuring the safety of its members. How do we protect ourselves without over-compromising our liberties, including the free flow of people, goods, and ideas?
On the whole, the US is not an empire in the historical sense. (Puerto Rico likes its status. We’d prefer they opt for statehood or for independence. Statehood would require them to pay US income tax. Independence would deprive them of US citizenship and free travel into and out of the US.) We are a superpower, perhaps in decline, who uses power in ways and degrees that, in the past, were only available to empires. Corporations also have and use powers that were once exclusive to nation states.
I’d prefer to discuss the aspects of the use of power – whether in Iraq by the US and UK (mainly) or in Turkey by the EU or in Tibet by the Chinese – than to evoke emotional responses by calling names.
The difference you’re discussing hinges on whether the empirial power considered itself to be conquering states or merely populated land. it also hinges in the historians answer to that question. Are tribes states? Empire is merely a word.
As far as American self-image is concerned, I think most people here assume that we’ve been an empire for a long time now. But many Americans still defend their self interest in terms of its supposed civilizing influence. Foreign policy ‘wonks’
professional political intellectuals for hireif they are liberals, can be no more than liberal nationalists, and as such defend the status quo, which is empire. see these people and most of the politcal yuppies at TPM cafe (“Starbucks”).The other problem is that Chomsky’s moral puritanism, while equally American, isn’t a very practical response.
The accidental strikethrough!ARGHH!
And what was Imperial Romes greatest contribution to the world? The idea of freedom.
Ye Gods, man. One of the Roman Republic’s contributions to the world was the idea of freedom (though the Athenians might have had something to say about that). Imperial Rome was a dictatorship of a fairly absolute kind, with appallingly restrictive laws and massive lack of freedom.
It is just that you Americans are, legacy-wise, in the same boat as the rest of us (British, French, Russians etc.).
Perhaps we differ in how we come to terms with our past. Whatever the denials from the fringe, US internments (whether Nissei or Phillipine or …) are roundly denounced. Whereas the more benign imperium …
I feel that Steve has some very solid points on the use of language in his posts. For me, personally, that something should be “Imperial” is more a question of a despotic reign, as I would link it to the contrast of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. I think that it is quite clear that the Chinese Empire, or the Japanese Empire, were far, far different entities, with almost no real similarities in what the Imperial system truly meant for those countries. Now in terms of cause and effect, I think that there is a vague conception that any nation that has succeeded in reaching “Empire” status is very influential, and so if we could accept that “Imperialism” is a question of massive power in modern colloquial usage, with negative connotations, well we could agree that it is a negative way of talking about US power.
From Wikipedia:
“The term imperialism was a new word in the mid-19th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it dates back to 1858. The Latin root is imperium (command or supreme power).
According to the Oxford English Dictionary(OED), imperialism was generally used only to describe English policies.
The term imperialism was used to describe the American war supporters in the Spanish American War by the now defunct Anti-imperialists. Many historians, such as Stuart Creighton Miller, author of “Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903”, use the term imperialist and anti-imperialist to describe the two rival factions.
In the 20th century, the term has often been used to refer to the actions of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan during the 1930s and World War II. Later, during the Cold War, it was also used in reference to the policies of both the United States and the Soviet Union, although these differed greatly from each other and from 19th-century imperialism. Furthermore, the term has been expanded to apply, in general, to any historical instance of a greater power at the expense of a lesser power.
Since the end of World War II and following the collapse of the Soviet Union , accusations of imperialism have almost exclusively been levelled at the sole remaining superpower, the United States.”
I think it is curious that I have rarely heard of Nazi Germany or the former USSR referred to as “Empires”. Could this be linked to the fact that Lenin was the principle exponent of capitalist imperialism?
I don’t actually think this discussion of empire is very useful. Almost any modern nation you can think of is an imperial power.
Any modern state in the Americas is imperial. That definitely includes Mexico, where native populations were “displaced” and settlers brought in. Essentially all the European states were imperial, in one way or another: UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Latvia (in the Caribbean), Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Turkey. The few who weren’t were colonized by other powers: Ireland, Poland (even there it is iffy), Finland, etc.
Asian states were obviously imperial: Thailand, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, Indonesia (ongoing in Papua and elsewhere), etc.
There are actually very few states that are not imperial in the sense that the original posting is talking about.
So the only thing I can understand about this is to draw attention to the scale of the empire, perhaps. But even there, the US is not particularly important in terms of imperial populations. After all, the Russian state still controls many millions of people who would prefer their own state, all things considered. This is even more true for the Chinese state. In comparison, the US imperial possesions include things like Puerto Rico (~4 million) and some Pacific islands with neglible populations.
If we are going to talk about imperial control, the UK in Northern Ireland has a much more serious and long-lasting imperial problem than the US does.
Forgot to add:
Just looking at the British Isles, it is clear that successful native peoples were “displaced” and replaced by settlers. Look at the Highland clearings, the potato famine, and the Pale as clear examples of official policy to get rid of troublesome natives and replace them with settlers.
Steve-
I know you didn’t ask me, but I’d say that empires are what they are not because they are ‘good’, ‘morally neutral’. There are good and bad things about empires, just like there are good and bad things about monarchies—it’s good to be the King!, like Mel Brooks would say—, about aristocracies, about democracies, etc. Naturally, the bad things about empires tend to overwhelm the good things, at least from the point of view of a fair number of those who are subjected by empires. But this is not what makes empires what they are.
By the way, when I hear the phrase ‘concentration camp’, what comes to mind is something far more generic than a nazi concentration camp. Nazi concentration camps are but a reminder of why concentration camps can become mass graves. But our collective condemnation of concentration camps ought not to derive simply from the proposition that they may sometimes end up being mass graves, mind you. We must condemn concentration camps for their essential injustice and cruelty. There may be a difference of orders of magnitude in degree of cruelty between Japanese-internment camps in the US and Nazi concentration camps; but that fact alone constitutes an incredibly petty reason to absolve the US for what it did to Japanese-Americans, if you ask me. Finally, what seems Orwellian to me is the unabashed defence of political excesses of a State by pointing out the supposed rhetorical excesses of its detractors, as if pointing out the existence of varying degrees of evil somehow rendered the State a victim of slander, and thus innocent of the charges imputed against it.
I often wonder how it is the case that the very people who—often, sensibly enough, I may add—distrust the government with their money are so willing to trust that it won’t violate the civil liberties of its most vulnerable inhabitants. When you think about it, giving the State money to spend (presumably unwisely) in welfare programs is far less threatening than giving the government the right to engage in massive data mining of communications without court warrants, or to conduct illegitimate kidnappings of foreign subjects with the ‘unintended purpose’ of sending them to countries where they ‘might’ be tortured.
Steve,
Even under the Nazi regime not all concentration camps were places ‘where people were sent to be gassed and burned’. And Chris is quite right that the Boer War saw the use of concentration camps, as the Parliamentary documents of the day called them. You can read a little about this and view some of the original documents online, thanks to Stanford University.
