Imperialism and Postcolonialism

Barbara Bush

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317870104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This account of imperialism explores recent intellectual, theoretical and conceptual developments in imperial history, including interdisciplinary and post-colonial perspectives. Exploring the links between empire and domestic history, it looks at the interconnections and comparisons between empire and imperial power within wider developments in world history, covering the period from the Roman to the present American empire.

The book begins by examining the nature of empire, then looks at continuity and change in the historiography of imperialism and theoretical and conceptual developments. It covers themes such as the relationship between imperialism and modernity, culture and national identity in Britain.

Suitable for undergraduates taking courses in imperial and colonial history.

Chapter 1
Untangling imperialism: comparisons over time and space

The quintessential explorer [Christopher Columbus] personified the whole ambitious, outward thrust of early modern Europe and its … determination to break out of the confines of the familiar, to make known the unknown, to defy the constraints of nature and conquer all that was conquerable.

(Sale, 1990, p. 201)

Thus began the mythologizing of European history around the Columbus legend and the Eurocentric prioritization of imperialism from the seminal date, 1492, the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. At this time Europeans had no special advantage, so why was the conquest so successful? How unique is Europe? In different manifestations the Chinese Empire lasted from 221 BC to 1911, compared with a brief 400 years of European empires. Should we be referring to imperialisms rather than imperialism? How do we interpret changes over time and differences between empires? What can we learn from comparisons between ancient and modern empires? Firstly, this foundational chapter charts the ebb and flow of empires over time, in the longue durée. These include land-based (continental) and maritime, formal and informal empires and those which combine some or all these features, synchronically (Rome) or at different periods in the lifespan of the empire (England/Britain). The second section compares empires, past and present, in defining the nature of empires and understanding the West’s ascendancy over the ‘Rest’. I argue that empires had negative consequences for the majority of colonized subjects and mainly benefited a minority in the imperial centre and colonial periphery. This given, imperialism also generated dynamic cultural change and resistance that challenged the inequalities inherent in imperialist relations.

Early and later empires were similar in that they were premised on military power and conquest of peoples to accrue wealth through a combination of trade, colonization, mining, taxation and tribute. The conventional starting point for modern imperialism and the restructuring of the world through capitalist expansion and globalization is the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century. Yet complex relations already existed between Europe and the Ottoman, Chinese and extensive Islamic trading empires, including the Mughal Empire of Northern India. In central and South America the Spanish conquistadores encountered the extensive Inca and Aztec empires. Eventually, with varying degrees of damage and over different time-spans, all these empires declined and succumbed to European power. Why did ‘we’, the Europeans, colonize ‘them’, the Asian, African and American ‘others’, and not the other way round (Brown, 1963)? Is it this ‘uniqueness’ which helps to explain how Europe and then the West came to dominate the rest of the world?

Three broad arguments can be forwarded in support of the ‘uniqueness’ of Europe: the rise of capitalism, European modernity (Chapter 3) and fortuitous ecological and physical factors or, in the words of Jared Diamond, ‘we are all equal but the playing fields are not’ (Diamond, 1997). All three have some validity. Assumptions of the ‘exceptionalism’ or uniqueness of Europe and the West are reflected in the historiography. From the 1960s to the 1980s, change and continuity in imperialism were at the heart of debates centred on the New Imperialism, circa 1870–1914. Historians who stressed continuity did not go back much further than the emergence of the Second British Empire in the late eighteenth century, a Eurocentric position that excluded important developments in earlier periods, even prior to 1492 (Armitage, 2001). Such Eurocentricism has been criticized as an ethnocentric ‘colonizer’s view’ of the world (Blaut, 1993). This has ignored the ways in which empires have been shaped in relation to each other since early antiquity and has prioritized the influence of the West, neglecting the Eastern contribution to Western development (Chaudhuri, 1990; Hobson, 2004). It has also precluded fruitful comparative analyses.

