The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

inescapable. In both cases, a vocabulary
    for subjecthood evolved. Subjects were not fully formed individuals;
    their primary identities were communal and collective. If they had
    rights to land, property, or protection, it was as members of a clan,
    caste, or tribe. They were “traditional” peoples who made no progress
    and indeed were barely aware of the passage of time.
    The distinction between subject and citizen was less important in
    premodern eras when rulers unapologetically exploited their own
    domestic populations, and as late as the eighteenth century only a
    small percentage of the global population could even be classifi ed as
    “free.” Sovereigns and nobles generated surplus wealth by exploiting tenants, peasants, serfs, and laborers. In return, these marginal
    peoples received some measure of protection. In sharing even the
    Introduction 15
    most minimal bonds of kinship with their rulers, they qualifi ed as
    nominally human. The European nationalist regimes that transformed their lower orders into citizens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also resorted to harsh tactics that might appear, at
    fi rst glance, imperial in character. But ultimately these peasants and
    townsmen emerged as full and equal members of a nation-state. Real
    assimilation, forced or otherwise, was part of the process of nation
    building, not empire building. Empires needed permanently exploitable subjects, not rights-holding citizens, to remain viable. Lucrative
    extraction was possible on a long-term basis only so long as subject
    peoples remained alien and inassimilable. The question of identity,
    what determined who was a subject and who was a citizen, is essential
    to understanding the true nature of empires, and to their history.
    Yet the nation was not the end of history. Indeed, the accelerated
    expansion of global networks of culture, commerce, investment, and
    migration in the second half of the twentieth century provided a powerful counterweight to the nation-state. Some scholars have gone so
    far as to argue that global capital now constitutes a new, more powerful form of sovereignty that has eclipsed the national variety.14 Transnational forces have also created new forms of pan-national identity
    that give like-minded groups of people additional means to challenge,
    if not thwart, the agendas of national governments, multinational
    corporations, and would-be empire builders.
    Although the era of formal empire is conclusively over, policy
    debates, particularly after the terrorist attacks of 2001, frequently
    revolved around imperial themes. Critics on the left indicted the
    United States for behaving imperially in adopting an aggressive foreign policy, while right-wing revisionists and neoconservatives sought
    to rehabilitate empire to demonstrate that military force was the most
    effective way to impose order and stability on a global scale. No one in
    the Bush administration seriously aspired to acquire an empire when
    they invaded Iraq in 2003; even the most ardent imperial apologists
    knew that this was simply no longer possible or politically defensible.
    Rather, the architects of the Iraqi occupation believed that they could
    use authoritarian methods to replace an enemy regime with a liberal
    prowestern government. Like earlier generations of conquerors, they
    continued to believe that hard power could be used creatively to persuade, inspire, and reeducate a defeated “inferior” people.
    16 THE RULE OF EMPIRES
    Critics on the American and European left were equally ignorant of the historical precedents they invoked in their attacks
    on the “Bush doctrine.” Even some of the harshest opponents of
    the war in Iraq failed to recognize that imperial rule was no longer feasible in an era that accepts national self-determination as
    a basic human right. Castigating the Bush administration for its
    unrestrained use of hard power, they produced a raft of books and
    editorials warning ominously that the