Bro. Bartleby,
It’s risky to accept the opinions of imperialists about the colonized, but I don’t think the Romans certainly believed they were bringing freedom to the conquered, or that those they conquered had no idea of liberty. In Gallic War, 3.10, Julius Caesar notes that ‘all men likewise, by nature, love liberty and hate the condition of slavery’. And look at the speech he places in the mouth of his enemy the Gaul Critognatus (Gallic War, 7.77):
(Quotations from the Bohn translation at the Perseus Digital Library.)
Tietjens,
But thinking about modern states in terms of empire is just one method of of putting them in historical perspective. And it allows historians and pundits to use related concepts, like ‘imperial overstretch’, to analyse the potential and limits of US hegemony. Or to put it another way, thinking in terms of empire is a way of thinking ‘about the modern use of power’.
But even there, the US is not particularly important in terms of imperial populations. After all, the Russian state still controls many millions of people who would prefer their own state, all things considered. This is even more true for the Chinese state.
For fuck’s sake ….
The fact that the Russian and Chinese states still control non-Russian and non-Chinese peoples in those large numbers and the United States doesn’t might have something to do with the sorry fate of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Of course it all depends on your definition of ‘advanced’ and I suppose ‘religion’ … but during the Byzantine period, from the reign of … say, Theodosius I.
So by “religion” you mean “Eastern Christianity,” and by “advanced” you mean “turned into an instrument of centralized social control”?
Chris,
Russian “indigenous” populations have declined in pretty much a similar way to American “indigenous” populations. I’m not actually counting them in the numbers. The Russians actually went farther, conquering the Caucasians, Tatars, Buryats, and Mongols, with relatively high population densities to this day. The Russians have been pretty successful at wiping out their indigenous populations also, but they were even greedier in terms of conquest than the Americans.
I’m sure there are also lots of Chinese indigenous groups who have been wiped out as well – the records just aren’t as good.
I still don’t see an argument that the US is some amazing imperialist relative to other countries.
Chris—what are the parallels between British detention camps that they ran during Anglo-Boer war camps and Nazi camps ? Secondly why is one interested in drawing these parallels ? On the first question the camps held only women and children ( idea here was to prevent the men who were fighting a guerila war from slipping home at night and receive shelter from their families.) no intentional mistreatment was involved . What you got was suffering ( bad food and bad hygiene ) caused by neglect essentially. Observe : when British press got hold of the fact that conditions were unhygenic in the camps ( fotographs of starving children ) there was an outcry and the British army dispached inspectors to check the situation out. The result was general elevation of hygene etc. Detainees were allowed to keep their possesions etc.
So what are the parallels you see exactly apart from the boring once ? We all use the term ‘concentration camp’ to mean death camp playing a role in intentional killing of people or it means organised mass murder.In other words what British did and what the Nazis did is morally apples and oranges. But you know this and this brings me to the second question of motivation . Well its a game called ‘character assasination’ Bush is a Hitler, American prisons are gulags on so on down the line .
It seems to me that intellectually one does this sort of thing when one runs out of good argument since what you do is use an ad hominem argument. But secondly you argue in a dishonest way because you know that the comparison wont stand up but you pretend that it does and insist on using it.
[CB replies: Zdenek, God knows what you are smoking, but a cursory inspection of my post and the thread would reveal that it was “Steve” who raised the matter of concentration camps. My role was to inform him that the modern use of the term originates not with the Nazis, as he appeared to believe, but with the British during the Boer war. ]
I still don’t see an argument that the US is some amazing imperialist relative to other countries.
Since the argument was that the US was imperialist in the same manner that China and Russia were and not that it was “some amazing imperialist compared to other countries”, that isn’t surprising.
The difference you’re discussing hinges on whether the empirial power considered itself to be conquering states or merely populated land. it also hinges in the historians answer to that question. Are tribes states?
Are you claiming that:
there was a substantial difference between pre-conquest african and american locals?
no imperialism happened in africa?
something else?
In pragmatic terms, an empire is any country that someone thinks they might be able to get away with changing the boundaries of, either by breaking a bit off or adding a bit. If they succeed, they were right (see trad. definition of treason).
soru
The most powerful military in the world by a long, long, way? Yup.
The most powerful economy in the world by a long, long way? Check.
Does it really matter whether the US can be described an empire? Nope.
Fun argument though – especially from #9 and others who seem blissfully unaware of the Roman Republic.
William Everdell, in his book the First Moderns, traces the history of the concentration camp back to Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the Spanish officer who used the word “re-concentration” for his policy of uprooting rebel villages in Cuba and moving them to barbed wire camps. Everdell remarks upon the fact that Weyler had been sent by the spanish as an observer during the American Civil War, and he had acquired an admiration for General Sherman, and particularly the tactic of total warfare employed by General Sherman in the March to the Sea.
When thousands of Cubans died, the U.S. protested to Spain. When the U.S. fought Spain and took possession of the Philipines, the Americans re-thought their objections and decided that Weyler’s reconcentration camps were just the thing to subdue the rebellious Fillipinos. And of course we are seeing them apply a version of the same methods in Iraq, now—Fallujah being one example, and Samara another. From a recent AP story about Samara:
“Since 2003, Samarra has come to symbolize the trials and errors of U.S. strategy in Iraq – a cycle of military offensives, lulls and new waves of lethal insurgent attacks.
In recent months, U.S. forces have resorted to draconian tactics to try to drive insurgents from Samarra and keep them out. In late August, Army engineers used bulldozers to build an eight-foot-high, 6 1/2-mile-long dirt wall around the city, threatening to kill anyone who tried to cross it. Entry into Samarra was limited to three checkpoints. Since then, attacks have fallen sharply, and voter turnout was high for the Dec. 15 national elections.”
Weyler lives on.
Trackback doesn’t seem to have kicked in. But I’m gratified to have annoyed Jane Galt , who tells us that the American claim not to be imperialist amounts to saying that the US never acted like King Leopold of the Belgians. Or perhaps I should quote her exact words:
Homme de paille?
Chris,
You haven’t actually established that the US is an Empire comparable to Russia and China. After all, Russia and China control far more people in a far more dictatorial fashion than the US does. Russia and China are amazing imperialists. They continue to hold large numbers of people under colonial control, while the US does not. If anything, the UK is more imperial than the US if we consider Northern Ireland and the failure of self-rule there.
Yes, the US is powerful, and yes the US has client states. But in the sense of empire, as you have defined it, in the present day, the US isn’t actually that significant.
Chris,
I am no expert in these matters, but, for what its worth, I think many indigenous peoples in China did in fact suffer more or less the same sorry fate. I’m not sure about comparisons of scale or extent, but here is some casual empiricism. Where I grew up in upstate New York you can still easily find the remaining enclaves of native populations (eg Mohawks) among a vast sea of European and African Americans. In my travels through China, I have frequently run into small pockets of minorities in a sea of Han Chinese. For instance, two years ago I took a detour from a cruise down the Yangtze to visit some of the famous hanging coffins. In the area I visited, a people called the “Bo” or “Ba” were responsible for these. According to our Han guide, they used to live throughout a massive stretch of China, including the middle Yangtze, but have now been reduced to really tiny and isolated pockets. I’m not sure there really is as much difference as you think.