World systems analysis, pioneered by Braudel (1984) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989), has also been criticized for prioritizing the rise of European capitalism since the fifteenth century. Archaeologists have extended Wallerstein’s analysis to ancient societies and empires, establishing that significant commercial exchanges and divisions of labour across borders created early economic world systems (Chase Dunn and Hall, 1997). Frank and Gills (1993), Arrighi (1994) and W. R. Thompson (2000) have argued that long-term economic growth, based on cycles of innovation, peace and stability maintained through a strong hegemony, has had a continuous history since the tenth century. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Sung Chinese Empire developed powerful political and military systems combined with maritime and economic innovation. Hegemonic instability, however, resulted in a reordering and stabilizing of the international system and China was challenged by the aggressive Mediterranean trading states that were, in turn, displaced by Western Europe. A cycle of the rise of empires through concentration, decline through deconcentration, and reconcentration in new imperial centres thus began (W. R. Thompson, 2000, pp. 13–14).

Such studies raise important questions about continuities, differences and similarities between empires across the epochs. Change was generated by competing power interests but also resistance to hegemonic imperial agencies by the oppressed. Empires, ancient and modern, have all waxed and waned but, as Alcock (2002) points out, old empires never entirely die but have an afterlife through ‘emulation and … rejection … of the mores of one empire by another’ (p. 370). Thus ‘empires of nostalgia’ claim the imperial tradition and outward trappings of the extinct empire. Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire of Charlemagne in the eight and ninth centuries mapped on to large parts of the former Western and Eastern Roman Empire (see Map 1, p. xvi). Russia inherited the Byzantine Christian legacy and Spain claimed legitimate decent from the Carolingian and Roman empires (Barfield, 2002). Later British and American empires also harked back to Rome, the archetypal, Ur empire past and present.

Time and change: the ebb and flow of empires

Before modern Europe

Empires emerged with the great civilizations of antiquity such as Old Babylonia (1800 BC), which bequeathed mathematics, science and the written word to future Middle Eastern and European cultures. The Greek Empire (c. 750–550 BC) created colonies around the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea and established some of the essential characteristics of later European empires, including an early form of orientalist discourse. The Achaemenid Persian Empire (c. 550–330 BC) was one of the earliest ‘world empires’, stretching from the Egyptian frontier to Uzbekistan (Kuhrt, 2002). (See Map 2, p. xviii) Led by Xerxes, the Persians invaded Greece in 480 BC and destroyed Athens. In the writings of the Greek historian, Herodotus (c. 450 BC), superior democratic, rational and progressive Greek identities were contrasted with inferior barbaric ‘others’ of the autocratic Persian Empire. Partly motivated by revenge, between 336 and his death in 323 BC, Alexander the Great defeated the Persians and incorporated their empire into his own, which extended as far as the Hindu Kush. Colonies were established and over 30 settlements named ‘Alexandra’ from Egypt to Alexandra Eschate, or Farthermost, in what is now Tajikistan. Alexandrian myths and claims of direct descent from the Greeks still persist in many parts of Asia (Wood, 2004).

Ancient empires were often transient and fragile (Howe, 2002, p. 37) but during late Antiquity, ‘world empires’ were created, of an area large enough to pass for ‘the world’, that could maintain control without serious competition (Fowden, 1993, p. 6). Late Antiquity covers the period from the second century, the peak of Rome’s prosperity, to the ninth century and the onset of the decline of the Islamic empire. This orbis terrarum (the whole world) stretched from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Iranian plateau but excluded China. Christian missions, however, had reached as far as India and the Chinese court by the third century, initiating the first travel writings (ibid.).

The Roman Empire (c. 55 BC to AD 410) established important principles of imperial rule that echoed down to the later nineteenth-century European empires. The Roman imperium was not simply a territory but encapsulated the Roman notion of commands given by a general or governor, the imperator. The Roman dream was that, through conquest, a vast area of peace, prosperity and unity of ideas could be created. At its zenith, 27 BC to AD 235, the Roman Empire incorporated vast tracts of Europe, the Near East, Egypt and North Africa. Pax Romana lasted for centuries, although there was rarely ‘peace’ throughout the empire and on the Rhine frontier the Germanic tribes were never pacified. The Romans envisaged empire as a single civic community, ‘a fortress on a macrocosmic scale’ which kept at bay those incompatible with community (Lintott, 1993, p. 186). Like the present-day American Empire, the Romans were engaged in an endless struggle against disorder and barbarianism and empire ended with the sack of Rome by the allegedly barbarian Visigoths in AD 410.

