The theme of ‘empire’ has always occupied the attention of historians. Some of these have worked to the order of the authorities and have celebrated the feats of conquerors, seeking to prove the immutability of state borders while in various ways depicting the loyalty and gratitude of the subjects — speakers of diverse tongues united beneath the sceptre of a single dynasty, a single flag, a single ideology or religion. Other historians have unmasked injustice and oppression, attempting to rewrite history from the standpoint of the defeated and subjugated. This has been done more or less successfully, but only for those peoples that have survived, retaining their culture and social cohesion while often also developing them under the sway of empire. Paradoxically, the most detailed narratives of imperial oppression have been left by the ideologues of peoples whose oppression was comparatively light. The nationalist traditions in Ireland and India, in the countries of Eastern Europe that found themselves under the rule of the Habsburgs, and in the Baltic lands seized by Russia have left us an abundant list of complaints against various empires. But we know of the conquest of Africa by Europeans, and of the enslavement of Africans, mainly through the open-hearted confessions and through the archives of the oppressors themselves. From many peoples, not even a list of complaints has remained. These peoples have disappeared from the face of the planet.
The peoples who have been fortunate enough to obtain their own ‘national’ state have acquired along with it their own ‘national’ history, serving the interests of the state just as earlier history served the interests of the empire. Lenin in his time called for a distinction to be drawn between the nationalism of rulers and that of oppressed peoples, but in the area of history anti-imperial nationalism is no more trustworthy than the imperial variety. At the basis of anti-imperial nationalism lies the same demand for the legitimation of the exclusive rights of one’s own nation or state. In the second half of the twentieth century the most blatant example of such an approach was Zionism; within the framework provided by this ideology the tragic story of pogroms, of anti-semitic mockery of Jews, and ultimately, the appalling history of the holocaust are no more than arguments used to help explain why the Israeli state can allow itself to ignore international law and the interests of the Arab population of Palestine. In the politics of the Baltic countries an analogous role is played by the history of their conquest by Russia, with the narrative transformed into an incessant ideological self-justification for the new national elites.
For history as a science there is no difference between the myths kindled by one nationalism or another, since they are constructed on the same basis. In these myths the political and ideological outcome of development is projected into the past, and events are interpreted according to the logic of state interests, even if at the time of the events depicted the state itself did not exist. Any uprising is now presented to us as a struggle for national rights, even if its real causes had nothing to do with this, and any conflict between the local elites and the imperial capital is explained in terms of discrimination and a clash of cultures.
By the end of the twentieth century arguments to the effect that ‘the age of empires is past’ had become generally accepted. The great monarchies were now to be found only in the history books, colonial powers had ceased to exist, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was perceived by liberal opinion as ‘the inevitable fall of the last empire’. The map of the world was now a motley of colours as national states, energetically constructing borders and strengthening their tariff barriers, sought studiously to ensure that their new subjects should not show the slightest sympathy for the foreign neighbours who only recently had been their fellow citizens.
Theoreticians of globalisation set out to prove that not only empires, but national states as well were archaic features of a bygone epoch that would soon give way to some new order in which the might of state functionaries would be replaced by the ‘natural laws of the market’, and by decisions of huge corporations.
In the early twenty-first century, however, the theme of empire has once again come into fashion. Nationalist ideologues in Russia have shed an ocean of tears while expending tons of paper and wasting some incalculable amount of electrical energy on propagating nostalgic tales of a great imperial past. In Britain books have begun appearing one after another explaining to the reader that there is no need to be ashamed of the former colonial empire. 1 As one historian put it, the politics of empire initiated globalisation by unifying the world, and no-one but British gentlemen could have done this so quickly, effectively, elegantly and humanely. 2 In transforming the world, the British empire acted as ‘an agency for imposing free markets’, implanting the rule of law, defending investors and in sum, installing incorruptible rule over approximately a quarter of the earth’s land surface. The empire also did its utmost to support analogous tendencies outside its own territory through the use of its economic influence; this was an ‘imperialism of free trade’. Ultimately we are supposed to recognise that through conducing to the growth of global well-being, the empire on the whole was ‘a Good Thing’. 3
It may be noted, as an example of an instructive ‘Freudian slip’, that Niall Ferguson as the author of this passage never once mentions democracy or human rights — perhaps because intellectual honesty does not allow him to present the empire as the bearer of these values, and perhaps for the reason that in speaking of such really important things as free markets and the defence of investor interests, he simply forgot about such trifles. But however scandalous Ferguson’s argumentation might seem at first glance, it is not to be summarily dismissed, at least for the reason that even so irreconcilable a critic of capitalism as Marx recognised that the spread of the bourgeois order across the planet was a part of human progress.
Taking over from Britain as leader of the capitalist world, the United States’ ruling class refused initially to recognise America as an empire. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, their rhetoric had changed. They were now open in discussing ancient Rome and the new role of American power as its legitimate heir on a global scale. On their left flank the fashionable thinkers Michael Hardt and Tony Negri constructed their theories with no less enthusiasm, depicting a sort of utopian-fantastical Empire, omnipresent, all-penetrating and all-encompassing, but somehow quite invisible. 4 This Empire (invariably with a capital letter) amounted in their words to an already total and fully-fledged reality, but at the same time was still at the stage of birth and formation.