Well, there is one big difference: pathogens were probably the most important tool in the displacement of Native Americans, and as a general rule I’m pretty sure that the Europeans who colonized the US had only a limited understanding of their role in so depleting native populations (the recent book “1491” describes numerous such instances). When the Chinese encountered these indigenous peoples, presumably their epidemiological isolation had not been as great and hence there was more need to actually kill them with their own bare hands. I’m not sure either death is a pleasant prospect to those doing the dying, and I do not believe that ignorance of germ theory exonerates the early Americans for their role in decimating indigenous populations with disease. My only point is that this was a messy and brutal process in both cases.
Many, many interesting things to pick through in the Galt post, but this quite hilarious claim:
seems to me to sum up in one sentence Ms. McArdle’s particular style of contributing to our understanding of world affairs.
I should add that my Han Chinese guide was explicit that the Bo (or Ba (I heard them called both)) were so reduced by conquest. He seemed neither proud or ashamed of this. He was just very matter of fact about it.
By the by, when I grew up in upstate New York, in school we were made well aware of the total destruction of pre-Columbian New York during the colonial era.
Chris,
Whilst I must admit to having never thought to compare shoe factories in Malaysia to what King Leopold did to the Congo (which in fact was nothing as it was his son Leopold II that decided Belgium would be a colonial power – try reading that sentence without grinning), I prefer this from the same post:
“No one in America is unaware of what happened to the Indians; no one that I have ever met has tried to justify it, though we are all awfully glad that we have a country”
Here’s my version: I killed a family and took their house. Now, I’m not going to justify it but I’m awfully glad I’ve got a house.
I have to agree, largely, with Steve. The interesting question is what sort of global power the United States is, rather than its national history. Its national history may inform the answer, but any global power will have an imperial history so that fact alone does not give us much to go on.
Neocons contend that the United States should behave like the imperial power they believe it is, and that it should rely on force to shape the world to its liking. Our efforts in Iraq demonstrate each day how juvenile their thinking was.
Tib,
In the terms of those who think the United States has an empire, I think it would be more accurate to say that the neocons believe that the United States should stop practicing ‘soft’ imperialism (e.g. using economic incentives and international legal structures to keep client states in line) and start practicing ‘hard’ imperialism (e.g. military regime change in unruly client states). That switch has indeed been less than entirely satisfactory, not least because, as empires go, the United States has an admirable commitment to the welfare both of its own troops (from what I remember, this particularly irked Ferguson) and of the people they conquer (within various notorious limitations), including a belief that they should enjoy at least a Potemkin democracy. Of course, there are incentives to have such a commitment, when rival great powers are armed with nukes. The Romans and the Brits, in their imperial heyday, never faced those.
(Sorry if this gets posted twice.)
Hektor,
there is plentiful ground for just criticism of the British state with respect to its acts and omissions in Ireland and Scotland, it’s true; but you’re being silly. You think the UK has an ‘imperial problem’ in NI now? In the face of the fact that the majority of NI’s people want above all else to remain part of the UK? Still, I can see your point. Republican theology promises us, after all, that the scales will one day fall from the eyes of the majority, who will then see that they are colonisés and start voting Sinn Féin. (Except, of course, when it hints darkly that the majority are colons who should start learning to swim.) If the UK has an ‘imperial problem’ in NI, then it is precisely the same problem the US has with respect to its native American population. Rather less of one, in fact, the depredations of the planters having been much milder than those of the American pioneers, and the lot of the descendants of the ‘colonised’ population today being incomparably better in NI than in the US.
Your argument that the potato famine and the highland clearances were ‘clear examples of official policy to get rid of troublesome natives and replace them with settlers’, by contrast, is spot on. Spot on, that is, so long as one includes under the rubric of settlers ‘native’ Irish strong farmers in the first instance, and sheep in the second.
Is the US an empire? Beats me. But if we’re using the standard of “subjugation of native peoples and colonial settlement” so are Britain (and I mean the island of Britain), France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, and practically every other country I can think of. You might want to narrow that definition a trifle.
Mrs. Tilton,
Yes, Northern Ireland is an imperial problem. It’s exactly the same problem as France had in Algeria, with long-entrenched groups whose political orientation is towards Britain, while the native majority wanted independence. However, unlike the Algerian case, Britain opted for partition and created a nasty little mini-state instead of evacuating its partisans.
Just because Britain cobbled together a pro-British majority while grabbing as much land as it could (otherwise, why include Derry?) doesn’t suddenly make it not an imperial problem. Why do you think so many people (40+%) support joining Ireland and leaving the UK (based on their party preferences), if their lot is so great and British rule is so benign?
You may support the inclusion of NI in the UK, but that doesn’t make it not an imperial problem. It’s not like grievances suddenly evaporate because a group gets a 50%+1 majority. Deal with it. Was Kazakstan not an imperial problem because the Kazaks were less than 50%? How about Talinn, where Russians at one time outnumbered Estonians?
After all, Russia and China control far more people in a far more dictatorial fashion than the US does.
Irrelevant to whether the US is an empire, although one of the reasons one might be interested in whether the US is an empire is because there is a long controversy in historiography whether imperials powers can be governed with republican institutions for any length of time. (The Bush administration appears to be tacitly arguing that they can’t.)
Russia and China are amazing imperialists. They continue to hold large numbers of people under colonial control, while the US does not.
No, one way or another we killed off most of ours. But direct colonial control is not the only possible form of empire.
If anything, the UK is more imperial than the US if we consider Northern Ireland and the failure of self-rule there.
Again, this is irrelevant, unless you’re claiming that there can be only one imperial power on the planet at any one time. Does the US exercise power over other countries comparable to the power exercised by the late classical Roman imperium or the nineteenth-century British empire? That’s the only question here. If the answer is no, then that’s that; if the answer is yes, we can move on to other questions, of motive and effect and possible alternatives. But “every other country did it too” isn’t responsive, except as an implied and reluctant “yes.”
Nice to see Northern Ireland creeping into the discussion for useful reason. A perfect sea of troubles indeed…
Hogan,
(1) The reason I discuss Russia and China is that Chris wanted to make a direct comparison between the US and them in the present day. (Read the last sentence of the initial post.) That comparison is not instructive, for the reasons I have mentioned above.
(2) Russia and China also have killed off many of their colonial subjects. They just happen to have gone after larger groups of people, and continue to go after them to the present day. So there is a difference in quantity. If the US still ruled the Philippines and Cuba, there might be more basis for comparison, but the US doesn’t.
(3) Almost every country you can name has been imperialist at some point. That’s a useless designation. What do you mean by imperialist? If you are comparing US actions to current colonialist actions by Russia and China, then I don’t accept the comparison.
If you want to make a claim that the US wields great power in the world and has client states, then I agree with you. But that isn’t necessarily implied by the word “imperialism”. Decide what you mean by power or imperialism, then we can discuss what you mean.
Oops. Above should read “for no useful reason”.