Antiquity’s contribution to the technique of empire, suggests Fowden, was the discovery of a ‘non-military … partially political basis for self perpetuation’. This was facilitated by the emergence of monotheism. Formerly pagan empires were now defined by cultural and political universalism, rooted in the unifying religions of Christianity and Islam that justified the exercise of imperial power and made it more effective. In its latter years, the Roman Empire was reconceptualized as a Christian world empire with a destiny to prepare the way for the kingdom of God, a universal society rather than an imperium created by conquest, although, stresses Lintott, this remained an aspiration rather than a reality (Lintott, 1993, p. 193). Nevertheless, the Emperor Constantine’s Byzantine Empire (AD 324–37), a direct descendant of polytheist Rome, had some success in unifying the fragmenting Roman Empire through Christianization (Fowden, 1993, pp. 3, 127, 170).

The apogée of late Antiquity was the Islamic empire founded by the Umayyed dynasty, the direct descendants of the prophet Mohammed. In 750 AD the Umayyeds were overthrown by the Abbasids and moved to Spain, France and North Africa. The Abbasids replaced Damascus with a new capital, Baghdad (founded 762 AD), the ‘City of Peace’, located near the Babylon of ancient Mesopotamia. At the ‘crossroads of the universe’ and of ‘fabulous wealth’, Baghdad stood for the ‘universalism, self sufficiency and completeness of the Islamic empire’. A prophesy attributed to Mohammed, however, warned of the ‘catastrophic downfall’ of Baghdad as a city where the ‘kings and tyrants of the world will assemble’ (Fowden, 1993, pp. 50–1). This has a peculiar resonance, given the US/British invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Islamic empire was characterized by religious and cultural tolerance, in stark contrast to contemporary media perceptions of Islam as fanatical, violent and at war with Christianity. During this era there was fruitful contact between Muslims and Christians in the Mediterranean through trade and interchange of technology. Even during the protracted twelfth-century Crusades, which brought the Christian ‘West’ into conflict with the Muslim ‘East’, some Christians accepted that they had much to learn from Islam; Muslims were less interested in the West, creating a cultural divide which is still unresolved (Fletcher, 2003).

The ‘Dark Ages’ is a purely Eurocentric concept, given the developments outside Europe in this period. As Fowden points out, ‘not all roads out of antiquity lead to the European Renaissance’ and ‘non-Latin’ perspectives on the past are now given more attention (Fowden, 1993, p. 9). When Genghis Khan died in 1227 he ruled over an empire that extended from the Caspian to the Pacific and was twice the size of the Roman Empire (Man, 2004). The Mughal Empire of North India (1529–1757) was founded by descendants of Genghis Khan, who had assimilated the Islamic culture and religion of the Middle East but retained military skills and other cultural facets that reflected their Far Eastern origins. A strong Chinese Empire and a reinvigorated Islam in Al Andalus (Islamized Spain and Morocco) shaped global developments from 900 to 1492. The period from 600 to 1600 also witnessed the rise of the Turks, nomadic warrior Turkoman or Turkik peoples who spread from Central Asia into what is now modern-day Turkey.

In the sixteenth century the vast Islamic and Chinese empires were, in terms of economic development, cultural sophistication and technological innovation, equal, if not superior to Europe. In Iran, the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736) was characterized by military might, artistic brilliance, economic prosperity, dynamic developments in science, philosophy, religion (the establishment of Shiism) and architecture (Newman, 2005). The Safavids engaged in war and treaties with the Ottoman Turks, who defeated Byzantium at the Siege of Constantinople, 1453, reassembled most of the fragmenting Islamic empire and expanded into the Balkans (Halden, 2000). Constantinople, the capital of the earlier Byzantine Empire (c. 330–1453), became the centre of this new Ottoman Empire that lasted until 1924. The Turks were converts to Islam but their culture remained open, tolerant, pluralistic and assimilationist, building flexibility and dynamism into the Ottoman Empire (Inalcik and Quateart, 1994). Before the defeat of the Ottoman navy by the Holy League (Spanish, Venetian and Papal ships) at the Battle of Lepanto (Greece) in 1571, the Ottoman Empire became the most formidable state in Europe, disciplined and highly motivated. Ottoman military and technological leadership was second to none and the Sultan’s territories and revenues greater than those of any Christian rivals (Lieven, 2000, p. 139). By 1800 the picture had completely changed.