At the basis of all these theoretical constructs is not so much knowledge or analysis as a sense, a social intuition, telling the authors that the age of empires is far from over. The imperial principle, however, has clearly found its realisation not in the shape of a monarchic state, seeking the loyalty of its subjects, but in a different guise that has escaped the understanding of these writers. The worse they have perceived what is occurring, the less clearly they have understood obvious phenomena, and the more mystical and hence also attractive is the image of Empire in their writings.
In the mid-twentieth century the critique of imperialism was reduced, to a significant degree, to a list of possible excesses and to a moral judgement on them. But in our present century the obligatory recognition of colonial crimes has turned into a sort of alibi for conservative historians, who after lamenting this cruelty have shifted to discussions of the civilising role of empires. Meanwhile, it must be recognised that throughout history crimes and barbarities have been perpetrated constantly, in the name of empires and of national liberation, in the name of revolutions and of counter-revolutions. The task of the researcher is not to complain about this situation, or to try to justify what has occurred, but to try to understand the complex historical mechanisms that underlie the drama being depicted.
Empires, though a state form created by the ancient world, have proven to be a requirement of capitalism, and moreover, of global capitalism. For many years the origins of capitalism went largely unquestioned. To Marx and other writers of the second half of the nineteenth century there was nothing mysterious about the fact that Western Europe had subjugated India and China, forcing the countries of Asia to follow in the tracks laid down by the world economy that the Europeans had constructed. The productive forces of the West were significantly more developed, and as a result, it was in the West that more advanced productive relations — and thus a more dynamic and effective society — had become established.
The picture changed completely once it became clear to historians how greatly the countries of the East in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had outstripped Western Europe in their level of economic development. But while forcing us to reject nineteenth-century political economy, this research did not provide us with new explanations for the processes being described. Or more precisely, the explanations that were ventured seemed highly unconvincing and superficial, beginning with the presumption that the culture of the West was unique and superior, and extending to the desperate conclusion of Andre Gunder Frank in his later years that the West was simply lucky that Columbus had chanced to discover America.
Over a decade and a half this discussion revealed that Marx’s original theory, for all its shortcomings, was both more logical and more firmly based in scholarly terms than all the conceptions that had been advanced in an effort to supplant it. An apparently insoluble contradiction had arisen: Marx’s theory rested on a series of clearly mistaken premises, and thus was ‘factually’ untrue, but all the other theories were even more incorrect! The only possible answer was that Marx’s theory was true after all, but not complete. There was some missing link that had not been analysed fully by the author of Capital, and that lay behind the disjunctures in the historical schema. This missing link was most likely the institutional role of the state. ‘Right up until the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century,’ Fernand Braudel considers,
until the moment when capitalism appropriated industrial production and made it the source of vast profits, the system felt itself at home primarily in the sphere of circulation, even if it did not disdain to carry out something greater than simple raiding operations when the chance arose in other areas. 5
With characteristic intellectual caution, Braudel in this quotation leaves himself a path of retreat, recognising that by no means all of the development of capitalism can be reduced to trade, but that it was in this sphere that the system’s development proceeded in its purest form. The penetration of capital into the sphere of production began long before the industrial revolution, and involved not only the urban manufacturing establishments of Western Europe, but also agriculture. There is no doubt, however, that commercial capital expanded more quickly and aggressively, and acquired political influence earlier, than the capital that arose in the area of industrial production. The American sociologist Charles Tilly is much more categorical. Neither the emergence of capital nor the use of hired labour was in itself enough to create the bourgeois system. All that took shape was a certain economic formation, developing and functioning within a society that as a whole operated according to different rules. Commercial capital in its turn was in no hurry to combine itself with hired labour in productive activity. This combination only occurred on a large scale toward the end of the seventeenth century in Western Europe, at the direct instigation of the state. Prior to this, Tilly states, the owners of capital had flourished for thousands of years without involving themselves directly in production. Capitalism as a system appeared at a late stage in the development of capital. 6
The aim of a capitalist economy is the accumulation of capital, and the means is the exploitation of free, hired labour. Capital, however, can also be accumulated through other means. Historically, neither commercial nor financial capital has had any requirement for hired labour as a necessary condition for its existence, or else has needed it only to a limited degree (employing the labour of bailiffs, sailors and clerks). Commercial and financial capitalists have been able to carry out accumulation on the basis of production organised along non-bourgeois lines.
Things are different in the case of industrial (or in the broader sense, productive) capital, which properly speaking also embodies the bourgeois mode of production. The great Russian historian Mikhail Pokrovsky examined the evolution of the bourgeois system from the point of view of the interaction and antagonism between commercial and industrial capital, showing that it was commercial capital, not the feudalism that had vanished into the past, that was the key element underpinning the ancien régime in Russia. But was this the case in Russia alone?
If we extend Pokrovsky’s concept to Western Europe and to the colonial world in the modern era, numerous problems and mysteries can be resolved.
While stressing the importance of hired labour as the basis for bourgeois productive relations, Marx in Capital pointed simultaneously to the fact that in the sixteenth century world trade and the global market opened up a new history of capital. 7 Hence capital, along with the market economy, not ...