Hektor,
Chris wasn’t making a comparison in the present day. He was picking up on Colley’s definition of “empire” as applied to China in its era of expansion and pointing out that that definition applies just as well to the US in its era of expansion (something no supporter of manifest destiny would ever have dreamed of denying). And the point was not gratuitous US-bashing (as if the word “imperialism” were nothing but an epithet—it is an epithet, but that’s not all it is), but pointing out the hollowness of the “Golden Age” myth some liberal anti-imperialists invoke of an innocent, pre-imperial US that we must now restore. That US never existed; it was Jefferson who spoke of an “empire of liberty” stretching across the North American continent, right there at the founding.
Hogan,
I agree with you and Chris that the idea of an innocent pre-imperial US is a mirage. But I don’t agree that the US and Chinese and Russian imperial histories follow the same pattern. Frankly, if Russia and China followed a similar pattern to the US, Chechnya, Dagestan, and the rest of the southern Caucasus would be independent, along with Tatarstan and a few other republics, and so would East Turkestan, Tibet, Manchuria, and probably Inner Mongolia would be part of Mongolia as an independent country. Taiwan goes without saying, not to mention parts of Yunnan province.
So I think a direct comparison of Russian and Chinese imperialism to the present-day US isn’t that useful. Historically it is useful, but not really in the present day.
I’d argue that while Brazil probably qualifies as an empire if the US does, not all Latin American states do. Mexico is largely inhabited by descendants of its pre-colonial population. Its maintenance of mestizo nationalism hides a population that’s actually a whole lot less mixed than that. It’s true that it still has communities that define themselves as aboriginal and deem the existing state as the result of a theft of their lands, but they are only a small part of the population.
The same applies to Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala, and I should think most of the rest. (Not Argentina, Chile or Uruguay though.) The dominant language, religion and culture of those nations was changed by conquest, and they were once part of a genuine empire. But that empire has now completely retreated and the descendants of the aboriginal population form the bulk of the population.
In order for those nations to still be empires – by the definition given – we would have to deem France to be an empire because it was conquered and its population converted and absorbed to an alien language and culture by the Romans. Modern Frenchmen still mostly trace their ancestry to pre-Roman Gaul, and those that don’t certainly don’t belong to cultures that ever conquered France. But, the language and culture of France owes far more to Roman than Celtic roots. If European France – seen in isolation from its present and former colonial empire – doesn’t qualify as an empire, than neither does Mexico.
If historical conquest by an expansive power, and the existence of some form of continuity between that conquest and the present government, were enough to make an empire, than the term really has lost all meaning. There is no inhabited corner of the earth that has never been conquered and assimilated by somebody.
27: Bro. Ben, ” but I don’t think the Romans certainly believed they were bringing freedom to the conquered,”
Again, the ‘idea’ of freedom was grasped by the imperiled from observation. Somewhat like a paleolithic tribe coming across another tribe that has mastered the art of making fire. They themselves are fireless, yet by example, they can see how to transform the idea to reality.
Perhaps we need to differentiate between the fact that a lot of state-building has involved imperialism, on the one hand, and ongoing imperialism, on one hand. That is, we need to stipulate a fuzzy line at which people’s perceptions have changed so that what were once imperial territories have become part of the nation. Such boundaries can be complex (e.g. between Cornish, and English, and British). British involvement in Ireland, or American involvement in Iraq, involve a much earlier stage of imperialism than the English conquest of Wales or the American annexation of Texas.
Or to put that all another way, we need to incorporate theories of imperialism into our general notions of state formation, state power, and international relations.
Imperialism can’t be used to characterise all state formation, because states can although group together in a federation which eventually becomes a superstate. But that’s not how most modern nations were created.
Bro. Bartleby,
Like I said, you’re seemingly ignoring the view of the Romans themselves on the matter. But in any case, the only way I can make sense of your view is to rephrase it thus: the Roman Empire made people aware of the idea of freedom by taking its reality away from them.
You may support the inclusion of NI in the UK
I don’t, though. I support any decision about the continuing inclusion in the UK of that part of the island of Ireland being made by the Irish people who live there. (Republicans would say the same, of course; they simply have a more restrictive notion of who Irish people are than do I.)
You want to learn a bit more Irish history before making grand pronouncements about it, by the way. ‘Britain’ didn’t ‘opt for partition’; Irish unionists insisted on it. (Just as Irish nationalists insisted on a partition of their own—unionists did vis-à-vis the Free State only what nationalists did vis-à-vis the UK.) Was partition an ideal solution? Hardly; it was merely the least bad one available at the time.* (Mind you, the border would have run rather differently if I’d been consulted.) For its part, the British government of the day expected that partition would be a brief and transitional thing, and that in due course they’d be shut of the whole damned island. They were wrong about that, but then they were wrong about a lot of things having to do with Ireland.
Anyway, back to the larger point. Me, I think it’s neither accurate nor useful to describe NI’s problems as ‘imperial’ in nature. But if you want to do so, fine. It’s simply that it is, as others have pointed out, no more an ‘empire’ than is the USA, and if anything rather less of one.
Looking back, it would have been a lot clearer if I’d said that, today, British involvement in Ireland, or American involvement in Iraq, involve a much earlier stage of imperialism than British involvement in Wales (the product of conquest long ago) or American involvement in Texas (the product of annexation long ago).
Just to respond to some criticisms above ….
Lots of people have made the not unreasonable point that very many states are the products of colonial expansion. Indeed.
But many of them are the debris of such projects rather than the outcome of their successful completion. China, Russia and the US are the more or less successful outcomes of such projects which have involved the subjugation, incorporation or elimination of the previous residents.
Contrast Bolivia (debris) and Australia, a successful project, but one which has spawned a society independent of the imperial initiator of that project.
Now whether or not we want to call China, Russia and the US today “empires” is really beside the point, which is to say that whilst Americans often contrast themselves with other states and think of those other states as being “imperialist” (a historical claim), their own history is sufficiently similar to those other states to undercut the implied claims of difference and moral superiority.
Actually, I think there’s a curious process of doublethink going on. Americans do, in many contexts acknowledge the wrongs done to the native population but then forget about that history when comparing their history to other “old” powers. So, for example, in Jane Galt’s thread there is both explicit acknowledgment of the former AND sentiments like this:
A statement that can only be explicable in terms of some kind of odd mental comparmentalization according to which the whole experience of the “frontier” doesn’t count as conquest or the seizure of territory from other peoples,.
Hektor,
Saying “the US is as much an empire as China is” is not the same as saying “the US is exactly the same kind of empire that China is.” Koko the gorilla and I are both primates, but we differ in some significant details (at least I consider them significant). We should be able to talk about what primates have in common without having to insist, at every step of the way, that they’re not all identical.
Hmm, do Imperial Powers allow such debates as this? Just wondering.
no one that I have ever met has tried to justify it
This is the most astonishing part of Galt’s silliness. I’ve got loads of undergraduates she should meet….
I think it is curious that I have rarely heard of Nazi Germany or the former USSR referred to as “Empires”.
“The Soviet Empire”’s a fairly well-known term, actually (but perhaps it is/was used mainly by students of the F/SU).