The rise of modern European empires

Tectonic shifts in the fates of empires refigured global relations during the fifteenth century. For centuries Western Europe had been on the wild fringes of Europe, firstly incorporated into the Roman Empire, and then overshadowed by the medieval Mediterranean maritime city states of Genoa, Venice, Amalfi and Pisa, whose power marked the beginning of the ascendancy of Europe. These maritime states, like the earlier Phoenician city state, created trade networks but attempted to extract wealth without occupation of a large territory and lacked the autonomy that defined them as empires (Barfield, 2002, p. 38). Additionally, Western Europe was initially not strong enough to take on the powerful Chinese, Mughal and Ottoman empires. But the Renaissance instilled new vigour into Western European society and economy. The reconquista, the expulsion of Islamic influence from the Iberian Peninsula, combined with improvements in navigation, facilitated the Spanish and Portuguese seaborne empires (Boxer, 1969; Scammel, 1989) and the European remapping of the world. Spain dominated in Latin and Central America and the Caribbean but also colonized the Philippines and ruled the Spanish Netherlands. The Portuguese trading networks in Asia were initially similar to those of the maritime city states and could not be classed as an empire. Indeed, the Portuguese faced increasing competition from the Dutch, who expelled them from Japan in the 1630s (Subrahmanyam, 1993). Eventually empire in Asia, Africa and Brazil (after negotiations with the Spanish) was secured (Boxer, 1969; Russell-Wood, 1992; Newitt, 2001; Lockart and Schwartz, 1983).

The epochal moment was the conquest of the Americas. The mood of the times in Europe was pessimistic after a century of famine, disease and violence. Repressive and corrupt regimes also stimulated the beginning of humanism and rationalism associated with the Renaissance. Exploration held the promise of contrasting utopias; Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) was driven by a religious vision and the desire to discover a ‘terrestrial paradise’ (Sale, 1990, pp. 30–1). Dreams of power and fantastic visions of Eldorado thus fired the imaginations of the first conquistadores, setting the precedent for future empires. The new navigators were initially searching for a western passage through to China and the riches of the Orient. Instead Columbus ‘discovered’ the ‘West Indies’; America was named after the explorer, Amerigo Vespucci (see Figure 1.1) and Columbus’s voyages inspired further explorations, including Sir Walter Raleigh’s ventures into Virginia in 1586 that resulted in the formation of the Virginia Company in 1606 and colonization (Thomas, 2004).

The ‘known’ world in 1492 was centred primarily on Europe and Asia (see Map 3, p. xxii). From a Eurocentric perspective this was the heart of civilization and the world unknown to Europeans was there to be conquered. The concept of ‘discovery’ of the Americas assumed a ‘new world’ of ‘virgin’ territory for Europeans to freely colonize. This has now been challenged. Archaeological evidence from Michigan, New England, Newfoundland and other sites suggests that North America was discovered and temporarily settled by Norse explorers as early as 1000 AD (Sale, 1990, pp. 69–71). Kamen (2002) also disputes the Spanish national myth of the ‘New World’ as an epic tale of organized empire building carried out by heroic Spanish conquistadors for the greater glory of King and God. The conquest that resulted in the cruel destruction of the Aztecs and Incas was, in effect, an international venture of ruthless self-interested European soldiers, adventurers, entrepreneurs and opportunists (Columbus was from the Italian city state of Genoa). The real conquistadors were European diseases such as influenza, typhus, measles, diphtheria, smallpox and gonorrhoea, against which the indigenous population had no immunity (Crosby, 1986; Cook, 1998; Kamen, 2000;

Figure 1.1 ‘Amerigo Vespucci and the conquest of the Americas’, redrawn from Vita e lettere di Amerigo Vespucci

Restall, 2003). Spain created an ‘empire by chance’ and the ‘conquest’ succeeded through a combination of cunning, force, depopulation through disease, luck and ‘very good timing’ (Thompson, 2000, p. 88). Similar ecological and biological changes destroyed other indigenous communities in the Caribbean and North America, helping to consolidate white settlement. It was these factors that facilitated exploitation, not imperial policies or colonialist machinations (Klor de Alva, 1995).

When the Spanish and Portuguese arrived in ...