For the US see, in particular but certainly not solely
Arthur Schlesinger, The ImperialPresidency
my apologies for the lack of spaces in the title, Firefox seems to be playing up again.
steve: Your argument sounds like sophistry to me. You brought up the irrelevant analogy of the term “concentration camp”, and then concluded with an ad hominem.
Is not one essential aspect of Empire the central rule of “outer provinces”? Aside from the few excontinental US territories, the US does not have a “formal” system of provincial viceroys “reporting” to a central power, e.g. the US administration.
If at all, imperial control is exerted via “business ties” and through strongly US influenced international entities like the IMF or WTO, and large corporate players. It strikes me it is not primarily the US administration ruling the empire/conglomerate of trade “partners”, but an entangled system of (multinational) corporate interests, with the administration partially acting on its behalf.
Is not one essential aspect of Empire the central rule of “outer provinces”? Aside from the few excontinental US territories, the US does not have a “formal” system of provincial viceroys “reporting” to a central power, e.g. the US administration.
But we still reserve the right to decide who governs certain countries (e.g., Haiti). The list of those countries isn’t always the same, but at least since 1898 or so, there’s always been a list.
Mrs. Tilton,
I do think we are straying from the point a bit now, but I’ll just respond to a couple of your points.
First off, I’m not a republican, but I will say that my impression is that republicans say that the issue of Northern Ireland should be decided by Irish people as a whole, that is, that it should be voted on by the whole island and not by the rump bit that was created in 1921. (Obviously, this would favor their political position.) It wasn’t until the Good Friday agreement that this changed. I don’t actually think there has been in recent memory a strong call for only certain people in Ireland to be able to vote and not others. So I don’t know where you are getting that from. I don’t see it from Sinn Fein, for example.
Britain always “opts” for partition because the “squabbling natives” demand it. They did it in Ireland, then in India and Palestine. It’s the default British mechanism for resolving their colonial pursuits, and it has in general led to irridentism and continuing bloodshed. There were certainly groups in Ireland that wanted partition, and other groups that did not. Britain had both the power and the authority to side with whatever group it wished. It chose partition.
By the way, I’m hardly the only one to compare Ireland to Algeria, which I imagine you would agree was an imperial problem. It’s a pretty mainstream position. For example, take Postwar, by Tony Judt, page 466: “Like French Algeria, Northern Ireland—Ulster—was both a colonial remnant and an integral part of the metropolitan nation itself.”
It’s also pretty clear that independence for Ireland has been good for the country in the long run. After all, it was always the poorest part of the British Isles while in the UK, but now it is one of the richest.
Scott Martens,
You are entirely too forgiving of South and Central America. Bolivia, despite having an indigenous majority, we can definitely characterize as an empire until fairly recently. Similarly for Peru, with large numbers of indigenous. Every country in Central America is similar, except Costa Rica, which is more like Argentina. Paraguay is the only counterexample I can think of, since the Guarani also completely dominate the state and most people speak it, from the president on down.
Hogan,
The US isn’t as much an empire as China is. We don’t have anything comparable to the Tibetans, Uigher, or Mongols.
Chris,
One other point. Australia and America are functionally the same in your analysis. They are both debris states which spawned societies independent of the imperial initiator of the project. You could throw Canada in there too.
The US isn’t as much an empire as China is. We don’t have anything comparable to the Tibetans, Uigher, or Mongols.
It’s not a question of headcount. Both China and the US meet the definition proposed by Colley. An empire with a smallish number of surviving indigenes is nonetheless an empire.
Australia and America are functionally the same in your analysis. They are both debris states which spawned societies independent of the imperial initiator of the project. You could throw Canada in there too.
After independence, neither Canada nor Australia purchased territory from other imperial powers (Louisiana, Alaska), nor did they acquire territory by conquest from other recognized nation-states (Mexico). It’s not quite the same.
Like cm, I think the distinction between programs of territorial expansion, consolidation and incorportation (i.e., the United States, Russia and China) differ substantially from systems of client states, subjugated overseas territories and economic hegemony.
In the former, the ultimate goal is to make the seized territory part of the nation (often through direct settlement by the conquering ethnic group) and the fate of the aboriginal population is assimilation or death. The United States annexed the Oregon Country in order to make it an integral part of the U.S. and people it with Americans.
I’m not sure if “empire” sufficiently captures this concept, if only because the British Empire of the 19th and early 20th Centuries seems to be the prime mental definition of the term these days, and it is squarely of the second type. Sure, the British did settle Canada and the Antipodes, but I doubt anyone thought there was going to be mass migration to the Gold Coast or Burma. These were states that were being controlled by the English crown for economic and security reasons, not for eventual assimilation.
The Russian and Chinese projects, though run by titular emperors, seem much more like American “expansionism.” The Soviet “empire” of the Cold War, though run by titular presidents, seems close to the British Empire.
Whether the U.S. seems to be trending toward an British/Soviet imperial style in its dealings with other nations is certainly a question worth debate. Whether the U.S. territorial expansion paralleled the Russian and Chinese ones seems beyond it.
You cannot compare murder and theft by a living person with the collective sins of long dead people in their dealings with other long dead people. (“I killed a family and took their house.”) My ancestors did not immigrate to the US until the 19th Century, a few decades before the mass immigrations several years on either side of the turn of the century. Most current US citizens and their ancestors had no hand whatsoever in the treatment of Native Americans. My only responsibility is to support fair treatment now and to champion the truthful teaching of our history as a people. If a family was killed and their house stolen 100 years ago, you cannot lay guilt on the house’s current occupants who were transferred from out of town.
So, at what point does an empire become a former empire? Or is it a permanent condition? It seems to me the US has not done any of the conventional “imperial” things in the past century or so; conquering new territories, etc. It certainly has extended its influence, but generally by mutual exchange; it’s not as though even “client” states such as Taiwan will comply with the US’s whim.
Isn’t the US something of a post-Empire state at this point? Whereas China and Russia are still shooting and forcibly migrating restive occupied populations, making the term fit them better.
BTW, this thread seems quite similiar to the one about Thomas Frank’s book over Christmas. Everyone is squabbling over what a word means, when in fact the problem is that one word is trying to cover multiple concepts. In the prior case, people were arguing over whether income or education better defines class, when in fact the more sociologically powerful way of dividing the population is income X education, so that the bins are high-ed/high-income, high-ed/low-income, low-ed/high-income, and low-ed/low-income (or however you want to bin it).
Here, empire is trying to encompass both nationalist expansion and various types of suzerainty. They aren’t the same thing, and using the same word for both leads to nothing but sound and fury.
First off, I’m not a republican, but I will say that my impression is that republicans say that the issue of Northern Ireland should be decided by Irish people as a whole, that is, that it should be voted on by the whole island and not by the rump bit that was created in 1921.
By the orginal definition, that would make them inperialists, as they strive to conquer by force of arms a populace that doesn’t want to be ruled by them.
Taking a vote across the whole British Empire, when it covered a third the map, whether or not it should invade some particular country of a few million people would not have made it a non-empire.
soru
Soru,
By that rationale, any national liberation movement is imperial, because there is always a population, however small, that wishes to remain under the control of the occupying power. And that’s a ridiculous usage of the word imperial.
A nation has one “people” who all consider themselves to be members of the same club. There can be minorities but there arent definable sub-territories that would rather be separate countries.
An empire is where one nation subjugates another and the people in that subjugated nation remain distinct and remain subjugated.
The US isnt really an empire because though we did indeed subjugate another people we KILLED THEM ALL AND TOOK THEIR LAND. Rightly or wrongly, the fact that we have now peopled our land with the winners and either killed or absorbed nearly all the losers means that there arent any areas left that are populated with subjugated people who would like to secede from the US.
Now, as for those foreigners over there in the Middle East, well that is a story for a different post.
Just dropped by to see how many people said “America IS NOT an empire and anyway, what’s wrong with empire anyway?” Cousin Bartleby seems to be about there.
One of the primary ways of supporting American imperialism, now or in the past, is to deny that it’s imperialism. Another is to point out that imperialism really isn’t all that bad. To me it makes the most sense to have different people make these two arguments, but it doesn’t always happen that way.
The US isnt really an empire because though we did indeed subjugate another people we KILLED THEM ALL AND TOOK THEIR LAND. Rightly or wrongly, the fact that we have now peopled our land with the winners and either killed or absorbed nearly all the losers means that there arent any areas left that are populated with subjugated people who would like to secede from the US.
Not all were killed, and not all of the survivors have been “absorbed.” Many live on land regarded as the sovereign, or at least more or less self-governing, territory of their tribes, albeit under the supervision of our Colonial Offi—sorry, Bureau of Indian Affairs. It would probably be hard to get a considered answer to the question of whether they want to secede, because they realize there’s no way in hell the Great White Father is going to let that happen; but their current lack of active resistance doesn’t make them less subjugated.
Britain always “opts” for partition because the “squabbling natives” demand it. They did it in Ireland, then in India and Palestine.
Nonsense on a stick. The aim of the British Govt in all three examples you cite was to try and avoid partition;in Ireland & India, the British authorities lost control on the ground,and in the case of Palestine were strong-armed into a situation
which lead to partition by the Truman Govt.
JLW,
Your definition that ties together an outflow of the population of the imperial center towards the colonies is, I think, pretty good. But according to Niall Ferguson, at least, the statistics for the outflow from the British Isles strongly show that tendency. Australia, Canada and the U.S., Ireland,South Africa, Kenya, and India, show evidences of that massive outflow.
America does something different—it absorbs the influx from the periphery. Instead of depending on American planters in Guatamala, this country depends on Indian doctors in El Paso and Indian engineers in Silicon Valley. That is pretty interesting, actually, since it diagrams the difference between the U.S. and, say, the Russian empire.
I think the real interest in this question of empire has to do less with whether empire captures a certain configuration of America’s behaviors in comparison with other empires and more with analyzing America’s foreign policy interests. One of the most irritating things about the pro-war discourse of the past couple of years has been the almost absolute lack of acknowledgment that nation’s have interests that may be peculiar to the nation itself. The U.S. isn’t a moral force, but a powerful nation that has, at times, been an instrument for moral good – but has never been merely an instrument for moral good—it has always served its interests, and the universal good has always been secondary to those interests. This isn’t to criticize—this is just what nations, and empires, do. To legitimate what they do, however, imperially inclined nation’s present themselves as a civilizing force, or the lynchpin of democracy, or some such thing. By talking about empire, we are reminded that you can’t erase the question of interest.
But the terms of the argument that Adloyada and Colley both accept seem to me to be seriously misleading since they centre on such questions as whether an informal network of client and subordinate states constitutes an empire or not. But there’s an obvious and much more straightforward way of answering in the affirmative, and that’s to hold the United States to the same standards that people (including Colley) use when dealing with other countries. And here I’m thinking of Russia and China.
The problem here is that Chris is using one definition of empire in one context to criticize an almost completely different definition of empire in another context.
Trust can mean confidence in someone’s integrity and good character. In another context it can mean a number of firms working together to set prices and limit competition. It doesn’t help anyone to criticize anti-trust laws on the basis that one shouldn’t work against people’s confidence in good character.
The confusion over empire is not as obvious as over trust in this example, but the definitions are different enough to cause confusion here. Under Chris’ definition of empire the US certainly is an empire, but the observation is almost completely banal because so many other countries would also qualify under that definition. (Contra Scott Mexico would almost certainly count if you look at those who rule in Mexico—very often descendants of the Spanish—rather than mere population percentages).
Chris is correct that Colley doesn’t use that definition later in her text, but that isn’t confusion on her part. It is obvious that she isn’t using “empire” in that sense when she talks about US influence over countries like Taiwan because the US is uninterested in making citizens of those who inhabit Taiwan, nor is it interested in changing the borders of the US to include Taiwan. Criticizing the term of art she uses as not in line with the original definition is no more helpful here than it is in my trust example. Both specialized definitions have historical roots in the more general definitions, but that doesn’t mean that using them in the more technical definitions is seriously misleading (at least not to those who see when they have shifted gears). When Colley is talking about empire and the US in Europe or the Middle East, she is clearly not using the definition that Chris and she is clearly not confused about which sense of the word she is using.
Part of the problem may be that the modern technical definition of empire as people apply it to the US intentionally tries to link dissatisfaction with empire in the original sense to actions which don’t qualify under older definitions. They are attempting to argue by analogy when a different term would have been more clear and useful. But if that is true, the term is seriously misleading in the opposite way from that which Chris is talking about. It is misleading because it is attempting to apply the imperial label to situations where the US is clearly not attempting to expand its territorial boundaries, nor is it attempting to gain colony-like control.
I don’t see how can clearly know anything about US intentions. Bush is, ah, not very forthcoming, and for the next three years the US intentions are George Bush’s intentions. We don’t know who will succeed him.
Thare have been lots of trial balloons by respectable, well-connected people about empire or an empire-like world order. When respectable, well-connected people talk about a monopolar world or “the world’s only superpower”, empire is one direction they can be going.
A lot of the rage at liberals you see on the right is because of liberal foot-dragging about America’s military world mission. Plenty of Bush’s supporters support his policy on the understanding that it’s really much more aggressive and less defensive than it pretends to be.
Maybe we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Traditionally, imperial powers were ‘elite’ folks that went about subjugating ‘less elite’ folks in far off lands. But in modern day U.S. ‘less elite’ folks have come from far off lands to stake claim to their piece of America, and in doing so are subjugating the tired and old former ‘traditionally imperial’ folks, those who point back to grandparents fighting in the Civil War or sailing on the Mayflower. This too might explain why Americans seem so arrogant to folks from other countries, for most likely that arrogant American’s family came from that other country … and after all, one is allowed to act boorish to another family member, especially one that was too timid to cross the ocean and was left behind. I do think the American experiment is still in process.
Sebastian H.:
It is misleading because it is attempting to apply the imperial label to situations where the US is clearly not attempting to expand its territorial boundaries, nor is it attempting to gain colony-like control.
Then. 13 colonies.
Now. 50 States.
clearly not attempting to expand its territorial boundaries
Sometimes I worry about you Sebastian.
Before all the subsidiary issues took on lives of their own, Steve still said it best. What good does it do to take refuge in dictionary definitions? When the word “empire” is used, it conjures up images of the British Empire or the French Empire or the Belgian Empire. You gave a minimal definition of the word “empire” so that you could apply the term to the United States with all of its maximal connotations. Your own post belies your motivations. You take pleasure in being one of those who “seriously upsets” people like blogger Adloyada (or blogger Jane Galt) and boldly challenging the self perception of Americans on the left and right.
If you have anything insightful to say about the extermination of American Indians or contemporary relations between the United States and its client states, let’s hear it. Simply applying the label “Empire” is a poor excuse for analysis and a pretty poor pretext for a post on a blog that usually has higher standards. This discussion of empire certainly falls into the category of “not so serious debate.”
Wow Chris, you really do have trouble with context don’t you?
Quick context quiz. In the portion you quote from my post am I more likely talking about Puerto Rico, Texas, or Taiwan? When Colley talks about US bases is she talking about California, Virginia, or Germany?
I presume you don’t want to figure out the difference, since you aren’t actually an idiot.
Brazil is an empire.
Was an empire. It actually had an emperor.
Hector and Sebastian: I didn’t say Mexico or any other country was necessarily run by any kind of ethnically representative government. But most Latin American nations actually have populations that identify with it, even if not with the rulers. The US also rules over a black population that isn’t represented in the ruling class in anything like its proportion to the population. This is wrong, but not necessarily imperial.
In order to be an empire, somebody has to be displaced by people from somewhere else. The aboriginal population of Mexico, and most of Latin America, was not displaced. Enslaved, massacred, treated like dirt, forced to speak Spanish and attend Catholic churches – yes, those things all happened and I’m not endorsing them. But majorities in every Spanish-speaking South American and Central American country with the exception of Argentina and Uruguay counts majorities of primarily aboriginal descent who identify with their nations, even though not always with their ruling classes.
The notion that I should have made plain is that the displacement of aboriginal population is a key component of what makes America, Russia and China empires, and a part of what once made Rome an empire. Not all empires are like that: The French empire rarely displaced people, but it ruled over a large territory with a large population to the benefit of a part of its population living in a small part of the empire.
By that rationale, any national liberation movement is imperial, because there is always a population, however small, that wishes to remain under the control of the occupying power. And that’s a ridiculous usage of the word imperial.
Do countries get to be divided into ‘nations’ and ‘occupying empires’ solely by fiat of the something like the Divine Right of Kings, or is there any 18C or later influence on your thinking?
soru
As for the rest of you arguing the point, if the word “Empire” can be applied to the United States, China, Russia, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Belgian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Seljuk Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire, then the term has no real analytic value. First declare the terms in which you propose to analyze empires, then define the term in such a way as to include those empires that lend themselves to comparison in thse terms and exclude those that don’t.
None of you are really interested in analysis, you are interested in rhetoric. If the United States can be called an empire, you figure, it can be tarred with the same brush as the British or Chinese or Russian or Belgian empires. If empires are bad and the United States can be called an empire then the United States is bad. Sloppy thinking. There are plenty of critiques to be made of the US past and present. Applying the term “Empire” may even be germain in the context of some of those critiques. But none of this is critique. It is simply name calling.
“The notion that I should have made plain is that the displacement of aboriginal population is a key component of what makes America, Russia and China empires, and a part of what once made Rome an empire. Not all empires are like that: The French empire rarely displaced people, but it ruled over a large territory with a large population to the benefit of a part of its population living in a small part of the empire.”
Ok, I understand how you are using it. In my view (when using the limited definition of empire that Chris uses) completely transforming the aboriginal population culturally to fall in line with the rulers (changing language and religion by force) probably counts too.
Apologies for the late, Aquavitted post, but :
You could find in lots of the reasonings of the pro war people – remember, back when it was oh so shrill to oppose it? – that complacent self image of the kinder, gentler, not-as-bad-as-19th-century-europe-anyways u.s. imperium (see Galt’s post for another helping if you feel so).
This is preoccupating, because it’s preoccupating that the current big military power is lost in a nationalist dream. And maybe some real examination of the history of the country would help for that. Really, it’s sooo, like, 2 centuries ago, y’know.
Ken,
First, even though the word state can be applied to the United States, China, Russia, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Belgian Empire, and so on, it retains ‘analytic value’, doesn’t it?
Second, as Chris stressed (see comment #4), he was not trying to portray the United States as evil for being an empire. As I pointed out in comment #6, even cheerleaders for the United States sometimes think about it in terms of imperialism.
Third, as I tried to suggest in comments #6 and #55, thinking about modern states in terms of empire is really only the beginning of analysis not the end of it. It’s a way of bringing on board a whole load of interesting historical work that has been done on classic empires and seeing how it applies more generally.
It’s plain that 19th-century America was an actively growing empire. Radicals like Henry David Thoreau recognized the Mexican War as an aggressive expansion and protested it as such.
There’s a worthwhile distinction to be made, however, between the assembling of the nation back in the day and the overseas military web—300-odd bases in 170-odd countries, isn’t it?—that we have assembled.
Ben,
To start with your second point, Chris began his post by referring to an exchange between Colley and Adloyola over the American adventure in Iraq and whether this made the United States an empire in the same way that the British Empire was an empire. Apparantly granting that the parallels between the contemporary United States and Imperial Britain are not a %100 match to say the least, he focuses on a throwaway line in Colley and finds another way to call the US an empire: it is an empire in the same way that China and Russia can be called empires. Does this open the way for an analysis of the US in light of scholarship on imperial China and Russia? No. It simply allows him to declare the United States an empire and then gloat over the fact that this is bound to ruffle American feathers and crow in triumph when Jane Galt took the bait and denounced him in her blog (#36). This comparison sheds no light on the debate at hand: whether current American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq make it an empire.
As for your third point, I agree with what you say in your post #55 about fuzzy lines and complexity. I think that a good deal of the fuzziness and complexity come from applying a vague and unhelpful term—imperialism—in an unrestricted way to discussions of America on the world stage today.
Is the word “state” a useful analytic tool? That too depends. If you are talking about the member states of the United Nations, then, yes, it is an accurate way of describing all 191 of them: each has a delegate, a single vote in the general assembly and so on. If you want to say that in the sovereign state of France “the state” monitors its citizens’ incomes for the sake of levying an income tax and that since Chad, too, is a state, then “the state” in Chad too must be capable of keeping track of its citizens’ income and levying an income tax, then no, this is not an analytically useful application of the term. There is an infinite spectrum of intermediate cases between these two examples. When applied in a limited and defined way, “Empire” can be a useful analytical term. In the current discussion is is not, nor was Chris interested in using it in a useful analytic sense in the beginning.
“A statement that can only be explicable in terms of some kind of odd mental comparmentalization according to which the whole experience of the “frontier” doesn’t count as conquest or the seizure of territory from other peoples.” (Chris #59)
Our plains Injuns would have been mightily puzzled over your claim that we seized territory from them. Ignorant savages, they could not conceive of the idea that anyone could “own” the land, and therefore they never made any ownership claim to it. Our culture, of course, saw it differently, and when the noble savages objected to our fences, we merely rounded ‘em up and put ‘em in concentration camps—er-uh—reservations, whatever. Imperialist? Naah. We saw it as claiming heretofore unclaimed and nearly empty lands occasionally traversed by simple nomads intent on stealing our cattle, horses and corn.
I’m surprised there is not more discussion of Niall’s Ferguson books: “Empire” about the British Empire and “Colossus” his corresponding books about the American (in his view) Empire . Much of the above assumes that empires are homogenous and uniformly bad. One of the points of his books is to argue against that: there have been many empires and some are much better than others. One of the striking features of both US and British history is the contemporary outcry raised in response to ignominious actions. Ferguson does not shy away from describing these ignominious actions and provides much material to argue against his conclusions. He feels that the world benefited from the British Empire and that the US should, for the world’s benefit, act more like an Empire. His conclusions are definitely iconoclastic but his history is worth reading if only to challenge long held assumptions which will be perhaps revitalized or perhaps changed by the exercise. So I guess I’m with contradictory ben on all of this. Ferguson’s books are well-written, entertaining, clear, informative and worth your time to read.
To be honest, Ken, I read the original post on Chris’s part as quite the opposite—Colley was trying to construe China as a present-day empire (and thus tarring it with all the negative connotations of empire) and Chris was taking a piss at her by showing how difficult it is to call an nationalist power expanding across contiguous landmasses an “empire” without ensnaring the United States in the definition.
From then on, I don’t know. But I certainly saw a lot agreement initially with your and Sebastian’s and my (#71 and 74) points than either of you two do.
jlw,
Yes, on reading over some of the many posts I skimmed before, I have to admit there is a lot more nuance in the discussion than I realized. Your post #74 says all I have to say on the topic. I shouldn’t have been so rude to you all or to Chris, though I can’t say I agree with your reading of his original post. Apologies to all in any case.
Scott Martens,
You need to include Brazil in that group with Argentina and Uruguay. The ethnic makeup of Brazil includes a large portion of descendants of involuntary immigrants from Africa as well as, especially in the south, European immigrants from Poland, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, and Spain in addition to a substantial Japanese population.
Also, what is now Costa Rica, upon the arrival of the Spaniards had a small indigenous population. It’s nothing like Guatemala, Southern Mexico or Honduras.
Chiming in to agree with SH (and the other “this is humptydumptyism” commenter) having done the opposite on a recent cb thread.
American empire is to real empire as American cheese is to real cheese.
I just wanted to reassure Chris: some of us perfectly understand your point.
To Hektor. I admit I don’t know the history of imperial Russia very well, but I doubt it was significantly more brutal than that of imperial USA (and by that I mean of course the conquest of the american land mass, not the conquest of Puerto Rico, Cuba…). Indeed, the almost total annihiliation of the native population (from at least 4 millions to 250.000 in 1900) was a constant source of emulation for Hitler. According to Toland’s and Fest’s biograhpies, Hitler modeled his conquest of eastern Europe to the american conquest of western America, explicitly praising the efficiency of american settlers. Like Chris pointed out, if Americans today are not faced with the same kind of resistance the Russians and Chineese face, it is largely because the former managed to wipe out the indigenous population, while the later did not (or maybe did not even try, I don’t know my history well enough).
Didn’t Ike tell Soviet commanders when they met in 1945 that they would get on fine because unlike the nasty Brits neither of them had ever had an empire?
As empires go, America’s been reasonably reasonable. After 1865 or so, when we had the world’s most fearome army, we could easily have taken over Canada and Mexico, but didn’t. Mexico may have been more trouble than it was worth, and annexing Canada was simply unnecessary.
Our more egregious takings, like Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Phillipines or Iraq, excited considerable domestic dissent and may have been more trouble than they were worth, which probably discouraged further such adventures.
The U.S. empire was sufficiently compact to be efficiently integrated. The Russian/Soviet empire was similarly contiguous, and it might have survived had it been competently managed, but its survival might also have required the extermination of the original inhabitants of its acquired territories, as in the continental U.S. and Brazil.
Nothing to add to what I’ve said already, except to note that Jane Galt’s absurd “no one that I have ever met has tried to justify it” now has counterexamples both on this thread in the form of the racist and historically ignorant “Ronzoni Rigatoni” and on the thread at her own blog.
Z,
My point is not that imperial Russian expansion was significantly more brutal than American expansion. My point is that it is significantly more brutal today. The Russian and Chinese imperial actions (e.g. in Chechnya and Tibet, among others) have no comparison in current American practices.
Look at the history of Siberian tribes or the Caucasus to get a sense of the gentle hand of Russian imperialism.
“Steve,
First, I didn’t say anything about anyone being evil.”
“Sebastian H.:
It is misleading because it is attempting to apply the imperial label to situations where the US is clearly not attempting to expand its territorial boundaries, nor is it attempting to gain colony-like control.
Then. 13 colonies.
Now. 50 States.
clearly not attempting to expand its territorial boundaries
Sometimes I worry about you Sebastian.”
Chris-
Your two quotes, above, clarify your original position (your original post) quite a bit. But is it what you really intended? To take the two above quotes seriously, the original post then states, essentially, that
1) America is an ‘empire’ similar to the Russian and Chinese empire, because it was expansionist. But this form of expansion took place in roughly 1810-1890 (before 1810, America was largely restricted to the Eastern seaboard, and in the 20th Century, Alaska and Hawaii were added. If you want to quibble by a decade or so on either end, feel free). and,
2) there isn’t necessarily anything ‘evil,’ or wrong, with this type of empire. You are making an observation, not a moral critique.
Really? The point of the original post is to say that America was an empire in the 19th Century, and that there’s nothing wrong with being that kind of empire?
Alot of the language in the post suggests otherwise (even the title: The American Empire, not the Former American Empire), and obviously, much of the discussion here concerns America’s present self-image, not its 19th-Century self-image. But if the post is really as banal as an observation of US behavior 100 years ago, I suppose it may or may not be right, but its really not terribly relevant or enlightening.
(The whole question of Time is really interesting, too. Because America in the 19th Century behaved similarly to Russia in the 17th-19th Centuries, and China over several centuries in the past, we are supposed to conclude; what?).
Note: by defining ‘empire’ traditionally, (say, similar to the British, Roman, or French empires of the past), it would be more appropriate to say that America was an empire (with its peak in 1945) that has been in decline ever since. In 1945, the US economy was equal to the rest of the world combined (i.e. was 1/2 the total world economy), US military force spanned the globe (far far more than today), the US military represented an enormous part of the US economy and manpower (a military of 10 million out of 150 million citizens, compared to today a military of about 2 million out of 300 million citizens. I don’t recall the military budget size, but I’m thinking it was 1/3 of GDP?). Nobody wants to conclude that FDR was an emperor far more than GWB is, though, so I can see why you would want to redefine ‘empire’ to suit your purposes.
Steve
‘The Russian … imperial actions (e.g. in Chechnya)….have no comparison in current American practices.’
Is this supposed to be some kind of a joke?
Take a long look at